BRITISH IDENTITY
In 2001 the Conservative election
manifesto proclaimed: ‘Britain is made up of many
ethnic communities. Conservatives
believe that we are richer and stronger for it.’
While Labour’s manifesto stated: ‘Labour believes that Britain can be a model of a multi-cultural multi-racial society.’
The imperative to publicly celebrate multi-cultural Britain is obviously a reaction to the fact that there is widespread public unease with the whole notion. While some promoters of multi-culturalism wish to fight racism, it is reasonable to ask if the promotion of a multi-cultural society is in the interests of the British people.
Numbers are important and the impact of millions of people from different cultures is quite different from the pressure of a handful of strangers. The presence of a single Uzbek lecturer may enrich the city of Oxford; the presence of 12,000 Uzbeks is unlikely to do so. In fact all the evidence is that British people do not want multi-culturalism, do not want to be culturally enriched by the presence of communities of different cultures and actively avoid their presence.
Migration Watch reported on 10/02/05 that:
Nor is this surprising. The whole of the twentieth century was a record of the breakdown of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic states. The first collapse was at the end of the First World War when the liberal leaders of the USA and Britain, Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, promoted the break up of the Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires. The second wave was the breakdown of the colonial empires with British India dissolving into Hindu majority and Muslim majority states, the dissolution of a multi-cultural Palestine into ethnic and religiously separate states and, on a gentler scale, the dissolution of the Malaysia Federation, the West Indian Federation, etc. The third wave of dissolution after the collapse of communism fragmented the Soviet State into new nation states and dissolved Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The whole history of the twentieth century then is the dissolution of empires into nation states whose boundaries are fixed on ethnic, religious or communitarian lines.
Despite this constant and repeated lesson, European and American politicians have encouraged immigration of people from different cultures into their homelands. At first the numbers were small and the impact marginal but this is no longer the case.
The USA, of course, accepted millions of European immigrants up to 1914 who were encouraged to turn themselves in a couple of generations into English speaking Americans, often anglicising their names. The resumption of immigration into the US since 1965 has been quite different. Immigrants are now nearly all at the bottom of the economic pile, are ghettoised by being Spanish speaking and are exerting downward pressure on the incomes of working class Americans as well as the quality of their schools and services leading the US more and more to a so-called Brazilian society, moreover such a society which has got a substantial minority speaking a different language. The US has, however, a powerful citizenship myth which has, so far, helped to mitigate this process.
The present policies of British governments encourage the formation of ethnic enclaves.
First, the very existence of the CRE focuses attention on racial divisiveness and encourages disharmony. There is no need for such a body which has a history of divisive behaviour. Nor does it exist in such countries as the USA and India.
Then the British government has allowed and encouraged the crystallization of ethnic ghettoes. It has allowed religious minorities to bring in religious teachers from outside. It has allowed foreign languages to be used in contact with local administration and state services. It has publicly pushed the idea of employment quotas (admittedly lumping together all ethnic minorities in the naive belief that a Japanese immigrant will welcome, say, more Bangladeshi police officers). It has allowed chain migration and the constant reinforcement and expansion of ethnic communities by bringing in marriage partners from their homeland.
These parallel communities are now deeply entrenched and do not celebrate cultural diversity, indeed they are an obstacle to it. They are now subject to mediation to the white majority by a special class of community leaders, unelected but potent in playing group and enclave politics. The postal voting scandals in Birmingham show the detachment from normal life in Britain that could allow Labour councillors to gather hundreds of bogus postal votes.
Then there is the dishonesty of the arguments for multi-culturalism. ‘To claim that migrants in the North have made a net economic contribution and are the source of social enrichment is obvious dishonesty’ Steve Moxon. The Institute of Community Studies calls it ‘a social disaster’.
Successive British governments have proclaimed and celebrated cultural diversity despite no wish or mandate from the British people for this policy. Indeed, British people have voted with their feet in the phenomenon of ‘white flight’.
Nor is this ‘white flight’ unrealistic since it avoids English families sending their children to multi-language schools and experiencing multi-language public services.
Then there is the expense of running a multi-cultural society.
Poorer white people have to take the greatest burdens of a multi-cultural society. Not only are their wages depressed by mass immigration but they find it harder to escape from polyglot schools; they also rely more on state services which are increasingly skewed in favour of minorities such as housing for large families; they resent their relatively small losses to their income more than middle class families who pay out more in taxes to fund multi-culturalism but are insulated from its effects as these rarely impinges on their communities.
The politicians have failed to confront the issue of national identity. After all, virtually everyone in England in 1950 was English and those who had Scottish or Irish ancestors merged into the English population within a couple of generations. There has been almost no effort to work out what form of adaptation newcomers should undertake and the onus for adaptation has been thrown on the host community by the setting up of the CRE, etc. and the fostering of the idea of multi-culturalism.
There is now a belated realization of the threat to national cohesion, the danger of enclaves and the fact that London could become a gigantic melting pot that commands the loyalty of no one. Britain is following the path of the Netherlands where, in 2002, the EU Commissioner, Fritz Bolkenstein, said that the integration of immigrants had failed and the situation was deteriorating. Dutch academics forecast a ‘Europe in a shambles’. In Britain it now appears that worries about integration and assimilation can no longer be beaten down by shouts of ‘racism’.
What needs to be done?
The most important matter is to regain the confidence of the people by strict and well-policed control of immigration. This is still not being addressed.
Some basic facts must be recognized.
Even if we reject multi-culturalism and tighten loyalty to British society, it is not possible, given the numbers and marriage patterns of ethnic minorities, to foresee either assimilation as with Scottish or Irish migrants to the UK or integration as with some West Indian migrants. The best that can be achieved is probably a form of ‘co-existence’, recognizing that certain communities have such different religious and cultural backgrounds to the English majority that they cannot hope to be integrated.
Co-existence implies that some cultural traditions of ethnic migrants such as polygamy, engagement in the politics of the country of origin, intermarriage with people from country of origin, etc. must be given up. Allegiance to the British state should be fostered on the basis of fairness, fair contributions bringing reciprocal benefits but admitting that certain ‘core’ activities of the British state would not attract support of some ethnic minorities.
For example, British rule in Ireland never allowed Irish troops to be engaged in Ireland. Lee Kuan Kew’s Singapore recognized that in certain key military units he could not recruit Malays. Similarly India has to take account of its ethnic diversity in its military profiles.
Co-existence, therefore, implies that certain key areas of the state must be largely controlled by the English majority and that accommodation of cultural minorities cannot be complete. Education must be England centred. Treatment of women must conform to the culture of the English majority. Literary and freedom and freedom of the media must not be threatened unreasonably.
National cohesion is based on national identity:
"You can have a Swedish welfare state provided you are a homogenous society with intensely shared values. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests".
[David Willetts]
Citizenship is not an abstract matter simply handing out a bit of paper with ‘British passport’ written on it. It comes out of a shared history, a shared idea of what the nation is for and a shared and continuing national conversation on the values and objectives of a society. ‘Behind every citizen lies a graveyard.’
FUTURUS/18 April 2005
While Labour’s manifesto stated: ‘Labour believes that Britain can be a model of a multi-cultural multi-racial society.’
The imperative to publicly celebrate multi-cultural Britain is obviously a reaction to the fact that there is widespread public unease with the whole notion. While some promoters of multi-culturalism wish to fight racism, it is reasonable to ask if the promotion of a multi-cultural society is in the interests of the British people.
Numbers are important and the impact of millions of people from different cultures is quite different from the pressure of a handful of strangers. The presence of a single Uzbek lecturer may enrich the city of Oxford; the presence of 12,000 Uzbeks is unlikely to do so. In fact all the evidence is that British people do not want multi-culturalism, do not want to be culturally enriched by the presence of communities of different cultures and actively avoid their presence.
Migration Watch reported on 10/02/05 that:
- 606,000 people moved out of London in the last ten years while 726,000 immigrants moved in.
- This internal migration is mainly from areas of high numbers of ethnic minorities to those with predominantly white populations.
- Overall the result is that the white population of the UK and ethnic minorities are becoming increasingly separated.
Nor is this surprising. The whole of the twentieth century was a record of the breakdown of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic states. The first collapse was at the end of the First World War when the liberal leaders of the USA and Britain, Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, promoted the break up of the Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires. The second wave was the breakdown of the colonial empires with British India dissolving into Hindu majority and Muslim majority states, the dissolution of a multi-cultural Palestine into ethnic and religiously separate states and, on a gentler scale, the dissolution of the Malaysia Federation, the West Indian Federation, etc. The third wave of dissolution after the collapse of communism fragmented the Soviet State into new nation states and dissolved Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The whole history of the twentieth century then is the dissolution of empires into nation states whose boundaries are fixed on ethnic, religious or communitarian lines.
Despite this constant and repeated lesson, European and American politicians have encouraged immigration of people from different cultures into their homelands. At first the numbers were small and the impact marginal but this is no longer the case.
The USA, of course, accepted millions of European immigrants up to 1914 who were encouraged to turn themselves in a couple of generations into English speaking Americans, often anglicising their names. The resumption of immigration into the US since 1965 has been quite different. Immigrants are now nearly all at the bottom of the economic pile, are ghettoised by being Spanish speaking and are exerting downward pressure on the incomes of working class Americans as well as the quality of their schools and services leading the US more and more to a so-called Brazilian society, moreover such a society which has got a substantial minority speaking a different language. The US has, however, a powerful citizenship myth which has, so far, helped to mitigate this process.
The present policies of British governments encourage the formation of ethnic enclaves.
First, the very existence of the CRE focuses attention on racial divisiveness and encourages disharmony. There is no need for such a body which has a history of divisive behaviour. Nor does it exist in such countries as the USA and India.
Then the British government has allowed and encouraged the crystallization of ethnic ghettoes. It has allowed religious minorities to bring in religious teachers from outside. It has allowed foreign languages to be used in contact with local administration and state services. It has publicly pushed the idea of employment quotas (admittedly lumping together all ethnic minorities in the naive belief that a Japanese immigrant will welcome, say, more Bangladeshi police officers). It has allowed chain migration and the constant reinforcement and expansion of ethnic communities by bringing in marriage partners from their homeland.
These parallel communities are now deeply entrenched and do not celebrate cultural diversity, indeed they are an obstacle to it. They are now subject to mediation to the white majority by a special class of community leaders, unelected but potent in playing group and enclave politics. The postal voting scandals in Birmingham show the detachment from normal life in Britain that could allow Labour councillors to gather hundreds of bogus postal votes.
Then there is the dishonesty of the arguments for multi-culturalism. ‘To claim that migrants in the North have made a net economic contribution and are the source of social enrichment is obvious dishonesty’ Steve Moxon. The Institute of Community Studies calls it ‘a social disaster’.
Successive British governments have proclaimed and celebrated cultural diversity despite no wish or mandate from the British people for this policy. Indeed, British people have voted with their feet in the phenomenon of ‘white flight’.
Nor is this ‘white flight’ unrealistic since it avoids English families sending their children to multi-language schools and experiencing multi-language public services.
Then there is the expense of running a multi-cultural society.
Poorer white people have to take the greatest burdens of a multi-cultural society. Not only are their wages depressed by mass immigration but they find it harder to escape from polyglot schools; they also rely more on state services which are increasingly skewed in favour of minorities such as housing for large families; they resent their relatively small losses to their income more than middle class families who pay out more in taxes to fund multi-culturalism but are insulated from its effects as these rarely impinges on their communities.
The politicians have failed to confront the issue of national identity. After all, virtually everyone in England in 1950 was English and those who had Scottish or Irish ancestors merged into the English population within a couple of generations. There has been almost no effort to work out what form of adaptation newcomers should undertake and the onus for adaptation has been thrown on the host community by the setting up of the CRE, etc. and the fostering of the idea of multi-culturalism.
There is now a belated realization of the threat to national cohesion, the danger of enclaves and the fact that London could become a gigantic melting pot that commands the loyalty of no one. Britain is following the path of the Netherlands where, in 2002, the EU Commissioner, Fritz Bolkenstein, said that the integration of immigrants had failed and the situation was deteriorating. Dutch academics forecast a ‘Europe in a shambles’. In Britain it now appears that worries about integration and assimilation can no longer be beaten down by shouts of ‘racism’.
What needs to be done?
The most important matter is to regain the confidence of the people by strict and well-policed control of immigration. This is still not being addressed.
Some basic facts must be recognized.
- A multi-cultural society is not desirable. In the modern world, such societies have failed as consciousness of differentiation has increased.
- Citizenship is not an abstract matter, it comes out of shared history and values.
- Strangers who wish to live here must accept that shared history and values.
- The nation has deep roots and cannot be re-fashioned by a cosmopolitan elite.
- Maintenance of special laws is dangerous.
- Maintenance and promotion of enclave languages should cease.
- Religious leaders should not be imported.
- Language and culture tests should be made compulsory for anyone wishing to come to the UK as a migrant.
- Such tests should be compulsory before leave to remain or British citizenship is granted.
- Chain migration should be ended.
- Community leaders should be de-recognised.
- CRE should be abolished.
- Social Services should not to be available for those who are not citizens.
- The bottom line is that migrants must be faced with becoming British people, retaining their religion and some cultural nuances or leaving the country. Normally newcomers integrate via marriage. This is a remote possibility in the case of some migrant communities although not all. Many West Indians are marrying into the white majority since they share culture and religion.
Even if we reject multi-culturalism and tighten loyalty to British society, it is not possible, given the numbers and marriage patterns of ethnic minorities, to foresee either assimilation as with Scottish or Irish migrants to the UK or integration as with some West Indian migrants. The best that can be achieved is probably a form of ‘co-existence’, recognizing that certain communities have such different religious and cultural backgrounds to the English majority that they cannot hope to be integrated.
Co-existence implies that some cultural traditions of ethnic migrants such as polygamy, engagement in the politics of the country of origin, intermarriage with people from country of origin, etc. must be given up. Allegiance to the British state should be fostered on the basis of fairness, fair contributions bringing reciprocal benefits but admitting that certain ‘core’ activities of the British state would not attract support of some ethnic minorities.
For example, British rule in Ireland never allowed Irish troops to be engaged in Ireland. Lee Kuan Kew’s Singapore recognized that in certain key military units he could not recruit Malays. Similarly India has to take account of its ethnic diversity in its military profiles.
Co-existence, therefore, implies that certain key areas of the state must be largely controlled by the English majority and that accommodation of cultural minorities cannot be complete. Education must be England centred. Treatment of women must conform to the culture of the English majority. Literary and freedom and freedom of the media must not be threatened unreasonably.
National cohesion is based on national identity:
"You can have a Swedish welfare state provided you are a homogenous society with intensely shared values. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests".
[David Willetts]
Citizenship is not an abstract matter simply handing out a bit of paper with ‘British passport’ written on it. It comes out of a shared history, a shared idea of what the nation is for and a shared and continuing national conversation on the values and objectives of a society. ‘Behind every citizen lies a graveyard.’
FUTURUS/18 April 2005