Race in the UK and Discussing It

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Britain's 'pockets of monoculture'

"Britain is becoming older, more liberal, more equal and more secular. But among British Muslims the trend is the opposite: younger, more socially conservative, more religious. That's according to Dame Louise Casey's report published today...

After hearing from more than 800 people during her investigation, not one person said there wasn't a problem to solve. As part of her report, she says that in some parts of the country, those from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds live in segregation...

I have seen in the last 12, 18 months, I have listened to, I only last Thursday was in a community where women who've lived here for years are not allowed out of their house without their men's permission. Now you can get as many right on people on the radio as you want today, you can get as many community leaders saying I'm wrong, but they cannot deny an uncomfortable truth, which is that inequality within certain communities in these highly segregated areas is getting worse not better.

In the very local authority where your chap was talking earlier in Oldham about it's all equal, you had the women on saying it's all equal, in that local authority it points as being almost impossible for a Muslim woman to stand as a local authority councilor because the men in that community push them away. I didn't find that isolated examples, I found it in these areas regularly...

Public institutions need to be much much better at talking about these sorts of issues and not worrying about being called racist or Islamophobic. We have to be able to talk about the fact that if you're from a Pakistani heritage community in some areas of the north, you're less likely to speak English than your male counterparts, you're less likely to be out getting a job, you're more likely in the home and not necessarily in my view by choice. Those are the sorts of leadership issues. The fact that we're on the programme today talking about the uncomfortable truths of what is happening in Britain today is the starting point. What flows from that has to be an integration strategy...

Last year or the year before, there are a bunch of people out there, I think from the trade unions saying how appalling it was that the government thought everybody in the public sector should speak English.

We've lost our sense really sometimes of kind of, common sense needs to dictate that if everybody speaks English. A woman that can't speak English is less likely to know how to get through the system if she's suffering domestic violence than me"


(related to the above) Migrants should swear an oath to live in Britain, government report demands

"Among her proposals is a demand for all new migrants to Britain to take an oath of allegiance where they promise to embrace liberal values before arriving. Dame Louise said ghettos have formed because the pace and scale of immigration has been 'too much' and some towns and cities have been transformed 'out of all recognition', it says. She said successive governments have 'ignored or even condoned regressive, divisive and harmful cultural and religious practices, for fear of being branded racist or Islamophobic'...

Muslim enclaves are concentrated in northern areas such as Bradford, Birmingham and Blackburn, where MailOnline revealed last month there is a halal butcher who has never served a white customer...

Dame Louise's report criticises the rise of 'Sharia councils', which have been allowed to run unhindered and in some cases support extremist values, wife beating and forced marriage and marital rape"


Listen to Today: Trevor Phillips discusses racial attitudes - Omny personal radio

"I think that we've seen in recent months the cost of not being able to have a straight conversation about whether there are differences between groups of people because of their race or religion and what those differences might be. We've seen that in Rotherham and Rochdale.

Further back, one of the things that most concerned me and to some extent changed my view about these, the Victoria Climbié incident where the inquiry showed that people who were, who could've saved this little girl who died because of abuse by her family were reluctant to talk about some or to deal with some of the issues because they thought that they would be regarded as insensitive towards black families...

'We are too shy to talk about some of the real issues. So take a recent example, which you covered here actually. Benedict Cumberbatch. Who didn't need to do this'

'He talked about coloured people'

'He wanted to say very important about the fact that black actors were not being employed at the levels that he thought they should...He used the word coloured, which in the old days was a polite word. In the United States when people use the term people of colour, that is an accepted word... and everyone went bonkers about it.

And my point about it is that Ben Cumberbatch said something very important and very valuable. It got buried because he used that word.

I think part of the fault is here. It's us in the media. Part of it is politics...

If you look at the coverage for example of the Cumberbatch story, how much was devoted to his original point and how much was devoted to the so-called storm about his use of this word?...

We took an originally important thing, which is recognition of diversity, understanding difference and so on and in some cases, I think, we have turned it into something which is a negative. And to the disadvantage by the way of minorities...

'Children can no longer talk about... Baa Baa Black Sheep as part of a nursery rhyme, for instance'...

'We are reluctant to say this, this kinda thing, for a simple reason: we worry that if we say, for example, Chinese children are systematically and routinely better performers at school... I can tell you that one of the, when we did the data on that, one of the struggles that I had when I was at the Commission with government and others was putting that in a report because people say that if you say that, you are stigmatising others... I have this argument all the time with academics. I have it actually by the way with journalists who say you can't say that because it's not true...

[About Cumberbatch] Where we end up with is that the next time a white person wants to say: look, I think there's an issue here about, you know, the employment of black people for example, we've done some work about the paucity of leading figures in the FTSE 100 and business.

The next time a white business leader wants to say we should do something about this, he or she I think will think twice because they will not, not because they don't want to say it but because they will say to themselves: if I say this, will I say it in the wrong way and will I make the situation worse rather than better?...

The big educational success story of the last 10 years has been London, which used to be at the bottom... of the league tables. Today they are at the top. Now there is an argument going on about whether or not, what that's about. Is it about bureaucratic changes? Is it policy and so on?

Or is it, as the Professor of Economics at Bristol University has demonstrated, I think, rather elegantly in an academic paper, that the high performing academic minority groups: Chinese, Indian, African by the way and Polish have exploded in numbers whereas the poor performing groups: whites, poor whites, and African-Caribbeans have gone down in numbers, and that accounts for the change.

Now, if we know that is the case, why is it that we don't think to ourselves: let's learn why these successful groups are successful and apply those lessons to the ones, to the groups that are less successful?

Now the fact that we actually have to have an academic debate about whether you can have that discussion says to me that we are really not moving on to the next stage in thinking about how we do best as a diverse society'"

Political correctness kills
The Bristol professor is Simon Burgess