The CRE is waking up a tad late to the reality of Asian ghettoes in Britains cities.
The reality of the segregated life here was a shock to me when I arrived. To see how little Asians and White British communities mixed together. It seemed I had to make a choice, belong to one or the other. Each side with its own quasi-tribal behaviour, affiliations, attitude and accent. You couldn't hang with one set and sympathise with the other. Not any more. Not after 7/7.
Being an Asian in Britain is depressing. Bad enough that one is lumped together into an amorphous characterless entity titled Asian, where one ceases to be Indian/Pakistani/Hindu/Muslim/Brahmin etc., which labels actually meant something to one for most of one's life. It is worse that this amorphous lump is then damned unequivocally and without any exceptions, to being a community on a nosedive into slumlife. Worse too that the slum-dwellers, with by far more time on their hands, haunt most Asian website message boards, spewing obscenities and vitiating any sympathy people might have towards them.
UK Fast Becoming Racially Segregated Nation
- Vijay Dutt. London, September 19, 2005
Warning has been issued that Britain is in danger of developing into a "ghetto" state, a racially segregated nation with ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims and Blacks, living in ghettos cut off from the rest of the society.
Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, believes that a New Orleans like enclaves, " literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and trepidation and nobody escapes undamaged" are inevitable. He says Muslim and Black ghettos are splitting cities.
He criticises the Government's Race Relations policy for promoting the acceptance of difference rather than upholding British values. " We are sleepwalking our way to segregation" and becoming strangers to each other and leaving communities to be marooned from the mainstream, Phillips says.
A report by the Institute of Public Policy Research revealed that with 1,147,905 new arrivals between 1991 and 2001 immigrants now make up 7.5 per cent of the population-one in 13 living here. A CRE research shows that most white people do not have a non-white friend while young Asian or Black have almost all Asian or Black friends.
The number of people of Pakistani heritage in ghettos, defined as areas with more than two-thirds of any one ethnic group, trebled between 1991 and 2001
Harriet Harman, the Constitutional Affairs minister, reflecting Phillips views also warned that some of Britain's black and poor communities were sinking into the same underclass exposed in the United States by Hurricane Katrina.
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