We should care that Robert Jenrick believes whiteness equals integration
Stephen Bush of The Financial Times calls it like it is.
Off the back of wannabe Conservative Party leader Robert Jenrick’s complaint about Handsworth, Birmingham as one of Britain’s “worst integrated” places, Mr Bush noted the following:
“Here’s what is not a measure of whether someone is integrated: the colour of your skin. No one who looks at me and my grandmother, a white South African, in the street, can tell which of us is more integrated…”
Very true.
And yet, Mr Jenrick had the gall to say that Handsworth was not “integrated” on the basis of this observation in the course of a 90-minute visit to the area: “But the other thing I noticed there was that it was one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to. In fact, in the hour and a half I was filming news there I didn’t see another white face”.
Handsworth is majority non-white – 25.1 per cent British Pakistani; 23.1 per cent British Indian; 10.2 per cent British Bangladeshi. White British people make up 8.7 per cent of the ward; black British Caribbean people 8.2 per cent; black British Africans 7.8 per cent.
With ethnic percentages like that, it’s hardly surprising that 90 minutes could pass in Handsworth without seeing a “white face”.
But for an area not to be white does not mean it’s not integrated. As Mr Bush wrote in the FT, “a British Pakistani person living side by side with a British Indian person is an example of integration”.
Even though Mr Jenrick has claimed he wasn’t not talking about “skin colour”, it’s obvious that he was. Mr Bush writes: “…he [Jenrick] clearly is, because he cannot tell just by looking at people during a 90-minute stay somewhere whether or not they speak English, if they participate in the labour market, and so on…What he is saying, explicitly and clearly, is that he believes that not being ‘white’ is the same as not being integrated, a proxy that he can use in conversation because they are close enough to be indistinguishable”.
Such sentiments would be less shocking if they issued from the mouth of someone other than Robert Jenrick. This is a man who could become prime minister of the United Kingdom…that’s if he were elected leader of the Conservative Party and his party won the 2029 general election.
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[Stephen Bush’s FT piece is here, behind a paywall]
