Amidst the sadness of yesterday, there was some amusement to be had. No, I'm not referring to the untimely death of Rik Mayall, a man who made a very funny TV programme thirty years ago, and some progressively less funny ones thereafter. I'm talking about the Ofsted report into conditions in Birmingham state schools which has reported a series of attempts to Islamify education, together with a culture of fear, intimdation and bullying of staff.
Despite the seriousness of the Ofsted revelations there are laughs to be had, for as with so many of the most enjoyable political events the Trojan Horse row is embarrassing for all sides.
It's embarrassing for Ofsted because it beggars belief that schools which only a year ago they said were outstanding could have plummeted so rapidly in standard. Recent inspections have been made in the light of the - perhaps fake - Trojan Horse letter detailing an Islamic plot, and it looks suspiciously as it Ofsted haven't been looking for Islamification until now. In other words Ofsted, failing previously to do its job properly, has moved the goalposts. Sir Michael Wilshaw declined to take questions about his report yesterday, no doubt fearing that some of them might be awkward.
It's embarrassing for the Tories too, because the culture of autonomy, started under the Blair governments and enthusiastically taken up by Michael Gove, assumed that all the people running schools outside of local authority control would be fit to do so. Ofsted's report shows that it ain't necessarily so. Whither Academies and Free Schools now?
But most of all it's embarrassing for Labour and its supporters. Why? Well the most obvious thing about the Wilshaw report is that, apart from a few instances of anti-Christian assemblies being given by Al Qaeda sympathisers, it appears to have uncovered very little in the way of Islamic extremism. What's so particularly worrying about the situation Wilshaw details is that it appears to have arisen from from the application of basic run-of-the-mill Islamic principles - girls marginalised in learning, segregated classrooms, evolution dismissed, arts classes cancelled, a performance of Much Ado About Nothing abandoned. Whatever else this is, extremism it's not. It's just consistent with the way Islam thinks.
To be clear, I've written previously here that I don't blame the school governors for trying to Islamify their schools. If you have a democratic system of governor oversight, Muslims have as much right as anyone else to do the overseeing. Our outrage that these people should have the temerity to try and run schools their way is fake, and our surprise is jejeune. Who knew this could possibly happen? Who could possibly have thought that if you invited hundreds of thousands adherents of one of the world's great religions into a country whose culture still substantially derives from an earlier loyalty to a substantially different one, conflict might ensue?
A lot of people on the Left certainly didn't see it coming. All governments have presided over lax immigration rules (and lax enforcement of them), but the Labour party has long been immigration's champion. Britain's liberal ruling classes, cheered on by their friends in the media (and, it must be said, in the CBI), have for decades made reservations about immigration a taboo subject. Moreover, as David Goodhart's book The British Dream details, Labour governments and Labour local authorities have devoted much money, resources and intellectual capital to the idea that immigrants should retain their own identities rather than subsuming themselves in British culture. No doubt it seemed a good and respectful idea at the time. But as events in Birmingham demonstrate, there's a downside. That flapping sound you can hear emanating from the Midlands is the sound of chickens coming home to roost.
I've written a lot here about racism and racist language. Although I'm a devotee of free speech in almost all circumstances, I concede that a country which has taken on a lot of people who look different needs to make a titanic effort to absorb them successfully. A curtailment of the right to be offensive is a price worth paying. You only have to look at the latte-shaded England football team to see the success of that assimilation project. But if it was worth criminalising white people resentful at seeing their towns transformed in a way they didn't like for the cause of long term unity, it surely must also be worth applying similarly draconian solutions to what is a much bigger problem.
Absorbing Afro-Caribbean immigrants was relatively easy. They came from a Christian or post-Christian culture which fitted pretty well with Britain in the late 20th century. Integrating people with a different culture altogether, with radically different views on the family, relations between men and women, the role of women in society, the right of girls to be educated (I could go on here), is going to be much harder. The place to start would seem to be in schools. With the young ones in fact.
