Some districts are on their way to becoming fully fledged ghettoes … Trevor Phillips, Commission for Racial Equality

Some districts are on their way to becoming fully fledged ghettoes – black holes into which no-one goes without fear and trepidation, and from which no-one ever escapes undamaged. The walls are going up around many of our communities, and the bridges … are crumbling.

The aftermath of 7/7 forces us to assess where we are. And here is where I think we are: we are sleepwalking our way to segregation. We are becoming strangers to each other, and we are leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream.… These marooned communities will steadily drift away from the rest of us, evolving their own lifestyles, playing by their own rules and increasingly regarding the codes of behaviour, loyalty and respect that the rest of us take for granted as outdated behaviour that no longer applies to them. We know what follows then: crime, no-go areas and chronic cultural conflict. Trevor Phillips, Commission for Racial Equality

Introduction

This chilling evaluation from Trevor Phillips in 2005, then the head of Britain’s government race relations body, instils a sense of fear about the nature of minority ethnic residential concentrations, ‘marooned outside the mainstream’. His comments made international headlines when they were released ahead of their delivery at a speech to the Manchester Council for Community Relations, and stoked debate about segregation and diversity. The debate had begun in 2001 when reports into riots in northern English cities talked of ‘self-segregated’ cities ‘gripped by fear’, and pointed to isolation and competition between ethnic communities, so segregated that an Asian interviewee ‘would not see another white face until I see you again next week’. The result of those reports was a government focus on ‘community cohesion’ to bridge what were seen as gulfs between communities. Phillips gave a national security edge to government policies by blaming segregation not only for social disadvantage but also for violence and terrorism in the reference to the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. The desire or otherwise for ethnic diversity and the claimed link between segregation and terrorism were examined in Chapter Five. Residential segregation is the subject of this chapter.