Leicester and Birmingham have become the
first UK cities to have "minority majorities"
- census reveals
Dr Mozammel Haque
According to the 2021 census, shows that Leicester and Birmingham have become the first UK cities to have “minority majorities”. It also says England and Wales are now minority Christian countries.
The Daily Guardian reported this census report on 29 November 2022. Robert Booth, Pamela Duncan and Carmen Aguilar García wrote the following report in the Daily Guardian on 29 November 2022. Copy @The Daily Guardian
"Census
England and Wales now minority Christian countries,
census reveals
Data shows Leicester and Birmingham have become
UK’s first ‘minority majority’ cities in new age of ‘super-diversity’
"Shoppers on New
Street in Birmingham. Minority ethnic people make up 51.4% of the population in
the UK’s second largest city, where 20 years ago seven out of 10 people were
white. Photograph: Jacob King/PA
Robert Booth, Pamela Duncan and Carmen Aguilar García
Tue 29 Nov 2022 13.07 GMT
"England and Wales
are now minority Christian countries, according to the 2021 census, which also
shows that Leicester and Birmingham have
become the first UK cities to have “minority majorities”.
"The census revealed
a 5.5 million (17%) fall in the number of people who describe themselves as
Christian and a 1.2 million (43%) rise in the number of people who say they
follow Islam, bringing the Muslim population to 3.9 million. In
percentage-point terms, the number of Christians has dropped by 13.1, and the
number of Muslims has risen by 1.7.
It is the first
time in a census of England and Wales that fewer than half of the population
have described themselves as Christian.
Meanwhile, 37.2% of
people – 22.2 million – declared they had “no religion”, the second most common
response after Christian. It means that over the past 20 years the proportion
of people reporting no religion has soared from 14.8% – a rise of more than 22
percentage points.
The archbishop of
York, Stephen Cottrell, said the census result “throws down a challenge to us
not only to trust that God will build his kingdom on Earth but also to play our
part in making Christ known”.
He added: “We have
left behind the era when many people almost automatically identified as
Christian but other surveys consistently show how the same people still seek
spiritual truth and wisdom and a set of values to live by.”
The chief executive
of Humanists UK, Andrew Copson, said: “One of the most striking things about
these census results is how at odds the population is from the state itself. No
state in Europe has such a religious setup as we do in terms of law and public
policy, while at the same time having such a non-religious population.”
Analysis by the
Guardian shows areas with a higher proportion of people from ethnic minorities
are also more religious. And places with a higher proportion of white people
also have a bigger proportion with no religion. The places with the highest
numbers of people saying they had no religion were Caerphilly, Blaenau Gwent
and Rhondda Cynon Taf, all in south Wales, and Brighton and Hove and Norwich in
England. They were among 11 areas where more than half the population are not
religious, including Bristol, Hastings in East Sussex and Ashfield in
Nottinghamshire, most of which had relatively low ethnic minority populations.
The places with the
lowest number of non-believers were Harrow, Redbridge and Slough, where close
to two-thirds of the populations are from minority ethnic backgrounds.
The slump in
religion and emergence of minority ethnic populations as a combined majority in
whole conurbations in England and Wales is revealed in data about the
ethnicity, religion and language of close to 60 million people gathered in a
snapshot census on 21 March 2021. The Office for National Statistics (ONS)
cited differing patterns of ageing, fertility, mortality and migration as
possible reasons for the change in religious profile of the countries.
Across the two
countries, 81.7% of the population is now white, including non-British, down
from 86% in 2011, 9.3% is Asian British, up from 7.5%, 2.5% is Black, Black
British, Black Welsh, Caribbean-African and African, up from 1.8%, and 1.6% are
other ethnicities.
Ushering in a new
age of city-wide “super diversity”, the ONS data showed 59.1% of the people
of Leicester are
now from ethnic minority groups, a big change since 1991, when black and
minority ethnic people made up just over a quarter of the city’s residents.
Leicester’s Asian population first became well established after 20,000 people
settled in the east Midlands manufacturing city after expulsion from Uganda in
1972.
Minority ethnic
people also make up more than half the population in Luton (54.8%) and
Birmingham (51.4%), the UK’s second largest city where 20 years ago seven out
of 10 people were white. Since the second world war, Birmingham’s population
has grown with immigration from the Caribbean and south Asia, as well as
Gujaratis who had been in east Africa.
The mixed-race
population grew by half a million people to 1.7 million over the last decade,
but the rate of increase was slower than for the previous decade.
The census deputy
director, Jon Wroth-Smith, said the figures showed “the increasingly
multicultural society we live in” but added that despite the rising ethnic
diversity “nine in 10 people across England and Wales still identify with a UK
national identity, with nearly eight in 10 doing so in London”.
The figures will
present a fresh impetus to policymakers to tackle embedded racial inequalities,
which mean black and minority ethnic people are 2.5 times more likely to be in
relative poverty and are falling faster and further below the poverty line in the
cost of living crisis, according to the
Runnymede Trust, a race equality thinktank.
While there have
been significant improvements in the educational attainment of almost all
ethnic minority groups in recent years, median weekly earnings among black
Caribbean male employees were 13% below white British men in 2019, with
Pakistani and Bangladeshi pay 22% and 42% lower, according to research by
the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The census revealed
a substantial fall in Christian religious adherence. Islam, by contrast, is
increasingly widespread, from 4.8% or 2.7 million people in 2011 to 6.5% and
3.9 million people in 2021.
Humanists and
secularists seized on the figures as proof of the need for an overhaul of
religion’s role in a society that has bishops of the established Church of
England voting on laws and compulsory Christian worship in all schools that are
not of a designated religious character.
“It’s official – we
are no longer a Christian country,” said Stephen Evans, the chief executive of
the National Secular Society. “The census figures paint a picture of a
population that has dramatically moved away from Christianity – and from
religion as a whole. The current status quo, in which the Church of England is
deeply embedded in the UK state, is unfair and undemocratic – and looking
increasingly absurd and unsustainable.”
The census did not
ask people whether they were Church of England, Catholic or any other denomination,
but the findings are likely to indicate shrinking congregations for the
established Anglican churches of England and Wales. In 2018, the British Social Attitudes
Survey found only 12% of British people were Anglicans, down
from 40% in 1983.
Dr Adam Rutherford,
the president of Humanists UK, said people should not think a decline in
religion equated to an “absence in values”.
“We might be living
in a more values-driven society than ever before,” he said. “Surveys show, for
example, that around three in 10 British adults have humanist beliefs and
values, and it’s a trend we’ve seen growing in recent years.”
Humanists say they
trust science over the supernatural, base their ethics around reason, empathy
and concern for humans and other sentient animals and that in the absence of an
afterlife, “human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking
happiness in this life and helping others to do the same”.
This article
was amended on 29 November 2022 to include contextual percentage-point data for
the changes in the number of Christians and Muslims between censuses, and to
correct the figure for the percentage rise in the Muslim population from 44% to
43%."
Acknowledgement: The Daily Guardian 29 November 2022
Courtesy: @The Daily Guardian, 29 November 2022
