There is a story that when the poet and historian Robert Conquest was asked if he wanted to retitle a reissue of his seminal study of Stalin's bloody 1930s purges, his friend Kingsley Amis suggested "I Told You So You Fucking Fools".
This morning as I flicked through the new Civitas report, Race and Faith, by
Trevor Phillips, the former student activist and broadcaster, I wanted to shout out Amis's suggestion on every page.
You can download Phillips' masterly dissection of our failure to manage diversity here.
I haven’t read it all
yet, but the thrust of it seems to be that too much tolerance of diversity is a
bad thing and that “the different sets of values
and behaviours prevalent in some ethnocultural communities present a serious
challenge to the process of integration in our society” (no shit Sherlock).
“The
typical response of Britain’s political and media elite confronted with awkward
facts has been evasion”, he writes.
We risk “allowing our country to
sleepwalk to a catastrophe that will set community against community, endorse
sexist aggression, suppress freedom of expression, reverse hard-won civil
liberties, and undermine the liberal democracy that has served this country so
well for so long.”
I can’t tell you
how much I’m enjoying reading it. Because this is Trevor Phillips, a black man, a member of the Labour party, not some hatchet faced racist from the Tory shires. Now at last they'll start listening over at the Guardian.
No, OK, that's clearly not going to happen.
“The premise that any kind of
under-achievement or failure amongst people of colour must stem solely from
unequal treatment by the dominant society implies that all those who come from
minority groups have no agency other than that allowed by whites. People of
colour, for example, become puppets of others’ prejudices, with no capability
of managing or improving their own lives.”
Hallelujah.
“. .
. some minority groups hold very different values and ambitions
than those commonly held amongst the dominant majority; that those values and
ambitions are even further away from liberal ideals than the average; and that
because they are sincerely held by those groups, they aren’t going to change
any time soon. The European social liberal clings to the belief that we are
essentially the same ‘under the skin’ in the desperate hope that, with time,
‘liberal’ values will inevitably prevail amongst people of all backgrounds.”
“And still, our political and
media elites appear not to have scented this new wind. We maintain a polite
silence masked by noisily debated public fictions such as ‘multiculturalism’
and ‘community cohesion’. Rome may not yet be in flames, but I think I can
smell the smouldering whilst we hum to the music of liberal self-delusion.”
I particularly
enjoyed that one. Any sentence including the words "liberal self-delusion" is good with me.
Phillips continues, "even those of us on the progressive wing of politics must now surely accept that in the conditions of today’s society, our reflex defence of traditional behaviours and separate communities is actually undermining one of the most cherished of left-wing values – social solidarity."
And on p.32 I am truly transported to heaven. Mr Phillips writes of the Macpherson report into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence, "It used the phrase ‘institutional racism’ to describe what it had found. This was a mistake whose consequences are still felt today." Oh Jesus. Nirvana. I have been pointing out for years (on this blog; to anyone who would listen) that some policemen were racist, just as some of them were corrupt and incompetent, but that is not the same as the institution being racist. Now at last someone agrees with me.
Where
I think Phillips is wrong (and this touches on the recent debates about Ken
Livingstone's anti-semitism) is that none of this has anything to do with race. It’s all to do with culture. Afro-Caribbean migration worked, in the end,
because the migrants had a broadly similar cultural background to the white
population, and because of intermarriage.
Muslim migration isn’t working because the migrants have a significantly
differently cultural background, one which, moreover, makes intermarriage
difficult (if not actually physically dangerous for the participants). We are in grave danger of turning parts of Britain into societies split along religious lines. As if Northern Ireland wasn't bad enough. Anyone who thinks this is hyperbole hasn't been to the Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns.
The
use of the word race, I contend, has actually done enormous damage to our
ability to identify the phenomenon confronting us, not only because it obscures
its real nature but because it enables those who feel criticised to shut off
debate by playing the “race” card. As Phillips himself writes, "There are costs to this fastidiousness. If we cannot
even name some of the aspects of the problems, how can
we seriously hope to address them? . . . But the use of these terms has a purpose for those who
coin them. They are one more brick in the wall of
denial."
There are times in Race and Faith when Phillips seems to be within touching distance of grasping how damaging this has been:
"However, the most dangerous trend in my view, has
been the recent over-use of the epithet ‘racist’. This
word (and its close cousin, ‘Islamophobe’) is now freely
applied to almost anyone who disagrees with liberal
orthodoxy on matters of racial and religious difference.
A word with such toxic associations should really be
reserved for individuals or organisations which are
truly malevolent and racially exclusive . . . The widening of the use of the word ‘racist’ has now
spread beyond political knockabout to encompass the
concept of ‘microaggression’, borrowed from American
university campuses."
As a defence against this kind of folly, "Parliament should . . . renew and formalise a presumption in favour of freedom of expression . . . there should be a case for the accretion of limitations and caveats on freedom of expression to be swept aside and replaced by legislation ensuring that only speech and gestures that directly encourage physical harm are subject to legal restriction". Yes, yes and thrice yes. Bravely, Phillips sets out what this might mean in practice. Calling him a "nigger", however rude and offensive, would not be an offence. Calling out, "Get that nigger over there" certainly would be.
The laissez-faire multiculturalism beloved by the Left hasn't worked, Phillips concludes. "It is time for us to abandon the old idea of organic
integration. We have neither the time nor, in the modern
jargon, the bandwidth, to allow a natural convergence
of so many different cultures and traditions. Nor, in a
globalised world, with the aggressive proselytising of
Islamist militancy, can we rely on the notion that every
community will, with time, come to see the advantages
and attractiveness of western values and ways of living."
Correct. For me one of the most perplexing, infuriating and contemptible aspects of non-European migration has been that migrants came to Britain because the values of the countries they left behind had ensured they remained poverty-stricken, sectarian and corrupt basket-cases.
And yet, having arrived here (or having been born here) they persisted not only in clinging to the practices that their ancestors were, wittingly or not, trying to escape, but also tried to elbow aside the culture that made the UK somewhere worth escaping to.
