Civitas Blog

In recent times, and especially since the July tube bombings, many have begun openly to question the wisdom of the received policy of multiculturalism which recent critics have begun to claim does not do enough to integrate minorities, especially British Muslims.

Not so, argues Bristol University’s Professor Tariq Modood, in a recent article posted on Open Democracy in which he defends the beleaguered policy. Instead, so Professor Modood contends, the source of ‘the lack of a sense of belonging to Britain able to withstand the ideological call of jihad against fellow Britons… can be found in arguments on both the right and left [of the majority society]’.

In Professor Modood’s reckoning, therefore, the four British-born Muslims who blew up their fellow passengers had been unable to acquire a British identity as a result of right-wing ‘notions of Britishness that hold non-white people are not really British and that Muslims are an alien wedge’ and left-wing notions that hold there is ‘something deeply wrong about rallying round the idea of Britain, … and that the goal of seeking to be British … is silly and dangerous, and indeed demeaning to the newly settled groups among the population’.

To counter what he considers these causes of British Muslim alienation, Professor Modood argues that ‘what is urgently needed is not a panicky retreat from multiculturalism, but … to recognis[e] Muslims as a legitimate social partner and include them in the institutional compromises … that characterise the evolving, moderate secularism of mainstream western Europe’ .

‘Moreover’, Professor Modood concludes by observing, ‘ this is not just a matter of state action, for the burden of multicultural representation has to be borne by the multitudinous institutions of civil society that constitute our public space, our public interactions, and our plural, public identities.’

About this analysis of the causes of Muslims alienation, several doubts may be raised.

Jews were able successfully to integrate within British society, as Professor Modood himself acknowledges in the article, at a time when racially exclusivist notions of Britishness were far more prevalent than they are now.

Moreover, Jews integrated without need of either state or civil society having to change much to enable them to do so. Indeed, early on in the history of their re-settlement in Britain after their centuries-long explusion from it in medieval times, the Anglo-Jewish community went out of its way to expedite its integration. It set up and financed schools for its chiildren, not to impede their assimilation as do those who call for separate faith schools today, but to facilitate it by making Englishmen and Englishwomen of British-born Jewish children.

Moreover, the Anglo-Jewish community went out of its way to avoid becoming in any way a burden on the public purse by developing an elaborate and entirely self-financed set of welfare services for its members.

Why, on earth, should church and state in Britain, let alone civil society, be expected to make any further institutional compromises, beyond those already long since made well before the post-war wave of largely Asian Muslim immigration, so as to offer to minorities ‘a plural, changing inclusive British identity which can be as emotionally and politically meaningful to British Muslims as the appeal of jihadi sentiments’?

Early on in his article, Professor Modood observes that American Jews, often cited as a paradigm of a successfully assimilated minority, ‘have also changed the American society and culture they have become part of’.

Too true, but this was because their fellow Americans came to adopt Jewish idioms, humour, and culinary tastes voluntarily, not to prevent American Jews becoming alienated and turning to terrorism..

Just like the popularity in the USA of bagels and Bilko, the current popularity in Britain of the Notting Hill Carnival and of chicken tikka marsala bears ample testimony to the capacity of its predominantrly liberal Anglo-Protestant culture to absorb spontaenously such elements of minority cultures as its populace find to their liking. Minorities who, better to facilitate their own accommodation, expect more modification of mainstream cultures than their bearers are spontaneously willing to make, risk demanding more movement from national mountains than is compatible with their stability and hence with the well-being of those who dwell upon their slopes.

Instead of always asking of the mainstream culture and society ever more in the way of change to prevent the alienation of their young, how about minorities who have chosen to settle here teaching their children the value of gratitude to their hosts and of their need to make appropriate adjustments, rather than forever calling upon their host communities to change more swiftly and radically than they would be happy to do of their own accord?

In the battle of ideas, particularly where education is concerned, one of the few weapons left in Tony Blair’s arsenal is that of rhetorical sophistry. ‘Higher standards’ have to be interpreted as falling standards disguised by higher grades, for example, and the assertion that specialist schools ‘outperform’ comprehensives is true only because only top performing comprehensives are allowed to convert and become specialist schools. The same semantic slippage bleaches such words as ‘choice’ and ‘independence’ of their potency.

What is multiculturalism? I only ask because yesterday in the Guardian the mayor of London’s director of policing and equalities, Lee Jasper, launched into a tirade against Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, that was characteristic only for its anger and ignorance. Entitled ‘Trevor Phillips is in danger of giving succour to racists’, his ‘argument’ begins by attacking Phillips, and those like him, who have the audacity to suggest that multiculturalism intensifies segregation. Relying on a fairly faulty syllogism, he claims that all who are opposed to multiculturalism want total assimilation and are, by implication, ‘white supremacist’. To address this slur, we need to remedy an underlying deficiency in Jasper’s article, which is that he attempts no definition of multiculturalism. Since most people understand it merely as being part of a multi-ethnic society this matters greatly.

‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. ‘Education, education, education’. ‘No return to boom and bust’.

One by one, the flag-ship commitments that brought New Labour to office in 1997are running into the sands.

A very small statistical dip in the overall crime rate allowed the Government misleadingly to boast of having successfully reduced crime. But violent crime stands at an all time high. The Government has spectacularly failed to get tough on its immediate cause -- the criminals who perpetrate it.

Despite long-standing evidence of a steadily mounting need for additional prison capacity to house the burgeoning numbers of offenders awarded custodial sentences, the Government has persistently refused to build any. Yesterday’s Times contains a front-page story that , to solve of prison over-crowding, the Home Office intends to extend still further its already hazardous early release scheme. ‘Criminals sentenced to four years in prison could be freed after just 18 months.’

With recidivism rates for those granted early release standing at 8%, we can be certain that violent crime will continue to stay uncomfortably high.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair’s boast to have improved school performance received a cruel blow by a report also in yesterday’s Times that, ‘despite soaring A grades at GCSE and A level, … nearly half of students this year failed to get a grade C or better in GCSE maths and 40% failed to reach a C in English’.

According to CBI estimates, ’15 million adults do not have the arithmetic skills expected of a 14-year-old and …one in ten adults cannot read to a similar level.’

Whatever the Pink Floyd may at one time have blithely sung, our school-children certainly do need an education. If their teachers are failing to provide one, this could be partly due to their having graduated from university without adequate proficiency themselves in these subjects.

As to our Iron Chancellor’s proud boast of having presided over an unparalleled sustained period of economic growth that has enabled him to increase spending on public services massively without increasing government debt or taxes, all that seems about to change and be shown up for another failed promise. In making his budgetary calculations, the Chancellor appears to have relied on growth estimates that now appear wildly optimistic.

Meanwhile, as is also reported in yesterday’s Times, the latest official unemployment figures show ‘the number of people out of work and claiming benefits climbed for the eighth month in a row, marking the longest sustained increases in unemployment since the early Nineties.’

These economic trends would not be nearly as depressing as they are -- forgive the pun! – did not yesterday’s papers also reveal the Chancellor’s much vaunted Working Families Tax Credit scheme to have proved itself monumentally unworkable and plagued by fraud.

Perhaps, it is the fault of all those innumerate employees turned out by our failing schools and universities who administer the system, but the last year, the most recent for which there are figures, it is reported the Revenue overpaid tax credits to the tune of ‘£2.2 billion to 1.9 million families’. The Revenue is expecting mistakes of a comparable order of magnitude this year.

Small wonder is it, as yesterday’s Times reports, that the National Audit Office has become so concerned about the high level of benefit fraud that it has ‘refused to give a clean bill of health to the tax credits section of the Inland Revenue’s accounts for the third year in succession.’

At one time, such a dismal track-record of a Government in office might have been expected to be visited by voter revenge at the ballot-box at the next general election. However, if its lack-lustre record in office were not bad enough, to the list of Government initiatives that have proved failures can be added one that might well prevent this from happening.

It is also reported in yesterday’s Times, the Government seems determined to press on with household rather than individual registration for postal voting, against the strong advice of the independent Electoral Commission that household registration lends itself to electoral abuse.

Doubtless in future, offenders stuck at home on early release from prison will have a field-day fraudulently claiming benefit, before, through using multiple votes they have frauduently amassed by registering their household, keeping in power a Government that has served them and other criminals so well, but the honest law-abiding majority so badly.

‘Parents blamed for unruly pupils’ ran headlines across the press last week. A survey of 500 primary and secondary school teachers conducted for Teacher’s TV found that eight out of ten teachers saw parents’ failure to control their children as the primary cause of discipline problems in school. According to the findings, twice as many teachers believed parents were the cause of poor behaviour than thought it stemmed from school-related factors.

Anyone interested in Tony Blair's educational reforms should take a look at Stephen Pollard's excellent article in yesterday's Times. Not only does he make the astute point that Blair's "independent" state schools plan simply represents a return to the grant-maintained system that New Labour abolished in 1997. He also makes some revealing observations about his co-author on A Class Act, Lord Adonis, who has for some years been Tony Blair's key adviser on education policy.

Today’s Times reports that a former communist mayor of a Sicilian town has just entered a convent of a closed order of nuns that has required her to take a vow of silence so that she may spend her remaining days in contemplation and prayer.

Only slightly less bizarre is another report in today’s Times that Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, has denied an accusation that has just been levelled against him by the Commission for Judicial Appointments, the independent watch-dog charged with scrutinising judicial appointments to ensure their fairness, that he has appointed to the bench a disproportionately large number of Oxbridge educated barristers who gained firsts.

What is so bizarre about the story is less that the Commission should consider a candidate’s class of honours and the university which awared them not a relevant consideration to any decision as to their likely suitability for some post that requres intelligence and sound judgement. It is rather the vehemence with which the Lord Chancellor apparently has denied the suggestion he was affected by such considerations in his deliberations as to whom to appoint.

The Lord Chancellor, who is reported to have read law at Cambridge, is quoted as having responded to the accusation by saying: ‘The plain implication [of it] is that I was influenced by details of which Oxbridge college they attended, and whether they obtained first class degrees. This is wrong. The candidates’ educational background played no part in the process.’

I am deeply puzzled by m’learned friend’s response and would truly welcome enlightenment from readers as to why a candidate’s degree class and from which university it was gained should be considered irrelevant in deciding their suitability for a position.

Having gained a first from Oxbridge is surely not like having been brought up in Chichester or even having been to Eton.

Surely, the Lord Chancellor should have come clean and admit he had taken into account the considerations of which he has been accused of having taken into account. Clearly, they were, at most, only one of several others of which many must surely have carried far greater weight. But, at the margin, where most appointment deciisons to highly competitive positions are made, such minor considerations can and should have their place.

Or do we now live in a world where educational qualifications are mere ‘background’ and all that matters is how badly under-represented and disadvantaged some minority group is to which a candidate belongs?

The badly scarred and understandably sad-looking face of a twelve-year old Sheffield schoolgirl stares reproachfully from a photograph on the front page of today’s Times. The poor girl acquired her disfiguring injuries after she was savagely set upon by a knife-wielding classmate whom the previous day the brave victim of the attack had tried to stop bullying a third schoolmate.

Earlier this year, Secretary of State for Education, Ruth Kelly, set up a ‘behaviour task force’ to make proposals about how to tackle the growing problem of classroom bullying and disorder which it is due to publish today. It was, apparently and welcomingly, asked to adopt a long-overdue and badly-needed zero-tolerance approach to the problem.

We should, however, not hold our hopes too high. For we have long been promised so much by the present government and given so little it is difficult to believe we shall not this time receive only yet more brave words that amount to little in practice.

By way of illustration of the current tragic gap between rhetoric and reality today in all matters to do with schooling today, consider what was said in its last Ofsted report about the approach of the victim’s school towards instilling good behaviour in pupils:

‘The school looks after its pupils well…. The school successfully integrates many pupils with challenging behaviour, and those who have been excluded from schools…. A programme for personal, social and health education is well organised and effectively taught. … Moral education is good. Expectations regarding behaviour are clear, and pupils are full aware of the difference between right and wrong.’

Now, we all know that one swallow does not a summer make. But by the same token so do we that it takes only one rotten apple to spoil a barrel. Moreover, it simply defies belief to suppose the attack was a totally isolated incident or that a twelve-year old girl would be carrying a knife to school with the intention or willingness to use it as she did had her doing so not been to some extent in keeping with the entire culture of that school, if not at its official classroom level, then at its unofficial level in the playground.

(There’s a word whose literal meaning harks back to earlier more civilised times and serves as a standing indictment of the harsh and brutal reality that place has all too commonly and tragically become today.)

But the rot goes well beyond the disturbed and deprived family backgrounds which are such fertile incubators of the many disorderly and disturbed children who attend today’s schools. It goes right up to the top of the educational establishment. Consider, for example, what the same Ofsted report said about that same school’s approach towards moral education:

‘Moral education is good…. When moral decisions are to be made, pupils are taught to think these through from action to consequence…. Moral issues are debated as they arise in lessons, for example, global warming and its consequences, refugees and persecution.’

Lord above! If ever there was a moral decision to be made by a school child, it is not whether the G8 countries should adopt some protocol about reducing carbon emissions or whether there should be a law prohibiting incitement to religious hatred. It is whether they school bring into school a knife today or any other with the intent or preparedness to use it.

Admittedly, this moral issue is by no means as straightforward as might at first sight appear. Were school environments entirely orderly and civil, the question should simply not arise for a child of whether to carry a knife to school. It does, however, when schools have been turned into blackboard jungles into which children must daily venture in fear and trembling of being assaulted. Then, whether to carry a knife to school does become a genuine moral issue for them.

Having said all that, it seems Ofsted, along with the entire educational establishment of this country, has got the moral focus all wrong if it and they should think moral education in schools should be about fostering in their pupils the ability to debate such issues as the ethics of global-warming, rather than about instilling in them basic common decency, as well as attempting to develop their abilty to think for themselves about how to be decent as well as their wanting to be, when all about them there is so much moral chaos, disorder and unruliness.

School, as we know, is no moral substitute for the home and, unless their pupils' home environment is stable and nurturing, it is an uphill struggle for teachers to turn out morally decent products.

Perhaps, then, more emphasis should be given in schools and in the wider community at large on the value of stable homes and family-life. ‘Oh!’ we will be told ‘to do that will stigmatise those children not fortunate enough to have been born into one!’

Balderdash! If the time has come for society to adopt a policy of zero-tolerance towards classroom disorder and bullying, it has also come for it to get tough on the causes of classroom disorder and bullying. Of these unsettled and unstable home-lives must be a principal, if not the single biggest, cause.

All those 'sixties feminists who back then championed the break-up of the two-parent family because, so they claimed, this would liberate women from domestic violence should be made to take a long hard look at the photograph of that poor school-girl’s face and made to answer the simple question of whether their sisters’ liberation from the oppressive patriarchal family was worth her scars inflicted by a girl not a boy as well as all the other injuries and indignities suffered by all other victims of violent crime today.

On the eve of the new Education White Paper, the furore over the government’s misleading presentation of GCSE performance continues to rage. To have presented an overly ‘optimistic’ picture would have been one thing, but this particular ‘overstatement’ raised a very serious set of issues surrounding both the state of education and the scrupulousness of DfES reporting.

I love it when this government gets its knickers in a twist. Goodness knows it’s got itself tangled up in so many problems it deserves to be tripping over. The attempt to legislate virtually every aspect of public and private life is proving complicated for the classroom swat Ruth Kelly, the priggish Patricia Hewitt and the haughty Baroness Scotland. They’re not alone, but they’ll do for today. You see, Kelly’s trying to keep bossy Blair happy by doing exactly what he tells her, Hewitt’s having her pigtails tugged by that naughty Johnny Reid, and as for Baroness Scotland, she’s been pushed around in the playground of the Lords.

This year has witnessed more important national anniversaries than most. Among those already celebrated have been the sixtieth anniversary of Britain’s defeat of Nazism and the two hundredth anniversary of Nelson’s decisive naval victory at Trafalgar.

Next week marks the four hundredth anniversary of no less important an event in this country’s epic march towards freedom. This was, of course the uncovering of the plot by a group of disgruntled Catholics to blow up James 1, together with his family and senior advisers, at the state opening of Parliament, as prelude to their effecting a re-Catholicising of the country.

Last Monday, Culture Minister, David Lammy, took part in a debate at the British Museum organised by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The subject of the debate was ‘Where Now for Black and Minority Ethnic Heritage?’. In his speech, Mr Lammy succeeded in enunciating one important truth. Unfortunately, it was obscured by many more falsehoods and specious arguments which led, predictably, to some depressing policy proposals.

The truth Mr Lammy stated was one concerning the profound challenge that the events of July 7th pose for the prospects for social cohesion and inter-ethnic harmony. He said:

‘What came under attack that terrible day was … the dream of a nation we might one day become.... Germaine Lindsey, a 19 year old-old black man, [was] driven by a hatred so strong he blew himself up, killing many others in the process: if there is a more blunt challenge to our aspirations for a vibrant multi-ethnic Britain to which all Britons feel they belong, I have yet to hear it.’

Too true, but it is worth observing that the hatred that drove Germaine Lindsey to butcher his fellow-citizens in such an indiscriminate manner had nothing to do with his colour and everything to do with another differentiating attribute of his that somehow Mr Lammy omitted to mention.

In response to that challenge, Mr Lammy went on to issue a challenge of his own to the heritage sector, mimicking George Bush’s response to September 11. He said: ‘If you are not part of the solution to this crisis of Britishness, you are part of the problem.’

In so far as the events of July 7 signify ‘a crisis of Britishness’ , that crisis consists in the presence within Britain of a sub-section of one of its religious minorities, distinguished from everyone else -- including many, and one assumes and ardenlty hopes the vast majoirity, of their own co-religionists -- by such strong antipathy towards current British military action in Iraq on the alleged grounds, spurious in my view, of it being insufficiently respectful of their co-religionists, as well as antipathy to all in Britain supportive of or acquiescent in this action of their government, that they are willing to resort to acts of terror in an attempt to force the government to discontinue that military action.

If my analysis is correct of what the current crisis of Britishness is, then it is difficult to see how the heritage sector might be implicated in it one way or the other.

But if you want to push the heritage sector in a certain multicultural direction, then you will be inclined to analyse the crisis differently. For you will not want to miss an opportunity to suggest, quite fallaciously, that anyone in the heritage sector who might see no need to move in that same direction too is complicit in causing whatever bred the alienation and animus of a section of the populace that led to the events of July 7th.

The new Education White Paper was heralded as Blair’s transformation of the English education system. This White Paper was professed to signify bold ‘new freedoms’ and ‘new autonomy’ for schools. But now that the reforms have been unveiled, just how revolutionary are they, and what changes will they mean to the everyday lives of teachers and school children in this country?