Sorry, clarify that statistic for me. Are you seriously saying that 1 in 3 infants in Britain is from a non-white minority group?

A couple of points:

1) There is a difference between multi-racial and multi-cultural. You don’t specify if your daughters multi-racial friends are also multi-cultural. The two don’t necessarily go together.

2) It’s not just up to the indiginous Brits, of whatever race, to start working towards ending segregation. Immigrants need to do their share too. Unfortunately where I live, the Poles shop at the Polski sklep, the Somalis shop at their shops, the Ghanaians at theirs and so on. The only time people are ‘integrated’ is on public transport when most people prefer to sit in silence or in the larger supermarkets which is hardly a public forum of conversation. The enclaves you write about aren’t just between rich and poor – in poor communities there are micro-enclaves everywhere.

3) To play Devil’s Advocate for a moment, why is it ‘not good news’ for white Britons to relocate to areas of greater cultural homogeneity, but seemingly OK for immigrants to set up their own culturally homogenous enclaves within British towns and cities? Many of us find the enclaves established by ex-pat Britons in places like Benidorm or the Algarve risible, but yet here people in the predominantly poor communities which are affected by immigration and imposition of cultural shifts are told to just suck it up.

Absolutely: 4: Schools! Segregation at school along faith lines divides children from their early years. Learning together and accepting differences is the key, imo.
Faith education should be the responsibility of home and parents and not be part of an overcrowded National Curriculum.
Not to mention an independent sector that divides them along income, geographical and class lines.

@ 2 Spenny

Given that the author didn’t say it was all on indigenous Brits, and specifically said he was AGAINST segragation, I really don’t know why you’re addressing all that to him. Less devil’s advocate, more straw man.

@4 Chaise Guevara.

I never suggested that the author of the piece is pro-segregation. I suggested that many immigrant communities are, which means that the onus is on indigenous Brits to do the donkey work because they are the ones here for the long haul.

Where is the incentive for, say, Polish immigrants who churn in and out of the country every 3 years or so to engage with these networks of integration that the author says are necessary?

The evidence where I live is that, like many ex-pat communities, including British ones overseas, is that what happens in practice is that shops and clubs are set up selling and providing home comforts which tide them over until they want to go back again.

@ 5 Spenny

Fair enough – my experience is different because most of the immigrants near me appear to be Pakistani*, and from a casual glance they tend to integrate more than that. Yeah, there’s a ghetto of sorts with a very large Pakistani population, but it’s seen as a good place for a night out (curry, shisha), the atmosphere is friendly, and there are loads of Pakistanis living in surrounding areas.

I think the sensible conclusion here is that people who are over here for only a couple of years probably won’t integrate very much and for the most part that’s not a big problem, and the onus (insofar as there is one) should be on both natives and permanent immigrants to integrate. And the immigrants probably integrate more for a number of factors (immigrants in general are often very positive about their new homeland and want to be part of it, plus there’s just more for them to integrate into so to speak: they’ve got more motive to learn our language than we do theirs).

*I could be wrong. This is based on a few conversations and the fact that they’re obviously of Indian heritage and are generally Muslim where any preference is expressed. They could be from India or Bangladesh.

Chaise @ 6

Funny you should mention shisha. I was in Bradford yesterday and my work contact took me to a shisha cafe. It was excellent! Very friendly, unbelievably strong coffee, interesting food and I tried ‘a pipe’ (as they called it). However, I’m not sure everyone should have been smoking indoors, although it was welcome given the weather. As for shisha, I’ll stick with cigars.

Look at the consequences of white flight from London on schooling standards:

“In 1997, just 16% of its students got five GCSES at grades A-C, the league table measure then. Last year, 71% passed at least 5 GCSES at grades A*-C including English and Maths.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-21534863

“London schools have improved so rapidly over the past 10 years that even children in the city’s poorest neighbourhoods can expect to do better than the average pupil living outside the capital.”
[FT 13 January 2013]

@8 Bob B

And therefore, if your sole aim is to to improve educational results in London, then removal of all white children from these schools must be the logical conclusion of what you are saying?

You may have heard this type of logic before.

Max: “And therefore, if your sole aim is to to improve educational results in London, then removal of all white children from these schools must be the logical conclusion of what you are saying?”

The direction of causal relationships here is uncertain. There’s a risk of concluding post hoc propter hoc.

I live in a borough on the SW periphery of London which has consistently been at or close to the top of the league table for local educational authorities in England based on average attainment in the GCSE exams for more than a decade. The local ethnic mix is about the London average.

IMO insufficient attention is paid to this factor:

“Government figures show only 15% of white working class boys in England got five good GCSEs including maths and English last year. . . Poorer pupils from Indian and Chinese backgrounds fared much better – with 36% and 52% making that grade respectively.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7220683.stm

IMO insufficient attention is paid to this factor:

“Government figures show only 15% of white working class boys in England got five good GCSEs including maths and English last year. . . Poorer pupils from Indian and Chinese backgrounds fared much better – with 36% and 52% making that grade respectively.”

I wonder what other causative factors might be involved there, how many of those white working class boys have two parents looking after them compared with their Indian and Chinese descent peers? Not that single parents are bad per se, but being a single parent and holding down a job at the same time can pretty much tired you the fuck out, so you can’t keep a good track of junior’s educational achievement. Many hands make light work and all that.

Cylux

Asian cultures, especially the cultures of China and Japan, have a long traditional regard for learning, and education and for teachers. By accounts, parents press and encourage their children to do well at school. In Japan, the pressures become so intense that there is a high teen suicide rate. China in ancient times introduced exams for entry into its civil service. The Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of Britain’s civil service date from the 1850s – previously, civil service appointments were based on patronage.

There is no comparable English tradition. “Academic”, “theoretical” and “intellectual” have acquired pejorative overtones as compared with “experience”. In 1800, there were four ancient universities in Scotland compared with only two for England and Wales.

“We have noted a substantial body of original research . . . which found that stagnant or declining literacy underlay the [industrial] ‘revolution’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . Britain in 1850 was the wealthiest country in the world but only in the second rank as regards literacy levels. [Nick] Crafts has shown that in 1870 when Britain was world economic leader, its school enrolment ratio was only 0.168 compared with the European norm of 0.514 and ‘Britain persistently had a relatively low rate of accumulation of human capital’.”
Sanderson: Education, economic change and society in 1780-1870 (Cambridge UP, 1995) p.61

By the mid 19th century, the popular perception was that Britain had become relatively affluent through technical innovations in manufacturing without much attention to education for the lower classes so schooling could be left to the churches and to charities. That changed with the 1870 Education Act which made provision for school boards to provide opportunities for universal primary education. A decade later, universal primary schooling up to the age of 12 was made compulsory.

Orwell famously wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), chp.7:

“The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly.”

Those values have survived in neighbourhoods nurturing working class values. Attlee’s Labour government 1945-51 championed grammar schools and 11+ selection to enable bright working class youngsters to escape entrapment by neighbourhood peer groups and get a good academic education based on merit.

While the London borough where I live has stayed at or near the top of the schools league table for England ever since the advent of the league table in the early 1990s, note that some other local educational authorities elsewhere have stayed at or near the bottom year after year.

Hate to break it to ya Bob, but that Orwell quote is now so out of date it might as well be referring to an alien species as far as its accuracy is concerned. 14 year olds in today’s schools hating learning because they’d rather have a job and be working?
Not bloody likely.

13

I can’t remember how many times this has been pointed-out, although Bob has been known to blame the celebrity culture/football for the current lack of interest in further education by white working-class boys. The Orwell quote is reserved for when he hasn’t got anything better to say.

12

The population was more literate in the 18th century than the 19th, The French Revolution made many wary about reading skills for the masses, although there were other reasons such as market refusal to respond to need when there was no profit impetus.

Really interesting subject, but can it be done justice on a talk board? It’s such a divisive ideological issue. You can’t make everyone like diversity, and you can never (it seems) get its champions to admit to it’s flaws and limitations.
I’m in Bristol today and don’t know it well at all, but have a few days to have a look around and will be most closely looking around its most diverse and multi-cultual neighbourhood of St Pauls. I was already walking around it a bit this morning.
I like the look of it, as I like those kinds of inner city urban areas. Ethnic minority people, students and grungy ”artistic” lefty/liberal white people make it one of those vibrant areas.
It all looks a bit ”Banksy” as I’ve never seen an area of a city with so much mural/grafitti art.
If I looked a bit closer, some things might not look so ideal. I have to go the the job centre and I’ll have a look as to what that looks like. Are ethnic minority people more likely to be unemployed and poor? Probably.

That’s a heck of a change between two censuses, and I presume if you look at it on a graph, the line (in change) is predictited to continue, faster or slower, in a similar way. Maybe there’s another 500,000 people currently living in Somalia who have yet to make Britain their home yet (or is it just 50,000?)
And is that always a good thing? It is for the Somalians I suppose, as they can make new more fulfilling lives here. It might create ‘ghettos” though if they struggle to get on and prosper.
It’s all quite complex. Interesting though.

The right-wing commentators have been predictable. For them, this ‘white flight’ is proof that multiculturalism is a terrible idea, immigration is all bad and the only answer is to close the borders.

Multiculturalism is only a terrible idea if diversity among groups is promoted as a positive. It’s not.

Reducing immigration will never stop this country being diverse or becoming more so; my daughter is 3, a third of her peers are non-white.

What does skin colour matter? That is a particularly racist comment.

The solution is integration. Activities that bond people together across boundaries are the key – not immigration policy.

No it’s not. The solution is to treat everyone, whether immigrants or not, as individuals and not as a group of automatons, hamstrung by their “culture”.

Oh yes, and allowing people to bond as and when they wish rather than funding fake charities to create fake “integration”.

@ 16 pagar

“Oh yes, and allowing people to bond as and when they wish rather than funding fake charities to create fake “integration”.”

What are these fake charities that force people to integrate falsely?

London has always been an immigrant and a transient city.

It has always been a gateway to life in the UK – and it has always attracted young people from across the country. It has also always seen those of a certain wealth and age leave it for greener pastures elsewhere in the UK.

And there isn’t much by way of evidence that this has changed.

Of course nowadays the influx of immigrants is less Irish or Jewish or Huguenot. Nowadays it tends to be black or brown skinned. But there has been no evidence of a change in the long term trend of young people coming to london with little, and then leaving with plenty when they are older (or in later generations)

Granted it is only about 25 years since London started growing again after several decades of decline. But that era of decline was a seemingly short term blip in a centuries old process of growth in population.

And for all that – the data about white flight is ludicrously weak.

Most notable among its failures is to assume that statistical groups are individuals. They are not. There has been a drop in white britons in London, but given the long run trends in London, this may reflect falling birthrates more than people leaving the city. There is also a ludicrous implication that there is no black or brown flight from London – which is just wrong. Thousands of black and brown people have left London in the last decade. But hey, lets ignore that when creating a racially-motivated buzz-term huh?

Also – for white flight – there is an alarming and agenda driven overlooking of the incoming white population. It may be foreign but that means “white flight” is a ludicrous racialisation of a phenomenon that isn’t about race on two counts.

so – the question is this – why does London not attract large numbers of poor young white Britons like it used to?

might we ponder that our housing market, social housing, benefits systems and so on being rather geography dependent plays some part in that – in a way that some one from Poland or India might be less concerned about?

Because that seems a more sensible thing to look at than why people continue to leave London over time as they have done for hundreds of years.

M4E

Yess – but why the dramatic improvement in London’s schooling standards compared with other places? Is that improvement in schooling standards related to the white flight from London or just coincidental?

The BBC’s report by Mark Easton has a map showing the London boroughs with the largest/smallest exodus along with a listing of places where the emigrants from London mainly moved to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21511904

There is little point attempting to draw any conclusions without a full set of information, I would suggest that age will be quite significant, as @18 suggests, as will class. Another point is the areas in London which now attract middle-class have changed, I’m reluctant to use the term ‘gentrified’ Looking for a simple cause and effect is pointless and so is using the term ‘ethnic’ and ‘class’ as if they are mutually exclusive.

Bob

Hard to know the extent to which education was impacted on without knowing the age profiles. If the flight was a lot of old people dying, then it’s not likely to have been a factor. But actually recent studies suggest the white working class is now the lowest performing sub-group in education. So it may have played some part.

steveb

That’s the thing – London is always so in flux that the idea of looking at it in this static way is absurd.

I for one would at least like to know how many black and brown skinned people flew from London over the same ten year period. But when I ask that it turns out we don’t even know how many white skinned people did.

Margin4error:

There is an old truism about immigration patterns which goes “Half a mile or half a world”. It describes a basic human reaction to dislocation; to seek the familiar. First generation immigrants will usually settle within a very close span of where they first lived when they arrived, and that will usually be near others from the same origin. Otherwise, they will likely return.

This isn’t a modern thing; Rome remarked the same phenomenon, as did medieval Venice and London. It’s just still true. It is the explanation for Southall, and for the geographic concentration of Catholics within Glasgow.

The thing that keeps getting missed in this whole debate is that it is held almost entirely about behaviour patterns of first generation immigrants. Second, and then much more so third, generation descendants of immigrants display much more flexible settlement patterns, and are, in fact, typically or at least frequently well integrated. Living in North London as long as I did, you very quickly realise that a voice on the phone is no guide to ethnicity at all, to use accent as a very crude proxy for integration.

A significant proportion of the non-white population of Britain are not immigrants. They’re British and always have been. They are just as likely to migrate internally in a pattern which, were they white, would be called ‘white flight’ as actual white people. This is particularly true of university graduates, who display settlement patterns nearly identical to white graduates. I know more than one person of West Indian descent, born and bred in Hackney, but who now lives in Surrey or Hertfordshire, because they could afford to not live in Hackney any more.

London is the special case it is because it is a city of cyclic migration, as someone said above a ‘gateway to Britain’ in the way New York was a gateway to America and Montreal to Canada. If you look at the history of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green you get a very powerful sense of that: successive cultural immigrations landed there because it was a slum and cheap, and then moved out as a new wave immigrants from somewhere else arrived. This pattern holds back to the Huguenots and further.

According to the 2011 Census, London’s population grew by 12pc in a decade, the fastest growth on the country.

“Around half of the residents of England and Wales who were born outside the UK last arrived in the UK between 2001 and 2011. The largest increase in non-UK born population was in London, where over a third of residents were born abroad [37pc] and almost a quarter were not British nationals.” [report in The Guardian]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/dec/11/census-one-in-eight-born-abroad

I thought the subject would be to big for this blog.
Maybe it’s just not the right kind of forum to discuss these things. Across the internet with strangers. It’s too an emotive and ideological subject. Integration/diversity, evermore immigration from the poorest places on earth. Yesterday there was the front page Daily Mirror story about a killer from Sudan’s Janjaweed militia living as an asylum seeker in Birmingham.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mohamed-salim-sudan-war-criminal-1759679

That’s a part of our modern diversity of course, but maybe it’s better just not to know. As long as he’s not killing people in this country it’s all right I guess. That must be the logic when you start accepting tens of thousands of people from war zones. You will get the combatants coming too.
Walking around inner city Bristol this last couple of days, you can see old and new waves of immigration and diversity. In one primary school in the St Paul’s area, all the children seem to be young Somalis, with the girls all wearing white school uniform hijabs.
I thought it might be a Muslim school for a moment, but there were a couple of white children in there too. This is a community that is constantly growing I’d guess, while the older Caribbean community has stopped growing, and is (perhaps) being displaced a bit, through integration and moving out of the area.

One aspect about this debate online like this is how people are reluctant to respond to things that go against their ideological view.
So if I was to ask the hypothetical question about whether there can be ”too much” (diversity) too quickly, many people would chose to ignore it, or just say that London (for example) had always been a gateway city. Implying that it was fine for that to continue for ever and with who-ever. Even if it changed things on the ground in ways that some people didn’t like. Making a local area more like it is in Bangladesh for example. And bringing the corruption of Bangladesh politics to English local politics. And a community having a penchant for welcoming the most backward religious speakers and from overseas to speak in their places of worship.
I know that the Catholics can be pretty reactionary, but there are far worse than them now, speaking to English Muslim communities almost on a weekly basis.

Can the diversity and multi-culturalism of the UK just take them all, and change everything for the better?
By the second generation make everyone into liberal democrats? I’d say it’s not safe to think you can.
You might get ghettos of deprivation, and not just economic deprivation, but cultural too. (I mean from the liberal enlightened point of view).

Another annoying aspect of the modern diversity is that we all need ”re-education” by diversity experts, to bash the racism and prejudice out of us.
So all our institutions have been found institutionally racist etc, and we have to get sent away on diversity courses to put our thinking right.
Personally I resent it, but it’s not optional – you must comply.

“600,000 people have just left London for a less diverse area.”

No, the White British population of London has reduced by 600,000.

This includes the effect of births and deaths, by the way. Lots of people marry people from other ethnicities now – and their kids are “Mixed” not “White British”. It’s just people looking for the ‘white flight’ narrative have assumed it’s got to be all about people ‘moving out’, fleeing problems.

The change also will of course include people moving for many, many other reasons.

So, the idea that you can stem this tide to any significant extent by getting ethnic groups to talk to each other is ridiculous.

@ Jungle

“It’s just people looking for the ‘white flight’ narrative have assumed it’s got to be all about people ‘moving out’, fleeing problems.”

Exactly. Rather than, say, moving out to a nice big house in the suburbs/country because they’ve just had kids, or bought their own home, or decided to downshift. I suspect people moving out of cities are normally either escaping inherent city stuff like noise, dirt, and crowds, or they’re not looking to escape anything – they just actively want to live in the new place.

“The change also will of course include people moving for many, many other reasons.”

One of which is that it’s very likely that with a buoyant housing market in London and a relatively depressed market in most of the rest of Britain since the bursting of the house-price bubble, it has been possible to sell a house in big, crowded London and buy a better house in some small town or a bucolic rapture in another part of the country, especially if the kids have had the benefit of a London schooling and the difference in house prices would help to fund the kids through college. There are knock-on effects in delightful villages where local folk have greater difficulty in finding affordable housing.

I’d be interested in seeing research showing the extent to which the London boroughs of greatest exodus coincide with the greatest inward settlement but the best I can find is these maps in The Economist maps showing growth rates of ethnic minority populations in London boroughs and density of minority settlement:
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21568396-britain-becoming-more-its-capital-city-london-effect

24

If you want to observe rapid social and cultural change you would do no better than South Yorkshire. In less than 20 years it moved from being a collection of pit towns and villages with communities whose families knew each other for several generations, to a yuppi paradise embracing bistros, health centres and estate agents. Not noticed much change in skin colour though.

Reducing immigration will never stop this country being diverse or becoming more so; my daughter is 3, a third of her peers are non-white. We are a multi-racial country – we need to deal with it, not deny it.

This country perhaps, but not the local areas in this country. It is a mistake just to look at this through the lens of race or to assume that people leaving London are horrible racists. They may be. But there are also other reasons to move out of the cities. Take my old neighbourhood which now regularly features a group of shirtless teens who sit on the doorsteps of the houses on the street all night drinking and loudly swearing. Not surprisingly some of the older residents find this a little intimidating. Which it is – violence is not uncommon. Nor are broken windows, people pissing on other people’s doorsteps, muggings and so on. Naturally everyone who can leave, has left. Notice there is nothing about race in this description although you are free to make whatever assumptions you like. It is rational no matter what the races of the people involved are. Minorities are fleeing if they can afford it too. Most people with barely teenage daughters do not want them to have to go to school every day down streets where they are loudly and rudely propositioned by unemployed young males every twenty paces.

So what those that can afford to do so are going to do is flee to places these sort of young men can’t afford to live. If they could keep them out, they will. And it won’t take them long to figure out how to do it either – planning regulations work nicely to keep poor people out. And unfortunately the sort of young men who sit shirtless in the street drinking are likely to be poor for some time to come. The future of Britain is ever more segregated, not less. Just as in America or Brazil. At least until Britain once again has a common culture.

Perhaps people identify more with their own race, without actually believing they are superior to others?

I believe all people are created equal, but I graduate towards people who are like me. This isn’t just about skin colour or culture, but even down to which football team I support (which would over-ride everything!)

I am not so sure forced integration would work as the OP suggests – that’s what the action would be. Perhaps not deliberately jamming lots of foreigners in the country in a short space of time might have been a bad idea and you might want to apologise and admit you all made a mistake?…..unless social division was the aim, which is I am sure what Orwell was warning against.