In the United States Professor Wilson thinks that the marginal emergence of a black middle class has deepened the

In the United States, Professor Wilson thinks that the marginal emergence of a black middle class has deepened the plight of the rest. “Jewish” means white-collar, self-employed, suburban, owner-occupied. On Peach’s analysis, Chinese – the most invisible minority – join Indians in the “Jewish” model. Proportionately, more Indians are middle class than whites.In the census report, Professor Ceri Peach of Oxford divides ethnic minorities into “Jewish” or “Irish” models of settlement “Irish” means blue-collar, inner city, council housing. Indians are moving away from inner cities into suburbs, and then into the expanding market towns. They are following the same route as the white middle classes There are, of course, differences But they are mostly to Indians’ advantage. They have moved on into business and the professions.Complaints about racial discrimination have risen But this is a tricky statistic.

With higher ambitions, people knock against previous ceilings. A celebrated sociological study, The American Soldier, showed that men who knew they had no chance of promotion were more contented than men who knew they had some chance of rising. The chapter on Indians in the last census report was headed “Onward and Upward” You could add “Outward”. Such jobs also drew Pakistani migrants into the textile mills of south Lancashire and West Yorkshire. (Both groups were damaged terribly when this work collapsed.) In spite of the obvious differences, many commentators could present them as a homogeneous, equally disadvantaged ethnic minority.The Indians changed all that. They arrived mostly from east and central Africa, after being short-sightedly thrown out by the newly independent black regimes They are now, at about 900,000, the largest ethnic minority.

Labour activists objected to his daughters going to the fee-paying North London Collegiate School. In England, class trumps race.It didn’t always seem to be so. The first, largely West Indian migrants slotted in, mostly, at the bottom of the social pecking order They often did basic blue-collar jobs. It is almost as if, paradoxically, such agreed battlegrounds are part of the glue that holds society together Here, that battleground is still class. When the Anglo-Caribbean broadcaster, Trevor Phillips, emerged as a possible candidate for London mayor last summer, he ran into trouble, but not because of the colour of his skin. But it has nowhere led to the ghettos Professor Wilson speaks about Even Brixton has a majority of white residents.

(The Bangladeshis of Tower Hamlets are the most concentrated migrant group.)A class-free (or race-free or caste-free) society is a noble ambition In reality, all societies have sharp internal divisions. Eltham, where Stephen Lawrence was murdered, is astonishingly white. For some, its cosy semis have been a refuge from blacker streets of south London “White flight” exists. This is not how it is, say, in the McDonald’s outside Birmingham New Street station.England is a long way from those 1950s b&b signs, saying “No blacks, Irish or dogs”. It is because pervasive class awareness is an English, rather than British, phenomenon. So, also, is the urgency and importance of how to think about race. Any student who goes from London (or other major migrant cities) to a Welsh or Scottish university is immediately struck by one overwhelming social fact Between 98 and 99 per cent of the local population is white.

In America, by contrast, there is an open readiness to categorise everyone by ethnic origin – black, Jewish, Polish, Italian, Irish. The melting pot is more like a colander.But in England now? Consider the anger produced by the Commission for Racial Equality’s series of amazingly stupid advertisements, trying to raise “awareness” by deliberately portraying racism The anger was symptomatic. Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers, Keeping Up Appearances, on the one hand; Pride and Prejudice, The Code of the Woosters and Human Croquet, on the other. They are overtaken by newer arrivals.The English vice is still snobbery. Awareness of the minutiae of class permeates everything from fashion to literature Comic writing, for example, is inseparable from class. (Or if they do, it is on the grounds of race, not class.)”.You can say that again. The “ghetto poor” (in the words of the black American sociologist William Julius Wilson) remain at the bottom of the heap, 133 years after slavery was abolished.