Civitas Blog

In yesterday’s Guardian, Vikram Dodd reported that Britain is more racially integrated than ever before, using academic research that is undermined by actual ethnic agglomerations. Isolated concentrations of ethnic groups in different cities and constituencies are not only evidenced by Census statistics, but also signalled by tensions such as those in the north of England in 2001 and, recently, in Birmingham (have these been forgotten with a promptness that could not be improved upon because they didn’t fit the white-man-as-oppressor picture?). Dodd quotes Dr Ludi Simpson, author of the research, as saying that ‘segregation does not cause social exclusion’. The overwhelming mass of evidence, from the Jim Crow laws in the US, to the findings of the government commissioned Cantle report into the 2001 troubles, to everything that has been happening on the streets of France (and you needn’t take my word for it – almost every interview with a rioter evinces some kind of complaint about being segregated) indicates that this is patently nonsense. Ghettoes promote suspicion and ignorance of other groups – and tension.

Regarding events in France, we should be careful to avoid indulging in smugness. Can anything be learned, though, from what has happened across the Channel? In yesterday’s Times David Aaronovirtch, who has often in the past been outspoken against militant wahabi-jihadi-salafi Islamism, and attacked for being so, takes issue with articles by Rod Liddle and Patrick Sookhdeo in this week’s Spectator. He makes the tiresomely obvious point that it is wrong to assume that all Muslims can be categorised as zealots, a point undermined by being exaggerated. He also observes that intelligent people are failing to use their discernment because their alarm has risen to such a state that they will blame Islam for the French riots. Well, the evidence strongly suggests that Islamists have fomented the riots, which is not, however, to claim that they are the sole cause of them. Of course much of the rioting has arisen out of resentment at poverty and exclusion among many groups. It has partly also arisen out of segregation.

Crucially, Aaronovich fails to recognise the truth in what the Spectator articles perhaps overstate. If Liddle and Sookhdeo are mildly alarmist, they are nevertheless right that separatism has been caused at least as much by immigrants of, say, the Maghreb, as by the host nation. The Muslim community in France, as in Britain, as in Holland, seeks to stay together, forming itself into Islamic enclaves – a statement that it no less true in general because there are obvious exceptions. Thus it is that in Birmingham, as in Oldham, as in Paris, as in Amsterdam, Islam has given many of the rioters a unified identity. We do not need to exaggerate the extent to which it is true to accept that we have in the last thirty years or so, and longer if you trace the genealogy of extremism to the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, witnessed the radicalisation of mainstream Islam on a global scale. If we are to have any chance of avoiding doing a France, we have to prevent people doing an Oldham or a Bradford or a Birmingham again. This implies that we must recognise the danger posed by balkanised Islamic communities. We must seek, not multiculti separatism, nor conformist assimilation, but a robust acceptance of difference while demanding common ground and integration. We must seek the middle ground.