BRITAIN: The first places in Britain where white people are no longer in the majority were officially identified yesterday when the government disclosed detailed results from the 2001 census.
The office for national statistics said black and Asian people comprised 60.6 per cent of the population in the London borough of Newham, and 54.7 per cent in the London borough of Brent.
Sixteen other London boroughs had black and Asian minorities that accounted for a quarter or more of the population.
Among the facts and figures that will reshape perceptions of Britain's multiracial society, it emerged that Leicester was the city-wide authority with the largest proportion of non-whites: its mainly Indian minority group comprised more than a third of the population. In Slough, the black and Asian minority was 36.3 per cent, in Birmingham 29.6 per cent, and in Luton 28.1 per cent.
Mr John Pullinger, director of economic and social statistics, said the minority ethnic population in England rose from 6 per cent in 1991 to 9 per cent in 2001. But part of this increase may have been due to a new classification that allowed people to record themselves as mixed race. He said that some of these 823,000 people might have described themselves as white in 1991.
The first big wave of information from the £200 million census showed large areas of the country with almost all-white populations, headed by Berwick-upon-Tweed and Alnwick in Northumberland, where the black and Asian minority was 0.4 per cent.
In Sedgefield, Co Durham - the constituency of Mr Tony Blair - it was 0.7 per cent. The proportion of English-born people in England has fallen 2 per cent to 87 per cent, and the proportion of Welsh-born in Wales also fell 2 per cent, to 75 per cent. Scotland was not included in the census.
Britain is changing in other ways, too. For the first time the census asked an optional question about religion. Answers may have been skewed by just over four million people refusing to answer, but the result showed 37.3 million in England and Wales describe themselves as Christian (71.7 per cent), 1.5 million Muslims (3 per cent), 552,000 Hindus (1.1 per cent), 329,000 Sikhs (0.6 per cent), 260,000 Jewish (0.5 per cent), and 144,000 Buddhists (0.3 per cent). - (Guardian Service)