Places like Knowsley also reveal something about race in Britain. Not that poor whites are exceptionally hard done by, though men with shaved heads and black bomber jackets will argue that they are. Rather, that the country tends to look at race in the wrong way. These days, overt discrimination is not nearly as big a problem as isolation. This is true of blacks and Asians as much as whites.
Comfortably colour-blind
On just about every reliable measure, Britain is exceedingly tolerant on race, and becoming ever more so. In a large survey in 1986, 28% of respondents reckoned that most white people would mind “a lot” if a qualified black person was made their boss. Two decades later the proportion had fallen to 9%. Government surveys find that 87% of whites, and 91% of ethnic minorities, say people from different backgrounds get on well together in their neighbourhood—up substantially from ten years ago.
Lest this be thought mere political correctness, behaviour has changed just as much. With the odd and not too worrying exception of the Chinese, every ethnic group is becoming less segregated. Between 2001 and 2011 the number of Britons with mixed white and black-Caribbean parentage jumped from 237,000 to 427,000. There was a similar increase in the number of mixed white and Asian people.
Britons are also more tolerant than other Europeans. Polls show they are unusually at ease with the idea of a non-white political leader. Immigrants fare reasonably well in the job market. In 2011, 7% of British-born people and 8% of immigrants were unemployed. In Sweden, where racial attitudes are just as liberal as in Britain, the unemployment gap was much wider: 7% for natives, 15% for immigrants. Britain is the only large European country where immigrants are less likely to drop out of school than are their native-born peers.
Many Britons loathe immigration, and nearly all think there is too much of it. But this may be the reverse side of the same racially tolerant coin. People may be dubious about immigration partly because they set exceedingly high standards for their country. They assume that immigrants must be accorded precisely the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. The country has never had a large guest-worker programme.
Yet this harmonious picture is marred by some ugly blots. Some people in some places have fallen out of mainstream British life. This is bad for them, and also for everyone else. It is quite a different problem from broad racial discrimination: less serious, but also harder to solve.
In the 1960s and 1970s many Pakistani men were brought to England’s northern towns to work the night shifts in textile mills—a last-ditch effort to sustain a dying, uncompetitive industry. This failed, and within a few years thousands were thrown out of work. Men scattered to other unskilled jobs, heading for one in particular. A decade ago it was calculated that one in every eight Pakistani men in Britain was a taxi- or minicab-driver.
It was a bad beginning. But the Pakistanis of northern England, who started out as economically marginalised, have removed themselves in other ways. Old-timers remember how the earliest migrants, generally single men, adapted surprisingly quickly to British society, occasionally dating white women and frequenting pubs (they also adored Bollywood films). Then they started bringing parents and marriage partners from the part of rural Pakistan where they came from, the Mirpur Valley in Kashmir. They have kept on doing so ever since.
Bogged down in Bradford
The consequence, says Nuzhat Ali, a campaigner who lives in Bradford, is that culturally “we are constantly going back to the first generation.” Four in ten Pakistanis in the city were born in Pakistan—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. And the community is mired in old ways. Ms Ali had expected the custom of first-cousin marriage to die out in her generation, but it persists. As a result, birth defects are too common: consanguineous marriage seems to double the risk.
Clans, or biraderis, are a mighty force in Bradford. They select marriage partners for young men and women. They run the mosques. They corral votes for politicians (almost invariably Labour ones). In Birmingham, another city with many Mirpuris, postal votes are occasionally delivered in suspicious batches.
The Pakistanis who live in England’s northern cities are not just isolated and backward compared with other ethnic groups. They are also far less cosmopolitan than many people in Pakistan. Irna Qureshi, a researcher who lives in a suburb of Bradford, says visitors from Asia are frequently shocked by the town’s traditionalism. They arrive wearing jeans, only to find themselves surrounded by British Asians wearing shalwar kameez.
Why are Bradford Pakistanis so cut off? Not primarily because of racism or Islamophobia, though both exist. Nor because they have decided to isolate themselves—though that is true of some. Pakistanis who make good, as doctors or solicitors, often move to mainly white suburbs. Their houses have fancy painted railings in front: an evocation of a South-East Asian family compound.
It is more their clan-based culture that sets them apart from British life, and perpetuates itself. Britain’s Pakistanis can escape this culture, but not easily, and their departure does not undermine it. Ms Ali says a growing number of people scorn first-cousin marriage, including herself, though she did marry a cousin. But the old ways remain mainstream: the biraderis and the imported spouses persist.
The problem is specific, not general. It is with Pakistanis in Bradford, not Pakistanis as a whole. Elsewhere, many have blended happily into British life—notably in London, where a fifth of Britain’s Pakistanis live. But this group in this place is stuck, just as the working-class whites who live in Stockbridge are stuck.
Much the same is true of Afro-Caribbean boys in rough neighbourhoods like Handsworth, in Birmingham—one of the places that rioted in 2011. Craig Pinkney, who runs Real Action UK, a mentoring and outreach programme for Birmingham’s most troubled youths, says black boys frequently slip into a posture of opposition to authority. They begin by challenging teachers and move on to the police. This culture persists down the generations. Handsworth has scores of gangs—tiny, often rather pathetic outfits that are nonetheless capable of trafficking drugs and the occasional gun. Some of the leaders of these gangs, Mr Pinkney says, are the children and grandchildren of the men who rioted against the police in the 1980s.
Again, the problem is specific—some neighbourhoods, even some families, more than others; black boys, not black girls. It is exacerbated by racial discrimination, including among the police. People in Handsworth say the neighbourhood-beat coppers are fine: it is the officers in citywide patrol units, charging out of vans as if high on drugs, who get young people’s backs up. Still, overt discrimination is not nearly as bad as it once was.
Out-and-out racism and Islamophobia have proved straightforward to tackle, if hard to stamp out completely. In the 1970s Britain made it illegal to discriminate on racial grounds in employment or housing. Since the 1980s the police have been under pressure to behave better. Hate speech has been criminalised. All of these reforms were resisted, but over time they have worked. It is harder to solve the problem of isolation.
Since the problems are distinctive and local, the solutions might be, too. In Knowsley, better transport connections would help, to make it easier for people to get to jobs. In Bradford, a dose of home economics for teenage boys would be a good idea. One reason so many Pakistanis go to college and university locally, and thus stay within the orbit of their parents’ and relatives’ marriage choices, is that they cannot cook. Black boys need alternatives to the streets above all.
The really important thing is to understand where the problems lie. They do not lie with whole ethnic groups, nor with mass immigration. Instead, they are specific and deep. Britain mostly gets on well—better than most other countries. But the exceptions are woven tightly into the national fabric.
