Study title

This is a late July 2013 YouGov political tracker survey combining data on attitudes to race and immigration with questions on mobility history as well as voting intention, media consumption and other background variables. Data is also geocoded to ward level and ward-level census variables appended. The quantitative research will be based on ONS longitudinal survey and census data, as well the large-scale Citizenship Surveys and Understanding Society surveys. We will identify individual respondents from the quantitative research and explore their responses through qualitative work, in the form of three focus groups - two in Greater London, one in Birmingham. These will probe connections between respondents' local and national identities, their intentions to move neighbourhood, and their opinions on immigration, interethnic relations, community cohesion and voting behaviour.In the past decade in Britain, the 'white working-class' has been the focus of unprecedented media and policy attention. While class is a longstanding discursive category, the prefix 'white' is an important rider. We live in an era of global migration. Population pressure from the global South, and demand for workers in the developed North, will power what some term a 'third demographic transition' involving significant declines in the white majority populations of the western world (Coleman 2010). In the UK, the upsurge in diversity arguably presents a greater challenge for the working-class part of the white British population than for the middle class. Why? First, because for lower-status members of dominant groups, their ethnic identity tends to be their most prestigious social identity (Yiftachel 1999). Second, minorities tend to be from disadvantaged backgrounds and are therefore more likely to compete for housing and jobs with the white working class. Finally, because the white working-class is less comfortable navigating the contours of the new global knowledge economy than the middle...