Sleepwalking Towards Segregation?
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Jasper Copping, Telegraph (UK), August 27, 2006
• About 9 per cent of British residents, some 5.4m people, are now from ethnic minorities, rising to between one-third and 40 per cent in London. On current trends about one-fifth of the population will come from an ethnic minority by 2050, many of them fourth or fifth generation.
• Data from the 1991 and 2001 censuses shows that there are 14 council wards where one ethnic minority group comprises more than half the population. In seven of these neighbourhoods, at least half the population is of Indian origin; in the remaining seven, Muslims are the majority community
• There are 118 neighbourhoods where all non-white groups together are greater than half
• In the census of 1951, there were just 15,300 Caribbean people living in Britain. Ten years later, there were 171,800. Today it is estimated to be 566,000.
• Around a quarter of a million immigrants come to Britain from the Third World each year, a city the size of Cambridge (110,000) every six months. Government projections for future population growth show a net migration policy in England producing the equivalent of a new city of Birmingham (1m) every five years.
• In the past five years, the white population grew 1 per cent, while the Bangladeshi community grew 30%, the Black African population by 37%, the Pakistani community by 13%.
• The Office for National Statistics says that one in 50 marriages involves a husband and wife from different ethnic groups.
• A 2001 Mori poll found 66% of the public thought there were too many immigrants in Britain, up from 55% a year before.
• In 2002, an ICM poll showed that 47% of whites believed immigration has damaged Britain in the past 50 years, along with 22% of Asians and Blacks.
• Nearly 45% of all ethnic minority people in the UK live in London
• According to the last census, in 2001, 30% of London residents had been born outside England—some 2.2 million people, to which can be added tens of thousands who did not complete a census form. This total does not include the city’s second—and third-generation immigrants
• More than 300 languages are spoken by the people of London, and the city has at least 50 non-indigenous communities with populations of 10,000 or more.
(Posted on September 6, 2006)