A duty to integrate?

Published on Sunday 10 December 2006 00:55

MY NICKNAME at school was Bounty Bar. It was a throwaway, childish dig, but a racist one nonetheless, because it referred to the fact that my classmates saw me as brown on the outside, white on the inside.

What they were alluding to was that although I looked like the many other Asians in our school (because, you know, we all look the same) I was different as I didn't hang out with my own kind: I watched Neighbours, wasn't religious and liked fish fingers as much as mutter paneer.

It wasn't until years later that I asked my parents why I mainly had white friends, why I didn't speak Kannada, their language, and why I didn't know more about Bangalore in south India, where they are both from or, for that matter, their religion Hinduism.

The answer was interesting and came back to me in light of the latest debate over the issue of multiculturalism and integration - two terms which have bizarrely become so at odds with one another in the past couple of years - following Tony Blair's speech on the subject on Friday.

My parents explained that after arriving in Britain in the early 1970s, a much more racist Britain than it is today, they decided that they wanted their children to be as British as possible so that our lives would be easier and we would have greater opportunities than they had.

How could I argue? It seemed to me a bold decision and one that worked out for the best, although as a result I do feel more estranged from my parents' home country and their culture than I would like, and I regularly kick myself for passing up the chance of being bilingual. Unsurprisingly, integration had both positive and negative sides.

But does any of this mean that Blair is right to argue, as Trevor Phillips, Ruth Kelly and so many others also have, that we all have "a duty to integrate", or that multicultural Britain has been thrown "into sharp relief" by last year's London bombings? In my view, no; just as has happened every time this debate has reared its head, most recently with all the attendant trappings of faith schools, the veil and terrorism, the blame has been landed squarely at multiculturalism's door.

Is anyone else starting to forget what multiculturalism actually means? A year ago Blair said he never quite knew what people meant by the term, which is pretty much the only time I've ever agreed with him.

I used to think it meant that I could live, work and hang out in the same places, the same cities, towns, offices, galleries and bars, as everyone else - that I was entitled to the same opportunities and quality of life, and that diversity was more than merely welcome in Britain, it was something to be celebrated, and perhaps, dare I say it, was part of being British itself.

Sure, adapting to British life - whatever that happened to be - was part of it, especially if, as with my parents, you wanted to further yourself as much as possible. But it also went the other way. Communities were supposedly enriched by rubbing up against each other's cultures and traditions.

Now, however, rather than standing for a rich diversity of cultures, multiculturalism has somehow become synonymous with separateness. It has become associated with fearful, isolated and inward-looking communities. It has been identified as the enemy of integration or, as New Labour terms it, "community cohesion". And when the Prime Minister pledged to crack down on funding for religious and racial groups, he once again conflated multiculturalism with religion.

Quite how multiculturalism has also been tangled up with terrorism is beyond me, when the majority of those among ethnic minorities who have not been integrated are mothers and grandmothers who have been unable to learn English; these are hardly the type prone to terrorism. Even looking at the backgrounds of the London bombers, one of the most striking things is just how integrated they were in their younger lives before they were seduced by fundamentalism.

In communities where racial tensions are high and people are consequently suspicious or scared of one another, levels of opportunity tend to be low. It's the deprivation that we should be addressing, rather than trying to force communities where trust has already broken down to just get out and mix more.

None of this is helped by the fact that whenever the debate comes around, the "other" voices we get to hear consist in the main of either Muslim Association of Britain spokespeople or self-appointed first-generation community leaders. These voices are pretty much exclusively male.

How could they possibly represent the 1.8 million population of Muslims, especially second and third generations, let alone the millions of other ethnic minorities in Britain?

I, for one, am getting a little fed up of unrepresentative people speaking for me.

Blair is right, however, to call on mosques that exclude women's voices to "look again at their practices" and to rule out the possibility of introducing Islamic sharia law into the country. If tolerance and equality are what make Britain, which is the Prime Minister's claim, this is an important part of ensuring their protection, but again it is largely a matter of religion, not culture.

A study last week showed just how sidelined Muslim women are feeling, particularly in relation to such debates as the veil issue, both within and outside of their communities. It's time we got to hear some of these voices. After all, isn't that the point of a tolerant society?