Last summer’s anti-immigration riots, which swept across 27 cities, were blamed on the spread of fake news and toxic social media. The truth was more complex, with political discontent being mobilised to create an incendiary situation. And resentment of the migrant community for their ‘otherness’ played a major part in this.

Former PM Tony Blair set some of the politics of settlement in motion by declaring that immigrants have a ‘duty to integrate’. Integration though, is seldom defined, and has two fundamental assumptions: that there is a single coherent whole which people are supposed to integrate into; and that ‘British people’ are fully integrated into this whole in a uniform way.

Evidence for this is scant and contested. However, if we refocus our gaze elsewhere, using the measures often applied to migrants and apply them to the nation’s elites, we see a complete lack of integration - however we choose to define it. And what the evidence suggests is that this lack of integration among elites is deliberate. Elites choose to segregate, but that choice is not seen as difficult or dangerous, and is not mobilised as a political issue.

We know that residential segregation is on the rise - in other words, elites tend to seek neighbourhoods occupied by people ‘like them’. While other parts of the population also congregate with people from a similar socio-economic background, they tend to do so due to cost and availability of housing, rather than voluntarily. In its most extreme form this can be seen in the form of gated communities, but even milder versions of wealthy neighbourhoods lead to less, rather than more, social connection and social interactions.

This self-segregation then plays out across other aspects of elite lives. People in this group will likely have attended private schools, a trajectory that extends to their children. About 7% of the UK population go to private schools, and the wealthier you are the more they become the norm. This educational inequality has ongoing impacts on social mobility and cannot be corrected by simply allowing a few non-elites into private schools.

Such schools are designed to ensure privilege. Why else would wealthy parents send their children there? They gain access to elite networks and are then part of a funnel towards the most prestigious universities. Private schools teach pupils how to access these universities - indeed many have institutional links with them - and they teach them that they belong there.

And once in these universities, the corridors and lecture theatres are dominated by people from similar backgrounds. This is ‘helped’ by the fact that state school pupils are filtered out, less likely to apply, even with the required grades, and less likely to be accepted if they do. Thus, this potentially key site of social interaction between social classes largely does not happen and this segregation subsequently transfers to the employment market where, for example, the ‘golden triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and elite London institutions creates its own elite. The dominance of the privately educated in all highly paid professions - business, politics, the media, law, medicine and finance - is evident across research and is again indicative of a self-segregated population.

Health and wellbeing are also affected. Health inequalities in the UK are on the rise and are reflective of wider inequalities. Not only are lifestyles different, allowing greater focus on health for those that can afford it, but access to quicker healthcare through the private sector removes elites from that equalising measure of the NHS. It also means that elites - those making many of the key decisions about public policy - are comfortably distanced from the impacts of their decisions.

Overall, this is a group who cut themselves off from many aspects of British society, who work closely with people from similar backgrounds, who live in areas with people from similar backgrounds, who have attended private schools and elite universities where they interact mainly with small elite groups in society and where they are prepared socially and culturally for their societal positions, and who then reproduce that process all over again with their own offspring. In a society that has practically no social mobility, this is a stable population who are able to reproduce self-segregation among their children.

Politicians and their media allies contribute to this segregation by never questioning it. Instead, they focus an inordinate amount of attention on complaints that there are non-elite populations who are not sufficiently ‘like us’ - such as the migrant community or the poor. The former require integration and the latter inclusion. So, while a great degree of political attention is paid to other groups, elites have had no such attention. This raises significant questions as to the aim of integration policies.

Policy seems to only be concerned with integration to the extent that it can shrink cultural differences between some groups and the imagined national whole, or else it is weaponised against migrants. It does not concern itself with class inequalities or with wider conceptions of social cohesion.

I am sceptical about integration as an aim of public policy. However, if it is deemed important enough to be pursued by policy-makers, and if the media are genuinely interested in the broader cohesion of society, then Tony Blair’s ‘duty to integrate’ has to be widened to include all groups who are currently not required to integrate.

This article first appeared in The National.

Dr Gareth Mulvey is a researcher at the University of Glasgow. He has a particular interest in the issues of migration, migration policy and the impact of policy on diverse migrant communities.

 

First published: 26 February 2025

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