Race in 21st-century Britain

Award-winning writer Sathnam Sanghera returns to his home city of Wolverhampton to find out why race still divides Britain – and why we’re scared to talk about it.

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According to the Sutton Trust, independent schools educate just 7 per cent of the population, but account for 71 per cent of senior judges, 36 per cent of the Cabinet and 26 per cent of BBC executives. Less than 1 per cent of people go to Oxbridge, and yet Oxford and Cambridge account for 75 per cent of senior judges, 50 per cent of diplomats and 47 per cent of newspaper columnists. Incredibly, one in seven judges went to just five independent schools: Eton, Westminster, Radley, Charterhouse or St Paul’s Boys.

I sometimes suspect that the reason I made it, when most of the Asian people I grew up with haven’t, is that I do a pretty good impression of being one of these men: attending a private school on an assisted place taught me how to talk like the white middle classes, while Oxbridge taught me how to behave around the ruling classes.

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