Gary Younge flags up some figures which he clearly thinks are appalling:
The racial group in
Britain that has the hardest time integrating is white people. A YouGov
poll for the Commission for Racial Equality last year showed that 83%
of whites have no friends who are practising Muslims, while only 48% of
non-white people do. It revealed that 94% of whites, compared with 47%
of people from ethnic minorities, say most or all their friends are
white. There is no good reason why white people should go out of their
way to befriend ethnic minorities. But the truth is some go out of
their way not to. A Mori poll for Prospect magazine last year showed
that 41% of whites, compared with 26% of ethnic minorities, want the
races to live separately.
Well, OK. Now I know that I often have problems with statistics but somehow I really don’t find that all that surprising:
In
the 2001 Census, 87.5 per cent of the population of England and Wales
described themselves as white British (seven out of eight people) and
in Scotland this increased to 98 percent of the population. In Wales,
the North East and South West, over 95 per cent of the population
described themselves as white.
Aren’t Gary’s figures simply an inherent part of the distribution? Why should we be surprised that 87.5% of the population don’t know 12.5% of it, while the 12.5% of it do know some of the 87.5%? Isn’t this exactly what we would expect?
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