00:00Well, I'm joined by our regular politics expert, Dr Steve McCabe, for a follow-up on a story about the
00:06fact that 80,000 people left Birmingham last year.
00:10Now, 63,000 did arrive into the city. For the story, we had hundreds of thousands of views and over
00:1750,000 responses,
00:19with many people saying we'd missed out one major point, that many people have decided to leave Birmingham
00:26because it doesn't feel like the place they grew up in anymore. And, Steve, what's your response to that, please?
00:32Look, there is no doubt that immigration from wherever it comes from, and of course we're not going to break
00:38that down, has changed the city.
00:40If I can say the census data shows in 1991, when they first started collecting it, 80% of Burmese
00:47identified as being white British.
00:49That's now down to less than 50%, 48.6%, if I remember correctly.
00:53So, for sure, Birmingham has had a lot of people come, and for some people, that provides a big challenge.
01:01I can't get inside their mind if that's what people think, that they don't recognise the city.
01:07And, undoubtedly, inner city areas have changed markedly in the last generation or so. That is a fact.
01:16And let's not forget that immigration has brought many benefits to the city.
01:20It's a real difficult one because, of course, as I say, we like to identify the positive things that diversity
01:28brings into us,
01:29but there are some people who see lots of negatives.
01:32And there is no doubt, of course, Birmingham is a city that's always relied on new people coming in, in
01:36terms of innovation, bringing skills in.
01:38And, of course, in the post-war expansion of Birmingham, it was absolutely essential for nursing, for manufacturing, for construction.
01:46The difficulty, I suppose, that many people feel is the culture has changed, and, of course, areas that they might
01:53once have grown up are no longer, or they don't feel like home.
01:56But, of course, that happens throughout the world.
01:58But, of course, undoubtedly, and I talked about the census data a couple of moments ago, the direction of travel
02:03is probably that by the next time that we have a census in 2031,
02:07then, of course, the number of white people will have gone down even more markedly.
02:12And, as I say, this is a question of the moment because, of course, people feel our country is being
02:18changed in ways that they don't like or recognise.
02:21And, of course, hence we sort of see sort of right-wing parties being sort of voted for.
02:25And, of course, in extremists, we sort of have the likes of the AFD who were voted in a sort
02:29of part of Germany, Saxony.
02:31Luckily, we've not had any sort of the big problems that come with sort of conflict in between sort of
02:36races.
02:36But, you know, I think it's an unfortunate sort of consequence of the people, they want to go elsewhere and
02:42maybe recreate the sort of the place of their youth.
02:44You know, that's one sort of good reason to sort of move out to Birmingham.
02:47And, of course, there are lots of sort of newer towns that sort of people sort of move to.
02:52So, yeah, it's a challenge.
02:54And, of course, I can't sort of account for sort of what people sort of may say online.
Comments