Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of the Foreign Policy Centre, who arrived in London from Uganda in 1972, said such fears are basically racist: 'Only white people worry about this. It's because for such a long time the world has been their own. To talk about it feeds a particular type of racism that says that blacks breed like rabbits. There is an underlying assumption that says white is right.'

She added: 'There is a white panic every time one part of their world seems to be passing over to anyone else. But it's foolish to panic about it. So what if we do become a majority? What difference does it make?'





For Alibhai-Brown, the decline of whites is a question of redressing the balance after they colonised much of the world. 'The empire strikes back really. There was this extraordinary assumption that white people could go and destroy peoples and it would have no consequence. It astounds me,' she said.





But present trends have little chance of redressing the injustices of history. Native Americans used to have the lands to themselves but are now less than 1 per cent of the US population, with little chance of becoming a majority again. The biggest growth is among Latinos (largely derived from Spain), and Asians, particularly from China and the Phillippines.



