America slides into chaos: but is that a smug smile on the face of the Brits?

Alice Miles:

Let us not be complacent about our own society. We pile our social problems into ghettos of our own, which most Britons do not breach. In America, 24.7 per cent of black people live below the poverty line, compared with 8.6 per cent of whites and a national average of 12.7 per cent. In Britain, according to the Office for National Statistics, 68 per cent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are living in low-income households, and a barely more creditable 49 per cent of black Caribbeans, compared with 21 per cent of whites. They may be measuring different things, but the ratios are similar.

Unemployment among Bangladeshi, Pakistani and black men is three times the rate for white British men. And look at the jobs that they do: one in three Bangladeshi men, according to the 2002-03 labour force survey, are cooks or waiters, compared with one in 100 white British men. Around one in ten black African women is a nurse, compared with around one in 30 whites. Pakistani women are eight times more likely than white British women to be working as packers, bottlers and canners, while Indian women are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to be working as sewing machinists. They may not be living among us, but they feed, drive, clothe and care for us. Wouldn’t it be nice if the country could do the same for them?

Government websites are strewn with statistics proving the disadvantages of our ethnic minorities. None of these figures is new. Education? Three times as many exclusions among black Caribbean pupils as among whites, and, for boys, half as many GCSE passes at grade A-C. Crime? Blacks, Asians and, especially, those of mixed race are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than whites. And health? Now here is an interesting omission. Britain does not register mortality rates by ethnic group, so that it is impossible to compare how long our different ethnic groups live. Given the frighteningly high rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease among black Caribbeans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, you can bet it would make shameful reading, but — or perhaps that should read, so — the Government refuses to collect the information.

The only vaguely meaningful comparison is rates of infant mortality, recorded according to the place of the mother’s birth, by no means a precise indicator of ethnicity. These show, however, that in 2002 in England and Wales, of children born to a mother herself born in the UK, 7.8 per 1,000 die within three months. This rises to 10.5 for mothers born in Bangladesh, 10.6 for mothers born in India, 14.5 for mothers born in Pakistan and 15.4 for mothers born in the Caribbean.

So tell me, again, what do we have to be smug about? I look forward to seeing all those television reporters currently flooding the American South filing earnest reports about Britain’s divided society when they get home.

Nice to see a journalist pointing out that the United States is not the only country that suffers from racial problems.