. In education, black Africans do better than white people, who do better than Caribbeans. There are big, indefensible inequalities here. But ones obscured by the old clichés of race relations. British social problems, too, tend not to come in colours. We tend to avoid the equivalent of the burnt-out cars in the Muslim-dominated 'banlieues' of Paris, or the regular bombings of Sweden's immigrant gangland crime. Recent disturbances in Leicester saw Hindu and Muslim gangs squaring up to each other, which stood out because it is so unusual. When immigrants move here, the old hatreds usually die. Muslims and Jewish leaders regularly meet in Manchester for kosher meals. One of my son's school friends has a Greek Cypriot mum and Turkish Cypriot dad: a union that, when I was living in that still-segregated country, I thought I'd never see. So a rich racial mix can be found at the top and bottom of British society. Recall the 2011 London Riots, where the video footage and subsequent trials afterwards showed a veritable Benetton advert of racial integration. A fusion dialect, Multicultural London English (MLE), is now challenging cockney as the capital's accent – coming through in slang, music, even poetry. An academic study into this phenomenon found the dialect can 'no longer be attributed to specific ethnic groups'. Studies into criminal gangs, and the infamous 'county lines' drug smuggling networks, show that they reflect the ethnic mix of the area. Such problems need urgent attention, but if you look at them through a b){kind=link}
When The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah lampooned the idea of British pearl-clutching as a brown-skinned PM entered No 10, he misjudged a nation
When King Charles III is crowned next May, a Hindu Prime Minister will leave 10 Downing Street with his Indian wife to attend the ceremony. The Muslim Mayor of London will already be at Westminster Abbey. Security will be headed up by the Home Secretary, a Buddhist. The only white holder of a great office of state, Jeremy Hunt, will arrive with his Chinese wife. And the Chief Rabbi will walk from Clarence House, having stayed the night as the guest of the King and Queen Consort. It will be a perfect scene of modern Britain.
While decades in the making, the change is disorientating to some. Joe Biden’s welcoming of “Rashee Sanook” has been much mocked but, in his defence, the roll call at Westminster has been changing rather a lot recently. The longer-term change in Britain is even more profound. When Biden entered politics, just six per cent of the UK workforce were foreign-born. Now it’s nearer 20 per cent, a higher rate than the US itself. There is no Statue of Liberty at London Victoria coach station, no equivalent of an “e pluribus unum” (“out of many, one”) national motto. But we now have a decent claim to being the greatest melting pot in the world.
Global perception lags behind the quietly transformed British reality. Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show in the US, assumed there would be a racist backlash to Rishi Sunak in No 10. So he based a sketch attacking what he assumed Brits would be saying: “The Indians are going to take over Great Britain and what’s next?… Women might be in positions of power!” All this, he said, simply served to highlight national paranoia and fragility.
In fact, the opposite is true: no one has made a fuss about Sunak’s ethnicity – and this silence speaks volumes. If a Hindu president were praying daily by a shrine in the White House – as Sunak will now be doing in No 10 – then America may provide the reaction that Noah speaks of. But no one in Britain cares very much. Any Brit flummoxed by the notion of a female prime minister will by now have had 43 years to adjust to the shock. Having Sunak in No 10 catches up with an everyday reality in Britain: one that is no longer controversial, or even remarkable.