Blick_UK Politics (9780198825555)_CH10

224 Chapter 10  Identity, equality, and power

Top 10 Main 'Other' Languages in England and Wales, 2011

Arabic French All Other Chinese (1) Portuguese Spanish

Polish Panjabi Urdu Bengali (with Sylheti and Chatgaya) Gujurati

0 100 200 300 400 500 600 Number of speakers as main language, thousands

FIGURE 10.2  Top 10 main ‘other’ languages in England andWales, 2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, 2013 Note: ‘All Other Chinese’ is an aggregate of Chinese languages and excludes those that wrote in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese.

Diversity is not consistent across the UK; the types of diversity we have discussed so far—ethnicity, language, religion—tend to be concentrated more heavily in some parts of the country than others. London, for instance, is characterized by exceptional levels of these types of diver- sity (Office for National Statistics, 2013). Disability There are a range of other characteristics defining iden- tity that contribute to the diversity of the UK population. In 2011, just under 18 per cent of people in England and Wales described themselves as having a disability of some kind. (The Equality Act 2010 defines a disability as a ‘physical or mental impairment’ that ‘has a substantial and long-term adverse effect’ on a person’s ‘ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities’.) This characteristic is another example of one which is distributed unevenly across the UK, as can be seen in Figure 10.4: a greater proportion of people living in Wales reported having a disability than in England. Gender, sexuality, and age The 2011 census also estimated that, in the UK as a whole, there was a total of 32.2 million women, and slightly few- er men, 31 million (for a discussion of trans identity, see In Practice 10.1) (Office for National Statistics, 2012a).

Sikh 1%

Jewish 1%

Hindu 3%

Buddhist 0%

Muslim 5%

Other (as classified by Census) 0%

No Answer 7%

Christian 59% © Oxford University Press

No Religion 25%

FIGURE 10.3  Religion in England andWales, 2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, 2012b

Religion With respect to religion, Figure 10.3 shows that a major- ity (59.3 per cent) of respondents in England and Wales said they were Christians—Christianity is the most widely followed religion—but the rest of the population were of another religion or none.