We are in a political moment of obsessive focus on the question of migrant integration into British society, with the far-right mobilising around these issues at present and ‘mainstream’ politics absorbing rather than confronting them. 

A year after the July 7th 2007 terrorist attacks in London, then Prime Minister Tony Blair set some of this in motion in a speech questioning multiculturalism. He declared that immigrants have a ‘duty to integrate’. Integration though, is seldom defined, and entails two fundamental (but often unspoken) assumptions: that there is a single coherent whole which people are supposed to integrate into; and that ‘British people’ are already fully integrated into this whole in a uniform way.

Evidence for either claim is scant and contested. However, if we refocus attention on elites, using the same measures that are often applied to migrants, we see a complete lack of integration. And the evidence suggests that the lack of integration among elites is purposeful. Elites choose to segregate, but that choice is quietly normalised. Here are some examples:

Residential segregation is on the rise (see, for example, Musterd et al (2017)).  This is not, as the attention of the day might suggest, a segregation based on migration status or ethnicity, but rather on social class. In other words, elites are seeking neighbourhoods occupied by people ‘like them’. In its most extreme form this can be seen in the form of gated communities, but even milder versions of wealthy neighbourhoods lead to less, rather than more, class based social interaction. 

This self-segregation then plays out across other aspects of elite lives. People in this group will likely have attended private schools, and their children will do likewise (see Friedman, Laurison and Miles 2015). About 7% of the UK population go to private schools, and the wealthier you are the more they become the norm. This educational inequality has ongoing impacts on social mobility and cannot be corrected by simply allowing a few non-elites into private schools. 

Such schools are designed to ensure privilege. Why else would wealthy parents send their children there? They gain access to elite networks and are then funnelled towards the most prestigious universities. Private schools teach pupils how to access these universities - indeed many have institutional links with them - and they teach them that they belong there. 

And once in these universities, the corridors and lecture theatres are dominated by people from similar backgrounds. This is ‘helped’ by the fact that state school pupils are filtered out, less likely to apply, even with the required grades, and less likely to be accepted if they do (Boliver 2013). Thus, this potentially key site of social interaction between classes does not exist, and this segregation subsequently transfers to the employment market where, for example, the ‘golden triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and elite London institutions, creates its own social stratum (Wakeling and Savage 2015). The dominance of the privately educated in all high paid professions, business, politics, the media, law, medicine and finance is demonstrated in a range of research and is again indicative of a self-segregated population (Lambert and Griffiths 2018). 

This segregation impacts health and wellbeing too. Health inequalities in the UK are on the rise and are reflective of wider inequalities. Not only are lifestyles different, allowing greater focus on health for those that can afford it, but access to quicker healthcare through the private sector removes elites from the equalising measure of the NHS. It also means that elites - those making key decisions about public policy - are comfortably distanced from the impacts of their decisions. 

So although these processes are normalised, this is a group who cut themselves off from many aspects of British society, who work closely with people from similar backgrounds, who live in areas with people from similar backgrounds, who have attended private schools and elite universities where they interact mainly with people from similar backgrounds and where they are prepared socially and culturally for elite societal positions, and who then reproduce that process all over again with their own offspring. In a society that has practically no social mobility, this is a stable population who are able to reproduce self-segregation among their children (Cornwell and Dokshin 2014).

Politicians and their media allies contribute to this segregation by never questioning it. Instead, they focus an inordinate amount of attention on complaints that there are non-elite populations who are not sufficiently ‘like us’ – such as migrant communities. 

This raises significant questions as to the purpose of integration and the debates about it. Policy seems to only be concerned with integration to the extent that it can shrink cultural differences between some groups and the imagined national whole, or else it is weaponised against migrants. The current ‘debate’ presents migrants as a homogenous blob who threaten all aspects of our lives; it does not concern itself with class inequalities or with wider conceptions of social cohesion where inequality apparently does not really matter.

I am sceptical about integration as an aim of public policy as my recent article suggests (Mulvey 2025). However, if it is deemed important and is pursued by policymakers, and if the media are really interested in the broader cohesion of society, then Tony Blair’s ‘duty to integrate’ has to also apply to this most segregated group, and that would include Blair himself.

References:

Boliver, V. (2013) ‘How fair is access to more prestigious UK universities?’ The British Journal of Sociology, 64 (2): 344-364.

Cornwell, B.  and Dokshin, F. A. (2014) ‘The Power of Integration: Affiliation and Cohesion in a Diverse Elite Network’, Social Forces, 93(2): 803-831.

Friedman, S., Laurison, D. and Miles, A. (2015) ‘Breaking the ‘class’ ceiling? Social mobility into Britain’s elite occupations’, The Sociological Review, 63 (2): 259–289

Lambert, P. and Griffiths, D. (2018) Social Inequalities and Occupational Stratification Methods and Concepts in the Analysis of Social Distance, Palgrave MacMillan London.

Mulvey, G. (2025) ‘Running, eyes open, into segregation: The absence of an integration strategy for Britain’s elites’, Critical Social Policy, 45 (3): 387-405.

Musterd, S., Marcińczak, S., van Ham, M. and Tammaru, T. (2017) ‘Socioeconomic segregation in European capital cities. Increasing separation between poor and rich’, Urban Geography. 38 (7): 1062-1083.

Wakeling, P. and Savage, M. (2015) ‘Entry to elite positions and the stratification of higher education in Britain’, The Sociological Review, 63 (2): 290–320.

 



First published: 3 November 2025

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