The underside of political culture
The British National Party and its leader, Nick Griffin, have been in the news recently. Is this another result of economic recession? Does the "threat" of the EU explain the changes? Is British politics changing?
On the edge: Why some communities feel frozen out and powerlessThough open racism has been dwindling in Britain, competition for jobs and state resources makes some whites grumble that they are taking second place. This is nothing new, but a recent rise in support for the British National Party (BNP), a far-right group whose policies include paying non-whites to go “home” to Africa or Asia, has rung alarm bells...
White discontent is a puzzle, because white Britons are much better off than others. About a fifth of white children are classified as poor; the figure runs from a quarter among Caribbeans and Indians to more than half among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Whites earn more than others and employment rates are higher. And they still benefit from discrimination...
Some white successes look less certain on closer scrutiny. Though white children in general do better than most minorities at school, poor ones come bottom of the league...
But the biggest white grievance is housing. The government’s annual Citizenship Survey asks people if they think their ethnicity counts against them in getting access to public services...The government has traditionally focused on inner cities, where ethnic tensions are worst. It may be time to look more carefully at the edges... Alex Fenton, a Cambridge academic working for the Barrow Cadbury Trust, thinks policymakers have focused too exclusively on the centre. “Most battle-hardened urban economists know the names of inner-city areas, but a lot of these peripheral estates are not so well known and not so well researched,” he says. Time to get studying.
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Labels: cleavages, political culture, UK
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:30 AM
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