A superb column by Alice Miles on the misplaced smugness of so much comment about the US' racial divide revealed by Katrina:

The subtext, and often the main text, of much of the reportage from New Orleans has been what a nasty, divided, unjust place the US has been revealed to be. Nature has overturned its smug certainties and left it reeling. And it strikes me that there is more than a little smugness in the reporting as well. British journalism revelling in racial division the other side of the Atlantic rarely seems to trouble itself to look at the ethnic splits this side of the pond.

What, she asks, if it happened here?

So let’s assume that the worst happens and the east of London is engulfed. Tower Hamlets, Stratford, and in the south, Lambeth would all be awash...

Let’s take a look at Newham, where the Olympic stadiums are being built. Sixty per cent of the population are not white; not far off the 67 per cent African-Americans in New Orleans. A third are Asian; another fifth black. Travel upriver and see the people of Lambeth: more than a quarter are black. In the neighbouring borough of Kensington and Chelsea, that falls to only 7 per cent...And what were we saying about racial ghettos in the United States?

Let us not be complacent about our own society. We pile our social problems into ghettos of our own, which most Britons do not breach. In America, 24.7 per cent of black people live below the poverty line, compared with 8.6 per cent of whites and a national average of 12.7 per cent. In Britain, according to the Office for National Statistics, 68 per cent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are living in low-income households, and a barely more creditable 49 per cent of black Caribbeans, compared with 21 per cent of whites. They may be measuring different things, but the ratios are similar.

Unemployment among Bangladeshi, Pakistani and black men is three times the rate for white British men. And look at the jobs that they do: one in three Bangladeshi men, according to the 2002-03 labour force survey, are cooks or waiters, compared with one in 100 white British men. Around one in ten black African women is a nurse, compared with around one in 30 whites. Pakistani women are eight times more likely than white British women to be working as packers, bottlers and canners, while Indian women are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to be working as sewing machinists. They may not be living among us, but they feed, drive, clothe and care for us. Wouldn’t it be nice if the country could do the same for them?

...[I]n 2002 in England and Wales, of children born to a mother herself born in the UK, 7.8 per 1,000 die within three months. This rises to 10.5 for mothers born in Bangladesh, 10.6 for mothers born in India, 14.5 for mothers born in Pakistan and 15.4 for mothers born in the Caribbean.

So tell me, again, what do we have to be smug about? I look forward to seeing all those television reporters currently flooding the American South filing earnest reports about Britain’s divided society when they get home.