The democratic engagement of Britain's ethnic minorities

Democratic engagement is a multi-faceted phenomenon that embraces citizens' involvement with electoral politics, their participation in ‘conventional’ extra-parliamentary political activity, their satisfaction with democracy and trust in state institutions, and their rejection of the use of violence for political ends. Evidence from the 2010 BES and EMBES shows that there are important variations in patterns of democratic engagement across Britain's different ethnic-minority groups and across generations. Overall, ethnic-minority engagement is at a similar level to and moved by the same general factors that influence the political dispositions of whites. However, minority democratic engagement is also strongly affected by a set of distinctive ethnic-minority perceptions and experiences, associated particularly with discrimination and patterns of minority and majority cultural engagement. Second-generation minorities who grew up in Britain are less, rather than more, likely to be engaged

School de-segregation and the Politics of ‘Forced Integration’

Using the programme for creating the controversial school academies, local governments in the UK have attempted to force an integration of schools with majority white and ethnic minority pupil cohorts via new mergers. This has largely been as a response to analysts’ fears about self-segregation and insufficient community cohesion, following riots in northern towns in 2001 and the spectre of radicalisation among young Muslims following 9/11 and 7/7. An examination of school mergers in Burnley, Blackburn, Leeds and Oldham reveals how they have amplified racial attacks on Muslim pupils and their feelings of insecurity, while also fuelling a backlash against what is perceived by some members of the white working class as a form of social engineering that endangers white privilege