open Democracy News Analysis - Thoughts on multiculturalism, Vron Ware - Comments

Toque on "Thoughts on multiculturalism"

Toque — Sat, 31 May 2008 18:25:00 +0100

I don't think discussion of multiculturalism means we are ignoring immigration, we wouldn't be having the discussion if it weren't for immigration.

The sheer scale of immigration, and the fact that for the large part it wasn't wanted, is the problem. It simply hasn't been possible to integrate the number of newcomers that have arrived, and their arrival (combined with a native population that didn't want, or ask, to be multicultural) has displaced or destroyed urban, white, mostly working class, communities (see Billy Bragg (who now lives in Dorset) or Michael Collins). Urban places that I knew as a child, parts of Birmingham, Coventry, Slough, are now completely unrecognisable. Walk down the street in Moseley and you don't even feel that you are in England, you may as well be somewhere in the Middle East. I don't know if that's what the Multiculturalists were intending to achieve but I can assure you that it wasn't something that the original inhabitants of Moseley wanted. And therein lies the problem. Resentment.

witanspeaker on "Thoughts on multiculturalism"

witanspeaker — Sat, 31 May 2008 16:02:55 +0100

It seems to me that criticism of multiculturalism is just another way for us to ignore the real issue: immigration and its permanent distortion of the settled nation.

britologywatch on "Thoughts on multiculturalism"

britologywatch — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:31:56 +0100

I think you can distinguish at least three main types of multiculturalism:

1) 'Exclusive multiculturalism', which is the classic kind that has tended to be discredited recently: the idea of encouraging people of different cultural backgrounds to retain and affirm their original cultures alongside the 'British' culture. I call this 'exclusive' because it does contribute to perpetuating an exclusion or separation of minority cultures from the mainstream 'British' (and especially English, Scottish, etc.) cultures

2) 'Inclusive mono-culturalism': this is the model New Labour attempted to implement, particularly post-9/11. This involves saying that people of non-indigenous cultures are free to continue expressing their original cultural identities but must subordinate the beliefs, values and behaviours characteristic of these cultures to an overarching acceptance of, and submission to, 'British values' and British norms. This is part of the overall project to articulate and impose a unitary Britishness, and it is if anything more divisive than exclusive multi-culturalism, as it imposes a British identity on people of an originally non-British background that sets those people apart from the primary English / Scottish / Welsh / Irish identity of 'indigenous' British people. It was also highly antagonistic towards Muslims, suggesting that they should abandon certain religiously inspired practices deemed unacceptable in the eyes of the purported normative Britishness, e.g. wearing the full veil

3) 'Inclusive multi-culturalism': this is my preferred model, which involves the attempt to integrate cultural multiplicity into the 'primary' British identities, i.e. English, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish. In practice, what this would mean is proactive initiatives at local-community level to open up dialogue, cultural exchange and joint community projects involving all the different cultures in any given local area, i.e. it cannot be a top-down governmental initiative. The ultimate aspiration would be a blending of the different cultural identities into a richer Englishness, Scottishness, etc.: cultural entities which would be themselves transformed by that process.

Toque on "Thoughts on multiculturalism"

Toque — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:12:00 +0100

I don't think anyone has a problem with multiculturalism with a small 'm'. That's just a natural product of a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, individualist society; it's healthy, liberal and libertarian; respectful and tolerant of others way of life.

What people do have a problem with is Multiculturalism (capital M) which encourages commuialism and group (instead of individual) rights.

The word was used as a by-word for pluralism and tolerance, but now it's become a by-word for ghettoisation, cultural Marxism and social engineering.

Thoughts on multiculturalism, Vron Ware

vron.ware — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:43:05 +0100

Vron Ware (London, author): It has become fashionable now to deride multiculturalism as 'over', disastrous, etc, but I still think it is important to try to write a more complex and faithful history of how things have developed in this country, with all the mistakes, successes, and other consequences. I don't see how we can have a constructive, political discussion about where we want to go in the future without this - and that applies to all the component parts of the UK, not just England.

For those paying attention throughout the 70s 80s and 90s, it was clear that that successive governments were avoiding taking a principled position on questions of racism and exclusion, whether in relation to housing, education, equal opportunities, national identity and so on. What has happened since the 2001 riots in mill towns, and particularly since the London bombings, is that 'multiculturalism' appears, with hindsight, to have been a coherent ideology sowing the seeds for the conflicts and crises we have now. This both obscures the rich ways that people have muddled along together in particular places, and gives the adjective 'multicultural' a bad name (although it still functions as a default for 'mixed', diverse, etc). It also masks the endemic racism that allowed certain places to practice segregation either by default or by bad planning.

A great change has happened over the last fifty years that has created a country that will never again be homogenous in the way it once was. Maybe it's better to stop talking about 'multiculturalism' altogether and find some different ways (and words) to make that recent and contested past useful in our current debates.