Britain Among Least Racist Countries in the World

A report published today reaffirms what the evidence has long shown: Britain is among the least racist countries in the world. Using data from the latest wave of the World Values Survey, the researchers demonstrate that Britons are more tolerant of immigrants and ethnic minorities than their counterparts in practically all other countries.

Respondents in numerous countries were given a list of various groups of people and asked: “Could you please mention any that you would not like to have as neighbours?” The charts below show the percentage who mentioned “immigrants/foreign workers” and “people of a different race”, respectively.

As you can see, only 5% of Britons said they wouldn’t like to have immigrants as neighbours, and only 2% said the same about people of a different race. The percentages were much higher in some European countries: almost one in five Italians said they wouldn’t like to have immigrants as neighbours, and almost a quarter of Greeks said the same about people of a different race.

These findings are not new, but it’s useful to have them reaffirmed.

In 2015, the Eurobarometer Survey asked people across Europe to say “how comfortable you would feel if one of your children was in a relationship with a person from each of the following groups”. The groups included black people, Asians, Muslims and Jews. Overall, Britons were among the most tolerant of inter-ethnic relationships – along with Swedes and Luxembourgers.

Regardless of how you operationalise ‘tolerance’, Britons come out as extremely tolerant, even compared to other Western populations.

Of course, social desirability bias could be playing a role here. It’s possible that Britons are more likely to give the ‘correct’ answer than people elsewhere. One reason to suspect that isn’t what’s happening is that far-right parties have never had much success in Britain (although this is partly down to first past the post).  

Unfortunately, the message that Britons are extremely tolerant people hasn’t gotten through to the left-wing commentariat or the leaders of many important institutions. Since the early 2010s, there’s been a dramatic rise in mentions of ‘racism’ in the media. And in just the last few years, almost every major institution has been labelled ‘institutionally racist’.

As you can see in the figure above, media mentions of ‘racism’ began skyrocketing just as survey-based measures of racism were hitting historic lows. The less racism there is, the more the media talks about it.

No one’s pretending there’s zero racism in Britain. But all things considered, it’s one of the best countries in the world to be an ethnic minority.