Citizens UK has launched a national enquiry into Muslim participation in civic life and social mobility. In Birmingham, it heard good news of progress and bad news of financial cuts
“Changing class is like emigrating from one side of the world to the other,” writes Lynsey Hanley in Respectable, her recent book on growing up working class in Birmingham in the 1980s. “The further up the social ladder … the more external influences are set up to favour you and your kind, to the extent that privilege becomes invisible and so weightless – literally – you don’t even know how lucky you are.”
Respectable charts the journey Hanley has travelled to reach the middle class and how it left her “uprooted and anxious”. It was a useful primer for two days I spent in Birmingham shadowing the Citizens Commission on Islam, Participation & Public Life, because the issue of social mobility dominated the discussion.
What are the barriers a Brummie Muslim girl or boy has to overcome to get to university, and to make the journey that Hanley travelled 20 years ago? On the upside, educational achievement in the city’s Muslim population has improved significantly, particularly for girls, but a university degree is no longer the passport to middle-class respectability it might once have been. You can still end up on the supermarket checkout saddled with a large debt. The high degree of segregation in Birmingham means that more than 70 per cent of the Muslim population live in the city’s seven most deprived wards.
User Comments (1)
It would appear that the experiences of the pupils at Archbishop Grimshaw Secondary School (now John Henry Newman Catholic College) don't count as Hanley, in a rather self-serving solipsistic manner, nominates herself as the only who, out of a population of a Housing Estate built to house 60,000 souls, has gone through tertiary education.
Archbishop Grimshaw has produced Teachers & Lecturers, Doctors, Nurses, Social Workers, Lawyers, Millitary & Police personnel, Banking & Financial services workers, Singers and media workers, etc
Most, if not all, of these professions and careers require the attainment of Degree level qualifications.
Hanley's view of the place and, more importantly, the people, from where she grew up should really be taken as part fantasy and part self-aggrandisement.