Multicultural Britain: What are we so scared of? - Ian Bell, Sunday Herald

This is a fascinating piece with a variety of anecdotes. As Britain is similar to Australia in many 'cultural' ways, I thought this would be a good piece to add to the discussion here. Sue Ellson, Newcomers Network

http://www.sundayherald.com/57566

MULTICULTURAL BRITAIN: WHAT ARE WE SO SCARED OF?


Essay ... By Ian Bell


After a century and a half spent using and then abusing the emigrés of Victoria’s empire, we now have people from the former fiefdoms of Rome, Charlemagne and Stalin, otherwise known as the European Union, arriving on our doorstep. Scots of Irish descent know, or should know, all about this. Scots of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Iranian, Italian, Lithuanian or, indeed, Polish descent certainly know all about it. Refugees, political or economic, they came here to make new lives, often as the native-born were departing in their hordes, with no sense of irony, for sunnier climes. It was hard work.

I can only speak, a little, for the Irish. When they began arriving here in the second part of the 19th century, after the famine, they were given that famously warm Scottish welcome. Our modern tabloids invented nothing. Back then – stop me if this sounds familiar – they were stealing our jobs, importing an alien faith, undercutting our wages, and divided in their loyalties. They were not to be trusted and, of course, they bred like rabbits. Even in the 20th century they were still being denounced by elements within the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

The great writer and journalist Neal Ascherson once remarked that the map of Europe is an illusion. In his description, Europe could only be understood as an endless series of cartographies overlaid, like transparencies, one upon the other. You could say the same about the entire world. States and kingdoms and empires come and go but so, continually, do peoples. Nothing is fixed. Nothing, ultimately, is controllable.

The history of Britain is the history of waves of immigration stretching back over millennia, everyone knows it. Scotland takes its name, as even an elementary textbook explains, from an Irish tribe. Today, when the notion of Britishness is endlessly disputable, the social map of these islands is like a flamboyant quilt of many colours and shades of colour. Very attractive it is, too.

Yet here we have Ruth Kelly, communities secretary, launching a “Commission on Integration and Cohesion” (England only – the Scots might miss the point) in the apparent belief that multiculturalism hasn’t “worked”. Kelly is concerned that too many people still feel “separate”. No pressure on British Muslims there, then.

Here, too, we have the tabloids going bananas, as only British tabloids can, over Polish plumbers. Have you tried getting a plumber lately? That little difficulty matters little to The Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express. Newspapers of their persuasion have been playing a malevolent game for half a century. Their patron plaster saint is Margaret Thatcher, she who in January 1978 went on TV to sympathise with the white natives who believed they were being “swamped by people with a different culture”. I make that 28 years of swamping. Still the hysteria goes on.

After all, the simple point about multiculturalism is this: it cannot be abolished. Once begun, it cannot be halted or somehow corrected by a commission. It evolves as the daily relations between people evolve. Sometimes those relations leave a lot to be desired, but when the likes of Kelly talk of tensions, or a lack of integration, all that they really mean is that there are bigots, of every stripe, in our communities. Multiculturalism is a fact of British life with only two enemies: racism, and those who seek to pander to a racist press. The tabloids, in other words, and the target demographic they share with the two largest political parties in Britain. Readers and votes: the calculation is that both can be garnered if you kick an immigrant.

So what is it with the native white British? France has the biggest Muslim population in Europe, not Britain. France has its inter-communal problems, God knows, and went through its own fit of anxiety over the arrival of the Polish plumber last year. But unemployment in France easily outstrips unemployment in Britain. Here, joblessness, as opposed to “economic inactivity”, is at a historic low.

The point about the 427,000 registered workers who have come to Britain from former Soviet states – those states that joined the EU two years ago – is that they are working. Working hard, paying taxes, buying goods, and enjoying strictly limited benefits – though officially only 7% claim them.

After decades in which millions of so-called “illegals”, mainly Hispanic, have entered the country, the United States has been going through its own bout of soul-searching, mixed with bigotry, over immigration. Right-wingers have come up with schemes to fence off the entire border with Mexico, but even George Bush realises that Los Angeles would grind to a halt if he clamped down in the way some have demanded. For the American economy, still the most potent in the world, there is no alternative to hard-working immigrants.

The best guess is that much the same is true of Britain if conspicuous growth is to be maintained. One estimate last week put the east European migrants’ contribution to the British economy at £2.5 billion annually. According to the trade, the building boom – all those PFI hospitals and badly needed houses – would be unsustainable if a native skills gap was not being filled by the imported plumbers, carpenters, electricians and bricklayers. Farmers, meanwhile, allege that the harvest could not be brought in without 70,000 migrants. For the record, both industries insist they would hire locally, if they only could.

In the catering and hospitality business, meanwhile, another phenomenon seems to be at work: migrants are filling the jobs locals won’t touch. This perhaps says something about British attitudes to work, or about the behaviour of some British employers, but it tends to undermine the claim that wages are being undercut. If the money were enviable to begin with, there would be no vacancies to fill.

Then there are the facts, inconvenient to some. Of the east European immigrant workers registered, more than 90% had no dependents when they arrived, and only 3% brought their children. Those intent on swamping us seem content to leave the family behind. Possibly, instead, they view their time among us as limited: do the job and then go home.

Wages are rising in Poland, after all. Economic growth within the eurozone is now faster than growth in Britain. We will, very soon, cease to be an attractive first port of call for economic migrants. When the European countries which have placed quotas on inflows from the accession states see the error of their ways – Spain, Greece and Finland are already easing restrictions – the British economy will pay a heavy price.

Scotland is already paying. Of the 427,000 east Europeans decamping to Britain between May 2004, and the beginning of July this year, 32,000 came to Scotland. I make that a mere 7.5% of the total. If the migrants add economic value, and if Scotland has an underlying problem with population decline – Jack McConnell, for one, doesn’t doubt it – we are losing out already. Growth in the Scottish economy has been sluggish for years, but here we risk ceding a potential competitive advantage simply because London’s tabloids pander to racism, and because Ruth Kelly’s knee has a jerk attached. The First Minister would wish things otherwise, but the voice of the Daily Mail is more powerful in Downing Street than the voice of Bute House.

The population of Britain contains 155,000 Americans. There are 106,000 recent arrivals from Australia, 70,000 Canadians, 57,000 New Zealanders, and 140,000 South Africans. Whisper it if The Sun is listening, but there are also 254,000 Germans, 94,000 French, and 54,000 people recently from Spain. Nobody suggests that any of these cause “tensions”. Nobody alleges that they place a strain on services or local housing. Can you make a tabloid scare out of a Canadian? Can you tell a Yankee to go home?

Yet these people, welcome all, are also of the essence of the multiculturalism that has the government in its latest spin. Some 600,000 individuals have arrived in Britain legally over the last two years. Subtract those from eight formerly communist states and you find 179,000 “permitted to settle”. Most of the souls contributing to that figure have come from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. How do we differentiate between them, in both official and tabloid language, and hard-working people from New Zealand or Germany? Melanin, merely, the stuff that colours all our skins. There is no other reason for official attitudes towards immigration.

Britain’s latest populist “problem” has nothing to do with immigration, in fact, certainly not in any economic sense. Overwhelmingly, the Australians and Americans are white; the Indians and Pakistanis are not. However she chooses to disguise the subtext, Ruth Kelly is establishing a commission on “integration and cohesion” because she regards race as a cultural and political issue. In the process, she makes it an issue.

Like its newspaper patrons, our government clouds the distinctions between immigrants, migrants and refugees. The Polish migrants provoke demented headlines such “Poles Flood In” simply because they wish to work. Asylum seekers – doctors, lawyers and engineers among them – are denied the right to work. The immigrants who are white encounter precious few problems. The immigrants who fail to be white run the gauntlet of official suspicion. A rational policy is nowhere to be found.

The United States achieved greatness in the 20th century because it did not waste time worrying over the meaning of multiculturalism. The melting pot was a fact . America’s real agony came instead from the horrific legacy of slavery. Is Britain to be forever beset by its disputable colonial inheritance, and by its insular habits towards Europe? Probably so, if history is any guide and if xenophobia has become policy. The Polish plumber will get your sink fixed, nevertheless, and keep your economy ticking over for good measure. The Muslim Scot will demonstrate the meaning of multiculturalism by example. The part-Irish Scot will remember his history. Ruth Kelly and her kind will waste everyone’s time, and do more grievous harm than good.

27 August 2006