The authors of this book are on a mission. The problem with missionaries is that they tend to be so single minded that they see only what they want to see and exclude evidence and views that do not accord with their own. To make matters worse, this book is also personal. It is an attack on Trevor Phillips, who is constantly in their dock accused of many heresies and denounced as ‘myth-maker-in-chief’. In their introduction, the authors claim to be taking the exact opposite approach, promising ‘evidence that is open and rigorous’, allowing ‘readers to assess the claims’ (p. 11), but fall well short of this mark.
The genesis of this book, as evidenced by the title, is Trevor Phillips's claim in 2005, that Britain is ‘sleepwalking into segregation’ and Finney and Simpson's mission is to ‘set the record straight’ on this and other claims. The truth is, of course, that this particular claim cannot be proved either way, the evidence from the 2001 Census is limited and out of date and there are simply not enough authoritative sources of data since 2001 to firmly establish more recent trends. And, in any event, the debate about segregation is not confined to spatial distribution, even if it is clearly the authors' principal obsession.
There is another problem with the authors' approach, in that they seem to believe that even by talking about concepts like ‘segregation’, ‘parallel lives’ and ‘White flight’, it simply adds to the anti-minority or anti-migrant ‘litany’ which creates a ‘moral panic’ which is ‘dangerously extreme because it is founded on myths’ (p. 166). The authors really need to question their own motives and tactics in juxtaposing real and imagined stories from popular newspapers, cartoons to illustrate their myths and quotes from MigrationWatch, with the views of independent commentators, which they do not happen to share.
The most debated area is that of ‘segregation’, though we have to wait until two-thirds through the book before we get to the promised ‘evidence’ and then frankly it is rather thin. The authors use the 2001 Census data, which they compare with that of ten years earlier, to come to their pre-announced conclusion that Britain has ‘neither ghettoes nor increasing segregation’ (p. 136). This is unsurprising, firstly, since there is neither any real discussion about what a ghetto is, nor what size or scale it might be in the British context. Poulsen's alternative classification is summarily dismissed (p. 134) and no other definitions are considered, we are simply told that the US position (areas with more than 90 per cent black people) is correct. Given that geographers do not agree on this point, it is hard to see how other commentators can be expected to follow Finney and Simpson's party line. Needless to say, on their definition, they tell us there are no ghettoes in Britain.
More breathtakingly, Finney and Simpson (repeating Simpson's early published views) decide that there is no increase in ‘segregation’ (between 1991 and 2001), mainly because they have re-defined it to exclude ‘benign’ factors. In other words, by only taking account of migration in and out of areas, they are able to argue that Britain is not ‘sleepwalking into segregation’. However, perhaps in an unguarded moment in the last chapter, they do agree that ‘segregation is increasing when measured by the size of the minority populations’ (p. 163). It seems to escape them, that most people would look at precisely this − the overall resulting mix of population – and this is after all what the indices of isolation and dissimilarity measure, not the reasons for growth. On this basis, they are apparently conceding that Trevor Phillips was right.
In this presentation of ‘the evidence’, it is disturbing to find a couple of notable absences. The one national data base which can provide an up-to-date part of the segregation jigsaw, is that of school populations. They fail to give any real consideration to the pioneering work by Ron Johnson and others (Reference Johnson, Burgess, Wilson and Harris2006) and only grudgingly acknowledge that they found ‘some increase in segregation levels in some cities’. This is then dismissed because Johnson and colleagues said that ‘this was to be expected’! However, they fail to repeat the principal conclusion of Johnson's work which found ‘national patterns of both residential and school segregation, with the clear suggestion that the latter is greater than the former, especially among those of South Asian ethnicity’. The omission is surprising since, unlike their previous studies the new data enabled them to base their conclusions on an analysis of every school in England, focus on much smaller and more relevant areas and to utilise a graphical concentration profile.
Why should this be omitted, and why too, should any mention of the ‘Index Wars’ in which Alan Carling of Bradford University contests Simpson's suggestion that segregation is a ‘myth’ and takes him to task stating that such claims ‘cannot survive critical scrutiny’ and chastises Simpson for a ‘political struggle for the correct position rather than (or in addition to) a technical struggle with recalcitrant numerical data’? (Carling, Reference Carling2006). Carling concludes by saying that ‘the only myth that seems to exist in this area is the urban myth promulgated by Simpson himself, namely that segregation and self-segregation are mythical phenomena in the Bradford District’. Additionally, Simpson could have perhaps explained his earlier work in which he found that the number of enumeration districts with over 75 per cent ‘South Asian’ population had increased from 29 in 1991 to 77 in 2001 and those with 25 per cent to 75 per cent ‘mixed South Asian and others’ increasing from 152 to 163 in Bradford, and why he nevertheless reached the somewhat surprising conclusion that Bradford had become ‘more mixed’ (Simpson, Reference Simpson2003). And why was Poulsen's conclusion (Reference Poulsen2005) that, with regard to 16 UK major cities, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities were increasingly separated and isolated and will continue to increase over time, also not discussed? Surely, we are entitled to have the promised evidence laid out in full?
But Finney and Simpson – and the whole debate − are far too focussed on residential segregation and the evidence from 1991 to 2001. None of us really knows what has happened since, though the schools data do offer some insights (and cast further doubt on Finney and Simpson's line). Actually, I would argue that some form of residential clustering is desirable and helps to preserve cultural support systems and diversity and that we need a more sophisticated approach to the whole notion of segregation through understanding the ‘layers of separation’ (Cantle, Reference Cantle2005). The authors take little account of segregation in other spheres which when combined with, or even separate from, residential segregation can amount to ‘parallel lives’ – a phrase I used to describe the separation of white and minority groups in 2001 (Cantle, Reference Cantle2001). This was not about ‘blaming ethnic minorities’ for self-segregation (a term I did not use), but was carefully chosen to suggest that both communities had become separate from each other. But then Finney and Simpson do not like the community cohesion agenda either, this is lumped in with their ‘litany of myths’ and is presented in a tendentious way, even to the extent of only quoting one part of the illustration of ‘parallel lives’ – the ethnic minority example, rather than the White example (p. 116).
What is most worrying about this book, is that Finney and Simpson seem determined to close out any further discussion of issues like ‘segregation’, suggesting that such discussion is part of an agenda by the ‘myth-makers’ to ‘scapegoat minorities’, to ‘set people of Britain against each other’ and ‘complicit in the unsavoury pastime of playing the race card’ (p. 3). Who would want to be accused of such things, surely it is better to keep quiet than risk the accusatory wrath of these two? But then, perhaps it is just possible that there are people who are genuinely concerned that societies that are both physically and socially divided by class, ethnicity and faith – and sometimes by all three – are both inherently unequal and unjust and will never enable the conditions for respect and understanding to triumph over ignorance, fear and demonisation? Just a few pages to consider this alternative point of view might have given credence to their stated aim to present the evidence fairly and openly.
