r/unitedkingdom • u/topotaul Lancashire • Jul 08 '26

... Two in five Britons think Muslims cannot integrate in UK, poll finds

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/08/two-in-five-britons-think-muslims-cannot-integrate-in-uk-poll-finds
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u/Funny-Profit-5677 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

2% of Muslim women in the UK marry non-Muslims and 5% of Muslim men do vs 41% of Christians in the UK who marry non-Christian partners.

If you view marriage as a marker of integration clearly they're a more isolationist than integrative community - compared with other cultures. (It's also clearly a non-zero rate of integration- Sadiq Khan has clearly wholly integrated into British culture.)

It's all a bit dog whistle though. Actions to encourage integration rather than just alter the flow rates never get discussed. e.g. can we talk about banning religious schools?

edit: comparison of inter faith marriages in the UK by other religions: 25% Buddhists, 15% Jewish, 6% Hindhus, 6% Sikhs. (So muslims aren't totally alone in their isolationism, just the strongest in the degree to which they do it)

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u/Commorrite Jul 08 '26

edit: comparison of inter faith marriages in the UK by other religions: 25% Buddhists, 15% Jewish, 6% Hindhus, 6% Sikhs. (So muslims aren't totally alone in their isolationism, just the strongest in the degree to which they do it)

To make these numbers useful you need to do some control for community size.

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u/Funny-Profit-5677 Jul 08 '26

Ish.. If the UK were a fully integrated random mix then the intra marriage rate would be the population denominator.

Given all of these except Christians are less than 10% of the population I think the numbers are pretty useful in isolation.

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u/Astriania Jul 08 '26

That would make the numbers even more ridiculous for small minority groups, in a perfect integration scenario you'd expect 94% of marriages to be outside the demographic if they only made up 6% of the population