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This week, the latest round of data from the UK’s 2021 census was published, including statistics on race and ethnicity. It was immediately met with a volley of inflammatory responses, which took away the eagerness with which some had apparently been waiting to weaponize the results.
Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, hastily recorded a video from a Union-jack-draped car seat in which he said that “London, Birmingham and Manchester are all minority-white cities now”, and that “only 46 per cent [of Britons] Now identify as a Christian. . . Immigration is changing the identity of this country in a big way.”
Conservative commentator Douglas Murray, who has previously described London as having “become a foreign country”, echoed Farage in blaming the declining number of British Christians on immigration. Others spoke of growing isolation and “no-go areas” on social media.
But almost all of these claims are false, as even a cursory look at the data shows.
First, the fact that London (54 percent white) and Manchester (57 percent) aren’t minority white at all, and Birmingham (49 percent) makes it just a hair’s breadth under the wire. Farage and co will only be looking at those who both identify as British And white
But if identifying as British is the key, why count only white Britain? (I think we know the answer.) We have data on the proportion of people in each region who have a British identity. In London, it’s 78 percent — and black and mixed-race Londoners are more likely to identify as British than the white population.
The claim of religion is even more dangerous. The argument is that “mass immigration” hastened the decline of Christianity in Britain. Yet that decline has been driven overwhelmingly by white Britons, less than half of whom now say they are Christian, down from 69 percent in 2011, a loss of nearly 7 million.
If preserving the Christian faith is important to “saving” Britain, we must look to the country’s black population. 72 percent of this demographic is Christian, half a million more than in 2011. The non-British white community is also worth checking out – 60 per cent are Christian, with a million added since the last census.
One might even ask why this seems so important. As of 1995, less than a third of Britons believed that being Christian was an important part of being British. By 2020, it had dropped to 20 percent. The last time I set foot in a church, apart from Christmas, Easter, weddings and funerals, was when I went to Doncaster’s “prestigious” nightclub Camelots, a former Presbyterian chapel whose many sins have been committed behind its stained-glass windows. In modern Britain, I suspect that a drunken night out provides a stronger source of shared national experience than going to church on a Sunday.
Finally, we come to warnings about “segregation” and “no-go areas”, which again prove unfounded. While Christianity ranks low on the list of what Britons say a person needs to be truly British, speaking the language ranks highest. But drill down to even the most monoethnic of Britain’s non-white neighborhoods and a clear majority speak fluent English in every one.
Segregation is one of many terms imported from the US by the UK’s culture warriors and now liberally but incorrectly applied on this side of the Atlantic. Racial segregation was legally mandated in the US South for the better part of a century under Jim Crow, and the policy of “redlining” — or the denial of financial services on racial grounds — quietly expanded similar practices. This has cast a long shadow, with one in 40 US neighborhoods still deeply divided, compared to less than one in 1,000 in Britain.
However, there is one point on which I will concede: these critics are right that they are part of a minority group facing ultimate collapse. In 2006 only 10 per cent of Britons thought that to be truly British you had to be white. By 2020, this figure had reduced to 3 percent.
john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch
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