US-STYLE summer camps and sports or cookery courses that encourage children from different races to mix could help to prevent Britain from “sleepwalking” its way to racial segregation, Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, said last night.

Extra funding for schools that attract a racially diverse intake of children and a redrawing of school catchment areas could also help to bring pupils from different races closer, he said.

In a speech that painted a disturbing picture of a racially segregated and “ghettoised” country, Mr Phillips took up the theme of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, and said that it was “time to wake up”. Almost without noticing it, Britain was becoming more divided by race and religion, Mr Phillips told a meeting of the Manchester Council for Community Relations at the town hall. Some areas were already becoming “black holes into which nobody goes without fear or trepidation and from which no one ever escapes undamaged”.

After the July 7 bombings in London, it was vital that Britain woke to the reality, he said. “We are sleepwalking our way to segregation. We are becoming strangers to each other and we are leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream.”

Mr Phillips insisted that he was not just referring to Muslims. He referred also to evangelical African churches that conduct terrifying exorcisms on children and to Sikh activists “who think their feelings of offence caused by a play are more important than the principle of freedom of expression”.

He also lamented “the almost casual acceptance that the majority of children in the African-Caribbean community grow up without a father-figure”.

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, accused Mr Phillips of painting only half a picture. While he agreed that ghettoisation was happening in certain sections of the Muslim community, particularly among people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, Sir Iqbal said that Mr Phillips needed to look at the underlying causes of that.

“In places like Burnley and Oldham there have been attempts by local authorities to have estates that only certain ethnic groups can come in. That has been a policy. It’s also true that unemployment is very high in the Muslim community and there are not the housing resources,” he said.

In his speech, Mr Phillips said that research had showed that younger Britons from ethnic-minority groups were integrating less well than their parents. Mr Phillips drew parallels with the United States and said that the extreme economic, social and racial divisions exposed in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, which caused particular devastation in poor, black areas, could happen here.

“When the hurricane hits — and it could be recession rather than a natural disaster . . . these marooned communities will steadily drift away from the rest of us . . . playing by their own rules and increasingly regarding the codes that the rest of us take for granted as outdated behaviour that no longer applies to them,” he said.

Mr Phillips suggested a number of “creative” solutions. “Think of the David Beckham football camp, or the Jamie Oliver cooking week — any opportunity that puts young people in the same place as people they would not otherwise mix with has to be a contribution.”

DIVERSE BRITAIN

Migrants accounted for 1.14 million of the 2.2 million increase in population in Britain between 1991 and 2001

Source: ONS, 2001 Census

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