SOCIAL SEGREGATION

29 September 2005

By: Ali Ismail

E-mail: aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk

Telephone: 0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)


BRITAIN IS A COLLECTION OF GHETTOES

The Home Office has ordered an investigation into the segregation of groups


A few days ago, while listening to our kitchen radio, which was tuned to the ‘Today’ programme of BBC Radio 4, I listened to a report of the ghettoisation of the United Kingdom into non-interacting ethnic communities. That disturbed me.
It seems that the Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), Trevor Phillips, made statements about the social aspects of the British population which gave rise to the radio news clip.
Nigel Morris, the Home Affairs correspondent of The Independent put it thus on 22 September:
‘A yearlong investigation into the alienation and prejudice suffered by young people from ethnic minorities has been ordered by the Government.
Ministers believe the kind of extremism that led to the London suicide bombings in July is fostered by the disillusionment felt in some communities within mainstream society.
Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), will reinforce their fears with a warning today that the country is “sleepwalking” into US-style racial segregation, with areas of major cities becoming “fully fledged ghettos”. He will say: “We are becoming strangers to each other and leaving communities to be marooned.”
The new Home Office commission, reflecting the CRE’s alarm, will be charged with forging links with young people from Muslim and other non-Christian groups. As well as potentially tackling the roots of terrorism, it could also be asked to find ways of building bridges between ethnic minority groups living parallel lives. It will get off the ground as quickly as possible and tour throughout the country, with the aim of making contact with groups traditionally excluded from political debate.
The Commission on Integration and Cohesion, to be chaired by a minister, will be told to produce by next summer proposals for encouraging integration. It will consider how to produce “an increased sense of Britishness” and a “shared sense of cultural norms and behaviour” that incorporates people of all religious and ethnic backgrounds.
In an implicit recognition that the Government has failed to tackle the poverty faced by some ethnic minority groups, the commission has also been asked to look at “how to push further to tackle inequalities which can trap people into segregated lives”.
The Home Office ministers Paul Goggins and Hazel Blears have already held a series of meetings with Muslim leaders to explore the roots of alienation in some sections of the community. A final meeting, to be chaired by Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, will be held in London today.
Announcing the creation of the commission, Mr Clarke said it would “actively engage young people and those who have traditionally had less opportunity to contribute to this type of debate”.
Seven task forces set up in the wake of the London bombings to examine how to improve integration and tackle extremism are due to meet for the last time this week. They are due to submit final reports at the beginning of next month.
They are expected to propose that Islamic schools, or madrassas, should teach “citizenship” and to suggest that a “media unit” is set up to counter misleading stories in the press about Muslims and their faith.
Mr Phillips will also call for fresh action today to root out institutional racism in the public and private sectors. He will suggest that “white” schools should take more ethnic minority pupils and accuse some universities of operating “invisible ‘no blacks may enter’ messages”.
He will tell Manchester Council for Community Relations: “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 say the number of Pakistanis in “ghettos” has trebled in the past 10 years, citing Bradford and Leicester.
The religious spread of the country is as follows: Christian 42.08m (71.6%), Muslim 1.59m (2.7%), Hindu 559,000 (1.0%), Sikh 336,000 (0.6%), Jewish 267,000 (0.5%), Other 170,000 (0.3%), No religion 9.1m (15.5%), Not stated * 4.29m (7.3%) according to the 2001 census’.
There are several strands to be considered here. There are many factors which contribute to the phenomenon of people not interacting.

First, it has to be admitted that most people believe that ‘birds of a feather flock together’. The ancient Chinese put it thus: ‘For two to walk together they must be in agreement’. A not particularly deep study of human groups reveals that they are primarily social and that the nominal work or task goals are secondary to the social aspects.

For example, sociologists have studied the unpleasant subject of sackings from workplaces and have concluded that approximately 90 percent of dismissals are primarily for social incompatibility reasons and the remaining 10 percent are for others such as over work performance and dishonesty.

Others have analysed expulsions from schools and have come to the conclusion that a popular boy or girl almost never gets expelled. When a child is expelled from school, it usually turns out to be the case that it is an isolated, friendless boy or girl. When the school administration wants to get rid of a pupil, there is a certain procedure. The person is charge, by virtue of his office, knows who the ‘leading lights’ or ‘opinion leaders’ among the pupils are. He then lets them know that the future expellee is out of favour and is to be got rid of, usually in coded language. That done, the influential children proceed to ‘talk down’ the victim as a result of which he becomes a social outcast. The undermining and the making of a dossier of his crimes and misdemeanours follows as a matter of course and the day of expulsion comes and goes. Afterwards, it is a virtual crime to say anything good about him.

Different firms and societies have their own individual sub-cultures and the primary task of a newcomer is in some measure to understand that sub-culture and to conform to it in his own way. If he fails to do so he is sidelined to the point where he feels it incumbent to leave or he gets told to go.

In Western societies where people find their own partners, it has been found that similar people get together. This is particularly apparent in married couples. When a couple ‘grow apart’ or get dissimilar to each other the marriage falls apart naturally afterwards.

Another powerful factor is the role of religion and of law. I am putting them both together because in my view religion and law share the same primary role in society: they are both methods of social control.

In the case of the law it cannot be reasonably denied that the dominant groups make the rules and regulations that govern a society. In a democracy the most dominant group are the people who have been elected by the largest number of electors relative to the other groups. In an absolute monarchy, it is the king or queen and his court circle.

In the case of religion, one finds that nearly all organised religions are systematic methodologies for managing and controlling social policy. That is why there are ‘state religions’ and that is also why there are religious wars. If religions were simply belief systems about a deity or deities or other supernatural explanations for phenomena there would be no bloodletting in their names. Steady state cosmologists do not declare war upon and kill big bang cosmologists – it is just a difference of opinion about things which can one day be tested and proved or disproved.

The above also explains, I submit, why religion is so often brought into court cases. Before giving evidence the witnesses are sworn to tell the truth by means of oaths to their deities. If my hypothesis is correct it would place priests and judges into the same social category in this regard.

Social psychologists in the USA, which like the UK has a great many ethnic minority people, have noticed that certain races and religious groups flock to certain jobs and professions. The hard sciences are the preserves of the Europeans and the Asians. The blacks and mestizos stay away from higher mathematics and physics collectively. The legal profession has many blacks, as does the profession of salesmanship.

In the schools of the USA, despite forced integration, it has been noticed that there are racial aspects for seating arrangements in the classrooms. In the lunchrooms the ‘whites’ eat together on some tables while the blacks eat at other tables. This nearly always happens when the pupils choose their own seating arrangements.

In the United Kingdom, particularly in the large cities, it is particularly clear that certain religious and racial groups stick together; Southall is a contender for being the Asian capital of the country. Brixton and Tottenham are neck-and-neck for the title of the black capital. Green Lanes in North London is the country’s Cypriot capital while the British Japanese community likes to live in and around Finchley.

The problem arises when the dominant norms of the society clash with the norms of various sub-groups. It is acceptable to eat pork for the majority Anglo-Saxon community but not for Jews and Muslims, particularly the latter. It is usual and normal for the Englishman to go to the pub for a pint of beer after work but Muslims are rarely seen in pubs, not even in highly Asian places such as the Bangladeshi capital of the UK – Brick Lane.

Matters come to a head over the subject of gender relations. The final stage of social integration is inter-marriage or at any rate partnering. In some cultures women are encouraged to stay away from men who are not close relatives and in others they are allowed to mix freely with both sexes. What is happening in the UK is that there is a pool of unattached ethnic minority men who are separated from their own womenfolk, excluding close kin, who are interacting with the womenfolk of other cultures and races where gender separation is not practised. This can only lead to tensions.

There was a time when England was ‘multicultural’ centuries ago when the Romans decided to leave and end their occupation. The Romanised and under-defended Britons were ‘swamped’ (Margaret Thatcher’s word) by Angles, Saxons, Celts, Jutes, Latins and others. That time is now referred to as the Dark Ages. Little by little the different races mixed and merged and today nobody in the country calls himself a ‘Jute’ any more.

My view of the situation is that owing to marriage patterns such as bringing in spouses from ethnic homelands instead of intermarrying either with the host population or one of the other ethnic minorities, ghettoisation is highly likely to result. Asians tend to cluster thickly to some professions such as accountancy and not to others such as ecological work. Not many Asians are members of Friends of the Earth or of Greenpeace and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has few Bangladeshi members.

Whatever the results of the enquiry ordered by the Home Office, I am pessimistic. I am anticipating that my kitchen radio in several decades time will be giving much the same kind of news on this subject as a few days ago.

THE END