Flight of white middle classes from inner cities accelerating as ‘no-go areas’ for non-Muslims expand, says UK race relations chief
LONDON: The flight of the white middle classes from the inner cities is accelerating, the Government’s race relations chief has said. Trevor Phillips said so-called ‘’white flight” - an American phenomenon now increasingly seen here - was deepening racial segregation.
Phillips has warned in the past of the growing polarisation of the country along ethnic lines. But his use of the emotive term ‘’white flight” will fuel the controversy triggered by the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester. He said last week some Muslim enclaves were “no-go areas” for Christians and there was a need for greater integration.
Phillips, who chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said the Bishop was right to raise the issue because white families were moving out of areas with high ethnic minority populations.
Interviewed on Radio Four’s Today programme, he said: ‘’There are areas in which there is no contact or very little contact between different ethnic and cultural groups.
“Nobody is putting up walls and gates but we all know that in virtually every big city there are places where different kinds of people feel uncomfortable, whether that is Asians in so-called white areas or white people in so-called black areas.”
He added: “We know that white flight is accelerating. That schools - we know this from studies done by Bristol University — are becoming more segregated than the areas they sit in. So there is a phenomenon we have to deal with and I think that the Bishop of Rochester was right to raise this.”
The term “white flight” was coined in 1960s America to describe the emergence of inner city ghettos. However, Government ministers have preferred to refer to it as ‘’churn” and to attribute the movement of people to house price fluctuations.
A survey conducted by the old Commission for Racial Equality in 2006 found that a quarter of Britons wanted to live in an all-white area.
