BBC survey: quarter of young British people don’t trust Muslims

More than a quarter of the 1,000 young Britons - aged between 18 and 24 - surveyed don’t trust Muslims, a BBC poll released on Wednesday shows.

According to the survey, 28 percent of the people interviewed said Britain would be better off with fewer Muslims while 44 percent said Muslims didn’t share the same values as the rest of the population, a BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat poll revealed.

About 60 percent, meanwhile, thought the British public had a negative view of Muslims.

In June, the BBC released the “Young People and Prejudice Survey” that included 1,001 people of the same age group. It showed similar same results; 27 percent of the people polled said they did not trust Muslims.

Professor Matthew Goodwin, a member of the ComRes government group behind the June survey, told the BBC: “every survey that I have run, and surveys run by my academic colleagues, makes it quite clear that a significant proportion of the British population hold negative views of Islam, and by extension British Muslim communities.”

According to the survey, 29 percent of young people blame Muslims for not doing enough to combat extremism in their communities while 26 percent and 21 percent respectively said Islamophobia regarding terror groups abroad and UK Muslims who have committed acts of terror were the reasons behind their mistrust.

However, the young people surveyed also showed suspicion of other religious groups.

About 16 percent said they did not trust Hindus or Sikhs, 15 percent said they did not trust Jewish people while 13 percent said they did not trust Buddhists and 12 percent stated that they did not trust Christians.