FIFTY YEARS AGO this month the US Supreme Court announced that a little girl called Linda Brown in a small town in Kansas could go to her local school a few hundred yards from her home, rather than be compelled to take the bus to a school five miles away. It was the most important judgment in the history of US race relations. Her education authority had insisted she could not go to her local school because she was black, and the school was for whites.

The judgment ended the intolerable practice of official racial segregation in the US. But it did nothing to end segregation itself. There followed decades of policies aimed at promoting integration, such as the largely failed experiment of “bussing” pupils long distances. Yet countless studies now show that schools, and neighbourhoods, are getting more segregated, not less.

So what went wrong? There are many factors, but the main one is so-called white flight, one of the most pervasive determinants of human geography in the US. During the 1950s and 60s American whites moved from the city centres to the affluent suburbs, leaving black ghettos behind them. The Supreme Court has many powers, but it cannot tell people where to live.

Could the same be happening in Britain? You are unlikely to hear the phrase “white flight” pass a politician’s lips, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

As the political parties limber up for the local and European elections next month, immigration is near the top of the agenda. There is concern that the openly racist British National Party will make huge gains, particularly by targeting what it describes as the “white flight” zones around Britain’s cities.

Britain is not the US, with its history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws. Here people are less mobile, and so less likely to move, and mixed marriages are far more common. But while Britain is much better at racial integration than America, there is still evidence of white flight. According to the 2001 Census, 20 towns and cities in the UK have neighbourhoods where whites are in a minority. Out of a total of 8,850 electoral wards in England and Wales, whites are a minority in 116, as well as in two whole London boroughs, Newham and Brent.

London, Birmingham, Blackburn and Leicester all have wards where whites make up less than 20 per cent of the population. In Southall Broadway, West London, just 11.9 per cent of the population is white. It is simply implausible that whites would have become such small minorities if they hadn’t either left the area, or avoided moving there in the first place. There appears to be white flight from London as a whole, with the number of ethnic minorities rising from 1.3 million in 1991 to more than two million in 2001, while the white population actually dropped by 390,000 as record numbers moved out.

A study commissioned by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and called Development of a Migration Model found that the more ethnic minorities there were in an area, the more likely people were to move out. It concluded: “The higher proportion of out-migration from places with the greater presence of non-white people conforms to the much reported push factor as white flight.”

A recent BBC survey found that 23 per cent of white Britons would not be happy if someone from another race moved next door, while 74 per cent of white Britons said white people avoided living in non-white areas.

White flight is probably largely caused by simple racism. But there are other factors. Human geographers consider white flight a derogatory term, and refer instead to white “self-segregation”. But whites self-segregate no more than Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets, Afro-Caribbeans in Brixton or Pakistanis in Bradford — they just have more choice of where to self-segregate.

SCHOOLING IS an important factor. A study by Bristol University found that when parents had choice, they usually wanted to educate their children with other children of the same race. The result was that many schools, particularly in inner cities, were becoming monoracial.

The housing market also plays a role, not least because, as one study found, estate agents tend to shepherd different races into different areas. In some parts of northern cities, such as Bradford, fear of white flight has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The arrival of ethnic minorities in a white area is associated with falling house prices, so the residents rush for the exit before they lose too much money, sparking the very house price fall they worried about.

Unlike the US, in Britain the very existence of white flight is still controversial. When the Plaid Cymru politician Dafydd Iwan was denounced last year for saying that white English people were moving to Wales to avoid immigrants, he replied simply: “That is the truth of it . . . ask them.”

Does any of this matter? It does if you are worried about social cohesion. As Trevor Phillips wrote before he became the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality: “How should Asian families integrate when the first reaction to their arrival in a ‘white’ area is a forest of For Sale signs? And how do they prevent their neighbourhood state schools becoming all-Asian when white parents withdraw their children, on the bizarre ground that they don’t want their kids to be in a minority? I’ve heard nothing in this debate that addresses the white flight which is the fundamental cause of segregation in the UK.”

Racial segregation has become so profound in Bradford that the local education authority has started the “Linking Project”, bussing children from all-Asian schools to all-white schools. We may have avoided America’s worst problems of racial segregation, but we can’t afford to be complacent.

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