NEW: last week we got the latest UK census data, on ethnicity, religion & identity.
It was met with toxic responses from the usual suspects seeking to weaponise the stats.
Almost every word of what they claimed was false.
My column: enterprise-sharing.ft.com/redeem/5957f3b
And a thread 🧵
Conversation
Replying to
First up, Nigel Farage tweeted a hastily-recorded video from a 🇬🇧 union-jack-draped car seat (you have to admire the attention to detail 😆), stating that "London, Manchester and Birmingham are now all minority white cities".
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And he wasn’t alone. The same claim appeared in a national newspaper headline:
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Guess what? The claims were wrong.
First there’s the fact that London (54% white) and Manchester (57%) are not minority white at all, and Birmingham (49%) only makes it by a hair’s breadth. Farage & co must have been looking only at those who identify as both *British* and white
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But if identifying as British is the key, why count only white Britons? (I think we know why...)
We actually have data on the share of people that identify as British. In London it’s 78%. Black and mixed-race Londoners are more likely to identify as British than white Londoners!
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So that’s the first race-baiting claim dispatched. Onto the next one:
Both Farage and Douglas Murray blamed the ongoing decline in Britain’s Christian population on "mass immigration" ... "causing a massive change in the identity of this country"
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This claim is particularly lolz.
The decline in Christianity in the UK has been driven overwhelmingly by *white Britons*, less than half of whom now say they are Christian, down from 69 per cent in 2011, a loss of about 7mn 📉
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In fact, if preserving the Christian faith is crucial to “saving” Britain, then might I point Messrs Farage and Murray to Britain’s black population (72% are Christian, half a million more than in 2011) or its non-British white community (60% Christian, more than a million added)
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In other words: not only is it straightforwardly false that ethnic minorities or immigrants are somehow pushing down the numbers of Christians in the UK, they’re actually propping the numbers up!
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And sticking with Christianity, why does this even seem to matter so much?
As far back as 1995, less than a third of Britons thought being Christian was an important part of being British. By 2020, that had fallen to 20 per cent.
It’s a really weird thing to fixate on.
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The last time I was in a church, excluding Christmas/Easter/weddings/funerals, was when I went to Doncaster’s “iconic” nightclub Camelots 👇😆
In modern Britain I suspect a drunken night out provides a stronger source of shared national experience than attending church on Sunday
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Finally, we come to the warnings over “segregation” and “no-go areas”, which again proved unfounded.
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While Christianity ranks low on the list of things Britons say one requires to be truly British, speaking the language ranks highest.
Drill down to even the most mono-ethnic of Britain’s non-white neighbourhoods, and a clear majority speak fluent English in every single one 🏴
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To make a slightly broader point: segregation is one of many terms UK culture warriors have imported from the US and now apply liberally but incorrectly on this side of the Atlantic.
The US has a *very* different history with race and especially segregation compared to the UK.
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Racial segregation was legally mandated in the US south for the best part of a century under Jim Crow, and the policy of redlining (very much not just the south!) quietly extended similar practices npr.org/2017/05/03/526
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Those policies have cast a long shadow. Even today, one in 40 US neighbourhoods is still highly racially concentrated (more than 90% from one minority race/ethnicity), compared to fewer than one in 1,000 in Britain.
Please stop lazily and incorrectly applying US terms to the UK.
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But I digress...
Coming back to the question of language fluency as a key definition of Britishness:
A certain type of person might point to statistics showing that 30-40% of some ethnic minorities in the UK don’t speak fluent English, but this is again deeply misleading...
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Among the *first generation*, yes, it takes time for people to become fluent, as it would for any emigrating Brit.
But among the second generation, their UK-born children, ~everyone is fluent. This is what successful assimilation looks like!
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We see similar shifts in other traits, too
has done great work on this topic, showing that children of immigrants are
- More likely to identify as primarily British
- Highly unlikely to only have friends of their ethnicity
- Less attached to their parents’ religion
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So, much to the chagrin of Farage and Murray, all the data points to a society that is increasingly diverse (rather than segregated), and increasingly comfortable (rather than anxious) about that diversity.
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In fact, British attitudes towards immigrants today rank among the most positive globally.
It is these attitudes of warmth, of welcoming people into British culture and community, that define Britain today, not some archaic belief that only white Britons are true Britons.
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Or, to put it another way:
The likes of Farage and Murray are right to worry that they’re part of a minority group facing terminal decline.
In 2006, only 10% of Britons thought that to be truly British you had to be white. By 2020, that figure had fallen to 3%.
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The full column again: enterprise-sharing.ft.com/redeem/5957f3b
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