Weekly Worker 593 Thursday September 22 2005

New Orleans comes to Britain?

Communists have always argued that multiculturalist ideology and implementation has introduced retrogressive divisions and are not surprised by Trevor Phillips u-turn, says Eddie Ford

Hurricane Katrina vengefully exposed the gross inequalities that blight the United States. The world saw how the faces of those left stranded and desperate in New Orleans were overwhelming black - not white, like most of those who composed the middle to higher echelons of the various state and federal agencies (particularly the Federal Emergency Management Agency). Far from being an ugly phenomenon on the steady retreat, ghettoisation, it seems, still effects and distorts American society with the same or even greater intensity than that which we associate with the ‘bad old days’ of the pre-civil rights era.

Surely the United Kingdom though, with its decades of ‘enlightened multiculturalism’ and institutional anti-racism - not to mention its proud social democratic heritage - has a fundamentally different social make-up to the US? If a Katrina or worse struck Britain, no doubt we would all muck in together like in the ‘good old days’ of the Blitz - with the Smiths and the Patels forming new bonds of kinship and unity. Communities hitherto disconnected would forge friendships. Order and British decency would be restored.

Well, think again - some suggest. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, has voiced the concern that the UK is becoming more, not less, ghettoised and argued that Katrina should serve as a wake-up call to those who believe that we have a racially/ethnically integrated society in Britain. In fact, worries Phillips, multiculturalist Britain is splintering at an alarming rate.

This is the message that Britain’s premier “race chief” (The Sunday Times September 18) was due to give on Thursday September 22 to the Manchester Council for Community Relations (whose slogan is, interestingly enough, ‘All different - all equal’, a formulation strikingly reminiscent of the old apartheid ‘equal but different’ credo). Britain is at risk of “sleepwalking” into “New Orleans-style segregation”, Phillips says in his much leaked speech, with “passively coexisting ethnic and religious communities, eyeing each other over the fences of our differences”. If something urgent is not done, he continues, the “nightmare” of “fully fledged ghettos” will come to Britain.

Already, according to Phillips, UK society is “becoming more divided by race and religion” - evidence lies in the fact that “our ordinary schools” are gradually “becoming more exclusive”, with “virtual ‘Whites, keep out’ signs in some urban institutions”, and even the universities are “starting to become colour-coded”. Bleakly, Phillips fears that some districts are on their way to being “literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and trepidation and from which nobody ever escapes undamaged”.

Given this grim, not to say exaggeratedly pessimistic, scenario, Phillips believes that the authorities might soon have no choice but to force ‘white’ schools to take large numbers of ethnic minority pupils in order to combat communalism and aid integration - a sort of UK version, if you like, of the disastrous bussing strategy deployed by a pressurised US federal government during the 1960s as part of its bid to undermine the segregationist grip of the southern states, whose educational institutions were racist citadels. Instead of making students travel to the other side of their city, how about massively increasing spending on deprived inner-city schools, as a way of achieving equality?

Of course, apropos of Phillips, we have been here before. Until recently, he was regarded as one of the leading advocates - indeed the apostle - of multiculturalism, automatically making him the bête noire of rabid anti-multiculturalists like Norman Tebbit and Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail. However, he appears to have grown disenchanted with the ideology and its implications. Notably, in an interview with The Times last year, he proclaimed - to great liberal and ‘politically correct’ dismay - that multiculturalism was out of date because it encouraged “separateness” between communities. Specifically, and now very topically post-July 7, Phillips focused on the situation of young muslims in the UK, claiming that they were being “indoctrinated by extremists” who told them they would never be part of British society, because of their colour and religion.

In the view of Phillips: “The first thing we must do is call them British again and again and again. Tell them they are British muslims and we accept them.” Logically, for Phillips, this introduced the imperative to “assert a core of Britishness”, because we find ourselves in “a different world from the 1960s and 1970s”. He also added - further shocking his former comrade-in-arms - that multiculturalism in fact stood for the wrong values: “What we should be talking about now is how we reach an integrated society - one in which people are equal under the law, where there are some shared values” (April 3 2004).

Communists say there is a kernel of truth to Phillips’s words - then and now. Yes, the ideology of multiculturalism has been divisive and anti-integrationalist - but, of course, our analysis and concerns are of a fundamentally different nature to Phillips’s. The CRE chairman, as a comfortable, well-salaried bourgeois, naturally fears ‘instability’ and ‘division’, as such a state of affairs poses a direct material threat to him and his class - the current ruling order must be defended and preserved at all costs. Therefore, quite understandably, Phillips wants the state and the ruling class to be in possession of a convincing set of ideas, an ideology, which will make the masses look to the national flag - not class - for its prime source of loyalty and identification.

In the past, Phillips clearly thought that multiculturalism was one of the main ideological vehicles to deliver this much desired social peace. Now, it appears, he no longer feels that to be the case. If anything, multiculturalism - partly thanks to the negative example of the United States - is beginning to look like a bit of a bad bet for increasing members of the ruling elite and their backers. Instead, Phillips, and others, are trying to construct a ‘new patriotism’, which remains fully committed to bourgeois anti-racism but dumps most or all of the increasingly awkward nostrums of multiculturalism.

On the other hand, we communists have always argued that multiculturalist ideology and implementation, especially in local government, has introduced retrogressive divisions - that is, reducing the working class to a patchwork quilt of different and competing (so-called) ethnic and racial groupings and sub-groupings. In this way, multiculturalism and its cult of ‘difference’ acts to erode the socialist project and ultimately acts as a rival, not an adjunct, to our internationalism.

Indicatively, Harriet Harman, now minister for constitutional affairs, seems to sympathise with Phillips’s comments. She has stated that the UK was “looking like America”, with some of Britain’s poor and black sinking into the same ‘underclass’ position as those in the US who were so battered by Katrina.

Here, presumably, Harman is referring to a recent YouGov poll for the CRE - which showed that 83% of whites have no friends who are practising muslims, while only 48% of non-white people do. It also revealed that 94% of whites, compared with 47% of people from ethnic minorities, say most or all their friends are white. Additionally, a Mori poll conducted last year for Prospect magazine showed that 41% of whites, compared with 26% of ethnic minorities, want the ‘races’ to live separately. There are other such - skewed and actually totally uninformative - studies and polls which seem to confirm the alleged drift into separatism/communalism. Clearly there are divisions and a general loss of direction in the political establishment.

Blair, of course, wants to hatch more faith and denominational schools, which can only lead to the further New Orleanisation of the UK. Obviously, Trevor Phillips’s latest intervention in this debate implicitly questions that endeavour - leaving the prime minister open to the reasonable charge that he seems determined to build ghettos, rather than demolish them.

It is also worth noting the problems that plague Holocaust Memorial Day, first introduced in 1999 - as it touches upon the questions of multiculturalism, integration, ‘islamophobia’, etc. Whatever some might claim, it is self-evident that HMD is a product of the ‘holocaust industry’, existing to serve two vital functions: to peddle the ‘The Holocaust’ as a categorically unique event in human history and, perhaps more importantly, to whitewash the role played by imperialism during World War II - especially British imperialism, of course. Blessed by priest, generals and mainstream politicians, HMD - and all other events like it - turns that barbaric world war into a noble crusade to defeat fascism and ‘save the Jews’ from evil Nazi madmen.

However, in reality, allocating such a privileged position to ‘The Holocaust’ can have the opposite effect to the one obviously intended - to promote ‘inclusivity’ and the benign, anti-racist credentials of the British state. Many muslims, especially as the carnage continues in Iraq, find HMD alienating and quite hypocritical. As Sir Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain put it, HMD is “racially selective” and “morally problematic” - reminding readers that when it was first touted, the MCB called instead for the “establishment of an EU genocide memorial day” (The Guardian September 20).

For expressing these views, Iqbal was widely slated - especially in the pages of The Spectator by Rod Liddle, the opinionated ex-political editor of the BBC’s Today programme. In a remarkably ill-tempered and stupid tirade, Liddle raged that HMD is “offensive only if you really don’t like Jewish people” and “was established for the rest of us, we gentiles, to remember and remember well a specific appalling crime committed against one race of people, primarily so that we may guard against such a thing happening again”. He concludes: “It is a lesson entirely lost, though, upon our muslim leaders, no matter how moderate they insist upon telling us they are” (September 17).

Communists treat Liddle’s muslim-baiting with contempt. Iqbal though, in his own way and no doubt for his own sectional reasons, has touched upon a truth - that the ‘official’ doctrines and myths of the British state are beginning to lose their purchase. Just ask the July 7 suicide bombers - if you could. Multiculturalism, before our very eyes, is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions - and Phillips’s ‘new patriotism’ is doomed to meet a similar fate.

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