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Behind these hopelessly vague terms such as "multiculturalism" (boo-word for the right) and "Islamophobia" (boo-word for the left) is a deeply worrying reality, which these conservative reports, like others from thinktanks of the left, do an important job of probing. That reality is one of far-reaching alienation among younger British Muslims. In an NOP poll last year, less than half the British Muslims interviewed identified Britain as "my country". An international poll by Pew showed that younger British Muslims overwhelmingly put their religious identity before their national one, unlike French Muslims. A Populus poll commissioned for the well-researched and thought-provoking Policy Exchange report shows a majority of British Muslims saying they have more in common with Muslims in other countries than they do with non-Muslims in Britain.
Shockingly, more than one in three of the 16-24 age group in the Populus poll agree with a formulation of sharia law, saying that "Muslim conversion is forbidden and punishable by death". At the extreme, this alienation from the country in which they live was expressed by the July 7 2005 suicide bombers and those arrested while allegedly planning an attack last summer. Perhaps we will find similar biographical elements among some of those arrested in Birmingham yesterday. Around the small hard core of active extremists there is what Shamit Saggar, writing in the latest Political Quarterly, calls a "circle of tacit support" that embraces tens of thousands of young British Muslims. Their alienation is exacerbated by the negative stereotyping of Muslims in the media and experiences of everyday prejudice.
The "multiculturalism" slogan of the right is crude shorthand for the worrying facts of separation. These are the "parallel lives" identified in the 2001 Cantle report, which memorably quoted a British Muslim of Pakistani origin: "When I leave this meeting with you, I will go home and not see another white face until I come back here next week." Ghettoes is the less polite term. This separation, which is cultural and psychological as much as physical, was not originally created by policies of multiculturalism, but what went by the name of multiculturalism in some British cities in the 80s and 90s did reinforce the separation. It privileged group identities, defined by origins or religion, over British or individual ones. It did not bring home to the children of Muslim immigrants any strong sense of shared Britishness. And it sometimes allowed the oppression of women to continue under the cloak of cultural respect.
If the French went to one extreme, of attempted monocultural integration, we in Britain erred in the other direction. Cameron and Gordon Brown both agree that a correction is called for. At a minimum, the English language, British history and the core values of citizenship should be better conveyed. But there are tough calls they are shying away from. Take, for example, the contribution of faith schools to cultural separation. The Cantle report recommended that at least 25% of places in single-faith schools, be they state or private, should be given to children of alternative backgrounds. Why is it, I wonder, that we don't hear either Cameron or Brown calling for that recommendation to be implemented? One can just imagine how their middle-class voters would react to the prospect of Muslim children being bused in to the London Oratory school.
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How racist is Britain?
Tuesday January 23, 2007
The Guardian
Events on Big Brother have ignited a fierce debate about Britain and racism. While researching his new book about the British psyche, philosopher Julian Baggini spent six months living in Rotherham, Yorkshire. Here, he explains why he doesn't believe most white Britons are racists - even though he heard racist language almost everywhere he went.
Many professional urbanites regarded my move to Rotherham as though I was going to Outer Mongolia. More than one joked about sending me food parcels, as though it would be impossible to get such staples as balsamic vinegar and buffalo mozzarella in Rotherham, and that life without such things would be intolerable, both of which are ludicrous suggestions. (As it turns out, Morrisons stocked plenty of exotic foodstuffs such as octopus and excellent regional sheep's milk cheese.)
'Paki." I can't honestly remember the last time I had heard that word outside of a news expose of the far right or a "hard-hitting" drama about racism. That was until my first proper conversation in Rotherham, when it was dropped into a sentence as though it were just another adjective, like "tall" or "Italian". [..]
Reading the reaction to Jade Goody's rather milder language on Celebrity Big Brother, it seems that many people are as ignorant as I was, or choose to ignore the uncomfortable truth. The mainstream British mind is not so much misunderstood as not seriously considered. To rectify this, 18 months ago I set out to examine the national "folk philosophy" - the set of beliefs and assumptions that informs how we live and how we think. To help me do this, I found the area with the closest match of household type - young and old, rich and poor, single and married - to the country as a whole. And so I ended up living for six months in S66, on the outskirts of Rotherham, South Yorkshire.
It was during my first conversation in the local pub that a former steelworker, Reg, mentioned the "Paki shop". [..] It was not part of some racist diatribe, but was simply a matter-of-fact description of the ethnic origins of the shop's proprietor. [..] Over the coming weeks, it became clear that Reg was no anomaly. I was immersing myself in everyday life, spending time in pubs, cafes, working men's clubs, shopping centres, public baths, sports stadia and betting shops. Almost everyone used the word "Paki" when referring to British Asians, yet of everyone I got to know, only Neil - happy to be described as somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun - would merit the charge of being truly racist. [..]
[T]here was a kind of innocence in their use of it that made me react less strongly than I would have imagined. There was no edge to what they were saying. [..] What the frequent mention of "Pakis" indicated to me was not that people hated all British Asians, but that there was so little mixing between the two groups that a term which would be offensive in mixed company could be frequently used without anyone minding. [..]
Social and ethnic division is a plain fact. Ethnic minority populations do concentrate in particular areas. Although mixed-race marriages are on the rise, they still comprise only 2% of all marriages. For the most part, people mix and marry with people mainly of their own cultural background, as determined by a combination of country, family origin or religion.
Britain is a patchwork of almost hermetically sealed sub-worlds, in which class as much as race is a crucial factor. This was something I felt very acutely moving from one to another. Many professional urbanites regarded my move to Rotherham as though I was going to Outer Mongolia. [see above].
We all like to feel that we are open-minded people who can be friends with anyone, and we also can probably come up with a few examples of friends who do not match our demographic profile to prove our lack of insularity. We might even be able to pull out that great British get-out-of-alleged-snobbery-free card: a working-class background. But if we are honest, the vast majority live, work and socialise overwhelmingly with people of a similar social type.
In any town, people know what it means to live in certain areas. When, for instance, another pub regular, Pete was reminded that his family came from the Valley Road, he said, "Ah, but the posh side, mind," the joke being there is no posh side. In somewhere like London, just as there are Bangladeshis in Brick Lane and Orthodox Jews in Stamford Hill, so there are literary clusters in Hampstead, media folk in Brixton, old money in South Kensington and so on. The desire to live among people you perceive to be like yourself is pretty much a human universal.
The opportunities to mix are limited because many areas remain deeply inhospitable to "outsiders". Communities are kept together both by factors pulling them in and factors keeping them out of others. What we need to realise is that on the whole, this works. Britain is a country where people of all races can get along, not because we're all such a culturally promiscuous bunch that we don't care whether our local butcher sells Cumberland sausages or halal chicken legs, but because we don't mind what others do, as long as they don't bother us with it.
[T]he best we can hope for is what has got us this far, with relatively little tension between communities: mutual tolerance. Toleration has become a dirty word in the multiculturalism debate. It is judged to be not good enough. People don't want to be tolerated, they want to be fully respected and acknowledged. Toleration implies putting up with something you don't much like, not embracing difference.
But [..] toleration is an underrated virtue. [..] To ask everyone to embrace everyone else is clearly absurd. Toleration is the best we can do, and what's more, it works. [..]
[Extremists] are never going to embrace other cultures. Obviously there is something in them that despises difference so much that they see the worst in others. And although these extremists are rare, I would suspect that the majority are also unlikely to ever truly love the other. Getting such people to tolerate others is the only realistic way we have of making sure they don't express outright hostility. [..]
It is right that when toleration breaks down, as it did last week in the Big Brother house, that we challenge the perpetrators and protect their victims. We should also promote greater understanding so that such breakdowns are as rare as possible. But understanding is and will always be limited, not least because almost everyone - including, especially, the liberal middle classes who pride themselves on their openness - lives in a distinct social niche, largely cut off from whole sectors of society.
Toleration, in contrast, can be applied to anyone, even if you have no idea how they live and what they think.
The alleged Birmingham plot to behead a British Muslim soldier shows that the terrorist threat is greater than ever and that the terrorists, having failed to break the British public's resolve on 7/7 are prepared to stoop to the lowest levels to impose their shocking ideology upon us.
Defeating such criminal elements will require the combined strenth of the government and the participation of Muslim communities across Britain. David Cameron's analogy between far right organisations and Muslim fundamentalists should have been at the centre of the debate long ago.
Muslim leaders now need to acknowledge that their short sightedness as shown by the complacency of the Muslim Council of Britain over the Dispatches investigation into fundamentalist preaching, has aided extremism, which now seems to be targetting law abiding Muslims.
Water meters were invented in 1851 by Wilhelm Siemens - in London. They have been in use in Germany since 1858. To liken the use of meters to a "new tax" seems astonishing for someone from a country where everyone pays exactly and only for the amount of water they use. But then again, we pay our rent by the square metre, not by the number of bedrooms.
