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09/19/2005:

"Britain 'sleepwalking to segregation'"

...The minister for constitutional affairs, Harriet Harman, agreed that some of Britain's black and poor communities were beginning to resemble those in the US.

"We don't want to get into a situation like America - but if you look at the figures we are already looking like America," she told the Independent. "In London, poor, young and black people don't register to vote."

Among the measures Mr Phillips will suggest is for "white" schools to be forced to take larger numbers of ethnic minority pupils to aid integration.

Mr Phillips admits his message is "bleak", but says the UK must heed the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.

"The fact is that we are a society which - almost without noticing it - is becoming more divided by race and religion," he will say.

Some districts are on their way to "literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and trepidation and from which nobody ever escapes undamaged".

He will warn that this situation risks culminating in a "New Orleans-style Britain of passively coexisting ethnic and religious communities, eyeing each other over the fences of our differences".

In his assessment of the UK following the July 7 terror attacks on London, Mr Phillips will add: "We are sleepwalking our way to segregation.

"We are becoming strangers to each other and leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream."
guardian.co.uk

"Literal black holes..."