Robert Jenrick is right, we have an integration problem: racist white people

In remarks he made in March, but were sadly only released yesterday, Jenrick was recorded as saying that he had travelled to Handsworth in Birmingham and it was “one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to ... that’s not the kind of country I want to live in. I want to live in a country where people are properly integrated”.

I could not agree more, and he talked more sense when he added that he wants “people to be living alongside each other, not parallel lives. That’s not the right way we want to live as a country.”

What Jenrick did not say, perhaps because it was so obvious, is that there is a community in this country that appears simply disinterested in integrating: they want to surround themselves with people who look just like them, they exist in social and cultural bubbles meaning they are in this country but not part of it, and while for a long time they were considered eccentric but harmless, recent events have shown that we underestimate the threat they represent to all we revere about our society.

I am referring, of course, to racist white people. That is why I am so pleased that Jenrick agrees with me that we need to start encouraging racist whites to better integrate into society. Imagine a group of flag-bothering patriots being taken to Handsworth, Southall and Bury Park in Luton and getting a chance to attend an Eid celebration or a Diwali ceremony. There would be resistance, but if we care about a cohesive society, we need to remember that the more contact these racist white people have with the rest of us, the greater the chance that they will realise that the Muslim family next door isn’t waging holy war – they are just trying to get their children to brush their teeth before bedtime.

Perhaps councils could pilot an “adopt a racist” scheme, pairing proudly patriotic Britons with brown and black families in their local area. Schools could help too – rather than merely studying past racist movements, students could get a chance to quiz living, breathing racists and ask them questions such as "Could you get me Billie Piper's autograph?" The students would gain valuable insights and the racists might realize that real life is not quite as bleak or joyless as their Facebook feed.

I can already hear the complaints: racist white people should not be expected to abandon their traditions of posting crap on social media and putting up flags on flyovers; they have the right to worship their gods – Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and that bloke who used to present Coast – and to order fish and chips while on holiday in Spain.

It was only this past summer – a summer of protests against asylum hotels, the "raise your flags" movement and the Unite the Kingdom march last month – that made me change my mind. It is probably too simplistic to claim that everyone who marched was a racist, but I think we can agree that everyone who marched was probably standing not too far from a racist. It is clear to me that something needs to be done and what is needed is that we must be far more proactive in helping white racists to integrate.

When your idea of truth has been warped by listening to hate preachers such as Katie Hopkins or making social media content for your campaign to one day lead the Tory party to electoral oblivion, then it isn’t altogether surprising if you end up spouting total nonsense. That is why I so welcome Robert Jenrick’s call for greater integration – and why I hope he now has the courage to take his own words seriously. Because if integration really matters, then surely the next great national project must be to help those most resistant to modern Britain finally join the rest of us in living in it.

Sarfraz Manzoor is the author of They: What Muslims and non-Muslims Get Wrong About Each Other, published by Wildfire Books

He is on Bluesky and Instagram @sarfranmanzoor

Photograph by Anthony Devlin/Bloomberg via Getty Images