I have not been able to trace the original report mentioned in this article. However I think that the conclusions of the report are stated correctly, and it should give pause to question, at a minimum, whether this is acceptable and if not, then what should be done?
Patel vs Rasul: The great UK divide
by RASHMEE Z. AHMED http://www.timesofindia.com/Articleshow.asp?art_id=1579940ONDON:
**The great sub-continental divide is alive and well, 7,000 miles away from India and Pakistan as Britain digests the news that people like 12-year-old ethnic Indian Abhay Patel and his Pakistani classmate Ahmed Rasul will grow up to be painfully different.
According to a new government study, boys like Patel are more likely to be white-collar workers and pillars of British society. For Rasul, the future may be bleak and in the dole queue.
The Patel-Rasul question is likely to become Britain’s biggest policy headache in the next decade, even as Britain shivers with shame at the fact that three British Pakistanis are interned by the US as fanatical al-Qaeda prisoners in Camp X-Ray and there is rising evidence of economic and social deprivation among British Bangladeshis and Pakistanis.
The study, commissioned by Prime Minister Tony Blair, is stark about the impact of ethnicity, religion and class on life, livelihoods and living standards.
It says that Britain’s Pakistani Muslims are three times more likely to be jobless than Hindus.
Indian Muslims do better than those from Pakistan or Bangladesh. But Indian Muslims, it says, are twice as likely to be unemployed as Indian Hindus.
Bangladeshi men are more likely to find jobs as cooks. And one in 20 Indian men is a doctor, a ratio 10 times higher than for white men.
So how confusing is this in the case of Patel and Rasul, two friends, who look like brothers from south-east London and speak a bit of so-called chutney Hindustani for fun, though their language of choice is English?
Sociologists say there is no contest at all. Patel is from an environment that pushes him to succeed. If Rasul does well, they say, it would be inspite of his circumstances.
Patel’s mother teaches at a school and his father works in a bank. His older sister is a lawyer and he goes home to India just once a year.
Rasul’s father owns a small business. His mother stays at home, looking after the five children. The family often have visitors to stay from Pakistan and they spend extended holidays there themselves, forcing the children to miss weeks of school.
The gap between the two families is one of aspiration, say sociologists, and this is why the report finds the average Indian Hindu three times more likely to prosper than his Muslim counterpart from Pakistan.
The study appears to be uncompromising about the role of religion, warning that “the odds of being unemployed do vary with religion”, but it also finds racism to be a huge drawback.
The colour bar is the one point at which Patel and Rasul remain equally disadvantaged, which may be small consolation for Britain’s South Asian community of mainly one-million Indians and 700,000 Pakistanis.**