Britain 'sleepwalking to segregation'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/race/story...573526,00.html
Staff and agencies
Monday September 19, 2005
US-style ghetto segregation in Britain "could be getting worse", the former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Lord Ousley, said today.
Lord Ousley - whose report into race relations in Bradford was published after riots in the city in 2001 - made the warning as the current CRE chairman, Trevor Phillips, prepared to call for controversial measures to prevent Britain from "sleepwalking" into racial and religious segregation.
On Thursday, Mr Phillips will tell the Manchester Council for Community Relations that the "nightmare" of "fully fledged ghettos" - similar to those in New Orleans whose existence was highlighted by Hurricane Katrina - could emerge in this country.
Today, Lord Ousley said Mr Phillips seemed to be saying the government had "failed".
"He's right in so far as he needs to highlight the fact we do have concentrations and clusters of ethnic groups in areas that are suffering poverty, racialism, exclusion and discrimination," he told the BBC's Today programme.
"It's not new - it's been around for a while. It may be getting worse."
The minister for constitutional affairs, Harriet Harman, agreed that some of Britain's black and poor communities were beginning to resemble those in the US.
"We don't want to get into a situation like America - but if you look at the figures we are already looking like America," she told the Independent. "In London, poor, young and black people don't register to vote."
Among the measures Mr Phillips will suggest is for "white" schools to be forced to take larger numbers of ethnic minority pupils to aid integration.
Mr Phillips admits his message is "bleak", but says the UK must heed the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.
"The fact is that we are a society which - almost without noticing it - is becoming more divided by race and religion," he will say.
Some districts are on their way to "literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and trepidation and from which nobody ever escapes undamaged".
He will warn that this situation risks culminating in a "New Orleans-style Britain of passively coexisting ethnic and religious communities, eyeing each other over the fences of our differences".
In his assessment of the UK following the July 7 terror attacks on London, Mr Phillips will add: "We are sleepwalking our way to segregation.
"We are becoming strangers to each other and leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream."
The Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Hain, who lived in South Africa before moving to the UK as a teenager in the late 60s, said Mr Phillips's warning had to be taken "very seriously" and was "very worrying".
"It is a complex picture," he said. "On the one hand, compared to 20 years ago, certainly when I came to Britain, there is much more racial tolerance and much more integration."
"One the other hand, as he points out, there is a tendency to congregate on a residential basis by your ethnic group. I just want to see, as he does, more and more integration right across the board."
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