TOI correspondent from LONDON: The Indian community, the largest Asian ethnic group in Britain, is outperforming all ethnic groups, including white British, when it comes to the percentage that work in professions, hourly pay rate, the percentage that owns homes, and the percentage in employment or self-employment.
The Indian community is the least likely to live in social rented housing.Instead 71% own their own homes and they are the most socially integrated, with more friends from outside their ethnicity than any other minority group. They also come second in educational attainment, after the Chinese.
The findings have come in a new report, “A Portrait of Modern Britain”, published by Policy Exchange, which describes British Indians as “one of the most successful ethno-religious groups in modern Britain”.
The report found the Pakistani-Bangladeshi community to have the lowest percentage working in professions and the lowest hourly pay rate, whilst the Arab and Bangladeshi communities are most likely to be economically inactive.
It is social class rather than race that is considered by all ethnic groups to be the barrier to success in UK, even though political discourse in Britain talks more about race.
The report describes a new group of ethnic minorities— MINTs, or “minorities in towns”— to describe those moving out of UK cities to towns and villages, where they are fully integrating with their white counterparts.
“The rise of MINTs is being driven by aspirational, asset-owning and business-minded British Indian families,” the report says, stating that British Indians are likely to become an “increasingly critical voter constituency” as provincial towns are Britain’s “electoral battlegrounds”.
Whilst Britain’s white graduates are moving leftwards, the highly educated in some groups, such as Indian Hindus, are moving to the right, the report said.
The report found new waves of migrants more tied to their native countries owing to easy travel and digital communications and this was what had led to conflicts of the Indian subcontinent breaking out in Leicester. It criticised the Hindu and Sikh manifestos brought out before the last general election for being part ofa “growth of openly communal electoral politics”.
It found that ethnic minority groups have less in common with each other than ever and so labels like BAME, Asian and South Asian are “no longer fit for purpose”.
The report also said all ethnic minorities were proud of being British and the majority preferred living in Britain to the US, Germany and France. It said they felt on balance “Britain has been a force for good in world” and want to celebrate UK’s achievements, and for children raised in Britain to be taught to be proud of its history.