When Rishi Sunak became prime minister, his accession was widely welcomed across the political spectrum, as the first British Asian to secure the top job in politics, and only the second from a minority background after Benjamin Disraeli in the nineteenth century.
Sunak’s sudden rise was unusual, insofar as he’d lost a leadership race to Liz Truss barely hours earlier. But he didn’t exactly come from nowhere, having been a highly visible chancellor during the pandemic.
Still, at a time when Britain is sometimes perceived abroad as an only slightly modernised version of Downton Abbey, prime minister Sunak forced the world to catch up with the fact that, as a nation, we are extremely diverse, from religion to ethnicity to the correct term for a bread roll.
And now we have new data to back that up. The proportion of the population of England and Wales describing themselves as Christian has fallen below half for the first time, the Office for National Statistics said today.
46.2% call themselves Christian (or at least they did on the day of the 2021 census) down from 59.3% a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the percentage of those saying they had no religion rose from a quarter (25.2%) to a little over a third (37.2%). London is in the vanguard, as ever, with just over a quarter (25.3%) of people reporting a religion other than Christianity.
For those who really know how to have a good time, check out the ONS’s interactive census maps page. There you can play around with data by ethnic group, language, national identity and religion across England and Wales as well as in your area.
The figures are not an especially surprising development, but it is notable that it should be happening in a country where the monarch double jobs as head of state and supreme governor of the Church of England, and where 26 bishops from the established Church are entitled to sit in the legislature.
As you can imagine, there have been some spectacularly bad takes in the aftermath of this data, and we should all be grateful to Sunder Katwala, Director of the British Future think tank and prolific Twitter thread weaver, for some calm thoughts. His instant analysis? Every faith in Britain is a minority faith now.
My main reflection is that, trade and fiscal policy aside (ok, and housing, immigration, climate etc) Britain seems like a country that largely has its stuff together. I was struck reading a story over the weekend by Horatio Clare in the FT, who went to Calais to speak with migrants determined to make it to the UK. Why, when France is a safe country? A taxi driver and rapper from Sudan explained:
“In France and Italy, Africans like us cannot have good lives. People move away from you on the bus. The UK is not like this — I have my younger brother there and he says come, it is better.”
I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, but it surely says something important that people who have never set foot in Britain so strongly believe this about us, and are willing to risk everything to come here. Not because prejudice and systemic racism doesn’t exist – it clearly does. But because, on a fundamental level, you can tell a lot about a place simply by whether people are desperately trying to escape it, or enter.
In the comment pages, Anne McElvoy says the Chinese Covid protests are widening the cracks in the country’s authoritarian edifice. Meanwhile, how to get first-timers on the ladder? Get their parents to downsize, suggests Homes & Property Editor Prudence Ivey. And Emma Loffhagen tackles the thorniest subject of all: do you *have* to go to the office Christmas party?
Finally – and speaking of which – an important public health message for December: how to exercise on a hangover. Charlie Gowans-Eglinton speaks with top trainers who explain what works the morning after – and what doesn’t.
