Toby Young Toby Young

Without prejudice

For months I’ve been looking forward to the Guardian’s much-heralded report on racism in Britain, which was unveiled this week. As a nation, we suffer from our fair share of divisions, with new fault lines opening up all the time, but our record when it comes to race relations is pretty good. Surely, a newspaper that prides itself on being guided by the evidence would reflect this?

We’re often told by members of the identitarian left that Britain is more racist than most other countries, but I didn’t expect the Guardian to fall for that. When comparing different countries, one way of gauging the level of racism is to ask whether people in that country would object if a person of another race moved in next door. By that metric, Britain is one of the least racist countries in the world. Less than 5 per cent of Britons say they would object, compared with more than 50 per cent of Jordanians.

We’re also told that racism is on the rise in this country, but, again, the data doesn’t bear that out. For more than 30 years, the British Social Attitudes Survey has been asking people what their reaction would be if a close relative were to marry someone black or Asian. In 1983, when the question was first asked, more than half the respondents said they would feel at least a little discomfort. In 2013, that had declined to less than 25 per cent. It’s set to fall further, too, since young people are less likely to object to inter-ethnic marriage within their families than older people.

There are other, more objective ways of assessing how racist a country is and Britain is faring well by those metrics, too. For instance, roughly 20 per cent of people in further education are from black or minority ethnic backgrounds, which is slightly higher that the percentage of 17- to 24-year-olds who are BME (18 per cent) and considerably higher than it was 15 years ago (13 per cent).

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