Multicultural Challenges to Modern Wales

Abstract

While the debate on diversity and the changing British identity is being well researched and well documented, what is less well known is how the component nations are coping with the new configurations of the British population. The Office for National Statistics and the ten-yearly censuses provide precious quantitative information on this topic, and we know that England is home to 85 per cent of the British population and to the vast majority of ethnic minorities as well as to newly arrived residents. However, there is much less information and research into the challenges posed to the other constituent components of the UK state, where there are common issues concerning the economy, employment, housing and so on but where the topic of the integration of new populations is somewhat more complicated. For, if it is of interest to commentators, researchers and politicians to enquire into the question of ‘what is British identity?’, then this questioning becomes more complex in those parts of the UK which were already struggling with identity problems before the issues of ethnicity and multiculturalism came to the fore. In Wales, multiethnic neighbourhoods are not a new feature dating back simply a few decades, because, for example, Tiger Bay in the Cardiff docks area has been well documented as a multicultural neighbourhood, and Cardiff was the location for the first mosque in Britain in 1860.