Kemi Badenoch think BME communities shouldn't have their own neighbourhoods but be made to move to other areas

But the white people had to move out for the housing to be available. That’s the thing.

They weren’t held at gun point and told to leave.

The places they ‘fled’ to will probably be the places that these immigrants would be sent to if suggested proposals go ahead.

Where would they move people, to deprived white areas? I don’t see them getting seen to Kensington and Charles do you?

There are lot of different issues here. Immigrants with very little money who rely on the state for housing here and in Denmark are the ones where the state has power to decide where they live. Others it is different. My area of London has gone from 70% white to 30% white and we have had a lot of "white flight" ie white people leaving for white areas, both working class white people and middle class. Does that matter? No, if it is just colour of skin but in a sense I have moved without moving in that people around me are now in Starmer's words "strangers". If the strangers were fitting in and copying the way the host culture behaves then all across the UK the host culture might be happier about the highest number of newcomers we have ever had in our history.

It is a certainly an issue that needs to be tackled in many countries to help ensure people can live in peace and harmony together obeying original local laws and customs.

If you wanted to link key worker status and cheap housing, there are more targeted ways of doing this, such as building subsidised accommodation for nurses.

I don’t want to derail the thread (which was about ethnic enclaves and lack of integration) but just to answer this point briefly: the idea that most people who live in social housing are the ‘deserving poor’, those who work full time in low-paid jobs, is not accurate, as a very large number, I think over 40%, of social housing tenants are not in work. There is no reason why an unemployed and perhaps also unemployable person should live in a social housing flat in central London. Check out Tower Hamlets (which also has integration problems) as a case study.
Also, there seems to be a lack of understanding of what ‘opportunity costs’ are.

Yes, it's quite weird, historically, on this scale.

And with social housing, it's not so much about what people are choosing. It;s more who is going into that housing in a given area, so it may not be people's choices at all.

The same happens with low cost. My daughter, who is a student, is living in an area that was historically a village, now part of a city, but has some of the cheapest housing in the city. It is just full of people recently arrived because that is where they can afford to rent. It's not that they are trying to all live together.

And nothing to do with racism, it's the same reason poorer local people live there.

the vast majority of social housing isn't built by councils, but by housing associations (sometimes referred to as registered providers) and they fund the developments largely by borrowing money from banks.

The population is now people from 60 to 70 countries now. Very unusual and never been done before.

I think a lot of them expected to be living with English, Scots and Irish and Welsh people but they are living with people from 60 to 70 countries instead that all thought the same thing.

We are now communicating via a strange globish or translation apps.

Was this the plan?

The sad fact of the matter is that women and children will always suffer in a situation like this

There are women who can't speak English, who absolutely need GP appointments, but who wait for primary school age children to come home from school as they can't speak enough English to make an apt, or describe what's wrong

The child is privy to health matters the absolutely shouldn't know about and the mothers keep missing out because same day appointments are unavailable in the afternoons

Ah, and Trevor Phillips has in fact commented on KBs idea in The Times.

I'll link but I don't have a share token, maybe someone else does?

Asking the Right Questions

I think a lot of people are attracted because they prefer to be near other people who speak the same language, have similar religious practices, and similar lifestyles and values.

There is a bit of a paradox with neighbourhoods like this. They can have benefits in terms of mutual support, and also can help new people when they arrive. If those who have been there longer have integrated well they will help others do so.

I suspect the sweet spot is a small community, in proximity to other communities, and where not everyone arrives at the same time. But not enough people to mean there is little need to interact outside that community.

The destruction of social housing has been the worst policy disaster of the last fifty years, even including Brexit.

There is no social problem that we have now that has not been made worse by the lack of affordable, secure housing.

The biggest social housing building happened after ww2. The building costs of those houses (the ones which weren't sold off under rtb) have been covered hundreds of times over by social rent. The rent is below market rent but it still covers the cost, it just doesn't provide profit.

Are you saying we should abolish social housing and charge market rent in those properties? If we do that, where do care workers and delivery drivers and single mothers fleeing DV live? Because if they all move somewhere with affordable private housing, there will be no HCAs bin men Amazon drivers or a whole swathe of other jobs which we need doing, across most of the south of this country and pockets elsewhere.

Good luck staffing an NHS hospital if no cleaners catering staff or ward nurses can afford to live within 100 miles of the place.

Sure but the housing stock in state ownership in London is now majority occupied by foreign households and non working people so that hasn't worked out that way. 400 billion pounds worth.

I've reached the point of observational disinterest in this now because it's unchangeable, late stage open door global socialism funded by this tiny island.

The only answer we get to the question why is "to pay pensions", which is clearly wishful thinking and was that really a reason to give the country away? Because that's going to last 20 years at a push.

Boomer slop as the young people say.

'Wouldn’t it make more sense to rent this out at market rate...'

Not for the very low paid people who work in and around Westminster, if they're pushed further and further out, it makes the commute to work longer and more expensive. As it is they're likely working long shifts during unsociable hours for minimum wages, anything that makes it tougher on them would be wrong.

This is a common misconception. Of course the tax payer foots the bill for social housing. Councils build social housing with taxes, and as the rent is way below market rate, there are opportunity costs that are also covered by the tax payer as these properties would fetch much more on the private market. Public housing is a public asset, so the yield from this asset matters. You may say that poor people have to be housed somewhere - I agree. But we have quite a bit of social housing in very expensive central London boroughs such as Westminster. Wouldn’t it make more sense to rent this out at market rate and use the money to fund spending on the NHS? The fact that social housing tenants can pass on their entitlement to a house to their children (it’s called ‘succession’) without paying a penny in inheritance tax and without means testing also troubles me, to be honest. That’s unearned privilege, not support for the weakest in society.

It's all a bit too late.

Demographic changes directly as a result of giving state assets in the form of housing to foreign nationals means that white 40somethings are set to be a minority here by the time they reach retirement.

Social housing isn't 'tax payer funded accommodation'. It's not for profit. Tenants are only charged the amount of rent it costs to fund the repairs and management of the stock, but it's not funded by the taxpayer the costs are covered by the rent. If tenants get a housing element of UC that's taxpayer funded, but it would still be whether tenants live in social housing or privately rented housing, the payment just goes to the local council instead of a private landlord.

Under the old Housing Benefit system council tenants paying rent were actually funding the housing benefit of those who didn't, so actually rent paying council tenants were covering all social housing rents, not the 'the tax payer' in general. I don't know if that's different under UC now.

I agree that well paid people living in social housing are morally on dodgy ground, as they could free it up for others who have no alternative options which they could afford if they chose. But they're not living off the tax payer.

I don't know how you could even do this. Our crappy street is ex council and now a mix of housing association, private rental and owned homes. The Asian (mostly Indian I think) families all own their homes (have extensions) so no one has the right to move them anywhere. The women don't speak English well though which I find incredibly sad, we say hello in passing and that's it. Their daughters wear jeans and some wear a loose headscarf so they are much more westernised than their mums.

Racism is why these ghettos exist, because people have bad experiences and feel everywhere is going to be like that so they stay within a community where they feel safe. Sometimes their young children grow up and move out but they are never fully integrated as they still carry with them the legacy of believing that racism accounts for every problem in their life. IME they dont move far enough away as they still want the security of the community. As the generations go on that may diminish - but not while everyone still falls over backwards supporting the idea that anything bad that happens is fuelled by racism. We have a generation that has been trained into believing nothing is ever their fault, there is always someone they can blame.

We still need to work on more equality of opportunity, especially for young people as that enables the moving out. There is also still too much racism in parts of society as the Met Police case has shown. But we also need to reduce the over emphasis on racism, recognising that that actually fuels racism.

It's a very tricky balance to get right. Kemi can race these issues as she is not white, most people are too scared to do so.

I've thought about this some more, about the pull factors I mentioned.

I think certain things would help make integration easier. Some of these things might already exist.

• Subsidised/free English lessons for immigrants, with targeted advertising for women. They have this in the foreign country where my mum lives for poor ecomonic immigrants to learn the local language. Edit to add - the take-up is anecdotally majority women who do the classes.
• Increased community services for mums with young children (which is when isolation is most likely to start) I mean like those free stay and plays in children's centres.

Things like this would gradually and organically increase integration.

Controversially, I also think having a high minimum wage is not good for integration. Because it makes it harder for small businesses to hire people, so more work happens off the books, within isolated communities (men helping out at their cousin's garage/corner shop etc).

What happened around Jess Phillips election was appalling. We should do something. But what?

The East Midlands is poorly integrated. We have pockets of different cultures, among swathes of white ex mining communities living in deprivation. Sticking individual families in those predominantly white areas would take commitment and support. They would be broadly accepted as individuals, but probably still exposed to significant background racism with the occasional knobhead thrown in. There are chunks of our cities that are very much dominated by one culture or another.

Do those areas seed wider integration? Do their young people grow up and move out, fully integrated? Or do they just expand the area?

It will take a change of mindset, starting with not all culture's are equal. KB's comments might at least start the conversation around immigration. As potatotomata's post says other countries have done something similar, the UK is way behind the curve on this.

Perhaps a job for academia, a study of all the countries who are ahead of us, they could could come up with a plan that might work for us.

But it all starts with a change of mindset, which is where it'll all come unstuck, because those who have convinced themselves that multi-culturalism is morally right, won't change their minds.

"Ghettos, where these men can socially connect and have the opportunity to abuse women as freely as their cultures and society demand, are therefore also bad. And this shouldn't really be a controversial take."

I agree with what you've written here @Plasticwaste , but these ghettos already exist (I wrote above about an area of Birmingham). I don't see how we can fix the problem now that so much rented housing is in private hands.

Nobody in power wants to do that. The sand is far too compelling for them.

Some feminists don't want to do it either, yet immigration is a feminist issue. High levels of male immigration from sexist cultures where women have little agency is bad. Bending over backwards to demonstrate that it's actually positive or even neutral is just as illogical as pretending that men can become women.

Ghettos, where these men can socially connect and have the opportunity to abuse women as freely as their cultures and society demand, are therefore also bad. And this shouldn't really be a controversial take.