Teaching Comparative

Ethnic/racial cleavages in the UK

RACIST bogeymen leered out of newspaper pages in both Britain and Northern Ireland... On the mainland, the far-right British National Party (BNP)... won its first two seats in the European Parliament earlier this month... Separately, white thugs in Ulster hounded more than a hundred Romanian immigrants—mainly Roma gypsies—out of their homes and, in most cases it now seems, away from the province altogether.

Tension [in south Belfast] between locals and east European immigrants had simmered since football hooligans clashed at a match between Poland and Northern Ireland in March. When the intimidation reached a peak on June 16th, the Romanians were moved to a church hall and then to a leisure centre. On June 23rd Northern Ireland’s government announced that most had decided to return to Romania...

Socially, Ulster leans to the right: civil partnerships, greeted with a shrug by most British Tories, attracted protests in Belfast when they were introduced in 2005; abortion is also more restricted than on the mainland.

It may be that these conservative attitudes extend to scepticism about outsiders. A survey published on June 24th by Northern Ireland’s Equality Commission, a statutory watchdog, found that nearly a quarter of the population would be unhappy if a migrant worker moved in next-door...

British hang-ups about minorities have fallen pretty steadily over the past 20 years, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey, a big questionnaire. By contrast, Northern Irish dislike of travellers is up by a quarter from 2005...

The election of a man with a conviction for inciting race hatred to represent northern England in the European Parliament spoils any pretty notion that all is well on the mainland...

Labels: cleavages, politics, UK

posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:56 AM