The lottery winners of life are Indian

Hopes for the eventual integration of ethnic minorities with Britain's indigenous population were based on the assumption that second and third generations would find the necessary transformations easier than had their fathers and grandfathers. We now learn that, sadly, this isn't happening.

Not only are the current young generation not merging, they are not even trying to merge; instead they're going to great and even noisy - not to say offensive - lengths to reclaim their ancestral habits and identities. And who can blame them, particularly those who come from India, now proclaimed as being on the brink of superpowerdom? Merely being British is no longer the great good fortune - like winning the lottery of life - it once was. The tables have been turned, with the Third World - so far as India is concerned - threatening to become the first.

This is the uncomfortable truth which we dare not admit - a truth quite beyond Enoch Powell's wild and ferocious imaginings. Today's young immigrants - apart from a few Muslim fanatics - are not so much hostile as indifferent and even patronising, with no more desire to assimilate with poor old Britain than the British Raj, in its heyday, had to assimilate with poor old India.

Enoch Powell prophesied that by now the black and brown man would have gained the 'whip hand'. He got it wrong. The pain today is more likely to come from a curled lip. Did the fathers and grandfathers do their descendants a favour by removing them from Asia, just when Asia was poised for an economic miracle? Very likely not. Forget about equal opportunity and all that jazz. Such benevolence is beginning to sound as archaic as Enoch's malevolence. ·