The thesis of this book is that we must learn to live well together if we are to develop a positive society, where difference and conflict are seen as opportunities for growth, and diversity is celebrated and not feared. This first main chapter explains the lessons that Leicester has to offer the rest of the world in how to go about this, and subsequent chapters put flesh on the bones that are outlined here.
We begin with the phrase ‘learning to live well together’. The intention expressed by ‘learning’ is important. Living well together does not just happen. It is a complex adaptive problem, which requires creative thinking, courageous action and the humility to recognise and move on from mistakes. No simple technical solutions will work. Social engineering, where people of different ethnicities are forced to live next to each other, or made to encounter each other in overly formalised sterile settings, does not lead to real learning. At best, participants offer a begrudging lip service which has little lived reality. Forced integration rarely results in real integration but only parallel lives.
Rather, we must decide we want to learn about the other. We need a disposition for encounter, for relishing difference, for seeing the other as someone who can teach us, enable us to flourish and develop a clearer understanding of our own identity. This process is messy, highly emotionally charged, very complicated but also enormous fun. Throughout this book, we are inviting you to come on a learning journey with us, as we explain our learning and experience in living well together.
The chapter begins with an introduction to the city of Leicester before introducing and explaining the ‘Leicester model’.
Introduction to the city of Leicester
The most diverse city on the planet
In 2013 the Independent newspaper described Leicester as ‘the most multicultural city on the planet’. In December 2015 a study by Suzanne Hall, Julia King and Robin Finlay from the London School of Economics suggested that Narborough Road, one of the main routes into the city, is the most diverse street in Europe, with 22 ethnicities and communities represented. It has not always been this way. Those who live in Leicester have had to learn how to live well together, and this has not always been an easy process.
Early history and populations
Two thousand or so years ago the Romans named the city Ratae Coritanum. The Saxons subsequently conquered it, and the city was also part of the Danish conquests known as the Danegeld. In the eleventh century it became Norman territory. The population was small, about 3000 families, until the eighteenth century when people flooded in from the countryside, taking Leicester to 150,000 in 1760. Victorian Leicester grew further, and the present population is around 300,000, with another 600,000 in the County of Leicestershire.
Twentieth-century migration and the present day
Victorian Leicester (1837–1901) already had significant Irish minorities and small numbers of Jewish and German economic migrants from 1890. This led to Leicester becoming one of the richest cities on the continent. In the period after 1940 Leicester experienced an influx of West Indians who came to fight in the Second World War and then as single male economic migrants. They faced a colour bar and extreme racism. Many left mainline churches, of which they had been members in the Caribbean, to form their own black churches such as the New Testament Church of God. Some are Pentecostal in style; the majority are in the Highfields area.
In the 1960s migrants from India and Pakistan arrived as single men to work in public services. East Europeans from Poland, Serbia, Latvia and Estonia also arrived in thousands. All these migrants lived in Highfields, the old Irish and railway workers’ area behind the railway station on London Road. It became known to whites as the ‘Khyber Pass’. Following independence in East Africa, Leicester received 60,000 Asians in waves, from Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. The largest group were the group Idi Amin expelled from Uganda in 1973. Originally Leicester did not welcome these migrants, with the Labour Council of the time taking out adverts in Kampala newspapers, aimed at deterring new arrivals.
‘Present conditions in the city are very different from those met by earlier settlers’ read Leicester’s advert in the Uganda Argus. In particular, it went on, there were ‘several thousands of families on the housing list’, ‘hundreds of children…awaiting places in schools’, while social and health services were ‘already stretched to the limit’ (Popham 2013). The basic message was: ‘Leicester is full.’ It failed completely as a deterrent; in fact, it had precisely the opposite impact, drawing Leicester to the attention of potential migrants who might otherwise have settled in other English cities. This hesitancy about receiving migrants is often missed in contemporary celebrations of the diversity of the city but must be remembered. Suspicion of migrants is by no means new.
Between 1968 and 1975 the ethnic minority population of the city rose considerably. The newcomers were in family groups, with full citizenship and initially via the Punjab to be followed by people from the Gujarat state of India directly or via Africa – the latter becoming known as ‘twice migrants’. They encountered a racist backlash in the form of the National Front (now the British National Party), who gained 25 per cent of the vote in Leicester in 1976 with the slogan ‘Stop Immigration! Start repatriation!’ Their vote collapsed with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and they are now only active in pockets of the county. The city itself, with its encouragement and funding of the Leicester Council of Faiths as early as 1986, took proactive steps to counter their influence.
Asian people weathered the abuse and hostility, turning to politics. In 1983 and 1987 large numbers of Asian Labour councillors were elected. In 1987, an Asian Lord Mayor and an Asian MP were selected and elected respectively for the first time. In 2001 many councillors lost their seats to new Indian Muslim Liberal Democrats in response to the Iraq War. Labour lost control to the Liberal Democrats for the first time for 24 years. As well as achieving a political breakthrough, since the 1970s Asian entrepreneurs have rapidly set up corner shops, and then businesses in food, textiles, property and land, just when Leicester’s traditional industries (shoes, textiles and light engineering) were in steep decline.
Since this time the ethnic minority population of the city has risen to 28 per cent in 1991, 36 per cent in 2001 and 49.4 per cent in 2011. The 2011 Census revealed a small majority for ‘White’ and ‘White’-related groups but ethnic minority communities already make up over half of the numbers in city schools. At the time of writing, Leicester is the UK’s most plural city.
The city is currently drawing in communities from Poland, Slovakia, Iraq and Zimbabwe, the Kurdish region of the Middle East, as well as an estimated 10,000 Somalis, mostly via Holland, Denmark and Sweden. There are several thousand Roma from central Europe as well, who are under the radar. Leicester City Council has managed this process well over the past 30 years, avoiding riots (with the exception of 1981) and turning clients into partners in that time. Leicester is seen as an international model of good race relations. There is a theory that the (twice-migrant) South Asian population of Leicester comprises communities that previously lived fairly harmoniously together before coming to the UK and that they have simply carried on in this vein, whereas in other cities the contemporary population is made up of groups that have a history of antagonism. Whether this is a sufficient explanation is a moot point, but versions of it are aired in discussions of Leicester’s relatively peaceful multiculturalism.
As Figure 1.1 shows, according to the 2011 Census, Christianity is now the faith of 32.4 per cent of people in Leicester (44 per cent in 2001). The figure for England and Wales is 59.3 per cent. Leicester has a Non-conformist Dissenter history, so Anglo Catholicism is rather weak here. There are some Asian Christians, many of whom are Catholics with roots in India. Former bishops of Leicester, the Rt Revd Tom Butler and the Rt Revd Tim Stevens, have actively encouraged interfaith dialogue and created expertise in a small cadre of Anglican priests, a tradition continued by the current bishop, the Rt Revd Martyn