Dis-United Kingdom - Leo McKinstry, soc.retirement newsgroup

I found this piece very confronting....perhaps it is a reminder that part of
'living in harmony' is being able to strongly display what it is to be an
'Australian' in a global village....Sue Ellson

Dec 5, 2:25 pm show options
Newsgroups: soc.retirement
From: Sordo - Find messages by this author
Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2005 11:25:41 -0800
Local: Mon, Dec 5 2005 2:25 pm
Subject: Dis-United Kingdom - Multiculturalism isn't working

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Dis-United Kingdom - Multiculturalism isn't working.

by Leo McKinstry
12/05/2005, Volume 011, Issue 12
http://www.weeklystandard.com

London
CONDESCENDING SUPERIORITY is a common British attitude towards the
French, whose Gallic bureaucracy, artistic pretensions, and recent
military record all serve as targets of ridicule. Now the recent wave
of rioting across France, largely perpetrated by Muslim youths, has
offered new scope to this smugness. Since the conflict began, the
British media have been full of sneers about racial problems in French
society, which supposedly has been far less successful than Britain in
integrating migrant communities.

But this complacency could hardly be less justified. As an Irish-born
writer who lives in both France and the United Kingdom, I believe that
the British approach to race relations has been disastrous, fostering
disunity, tension, and ethnic strife on a much greater scale than
anything that has occurred in France. While cars have been torched in
large numbers in French cities, Britain has experienced murderous
terrorist outrages committed by Muslim men who were born and bred in
England. Thankfully, there was only one fatality in the French
disturbances. In the London bombings in July, 52 people were killed
and over 700 injured.

Nor has Britain been free of serious race riots. Just before the
trouble began in Paris, there were several nights of street fighting
between Asian and African-Caribbean gangs in Birmingham, England's
second largest city. Two people were killed. And this incident
followed years of racial unrest in decaying industrial towns in the
north of England, such as Burnley and Bradford, where there are large,
radicalized Muslim populations, though the level of disorder is always
downplayed by the political establishment and media, anxious not to
undermine carefully manufactured images of multiethnic harmony.

In truth, Britain is now a deeply divided land, where suspicion,
intolerance, and aggression cast their shadow over urban areas. Only
the other day, the government revealed that, in the last twelve
months, the number of prosecutions for racial hate crimes had risen by
30 percent. In a courageous recent speech, Trevor Phillips, a black
broadcaster who now serves as the chairman of Britain's Commission for
Racial Equality, warned that the country is "sleepwalking towards
segregation," with society ever more fragmented by ethnicity and
religion. Using remarkably frank language, Phillips added that parts
of some cities will soon be "black holes into which no one goes
without fear."

This sorry situation has been created by a deliberate act of public
policy. For the last three decades, in response to waves of mass
immigration, the civic institutions of Britain have eagerly
implemented the ideology of multiculturalism. Instead of promoting a
cohesive British identity, they have encouraged immigrant communities
to cling to the customs, traditions, and language of their countries
of origin. The emphasis is on upholding ethnic and cultural
differences rather than achieving assimilation. This is in stark
contrast to France, which has taken a color-blind approach to
immigration, with newcomers expected to adapt to the culture of the
host nation. The recently imposed ban on Muslim girls' wearing the
hijab or headscarf in schools is a classic example of the French
model.

Britain has moved in exactly the opposite direction. Soon after the
French hijab ban was implemented, a British Muslim teenager brought a
successful legal action to win the right to wear in school full
Islamic dress from head to toe. She was represented in her court case
by Cherie Blair, the barrister wife of the prime minister. And Mrs.
Blair's action was typical of the spirit of the Labour-led British
ruling class, which has elevated dogmatic multiculturalism into a
principle of governance.

Racial segregation is woven into the fabric of British public
services. Indeed, under the latest race relations legislation, all
public authorities have a statutory duty to promote cultural
diversity. So inner city local councils and hospitals in urban areas
now print all their public documentation in ethnic minority languages,
including Kosovan, Hindi, Greek, Swahili, and Turkish, while many
provide extensive interpreting services. One doctor who works in east
London told me of her outrage at being sent to take a course in
Bengali so she could communicate more effectively with her patients.

Bilingualism is common in urban schools, given that almost 12 percent
of children have a first language other than English. London is now
the most linguistically diverse city in the world, with more than 300
languages spoken by pupils, ranging from Punjabi and Nigerian Yoruba
to Polish and Tamil. In addition, the government now provides funds to
Muslims to set up their own schools, in which there is a predominantly
Islamic ethos, imams are involved in teaching, and Arabic is learned
for the study of the Koran. At present there are just five such Muslim
state schools, but the government has announced plans to take the
number to 150, a move that smacks of appeasement towards Islamic
separatism. The police have also been infected with this spirit. In
recruitment in London, there is an open bias towards applicants who
speak "a community language." And in the Midlands city of Nottingham,
the July bombings prompted the chief constable to order his officers
to wear green ribbons "to show their solidarity with the Muslim
community."

Thanks to multiculturalism, the provision of public housing, the arts,
broadcasting, and community grants is now divided on racial lines. The
BBC, the main state broadcaster, has its own Asian network providing
news and features inside the U.K. in Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, and
Gujarati. There are now more than 140 housing associations in England
catering to ethnic minorities; one of them, the Aashyana in Bristol,
provides special apartments for Muslims with the toilets facing away
from Mecca. More than 10 percent of the bodies funded by the Arts
Council, such as theaters and dance companies, describe themselves as
black or Asian organizations. "British culture is not a single entity.
We should rightly speak of British cultures," says the Arts Council.

Yet the diversity enthusiasts want to celebrate every culture but
their own. In the self-flagellating climate of modern Britain, the
nation's traditions are increasingly regarded as reactionary and
prejudiced. Britishness has "systematic, largely unspoken racial
connotations," declared the government's Commission on the Future of
Multi-Ethnic Britain. The commission's report, published in 2000,
described the United Kingdom as "a community of communities" and
called for British history to be "revised, rethought or jettisoned."
The official mood of self-loathing, epitomized by the terror of giving
offense to any ethnic group, has become even more pervasive in the
last five years. In one typical instance, the English inspector of
prisons stated that wardens should not wear badges or tie pins with
the red cross of St. George, England's national flag, because this
could be "misinterpreted as a racist symbol."

Another extreme episode that was much discussed in the media five
years ago illustrates how multiculturalism can undermine the
management of social services. At Haringey Council in north London in
February 2000, an 8-year-old child from Ivory Coast, Victoria Climbie,
died after suffering a catalogue of cruelty, beatings, and neglect by
her great-aunt, Marie-Th�r�se Kouao, who claimed that Victoria was
possessed by the devil. Social workers and the police, alerted
repeatedly to Victoria's plight, were reluctant to intervene because
they did not want to appear culturally insensitive to Kouao's beliefs
or methods of discipline. Indeed, the prevailing mood in the Haringey
social work office was one of perverted antiracism, where the woefully
incompetent casework manager, Carole Baptiste, held meetings in the
dark to discuss African witchcraft and spent much of her time talking
about oppression of black women. "It is hard to say how mad it was,"
recalled one black social worker. "There were some black staff members
who would not speak to white people. Aggressive racial politics
permeated the office."

The English patriot and maverick socialist George Orwell wrote in
1941, "England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals
are ashamed of their nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always
felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an
Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English
institution." More than 60 years later, multiculturalism has provided
the ideal vehicle for the left, which now predominates in civic
Britain, to exercise its destructive influence. The neurotic official
obsession with the politics of racial identity has destroyed any
shared sense of national belonging. As the Asian writer Kenan Malik
has put it, "The problem is not that ethnic minorities are alienated
from a concept of Britishness but that there is today no source of
Britishness from which anyone--black or white--can draw inspiration."

Britain is fast replacing nationhood with a hierarchy of victimhood,
with different ethnic groups living in conflict, each trumpeting its
own sense of grievance. Age-old liberties, like freedom of speech, are
disappearing; a play in Birmingham was recently closed down because a
mob of Sikhs threatened to destroy the theater, claiming to be
offended by the content of the production. Meanwhile, the endless
British accommodation of Islamic extremism, in the name of racial
tolerance, has allowed terrorism to flourish in our midst. According
to one recent survey, 13 percent of British Muslims support home-grown
terrorism, a terrifying thought given that there are 1.6 million
Muslims in Britain.

Multiculturalism is not the road that France should go down.
Bomb-scarred Britain proves that integration is not achieved by
exacerbating racial division and institutional self-hatred.

Leo McKinstry writes regularly for the Daily Mail, Sunday Telegraph,
and Spectator. His biography of Lord Rosebery was published in Britain
earlier this year.