BRITAIN’S race relations
chief is to warn that the country is
“sleepwalking” into New Orleans-style racial
segregation, with Muslim and black ghettos
dividing cities.
Trevor Phillips,
chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality
(CRE), is to say the July terror attacks have
exposed a racial “nightmare” where some
districts are becoming “fully-fledged ghettos —
literal black holes” where people fear to go.
In a stark warning to Tony Blair, Phillips
will say in a speech this week that race
relations policy is failing to tackle the roots
of ethnic alienation and extremism.
He will suggest new measures that he admits
critics will regard as social engineering. These
could include forcing “white” schools to take
larger numbers of ethnic minorities to help to
encourage integration.
He will admit that his message is “bleak” but
sees America’s experience after Hurricane
Katrina as a warning to Britain to avoid similar
complacency in believing that it has an
integrated society.
“The fact is we are a society which, almost
without noticing it, is becoming more divided by
race and religion. We are becoming more unequal
by ethnicity,” he will tell Manchester Council
for Community Relations on Thursday.
“Our ordinary schools . . . are becoming more
exclusive and our universities are starting to
become colour-coded with virtual ‘whites keep
out’ signs in some urban institutions.”
In a side-swipe at Oxford, Cambridge and
other top universities, he will say: “If you
look closely at the campuses of some of our most
distinguished universities you can pick out the
invisible ‘no blacks may enter’ messages.”
Some districts, he will say, are on their way
to “literal black holes into which nobody goes
without fear and trepidation, and from which
nobody ever escapes undamaged”.
He will warn that if this continues, the
first century of black immigration would end in
a “New Orleans-style Britain of passively
coexisting ethnic and religious communities,
eyeing each other uneasily over the fences of
our differences”.
Assessing where Britain stands in the
aftermath of the July 7 attacks, he says: “We
are sleepwalking our way to segregation. We are
becoming strangers to each other and leaving
communities to be marooned outside the
mainstream.”
Phillips cites new evidence from the CRE that
“residential segregation” is increasing even as
some Asians are moving into middle-class areas.
“What is left behind is hardening in its
separateness,” he will say.
The number of people of Pakistani heritage in
ghettos, which he defines as those with more
than two-thirds of any one ethnicity, trebled
between 1991 and 2001. In Bradford, 13.3% now
live in such communities compared with 4.3% in
1991; in Leicester it has risen from 10.8% to
13.3%.
According to Phillips, new research also
pours cold water on hopes that children mixing
in schools might break down the barriers between
communities. The study by Bristol University
found that children are slightly more segregated
in the playground than they are in their
neighbourhoods. “That means that not only aren’t
the children meeting — nor are their parents,”
Phillips will say.
New CRE research will also show that most
white people do not have a non-white friend,
while young Asian and black people have almost
exclusively Asian or black friends.
Phillips will suggest that schools could be
given cash incentives to increase their ethnic
mix and local education authorities could be
forced to broaden their catchment areas to
include a more even racial mix.
He also has concerns about white
working-class ghettos in places such as Barking,
Essex, and parts of Yorkshire.
Critics will dismiss his warning as alarmist.
But Phillips will argue: “America is not our
dream but our nightmare. When the hurricane hits
— and it could be a recession rather than a
natural disaster — those (segregated)
communities are set up for destruction.”
