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Of the British population.






 

Plan

 

1. A mixed population

2. Religious and ethnic diversity in Scotland

3. Religious and ethnic diversity in Northern Ireland

4. Family

 

1. The streets of London are full of white, black and brown people, who originated from all over the world. In previous centuries, Britain, like all European countries from Ireland to the Urals, was shaped by mass movements, conquest, settlement and reconquest. Even in more peaceful times whole populations have moved in response to industrial development, technological change, agricultural catastrophe and political and religious conflicts, so that every country in Europe has a constantly shifting mixture of peoples, whatever its current national aspirations.

In Great Britainб less immediately affected by some of the wars, they have been able and, until recently, willing to accept refugees from conflicts on the European mainland. Large groups of Protestants from France in the seventeenth century, small groups of French Royalists after the Revolution, and individual radicals and revolutionaries of all kinds in the nineteenth century have settled there. Irish Catholics emigrated in their hundreds of thousands to Britain after the Great Famine of the 1840’s, bringing with them a Catholic culture which is quite different from English Protestantism in its traditions, values and family patterns of upbringing. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many Jews from Poland and Russia came there, often working as whole communities in the clothing trades of east London.

This “mixed population” is traditional enough, with counterparts of the groups mentioned here found all over Europe. But Britain has also been a colonizing power. Living on an island with many national resources and instant access to the sea, British traders, from the sixteenth century onwards, established contacts with the Indian subcontinent, with Africans and Arabs, and the settlers in North America. Trading soon meant colonization. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain built up a powerful Empire which was ruled from London. To run this Empire they needed a foreign Civil Service, a “Colonial Service” – to which many young men were recruited. Consequently, thousands of people left Britain to work as administrators and officials in the Empire, and as civil engineers, teachers, farmers, missionaries and traders. Emigration was always greater than immigration in this period. Very few of the colonized peoples had an opportunity to settle in Britain until after the Second World War.

After 1945 Britain suffered from a shortage of labour, especially in unskilled, poorly-paid jobs. West Indians, and then Indians and Pakistanis were invited to come and work in the country. Between 1955 and 1962 about a quarter of a million West Indians and rather fewer from the Indian subcontinent arrived in Britain. Such numbers alarmed many of the white population, partly because they feared for their jobs and housing, partly because they disliked these non-white people coming into “white” Britain. In 1962, the Government, in response to this panic, passed the first of a series of laws restricting right of entry into Britain and changing the status of British Commonwealth citizens. Commonwealth immigration was much reduced, though the families of those already there continued to arrive throughout the seventies and early eighties. Small groups of Hong Kong Chinese, Africans and Vietnamese were also accepted into the country during these years. But as people move around all over the world, Britain has become notably less welcoming. The island is heavily populated. Now non-white population is about 5% of the population at large.

During the last thirty years Britain has undergone a sometimes painful education about people, race, colour, prejudice and different cultural values. There have been victims, mostly among the black and Asian groups, but also among the poorer white groups who have felt their own way of life to have been utterly changed by the arrival of the immigrants. Blacks and Asians have suffered higher unemployment, poorer living conditions and discrimination of many kinds. Nevertheless there is much good in this story because the experience of living in a multi-racial society has undoubtedly changed people’s attitudes. Anybody who reads the literature knows that the colonized black peoples were regarded as less capable, less intelligent than the white people, more like children than adults. It is impossible to continue holding such opinions when children of all races grow up together.

Meanwhile, white British expectations of what is normal have broadened. They eat different kinds of food; enjoy different kinds of parties, music, festivals. They learn directly about different religions and traditions. They are simply less narrow than older generations. Racial prejudice still exists and occasionally flares into violence, but somehow the British have become a society of mixed races.

o 2. In Scotland the total minority ethnic population is just over 100, 000. This is an increase of 62.3 per cent in the last decade.

o The largest non-white group is people of Pakistani origin, with 31, 793 people - two thirds of a per cent (0.63 per cent).

o The second largest non-white group in Scotland is people of Chinese origin - 16, 310 people - one third of one per cent (0.3 per cent).

o 28 per cent of people in Scotland describe themselves as not religious.

o 65 per cent of the population describe themselves as Christian. 45 per cent of people in the Church of Scotland denomination are aged 50 or over, compared to 32 per cent of Roman Catholics.

o The second largest religious group is Muslim, despite accounting for less than one per cent of the Scottish population.

o Muslims have the youngest age profile of any religion in Scotland, with 31 per cent aged under 16 years.

o There are 6, 400 Jews.

o 3. There are 14, 279 non-white people living in Northern Ireland from a population of 1.68 m - less than one per cent.

o There are 737, 412 members of the Catholic community as defined by upbringing (43.8 per cent).

o Protestant faith communities, defined by upbringing, number 895, 377 (53 per cent).

o Chinese are the largest non-white community, numbering 4, 145 people.

o Asian communities - including Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi - number 2, 679, while Black communities number 1, 136.

o There are 234, 800 people who either speak, read, write or understand Irish.

4. “There is no such thing as society, ” Mrs. Thatcher once said. “Only individual men and women, and families.” Many people disagree with her, but there remains a strong feeling that the immediate or ‘nuclear’ family is the basic unit of society, and that traditional family values remain the mainstay of national life.

The nuclear family is usually pictured as a married couple, with two children, ideally a girl and a boy, and perhaps their grandmother, or ‘granny’, in the background. As a picture of the way most British live, this becomes increasingly unrealistic each year. If the picture includes the traditional idea of the man going out to work while the wife stays at home, it is probably true of less than 10 per cent of the country. Even without such a limited definition, only 42 per cent of the population live in nuclear family households, and even within this group a considerable proportion of parents are in their second marriage with children from a previous marriage. In fact, it is expected that by the year 2005 only half the children born in Britain will grow up in a conventional family with parents already married when they were born and remaining married after they have grown up.

Social attitudes and behaviour are undoubtedly changing. The number of people living alone has risen significantly, from one in ten in 1951 to one in four forty years later. At the beginning of a new century it is expected to rise to one in three. In the same period the proportion of households containing five or more people has dropped from one in five to fewer than one in ten. The British are clearly becoming a more solitary nation in their living habits. This will have social implications, for example, housing needs in the future.

There is an ever increasing proportion of men and women living together or “cohabiting” before marriage. Marriages are as popular as ever, with 400, 000 weddings yearly. But the divorce rate is high, and this has risen to be the highest in Europe. In fact, more than one in three first marriages ends in divorce, one quarter of first marriages failing in the first five years. One inevitable consequence of the climbing divorce rate has been the rise of single parent families. These families often experience isolation and poverty. The great majority of single parents are women. Children, of course, are the main victims.

There has also been an increase in babies born outside marriage. It is a sign of both increase in numbers and changing social attitudes that these babies, once described as `illegitimate`, are now described officially as `non-marital`.







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