United yet still divided

While Britain can be proud of its racial harmony compared with France, there is still some way to go before we can claim true integration

Published in the London Evening Standard 17 November 2005

If you’re reading this on a bus, lower the paper and look around. What you’ll see has no rival in the entire world. It is what one expert calls “the most mixed tangle of folk to be found anywhere on earth.”

I tried it myself yesterday and the expert is right. On the 341 from Hackney to Farringdon, you’d have seen what looked like a statistician’s cross-section of this city. A Polish girl texting furiously; half a dozen black women; an Italian designer on his mobile; a pin-striped white gent – and that was just the bottom deck.

So bus travellers will not have been surprised at a new study published this week which found that we are becoming more, not less, racially integrated. According to new research from Manchester University, the number of mixed neighbourhoods in England and Wales – areas where at least 10 per cent are from an ethnic minority – has increased substantially over the last decade. And more mixing is on the way.

That could make us feel pretty smug, especially if we’ve been casting our eye across the Channel. France has been burning these last three weeks, with riots in the impoverished suburbs of Paris and beyond. Unemployment and poverty are the obvious causes, but race is an inescapable part of the picture. The banlieues are home almost exclusively to black and North African immigrants and their descendants.

The segregation there is stark: the well-to-do and white in the city centre, the poor and dark-skinned warehoused like unwanted goods on the outskirts. (In many American cities the reverse pattern holds, white suburbs surrounding a black inner city.)

London is not like that. Here the city is not divided like a chessboard, into clear patches of black and white but jumbled up. In London, rich and poor, black and white, are never more than five or ten minutes away from each other. So Kensington and Chelsea can be one of the most expensive areas in the world, and still include Golborne Road and the surrounding pocket of deprivation. It has the largest population of people born outside Britain of any borough in the country (bar Brent). True, some of those are bankers from Frankfurt and New York but one in five of K & C’s residents are non-white.

There are historical explanations for this, starting with a system which made each London borough a mini-city of its own – complete with an obligation to provide social housing for the least well off. We’ve also had city-wide authorities, required to think of the entire Greater London area. The Mayor of Paris, by contrast, has only to cater to the café au lait drinkers in the centre of the city; Greater Paris, including the benighted suburbs, is outside his remit. What’s more, France had what amounted to a policy of dumping Algerian migrants outside the city - out of sight, so that they might be out of mind.

But the deeper explanation lies elsewhere, in rival approaches to ethnic diversity. The French ideal, as old as the republic, is integration: in the eyes of the law there are only Frenchmen, with no recognition of ethnic difference. No such thing as a French Algerian; no Moroccan French. Government statisticians are not even allowed, under the law, to ask people about their ethnic backgrounds. There are only the French.

Britain has gone another way. Our experiment has been with multiculturalism – acknowledging people’s differences. In this, we have learned from the US approach to immigrants, allowing people to have hyphenated identities: Scottish-British, Black-British, Muslim-British.

No one should pretend we’ve got everything right. Britain experienced urban riots, charged with race, in 2001 and again a few weeks ago in Birmingham. We have also endured a shock that France has been spared: the sight of four of our own citizens, born and raised in this country, bombing their fellow Britons on July 7.

So, much as we might enjoy condescending to the French, we cannot claim to be perfect. Nevertheless, we can begin to see more clearly those things we’re doing well – and those we need to fix.

In the plus column would be the degree of residential mixing, confirmed again by this latest study. That stands as a rebuttal of the claim the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, made in September – that we are “sleepwalking to segregation”, on our way to the colour-coded no-go areas that blight US and French cities. The latest figures suggest that, on the contrary, only a paltry 14 electoral wards in England and Wales have an ethnic minority group making up half the population. Most are mixed.

Funnily enough, if there is residential segregation it’s not caused by blacks or Muslims living alone. The only true ghettoes in Britain are white: like Berwick-upon-Tweed, with a 99.6% white population or Barnsley, 99.1% white, or the prime minister’s beloved Sedgefield, 99.3% white. These areas are not merely sleepwalking to segregation: they’re already there.

Even those areas that are mixed, like London, cannot claim to have solved every problem. For what most of us would admit is that physical, residential integration is hardly the heart of the matter.

Take my own neighbourhood, Stoke Newington in Hackney. Few could match its diversity, with blacks, whites, ultra-orthodox Jews, Turks and Kurds living on every street. Yet I would hesitate to say these people are meaningfully integrated. They mix – in the sense that they wait at the same bus stop – but they have little genuine contact. On this point, Trevor Phillips is right – warning of the “soft segregation” born out by figures showing few Brits have friends across the colour line, and even children in the playground tend to play with kids like themselves.

So, yes, we can be glad we don’t live in separate zones, as in Paris. What’s harder to claim is that we don’t live separate lives. In the end the issue is not where we live – but how we live. And on that measure, none of us can afford to be smug.

Posted on November 17, 2005 12:08 AM

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