Plus Ça Change…

A footnote to my last post about demographic change and establishment nonchalance. I've found a piece I wrote for the FT in 2012 about the silence that greeted London becoming a majority-minority city

A couple of weeks ago, it was announced that London no longer contained a majority from the UKs main ethnic group, known in the demographers’ jargon as the “White British”.

London is arguably the first great western capital city to pass this landmark, though that depends on where you draw the boundaries around Washington and on excluding Brussels as an “embassy capital” special case.

In any case, it is a remarkable event for London and one that was unexpected. However, the London Evening Standard, the capital’s main evening paper, tucked it away on page 10 on the day of the announcement, and the BBC London television news had it as the seventh item that evening. London mayor Boris Johnson’s usually ubiquitous blond bob was nowhere to be seen.

Two days later I met a senior official from his Greater London Authority who, when asked about the figures, said “What’s the fuss?”

This studied indifference of London’s political and media elite appears to be in sharp contrast to the feelings of many of the white British people who live in less salubrious parts of the city. For it is important to understand that the proportion of white British Londoners fell so dramatically – from 60 per cent in 2001 to 44.9 per cent in 2011 – not only due to high levels of immigration but also because of a mass exodus of white Britons.

Over the decade between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the number of white British Londoners fell by more than 600,000 (17 per cent). That is around three times the fall over the previous census period, 1991 to 2001.

“Most of the leading academic geographers did not expect London to become a majority minority city for another 20 or 30 years, they underestimated the extent to which White British people have opted to leave an increasingly diverse London,” says Eric Kaufmann an academic at Birkbeck College who is leading a project on “white flight” at Demos, the think tank I lead.

White flight is an emotive term which suggests discomfort with the changing racial composition of a neighbourhood. Clearly there are many other reasons why white British people might want to leave London – house prices, schools, fresh air and so on – but there appears to be prima facie evidence that white flight has played a role merely by considering where it is happening.

In Barking and Dagenham, for example, notorious for the brief success of the far-right British National Party in the late 2000s, the white British population fell by 40,000, almost one-third, between 2001 and 2011. Other increasingly diverse outer London boroughs such as Redbridge and Hillingdon have also experienced large falls in their white British population.

Does white flight always have to be the other side of the coin of large-scale immigration? It is a remarkably understudied phenomenon, perhaps because it is based on a notion of group identities and affinities that most liberal, individualistic academics do not feel or understand and tend to stigmatise as “racist,” at least when expressed by white people. But one of the interesting things about white flight is that it has continued, and in the case of London apparently increased, at a time when racist attitudes have been in sharp decline.

Some of the blame for this must lie with a modern political mind – of both left and right wingers – which has failed to understand some quite normal human feelings about rapid change and the unfamiliar, and has failed, too, to think more carefully about how to make it easier for different kinds of people to live alongside each other sharing common spaces in mutual trust.

So noisily have London’s political leaders been celebrating the diversity of their multiracial city that they have forgotten to see what is happening under their noses. If you walk around the city centre you see racially mixed pavements, shops, buses, tubes and even workplaces. But there is also a great deal of what the Americans call “sundown segregation”: if you followed people home you would find yourself in some of the most ethnically segregated places in Britain.

In large parts of the city white British people who can move are doing so: already less than one-third of the population is white British in Tower Hamlets, Harrow, Ealing, Brent and Newham. And London’s state schools are increasingly segregated too: although about 60 per cent of London’s south Asian population live in majority white areas, only about one-third of south Asian primary school pupils attend a majority white school.

The story is not all separation and segregation. The census revealed that the mixed race population of Britain, a large proportion of which lives in London, is now 1.2m. There is also, as in many of America’s biggest cities, some reverse white flight with middle class young people moving back into parts of the ethnic minority inner city.

The census data on the white exodus from London underlines just how remarkable Boris Johnson’s re-election was given the fact that most minority groups still overwhelmingly prefer Labour, at least in national elections. Perhaps his election is a sign of things to come with socially conservative urban ethnic minority voters switching to the Conservatives and the Godless, liberal suburbs turning to the red of Labour.

This piece was published around Christmas 2012 when I was director of the think tank Demos and had just launched a major “integration hub” project. There is much continuity between the indifference shown then and now towards the majority-minority transition. One change, the FT worldview is more overtly progressive and I think it highly unlikely that an equivalent piece would be published today (do prove me wrong if anyone from the FT reads this!).