Segregation isn't increasing - immigrant communities are enjoying economic success

We can't deny the existence, and sometimes the significance, of segregation. There are many examples of segregated communities, from the Amish of Pennsylvania through closed orders of monks or nuns to more problematic imposed segregation of East European Roma or, under apartheid, South Africa's Bantu people. These people, however, have either chosen a separate life or had such a life imposed on them. Segregation is not an accident of demography.

Yet Ted Cantle and Eric Kaufmann, in a report for Open Democracy, want us to believe that segregation is a function of demography rather than policy.

This paper comes to a clear view that whilst many areas have become more mixed, segregation is increasing in a number of very particular respects in the UK, especially the growing isolation of the White majority from minorities in urban zones. Further, the extent and pace of this change, within some communities, is very evident.

The contention here is that certain parts of England have, despite the country becoming more diverse, grown more segregated. To reach this conclusion the authors have looked at ethnicity data at ward level demonstrating that, between 1991 and 2011, certain parts of cities like Leicester, Birmingham and Bradford have become more segregated. But this only works if you accept segregation as being defined by "the extent to which an ethnic group is evenly spread across neighbourhoods", something that disregards choice or policy.

At the core of Cantle & Kaufmann's argument is the idea of "white flight" - that White British people are leaving as more non-white people are moving into a particular place:

...between 2001 and 2011 the White British population in England reduced as a percentage of the total population from 86.8% to 79.8% — a decrease of 8%. Although there was a decrease in the proportion of the population who were white in most areas, the decrease was much greater in the areas which had a low proportion of white British in 2001 than in areas which had had a high proportion. Thus for example, in Newham, which had had the lowest proportion of white British in 2001 there was a 50% decrease in the percentage of WB between 2001 and 2011; in Barrow in Furness, where 97.9% of the population were WB in 2001, this decreased by less than 1% by 2011. This does indicate support for ‘more mixing and more clustering’, but they are not equivalent trends, the clustering is noticeably more marked.

Setting to one side Cantle & Kaufmann's deliberately polemic choice of places, what is implied here is that White British people are, as soon as a black family arrives, throwing their chattels onto a cart and heading for Basildon. There is no attempt to understand why people move or indeed where they move to. We know that between 10% and 15% of the electoral register changes in any given year as a result of movement, family break-up and death. And we know that this churn is higher in poorer places with more rented property.

So people, of whatever ethnicity, moving out of Newham - or for that matter, within Newham - should not surprise us. We should welcome this as, in a lot of cases, it's a direct consequence of people bettering themselves. The question we need to answer is why the gaps these folk leave are being filled by people of non-white ethnicity in Newham but White British ethnicity in Barrow. To understand this, I'm going to talk about one place that Cantle & Kaufmann cite in making their argument - Toller Ward in Bradford.

Toller is an invented name to describe an area of inner city Bradford made up of Girlington and a large part of Heaton township (or "behind the hospital" as many might call it). Girlington is, and has been for a long time, a pretty poor place with tightly-packed terraces running down the hill from Duckworth Lane to Thornton Road. With Manningham, this community was one of the first places where Bradford's Mirpuri community came to live. But remember it was poor before that - local comedian Nicky Newsome would sing a maudlin song about growing up in Girlington filled with references to sleeping head to toe in a shared bed and eating meat on a Sunday.

Behind the hospital is a different place. Daisy Hill, Chellow Dene and Heaton aren't poor places but feature large Victorian and Edwardian properties, 1930s semis and a good few more recent (and grand) detached houses. In 1991 this area was, unlike Girlington, overwhelmingly white and middle-class (including me).

Over the years since, the process Cantle & Kaufmann see as a problem, Toller's White British population fell from 46.9% to just 10.4%. Why this happened is nothing to do with "white flight" but a simple consequence of economics and demography. As a middle-class area, the population of the Heaton half of Toller ward is determined by the supply of middle-class people to live in it. And here in Bradford that supply is coming from the City's Pakistani community. These people, brought up in Girlington and Manningham, are simply doing what previous generations have done and moving a little further out from the city centre and a little further up the hill. It really has nothing at all to do with their ethnicity.

Meanwhile, in Girlington a different pattern is playing out. In the poorest parts of the place, the population is less Pakistani as their economic success allowed them to move up the hill. In their place are new immigrants - Roma, Kurds, refugee Arabs, Francophone Africans, Somalis. And this, just as the other economic driver taking the Pakistani population to better homes in Heaton, gives the lie to Cantle & Kaufmann's idea of segregation. In time those new immigrants will move on and move out, probably to be replaced with another generation of immigrants.

So what Cantle & Kaufmann describe as "growing segregation" is nothing of a sort but rather the long established process of immigrant communities improving their economic lot and moving to better areas. We've seen this in London and Manchester with the Jewish community, and in North London with the Indian population. What we're seeing isn't segregation but rather the playing out of immigrant population's integration into our developed, successful consumer society.

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The cocoon of diversity

In my lifetime the cause of civil rights has transformed the lives of millions in what we now call 'minorities'. From the gradual liberation of women and allowing gay people to actually live free lives through to the insistence on equal treatment for people with different skin colours, we live in a very different, and more civilised, society than we did when I was born.

I also know that prejudice continues - from the laughable idea that someone can't be English because they've a slightly darker skin through to the casual way in which women, gay people and the disabled are excluded. In some ways what we do goes too far - positive discrimination tends to favour those individuals from minorities who probably need the least help and the straightjacket of 'protected characteristics' leaves some groups facing prejudice without recourse to the protection offered to others.

Now the problem is that, with all this placing of people into discrete groups - ethnicity, disability, gender, sexual preference, age - we have allowed groupthink to take over with the result that far from an inclusive, united and open society we have one characterised by self-segregation, exclusion and mistrust. A sort of self-imposed apartheid is growing from this corrupted soil:

Robert Lopez, a spokesman for the university, confirmed to The College Fix that the students’ demand for housing specifically for black students had been met, saying that the school’s new Halisi Scholars Black Living-Learning Community “focuses on academic excellence and learning experiences that are inclusive and non-discriminatory.”

What sort of world have we come to where intelligent, educated young people want to segregate themselves from others purely on the basis of their skin colour? Don't get me wrong here - if a bunch of black students (or for that matter brown, yellow, red or white students) choose to live together that's entirely their business. But to demand, as students at California State University in Los Angeles did, that the college authorities set aside a place purely for this purpose is to make diversity a protective cocoon rather than a chance to realise that all those other folk - men, women, gay, straight, black, white, able-bodied, disabled - are just other human beings.

This process of segregation - shocking given the history of racial oppression in the USA - is spreading across college campuses even to the extent of segregated induction and segregated staff:

UW-Madison’s Multicultural Student Center held meetings separated by race July 11. “The center held two distinct sets of ‘processing’ meet-ups. First, two ‘processing circles,’ one for white staff and another for non-white staff, were held in the morning, followed by racially separated ‘processing meet-ups’ for students in the evening,”

It seems that, far from seeking engagement in society, a section of black America is trying to create parallel structures and organisations simply to prevent any risk of 'microaggressions' resulting from sharing space with white people. This attitude is not only very disturbing but, worse still, acts to reinforce the unpleasant view that black people don't want to be part of wider American society. Put simply, all the work done - from Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King onwards - to get a society where minorities have equal rights is unfurling as these students, indulged by college authorities, recreate a world where group characteristics like skin colour, gender or disability are what defines a person not the 'content of their character'. And rather than this being a consequence of others prejudice it is rather the desire of these groups to avoid any place where words or actions might offend - a cocoon of diversity.

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Ted Cantle and Chuka Umunna are wrong - Britain is not getting more segregated

For many people in Bradford the 7th July 2001 is a date that brings back dreadful memories. Forget about the declining textile industry, the struggles of our city centre and our poor education system for a second - the one event that most damaged our city's image and reputation happened on that day. A small section of the City's population, in one relatively small part of the city rioted, looted, wrecked the livelihoods of local businesses and turned Bradford into a byword for segregation and racial tension.

And it was a small part of the city - from Westgate and White Abbey Road up to Carlisle Road, along Oak Lane and a part of Manningham Lane. I could walk you round the sites of that violent day, show you where the pubs and car showrooms were burned out, point to the shop that before that day was one of Bradford's oldest Polish delis and show you the spot where burning cars scarred the surface of the roads. That walk would take - with stops to reflect on this damage - perhaps an hour. Yet ask someone from elsewhere about our city and, chances are, that something referring back to that day will come up - perhaps a reference to our large Asian community, to crime, or drugs, racism or segregation. Even today, as the recent anti-semitism row shows, we allow the vocal presence of a large minority community - Asian Muslims - to dominate the discourse about Bradford.

There were two major reports commissioned into the riots, their causes and their consequences - one from Sir Herman Ouseley (Community Pride, not Prejudice) and one from Ted Cantle (which had a wider remit by looking at events on the same day in Oldham and Burnley). Cantle coined the term 'parallel lives' to describe communities in these places and, since Bradford was the biggest and most high profile of these riot-torn places, his characterisation of our city as a place divided became the basis for how elsewhere viewed Bradford.

From Cantle's work came the idea of 'community cohesion', a sort of catch-all phrase to cover working to reduce 'tensions' alongside the old concept of 'community development' and ideas around race, faith and integration. The premise of 'cohesion' is that it is an antonym of 'segregation' - cohesive communities are where different cultures not just share a place but live together in a place. Some people chose to see this agenda as a rejection of multiculturalism, arguing that integration is essential to cohesion whereas others took Cantle's argument as a case for embedding that multicultural agenda further into schools, workplaces and the wider 'community'.

When Bradford Council's Executive first sat down to consider the response to the riots - in a terrible irony on the afternoon of 11th September 2001 - we knew that our decisions would be subject to central government scrutiny and intervention, not least because we were then a Conservative-led authority under a Labour government. The Council's leadership (or which I was then a member) was not happy with either the Ouseley report - commissioned before the riots - or Cantle's 'parallel lives' report. We felt, and still feel, that the description of Bradford was limited, failed to acknowledge the wider city and ignored reasons for riot that were not about segregation at all but more to do with drugs, crime and racist policing.

This is a long context for a response to Ted Cantle's comments yesterday in The Guardian that suggest somehow segregation today is worse than it was back in 2001:

Speaking to the Guardian 15 years after he called for action to reduce polarisation following violent riots across northern England, in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley, Cantle said he was alarmed by the direction the country had headed since then.

“There is more mixing in some parts of our society. But there is also undoubtedly more segregation in residential areas, more segregation in schools and more segregation in workplaces,” he said. “That is driving more prejudice, intolerance, mistrust in communities.”

Superficially the evidence for Cantle's argument is strong and is set out in the article - a growing number of electoral wards with a non-white majority, schools with a majority minority intake and 'segregated' workplaces. I fear that this tells us only part of the story, problematises race and provides justification for the race or culture based special pleading that is such a driver of division. There is another, more positive story. Here from the Centre for the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) at Manchester University:

Inner London has experienced a decrease in segregation for most ethnic groups, with an increase of 3% or less for the White British, Caribbean and African groups. The White British group saw their greatest increase in segregation in inner London, although this was very small at 3%. Outer London’s decreasing segregation is particularly notable for the Bangladeshi (-12%), Chinese (-11%) and Mixed (-8%) groups. Segregation has decreased in metropolitan districts for all ethnic groups except White British. The White British and Other White groups saw marginal increases in segregation in other large cities. For all other ethnic groups, segregation decreased in these urban districts, in particular for the African group, with a decrease of 20%. The picture is one of decreased residential segregation in urban areas. An important mechanism for this change is dispersal from major cities to suburban and rural areas, in particular by families.

What we have here is a very different picture from that presented by Cantle and others - rather than seeing the colour of people living in a place as a mark of division, we see the same process of dispersal from immigrant communities we saw for previous generations of immigrants. People from Indian, Bengali and Pakistani heritage, as more of them succeed in life, molve away from the dense urban places of their arrival (or, for many, birth) in the same way that the children of poor East End Jews moved outwards to Golders Green, Hendon and Mill Hill. These Jewish families did not lose their faith or culture but their otherness was diminished by the things they shared with their new neighbours. There is no reason to suppose that the same dispersal for Hindu or Muslim, Asian and Black communities will not result in greater rather than less cohesion.

The reason for those statistics and for the frightening agenda apparent from Chuka Umunna is that the past couple of decades have seen the most concentrated influx of immigrants to the UK in our history. Whatever we think about this fact - The Guardian reports 1.2 million into London alone (although these are defined as not "white-British" so could be white European I guess) - if we define the lack of cohesion by simply counting how many black people there are in a given place then we fall into company with racists. Moreover, we define people by the box they tick on an ethnic monitoring form (a pox on these things) rather than on what they actually think, do or say.

The South Asian population of Bingley Rural - the ward I represent - was 482 in 2011 (it has likely risen a little since then - so maybe 600) and was 164 in 2001. In a small way this illustrates this dispersal. This is around 3% of the population, yet we elected a resident of Pakistani heritage as a councillor this May. If I were to be blunt, I doubt this would have been possible in 2001. Of course there is racism, I met people who said they wouldn't vote for Naveed because of his race and faith but overwhelmingly people seemed to see beyond that fact to the person underneath.

The Guardian article - indeed much of what I read in the press about the affect or impact of immigration - fails to touch on the truth about integration. Just as people don't judge me as a Roman Catholic or my wife as Jewish (although we've some problems with this), we are beginning to stop judging people by their skin colour. We've a way to go with Islam - we still make assumptions about a woman in a headscarf, for example - but even there the extent of our experience and witness of what most Muslims are like is beginning to change how we view that faith.

The way in which Ted Cantle frames his argument - focusing on numbers and concentration rather than actual evidence of segregation - doesn't reflect the reality of immigration, integration and dispersal. There's nothing new about recent arrivals clustering together - this takes advantage of family links, community and faith institutions, and provides the necessary social capital to support the new community in a foreign environment. But every example of a new community has seen that concentration diminish as they become established. This isn't to say that there won't be continuing concentrations - Indians in Harrow, Jews in Alwoodley, Pakistanis in Heaton - but these places are no longer inward-looking ghettos but just places where a lot of the residents happen to be Jews, Hindus or Muslims.

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