Overcoming barriers to integration

Towns and cities across the UK are expected to be far more ethnically diverse in future.

Most are unlikely to end up resembling the Wood Green district of Haringey in north London, which ranks among the most culturally mixed boroughs in the country.

As a government-appointed commission comes up with new recommendations to improve relations between migrants and local communities in England, what do its residents feel about integration? The commission considers the inability to speak English to be the single biggest barrier to integration.

John Okono, 28, came to the UK from Nigeria - an English-speaking country - three years ago and can see how some of the immigrant friends he has made have become isolated because of a lack of language skills. Mr Okono, who is working as a security guard as he studies for a masters degree, can see himself applying for British citizenship one day.

"Whenever you come to a different country you have to integrate yourself with the culture and speaking the language is a very important part of that," he said.

It is a point not lost on charity worker Patricia Rodgers, who was brought up in Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s and has lived in Haringey for three years, after a spell in Spain teaching English.

"It's definitely important for people to learn the language," she said. "I have taught it here to a lot of the Polish community and I'm going to start doing it again on a voluntary basis as there's a big need for it."

New shops

The shops of Wood Green, like most suburbs of London, offer clues to the changing make-up of its population.

Greek and Turkish-run grocers sit side-by-side Afro-Caribbean food retailers, Halal butchers and stores selling eastern European provisions. Accommodation advertisements in Polish, Russian and Chinese now appear in newsagent windows.

According to the 2001 Census, about 33% of Haringey's population of 216,000 were born outside the UK. White British people made up 45% of its residents.

Another message from people in Wood Green is that mixing with other residents is the key to becoming a more integrated community.

Emerging from a bagel shop is technician Mohammed Ali Hassan, 45, who came to the UK from Somalia in 2006 and has been granted asylum.

"I've only been here for a year so I don't really have friends of different nationalities yet - but when our children go to school, the parents have meetings and discussions so there integration takes place," he said.

Peter Cercek, 33, a computer worker who arrived from the Czech Republic in 2004, highlights a position communities moving to less diverse areas may find themselves in.

"For the first six months I only knew people from my country, but now I have friends of all different nationalities," he said. "If I lived in a small town I probably wouldn't mix, but there are so many different people it's impossible not to."

Sheraz Ahmed, 26, who came to London from Pakistan just five months ago, is working part-time on a stand selling telephone cards and studying English, ahead of starting an MBA. Friends he has made through work are from Mauritius and Albania, but his housemates are also Pakistani and he says he does not really know any British people.

"It's difficult to mix with other cultures when I've only been here for a short while," he said. "But that's why it's important to speak English."

The comments of student Christopher Lewis, 16, suggest that promotion of a common language more than Britishness is the most effective way to integrate communities in 2007. The UK-born son of Greek immigrants said he was not entirely at ease with being described as British.

"I've friends from Latvia and Africa but at the end of the day families always have tradition. You can socialise but your roots are going to be closer to you than your outside contacts," he said. "Some parts of me are British and some parts are not. The UK is a multi-cultural society now - it is not 'just British' anymore."

BBC

Hope not Hate blog update

The Daily Mirror Hope Not Hate bus launched today, kicking off our campaign aimed at spreading goodwill ahead of the May elections, on a journey from London to Glasgow that will cover 1600 miles and many different communities in the UK.

It was a bright cold day, and the bus was unmissable, parked up on a South London pavement by the market at Merton Abbey Mills. It had arrived from Wales that morning and it was the first time we had seen it in its red and yellow livery and experienced the reactions it gets. Lots of thumbs ups, waves and cheers, people at bus stops looking a bit puzzled because they're expecting the 38 not the Hope not Hate. The very occasional v-sign from people who don't like the idea of hope (what kind of person hates hope?).

We'll be spending 15 days on the bus in total, travelling from London to Glasgow in a strange curly scribble of a route that takes in all the communities who wanted to organise something for our fortnight celebrating the diverse and tolerant country in which we live. Our itinerary is still quite sketchy at this stage, but the route takes in Dagenham & Thurrock, Northampton & Leicester, Nottingham & Lincoln and Sheffield before we even get to Tuesday.

We're all really looking forward to visiting the different communities along the way. The celebrity support we've had so far has been overwhelming, but it's the real people we want to see. There's so much planned - from colliery brass bands to Welsh male voice choirs to school events and food festivals - that will be a real privilege to see.

It's not often you get the chance to take a journey like this, especially not on a 1964 Leyland Titan double decker. We realised today that it's going to be very cold, as there's no heating on the bus, and very slow (top speed 38mph and that's downhill with a favourable wind), and the bus lurches like a drunk on the top deck. But it's also going to be a fascinating insight into what makes up modern Britain.

We were all shocked today by the reaction of the BNP to the trip, which is aimed at nothing more earth-shattering or radical than celebrating the diverse country we all live in and see outside our windows and on our televisions every day.

There were quite a few phonecalls yesterday when a special eight page supplement launched the campaign, making offensive - and frankly factually wrong - comments about non-white communities and complaining about the "evil" Nelson Mandela.

Then today the BNP's official website took issue with our campaign and a piece I wrote for the supplement: "Clearly the writer has never stepped out of his or her ivory tower into the ghettos of Tower Hamlets, the killing fields of south London where various tribes of African descent are wagging (sic) war with one another, the no go areas for native Britons in Birmingham, Peterborough and Glasgow."

The thing is, I live in the 'Killing Fields' of South London and I love where I live. Part of the reason I love my street is that it is filled with different vibrant cultures. And I am far more concerned by what I've read on the BNP website today than by any of my neighbours.

I've also reported many times from the scene of all kinds of gun deaths and urban tragedies across Britain, and I can tell you that poverty is the defining factor here, not race. Poverty afflicts immigrant communities and white communities the same, and its presence is writ large over every gun death and knife death and drug death I've seen in the UK. Clapham North where a 15-year-old schoolboy was killed in cold blood last month is not 'no-go', but an affluent middle class area with pockets of poverty. His parents were decent working people whose son was trying to break free of a culture of criminality that afflicts people of all races who live in poverty.

The last time I went to a 'no-go' estate, in Glasgow, it was to cover the story of a white child in a predominantly white school collapsing from sniffing heroin at her desk. That tragedy was rooted in poverty too.

Anyway, I'm partly acknowledging this reaction as I expect this blog to attract the attentions of some of the same people who rang the paper yesterday, and I wanted to warn genuine readers that some of the comments posted below may well be by people with extreme views.

Mostly I'm shocked that the BNP are so blatant. I thought they went round knocking on people's doors pretending to be a mainstream political party these days?

Funniest moment of the day: Finding two European tourists on the bus taking photos of each other and presumably hoping to be driven to Hope, the destination on the front of the bus.

Best moment of the day: Meeting the cast of Rafta Rafta at the National Theatre who came out to support us in the rain by the Thames.

Song of the day: The wheels on the bus go round and round.

Weather: Wintery

Multicultural event of the day: Mr Singh who called to say he was wearing his special St George's red and white turban in honour of our campaign.

Mirror