We have the statistics. Why not consult them?

From ‘Not A Sheep‘:

In 2003 [Trevor Phillips] wrote an article where he said “from Rome, through Constantinople to Venice and London, our (European) nations have a history of peacefully absorbing huge, diverse movements of people, driven by war, famine and persecution; and there is no history of long-term ethnic segregation of the kind one can see in any US city.” A statement that any trip to Southall, Brixton, Tower Hamlets or many northern British towns would render negated.

Tower Hamlets population by ethnic origin: 51% white, 37% Asian, 22% others. Brixton population by ethnic origin: 62% white, 26% black, 12% others. Ghetto-tacular! (the latter is a ward of only 12,000 people, so you’d need to drill down pretty deep to find any hidden ghettoes…).

Admittedly, Southall population by ethnic origin comes a bit closer with 75% Asian and 12% white. But Southall is famed as bloody unusual by UK immigration standards; it’s also not what one would class as a long-term Yank-style ghetto – 44% of the population was born in Asia, for [deity]’s sake. Taking Southall as a sensible example of race relations in the UK would be like taking Whitechapel in the early part of the last century as your only datapoint and concluding that we were second only to Poland in the ghetto-isation of Jews…

In short, Trevor Phillips is absolutely right: in London, we don’t have the long-term, self-and-society-imposed segregation between races that exists in the US. People of different races in the UK live together, socialise together, marry each other, and have babies together.

There are exceptions – notice I haven’t covered the northern ex-mill-towns here, because they’re goddamn complicated and I’ve never lived in one. As I understand it, they’re as close as it gets to serious long-term segregation in the UK, and I’d be interested to read a rational analysis of how that’s developed – but bracketing them with mixed-race parts of London is as mad as saying “Brian Sewell and Jade Goody are both white, so we can draw meaningful conclusions about one from the other”…

3 thoughts on “We have the statistics. Why not consult them?

  1. According to http://www.lifeline.org.uk/about_TH.php?ID=47, 76% of the school age population in Tower Hamlets is "ethnic minority". In my experience of the area, which is now some 2 years old, most white people still there are elderly cockneys, who have had their cultural basis destroyed by immigration, and are spending their declining years surrounded by people who despise them. 51% white sounds rather high to me, although that figure is from 2001 so I'd guess things are pretty different by now – ethnic cleansing proceeds at one hell of a rate with modern technology.

  2. Bollocks. Of school age people in Tower Hamlets, 75% are now "ethnic minority". White flight is well underway in London, and is, if anything, even more bitter than in the US.

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