Last Thursday, generations of Chinese in Soho welcomed the Year of the Rabbit in time-honoured traditional ways. Yet we didn’t hear David Cameron demonise Chinatown as a ‘segregated community’ living ‘apart from the mainstream’. On the contrary, the annual lion dance spectacle has become an essential fixture in London’s calendar, enjoyed by people from many different cultures.
The Oxford dictionary defines multicultural(ism) as “of or relating to or constituting several cultural or ethnic groups within a society”. Note the word “within”. Yet there’s a growing tendency to rubbish multiculturalism, treating it as synonymous with the failed Labour policies referred to in David Cameron’s speech. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
When I first came to the UK in the early 1980s real parmesan cheese was hard to come by. Nowadays you’ll find it in virtually every corner shop, somewhere near the hummus, bagels and microwave naan. A trivial example, certainly, but over the past few decades British eating habits have evolved out of all recognition. ‘Modern British’ cuisine is a product of multiculturalism – and I’ve yet to meet anyone who wants to turn back the gastronomic clock.
When people feel welcome, they integrate. My children learned traditional English nursery rhymes not from me but from an Algerian-born volunteer at our local Sure Start. They played with children of Iraqi, Somali, Russian, and Brazilian parentage, while mums in hijabs swapped toddler war stories with mums in skin tight jeans. Some multicultural mums were friendlier than the native West London Sloanes.
Multiculturalism makes London a dynamic and fascinating place to live as well as a magnet for global talent. There are now so many French children in Hammersmith & Fulham that the Tory Council recently set up a bilingual French/ English primary school… State sponsored multiculturalism, Prime Minister?
Positive examples of thriving multiculturalism on our doorstep never seem to make it into big political speeches. Multiculturalism is invariably portrayed as a problem that needs fixing, rather than an enriching everyday reality – and indeed a competitive economic advantage in a complex, globalised world.
Dealing with hate-filled extremists urgently requires a different approach to that taken by Labour. However, constantly framing wider discussion of multiculturalism against the negative backdrop of Islamist extremism misses the huge contribution that cultural and ethnic pluralism has made to modern British life.
Dinti Batstone is a member of the Federal Policy Committee and former European Parliament candidate in London.
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14 Comments
Great post, Cameron should apologise for his sickening speech.
I wonder if he knows much about British history and the many cultures that have arrived here starting with the Normans?
@Frank
‘starting with the Normans’?
You should go back furher. Where do people think white Anglo Saxons actual come from? Certainly not these islands! nor the Celts before them!
And as for some right wing groups use of the flag of St George, Richard the 1st nicked both the Saint and the flag from Georgia on his way back from murdering muslims. Good to know things have not changed much in the last few hundred years!
What you say is absolutely right about London, but to be fair to Cameron I think he was talking about northern towns like Burnley or Bradford where white and a particular Asian community are segregated by area of the town, school etc. and virtually never meet. The whole world is in London and ring fenced communities like that are practically unknown.
“Yet we didn’t hear David Cameron demonise Chinatown as a ‘segregated community’ living ‘apart from the mainstream’”
Quick question for you; is there any statistically valuable correlation between terrorism as perpetrated against Britain, British peoples and Britain’s interests, and the Chinese community within Britain? Likewise; is there any statistically valuable correlation between public calls to accept the jurisdiction of alien legal systems over parts of the country, and the Chinese community within Britain? Further; is there any statistically valuable correlation between the violent and unacceptable abuse suffered by our returning soldiers, and the Chinese community within Britain?
I’ll answer that for you; no, there isn’t.
I can see why you struggle with this, because it involves admitting to applying a ‘dirty’ principle, i.e. discrimination the traditional definition of which is as follows; “the power of making fine distinctions”
Cameron was correct in both the narrow view, i.e. that tolerating the extreme as the gatekeeper and custodian to the violent is a very poor way to build a healthy and vibrant society, and also in the wider sense, i.e. the state should not sponsor and otherwise encourage sectarianism by promoting difference based on religion, ethnicity, or culture. You are British.
Why does this matter? It matters because one of the very definitions of Britishness is captured in the words of Mrs Patrick Campbell:
“Does it really matter what these affectionate people do — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!”
In short; it is not my place to interfere in the law-abiding private lives of others, immigrant or otherwise, nor too is it the immigrants place to interfere in my private life, particularly in advocating change to what constitutes law-abiding activity.
This is inherently a tolerant viewpoint, which is why it is perceived as deeply offensive when minorities call for alien concepts such as sharia, or abuse soldiers returning from war zones, because the tolerance is not being reciprocated, it is being abused.
However, where you get stupid people who believe that Islam has no place in Britain, or brown people should get back to where they came from, you will find me arguing against them.
That said, when you get outraged people who say that political Islam has no place in Britain, or any essentially alien orthodoxy that a minority is trying to push down the throats of the ‘natives’, I have a lot of sympathy.
I will likewise argue against those who advocate policy that deliberately seeks to create division between a people, by promoting their racial, ethnic, cultural difference, because all that matters to me is that someone is British, and considers them-self British.
I chose to live in the most culturally diverse part of London and I have no regrets. The problem with David Cameron’s speech was that it was too sweeping and too negative.
It concerns me that David Cameron has made an agenda setting speech on this issue, making all kinds of negative stereotypes and the response from the Liberal Democrat leadership has been silence. Is this a debate where we are not going to say anything, or do we just defer to David Cameron?
Dinti – you’re quite right – Cameron obviously forgot about the Chinese so I’ll remind him immediately and as soon as I do the LibDems will also forget about them. When are you going to wake-up to the Tories you are propping-up.
It is, sadly, all too obvious what Call-me-Dave’s real message is. It is that black and Asian people are responsible for terrorism because we are too tolerant of their insistence of keeping their distinctive differences.
But that is what diversity is all about, and we British are fortunate that our imperial heritage has left us with the rich diversity that makes our country the exciting, pluralistic and joyful land that it is.
But even if you removed all the non-white and foreign people, Britain would still be a truly multicultural nation, with people speaking a number of languages, own cultures and eating their own food. Even if you ignore the geographical differences between the countries and regions of Britain, class and religious differences would still mark us out as multicultural.
And a total absence of Muslims would not render us immune for terorism and killing, as 25 years of IRA religous war should remind us.
Indeed, the way in which Northern Ireland Catholics were discriminated against, bullied and denied equal opportunites should remind us of the parellels with the way Prots treated the Papists and politicised their young people into retaliation and resistance.
Let us belatededly learn that lesson before more young English muslims are driven into the arms of the militants.
Despite the dictionary definition this article is very vague about what multiculturalism is. What we’ve had is the idea that keeping cultural groups separate is somehow A Good Thing and to be encouraged. The trivial but important examples of how British society has accepted and come to enjoy styles of food which originated elsewhere are about the very opposite of multiculturalism, a melding of identities to produce a new, shared concept of Britishness which is much richer than what we had before.
Multiculturalism sought to stop that happening. Multiculturalism wanted to keep people apart and create separate societies with separate values. In Luton you can find ‘Pakistani’ women who don’t speak English, despite the fact that they’ve lived there all their lives. That’s a success by the standards of multiculturalism. It’s an abject failure and utterly shocking by the standards of anyone who believes in a decent and open society.
In short, multiculturalism as it’s been practiced in Britain is just racism with a different name. It’s done our society tremendous damage and put back the cause of building a new, better Britain with people from many backgrounds all contributing their best and getting a fair reward by many decades.
Exactly. This article is entirely specious because neither Cameron nor anyone else is suggesting that people shouldn’t be free to celebrate their own cultures.
Chinese new year celebrations and international foods everwhere are transparent examples of open multiculturalism rather than the closed multiculturalism that Cameron was talking about. We need to make sure the first is encouraged and the second is discouraged.
He was also talking about the fact that Islamism, even where it is not violent, feeds Islamic terrorism, and as such we must strongly discourage non-violent islamism that goes against our core values rather than ignoring it until things get blown up. This is not in any way opposed to Islam in general, which is not the same thing as Islamism.
These are difficult and subtle issues, but they are ones it is very important we talk about openly and stand up about. That process is made a lot harder though if as soon as anyone does this they are accused of opposing cultural plurality and cheap shots, when I don’t think there is any evidence of either.
Speaking as a Chinese immigrant myself, I must raise some reservations to Dinti’s use of Chinese New Year celebrations as a blanket acceptance that “multiculturalism” has worked for the Chinese community. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and neither can having many people celebrate a cultural festival one day of the year be used as definitive evidence that that cultural community has been integrated into mainstream society.
In fact, from what I know, the Chinese community in Britain is pretty unintegrated, with a reluctance of many Chinese people’s part to interact with another culture, due to many reasons such as language barriers and a sufficiently tight-knit community that satisfies a person’s need to socialise without having to seek non-Chinese sources. Chinese food is welcomed by British, yes, but how many people know what sort of concerns face the people who work at Chinese food outlets? Gambling, illegal immigration, the Triads, poor working conditions etc. Another tell-tale sign is the absence of any ethnic Chinese representation in the House of Commons (and only one peer in the House of Lords, Lord Wei, champion of the Big Society, who is said to be reducing his hours).
So I wouldn’t say that the Chinese community is “integrated” – in my understanding of the word – to British society. I don’t know whether it’s the failure of state multiculturalism, but there is a problem. The problems of segregation, under-representation and frustration are ones that many ethnic minorities in Britain share; I think they just tend to manifest themselves differently. For the Chinese, it’s the withdrawal of the community from public life, regardless of how much their food is enjoyed.
David Camerons’ speech was an outrageous, if implicit, use of the race card to start deflecting attention from the economic choices, and consequent debates. I am increasingly astonished at how far the liberal democrats will collude with the creeping conservative extension of the `coalition’… while there may be no gainers, it seems more and more obvious the main losers will be the liberal democrats…we are going back to the two part system…I know where I stand in that choice.
Dinti – a very good piece. For those still confused as to what we mean by multicultural, and the history of Britain, I can recommend a very good book: Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain
by Robert Winder. A comprehensive account about British history, and how poor immigrants arrived from across the world. In 1500, there were 3,000 foreigners in London, 6 per cent of the population, and it was said that “Tottenham has turned French”.
It also recounts how In 1764, the Gentleman’s Magazine reckoned there were 20,000 “negroe servants” in London alone, and the outright ant-semitism directed against Jewish refugees during the 1930s.
He traces the history of immigration, from the Normans to more recent asylum seekers, showing how each wave of foreigners were greated with hostility before they became accepted as a permanent part of British society.
Well worth a read. Ilustrates how nothing has really changed.
as Sly and the Family Stone said ” different strokes for different folks, and so on and so on, scooby dooby do”
Thought the whole thing sounded better in the original German.
Bit late in the day, Dinti, but great post. Always cracks me up the number of people clearly with surnames of Irish and Eastern European origin leaving hate-filled xenophobic comments on webpages