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A Crooked
Commission Page 24 We’ve been down this road before.
Cantle, Ousley, Parekh - all produced righteous reports, stretching to
hundreds of collective pages, covering the same ground that Ruth Kelly
has tasked her Commission on Integration and Cohesion to cover, again. Sunny Hundal concludes the future
of community relations is too important to hand over to government. I can hear you sigh already but bear with me. Broadly the government has two problems on its hands: religious fanaticism and immigration. It doesn’t really know what to do with either, hence Kelly’s call at launch for a “new and honest debate” on the issue of multiculturalism. Apparently we were all being dishonest before. Multiculturalism is a term used in so many different contexts that it has become a political football used merely to score a goal with the opposite side. A few weeks ago we were told by George Aligiah that multiculturalism was producing an apartheid state. He was preceded by Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, saying multiculturalism was to blame for “perverting young Muslims". It’s open season to use the term as a stick. I’m surprised the Hizb ut-Tahrir hasn’t joined the bandwagon by blaming multiculturalism for the Western world’s moral corruption. But I digress. The real problem here is not that there aren’t real social issues that need tackling to help people feel less fearful of one another in modern British society, but that Ruth Kelly muddles them up without laying out a clear path of progression. She said: “We must not be censored by political correctness and we can’t tiptoe around the issues. For example, it’s clear that we need a controlled, well-managed system of immigration that has clear rules and integrity to counter exploitation from the far right.” But we are not told which issues were being tiptoed around. Secondly I’d ask what immigration has anything to do with this since the point of this exercise is, in a long-winded way, referring primarily to second and third-generation British Muslims. So this is a fatuous debate. A loosely defined straw-man is being built up - multiculturalism - so it can be knocked down with ease. Physical segregation on race lines, though as much a result of “white-flight” as it is of faith preferences and racist estate agents, is actually not increasing, as an extensive study showed last year. Multiculturalism, however you define it, is a small cog in the wider scheme of things where alienation and terrorism is a result of factors that include the influence of Middle Eastern politics, foreign policy, issues of identity and belonging, racism and ignorance on all sides and much more. But the commission has already ruled out examining the role that our foreign policy has played in angering Muslims. Government policy has traditionally had little real impact on our way of life because the right of people to live where they want to or practice any culture (within the law) is protected by basic civil liberties. This is not to deny there are serious issues we need to deal with as a nation. People of different races and religions may be living side by side all over the country but there is still too much mistrust, ignorance and usage of stereotypes by people on all sides. As much as there are people who are very ignorant about Islam, there are others who believe white Christians are morally decadent people. The time for finger-pointing is over. If we want to see a nation at ease with itself, where people of different racial and cultural backgrounds can live together and contribute towards the well-being of society, then we have to all work towards that goal. There are areas of concern such as racism, Islamophobia, alienated youths, apathy towards democratic engagement and more. But for a start we have to demand a better debate on the issue. Blaming multiculturalism or racism alone (which either side is currently doing) is simply playing political football. Thus I’m cynical of the players currently involved because neither the government nor the “race-relations experts” have a good record. The former has a glorious record of forming commissions and subsequently ignoring their recommendations. The latter is infected with people who have a victim-mentality or want to use these commissions to build their own careers. Even organisations such as the Commission for Racial Equality have long eschewed evidence in favour of alarmist sound-bites. The job to create neighbourly relations cannot be left to the media or the politicians. They seem to end up making situations worse. We have to do this ourselves. Sunny Hundal is editor of Asians in Media magazine. He blogs at PickledPolitics.com |