Michael Smith welcomes the debate sparked by Britain’s race relations chief, Trevor Phillips
My late father was a textile businessman in Bradford, Yorkshire, who befriended the Muslim leader of the Pakistani community in Bradford at the time of the first wave of immigration from Pakistan and India in the 1950s. This immigration was encouraged by the Foreign Office to fill the manual jobs that were then vacant. Today (2004) I count some of Bradford’s Muslim leaders among my friends.
So I welcome the debate sparked by Britain’s race relations chief, Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, about the integration of immigrants as opposed to multiculturalism. In an interview in The Times, Phillips argued, in effect, that the received wisdom of advocating multiculturalism was simply not working: it has led to segregated pockets, or ghettos, of ethnic minority communities that don’t feel integrated into mainstream British society. ‘The first thing we must do is call [young Muslims] British, again and again and again, telling them that they are British Muslims and we accept them’, he said.
That latter phrase is a key to the debate. The white community does not always accept them (though Yorkshire warm heartedness and good humour are mitigating factors). The second and third generation of Muslim and Asian immigrants, who have grown up as UK citizens, often feeling alienated from their parents’ cultural roots but are too often kept at arms length by the white majority.
Too often the white kid gets the job on offer rather than the Muslim kid who may have the same qualifications. Such discrimination is outlawed but it still continues.
British foreign policy encouraged immigration. It could be argued that that policy, at a time of full employment in Britain, was racist in itself. Whites didn’t want to do the menial, low-paid jobs, so they were offered to people of other races. Now we could not run our health service or our public transport without non-whites. But fear of ‘the other’, often out of ignorance or a lack of contact, too easily leads to racism, extremism and hatred, and a corresponding reaction from young and alienated Muslims.
Many have integrated happily and successfully. But if integration is ever going to work it will depend, as much as anything, on the attitudes of the white majority. Otherwise it is hardly surprising that Muslims and others minorities stick together in pockets which represent multiculturalism but not integration.
NOTE: Individuals of many cultures, nationalities, religions, and beliefs are actively involved with Initiatives of Change. These commentaries represent the views of the writer and not necessarily those of Initiatives of Change as a whole.
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