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"UK 'must tackle ethnic tensions'" - BBC report
FinsburyParkCarrots
Seattle, WA Posts: 12,223
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5280230.stm
UK 'must tackle ethnic tensions'
Tensions between people of different ethnic groups and faiths in British society must be tackled, says Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly.
As she launched a Commission on Integration and Cohesion, she urged a "new and honest" debate on diversity.
The body, which will start work next month, will look at how communities in England tackle tensions and extremism.
But Ms Kelly says it will not look at whether faith schools are a good thing, insisting parents should have a choice.
The government is aware that society is fragmenting into tribes - but if they are talking about creating common values for different faith groups, what are they?
Munira Mirza, multiculturalism researcher
The government plans to have more faiths schools but critics say they increase segregation between people of different beliefs.
Ms Kelly said Church of England Schools were among the most "diverse" in the country.
And she said Muslim parents should not be denied the same opportunities offered to Christians and Jews in sending their children to faith schools.
But she did suggest faith schools could be encouraged to play sports matches against each other, or twin themselves with schools of a different faith.
Communities divided
The launch of the commission, which was originally mooted last July, comes amid growing fears of alienation, especially among young Muslims.
The Commission on Integration and Cohesion starts work in September and will tour the UK before reporting next June.
It will look at how towns, cities and communities tackle challenges such as segregation and social or economic divisions between different ethnic groups.
The commission is designed to carry on some of the research that followed riots in northern towns in 2001.
Following that violence, experts warned the government some communities were leading "parallel lives" with little or no contact with each other.
Tensions and benefits
In a speech in London, Ms Kelly said the UK had moved away from an era of "uniform consensus" about multi-culturalism.
People were now questioning whether multi-culturalism instead encouraged separateness, she said.
But the new debate had to be based on "fact, not myth".
Ms Kelly promised the commission would not be a "talking shop" and would not focus on tackling the ideology of a "perverted form of Islam" - something the government was examining in other ways.
Instead, it would look at building ways for people to get to know their neighbours and to stop people feeling a sense of "separateness".
Ms Kelly said northern English towns like Oldham had made significant progress in bringing people together since the 2001 riots.
She said: "Multi-culturalism, different communities in Britain, the fact that Britain is open to people of all faiths and none, has been a huge strength of this country.
"But what we have to got to do is recognise that while there have been huge benefits, there are also tensions created.
"The point of the commission... is to try and examine how those tensions arise and what local communities can do on the ground practically to tackle those and make a difference."
Ms Kelly said she accepted there were "elements of the Muslim community that profoundly disagree with British foreign policy".
HAVE YOUR SAY
Tolerance is a virtue, but we have made it our fault
Jim, Bedford
But she said foreign policy was not a "root cause" of extremism and could not be tailored for any one section of the community.
For the Conservatives Damian Green said: "There is a huge and vital challenge to be met in helping Britain's Muslim communities integrate fully with the rest of society.
"We hope that this latest government initiative has more substance than previous initiatives which have tended to grab a headline but then achieve very little in the long term."
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg said the belated launch of the commission was welcome.
But he warned: "To be truly effective, any attempt to reach out to disaffected members of our Muslim communities must also incorporate an honest debate about this government's foreign policy and some of its counter-terrorism measures."
Operation Black Vote condemned what it called a new attack on multi-culturalism by Ms Kelly.
And it said she had failed to mention the underlying roots of inequality, discrimination and racism faced by many black and ethnic minority communities.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/5280230.stm
Published: 2006/08/24 12:40:20 GMT
© BBC MMVI
Any thoughts on this?
UK 'must tackle ethnic tensions'
Tensions between people of different ethnic groups and faiths in British society must be tackled, says Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly.
As she launched a Commission on Integration and Cohesion, she urged a "new and honest" debate on diversity.
The body, which will start work next month, will look at how communities in England tackle tensions and extremism.
But Ms Kelly says it will not look at whether faith schools are a good thing, insisting parents should have a choice.
The government is aware that society is fragmenting into tribes - but if they are talking about creating common values for different faith groups, what are they?
Munira Mirza, multiculturalism researcher
The government plans to have more faiths schools but critics say they increase segregation between people of different beliefs.
Ms Kelly said Church of England Schools were among the most "diverse" in the country.
And she said Muslim parents should not be denied the same opportunities offered to Christians and Jews in sending their children to faith schools.
But she did suggest faith schools could be encouraged to play sports matches against each other, or twin themselves with schools of a different faith.
Communities divided
The launch of the commission, which was originally mooted last July, comes amid growing fears of alienation, especially among young Muslims.
The Commission on Integration and Cohesion starts work in September and will tour the UK before reporting next June.
It will look at how towns, cities and communities tackle challenges such as segregation and social or economic divisions between different ethnic groups.
The commission is designed to carry on some of the research that followed riots in northern towns in 2001.
Following that violence, experts warned the government some communities were leading "parallel lives" with little or no contact with each other.
Tensions and benefits
In a speech in London, Ms Kelly said the UK had moved away from an era of "uniform consensus" about multi-culturalism.
People were now questioning whether multi-culturalism instead encouraged separateness, she said.
But the new debate had to be based on "fact, not myth".
Ms Kelly promised the commission would not be a "talking shop" and would not focus on tackling the ideology of a "perverted form of Islam" - something the government was examining in other ways.
Instead, it would look at building ways for people to get to know their neighbours and to stop people feeling a sense of "separateness".
Ms Kelly said northern English towns like Oldham had made significant progress in bringing people together since the 2001 riots.
She said: "Multi-culturalism, different communities in Britain, the fact that Britain is open to people of all faiths and none, has been a huge strength of this country.
"But what we have to got to do is recognise that while there have been huge benefits, there are also tensions created.
"The point of the commission... is to try and examine how those tensions arise and what local communities can do on the ground practically to tackle those and make a difference."
Ms Kelly said she accepted there were "elements of the Muslim community that profoundly disagree with British foreign policy".
HAVE YOUR SAY
Tolerance is a virtue, but we have made it our fault
Jim, Bedford
But she said foreign policy was not a "root cause" of extremism and could not be tailored for any one section of the community.
For the Conservatives Damian Green said: "There is a huge and vital challenge to be met in helping Britain's Muslim communities integrate fully with the rest of society.
"We hope that this latest government initiative has more substance than previous initiatives which have tended to grab a headline but then achieve very little in the long term."
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg said the belated launch of the commission was welcome.
But he warned: "To be truly effective, any attempt to reach out to disaffected members of our Muslim communities must also incorporate an honest debate about this government's foreign policy and some of its counter-terrorism measures."
Operation Black Vote condemned what it called a new attack on multi-culturalism by Ms Kelly.
And it said she had failed to mention the underlying roots of inequality, discrimination and racism faced by many black and ethnic minority communities.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/5280230.stm
Published: 2006/08/24 12:40:20 GMT
© BBC MMVI
Any thoughts on this?
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
If they cry about not getting accepted.......Well what do they think.
We had a problem here in the city about grades and what-not being down with young students. Yet nobody in power will come out and admit that when you send a child to an English school and all you have taught that child at home is a foreign language (ie: not french/english) well you bring down all the other kids who actually know the language and can learn properly. But nobody takes this route.
I am all for being "politically correct" but if one side wants to bring all the baggage from home, I don't think I should bend over backwards to appease anybody.
To treat these people as disempowered is wrong. They may be disenfranchised but they are just as empowered as anyone.
when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley
Many would argue that economic migration is the last stage of colonialism, for many people from India, the area of Pakistan (before it was West Pakistan, and part of British India), and other areas previously run by the British Empire. What I mean is, when the British left, national elites took over these newly independent countries, but didn't have much capital. The people couldn't get jobs, but could claim British passports through being born British subjects under British rule, or having descended from British subjects. They'd say, well, they were in many ways forced to migrate to the former imperial centre.
All this said, they seem to forget that they are empowered to legally create change and with the personal freedoms provided for them by living in England that they are free to make the life for them and their family that they want. That so many seem to want a shitty life, living on the fringes of society within their own clans puzzles me. But then again most peoples actions usually puzzle. Very few people I've ever met actually walk the talk.
when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley
i am of indian descent, my parents and grandparents came from india to london. they immediatly accepted the way things were in this country and strove and still strive to make a good life for themselves and their family. too many ethnic communities come tot his country thinking they can reap the benefits but still think they are living in *insert home country here*.
from what i have obsereved i would say the trend of people moving to where their ethnic communites are is a very bad thing. it makes segrigated communities. my parents, luckily, moved to a quite diverse area which forced everyone to learn english in order to get by. its not like in some parts in london and the midlands where if you cannot speak punjabi or urdu you are screwed.
http://www.myspace.com/thelastreel http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19604327965
If you live according to a holy law, you don't see society in terms of the country in which you're living. You don't see yourself as marginalised from your immediate surroundings, as much as part of a global, religious community, living by socio-economic need, in places where there are dominant national clans on whom you're begrudgingly dependent. You're not looking into the nation, but neither do you see your self as on its fringes with a small clan. You're looking out to a world relgion, and to your god.
So the mindset I'm illustrating is different from the one you've proposed, because both have different ways of seeing nation and community. A nation needn't just be something geographically defined in terms of its infrastructure or borders. It can be an imagined concept, a perceived community across water and many miles. If we could get rid of abstract ideas of national community, we might get somewhere.
Yep, Kelly is pretty clueless, whether she's allowing paedophiles to work as schoolteachers, or following a Catholic neo-cult, herself. I think one solution is to limit so-called press-freedoms to publish the anti-immigrant bile we see in, say, the Daily Mail and Daily Express. Those papers test race laws to the limit. The latest "rivers of blood"-type crap I read in the media is anti-Polish. If this sort of nonsense is silenced, it'd serve to refuse sanction to divisionism and segregation.
when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley
I said that immigrant peoples - including my own (Irish) people - moved to Britain out of socio-economic necessity caused by the complex effects of independence and "development" without capital in newly developed countries. Nothing to do with greed! You have to be from a rich country to be greedy! An American invading Iraq is greedy, but not a migrant forced to return to the colonial centre and perpetuate his or her colonial exploitation. Do read up on post-colonial theory, particularly in relation to the after effects of European colonialism on developing, independent countries. You'll see that ideas of "free will" are a myth.
Not a single migrant was "forced to return to the colonial centre and perpetuate his or her colonial exploitation'. This is complete and utter bullshit in sentiment and action. Choices were available but not chosen.
Free will is never a myth. It is something that can never be taken away from you except by yourself through fear.
when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley
In that vein, I read about an interesting experiment in "Illustrated Science" (popular scientific magazine in Norway).
They put people in a room with a button they were then told to press whenever they felt like it, and they geared them up with sensors all over their bodies. What was found, was that the impulse started in the muscles in the hand, and later went to the frontal cortex in the brain(the center of rational thought, planning etc.). The decision did not originate in the brain, but in the muscles of their hands, and afterwards the brain decided it had chosen to do it. We're talking microseconds of course, but interesting...
Peace
Dan
"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." - Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965
In a similiar vein I listened to a discussion where the point was trying to be made that a true aetheist cannot believe in free will. That once you believe that everything is describable by science with no God intervention that thi salso carries over to all our actions. Where as free will is an essential tenet in Christianity (and probably other religions) where love for God is only valid if it comes from free will. All very intersting in an abstract way.
when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley
As for migration being because of greed, I dont think that's very fair to deduce. Do people getting an education and wanting to practice their profession do so out of greed? That they consciously decide to legally go where the jobs are and where they pay better, can you hold that against them? Sort of latches onto the brain-drain debate this does.
Peace
Dan
"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." - Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965
That's an American perspective. Some people in this world can't even see a pie.
The choice to starve or live a miserable, penniless existence in many cases, in a "developing" country with no opportunities for improving one's quality of life, maybe. If you call that a choice. I call it Hobson's choice.
And these people are very often afraid.
Is lack of social integration to blame for passengers demanding two asian youth be taken off a plane for fear of terrorism, no just outright racism.
that was pure racism! you are right. i am pretty worried as i am brown, have long hair and a bit of a beard. i am not muslim but what do ignorant people know? i am going to canada for xmas but if a bunch of racist travellers think i will suddenly blow up who will the captain beleive? me or them?
the terrorists have won. they dont need to blow up planes, they just need us to tun on each other. the head of the black police union was right... there is a new crime its called "travelling whilst being asian".
http://www.myspace.com/thelastreel http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19604327965
well said. I'm all for keeping some semblance of your history or culture, but I think assimilation into the new culture to which you CHOOSE to move is a courtesy and is common sense and will help keep that country strong.
This is an informative article about the dynamics and causes of diasporic migration.
Point 7 is interesting:
"In Britain it is the reality of the diaspora of empire within the nation that most fundamentally disrupts this dominant narrative of a unified, homogenous nation. More than simply introducing other cultural and ethnic voices into the nation, the diaspora in Britain is also what Kobena Mercer calls "a reminder and a remainder of its historical past" (7), a physical presence that underlines the paradox of immigration into Britain from its colonies even as those colonies, and the prestige and power they embodied and exemplified, were "lost" to independence. The postcolonial diaspora is not simply immigration into Britain from other places, as for example immigration into the United States or even Turkish "guest workers" in Germany," but is instead a continual reminder that "we are here because you were there" (7). Of course, there are many reasons for the timing of this movement of diaspora into the seat of empire; yet there is an unspoken sense within the dominant culture that it is the impotence of the nation/state, stripped of its empire, that is no longer able to keep the Other comfortably across the sea. The idea of immigration itself, then, violates Britain's sense of its secure national borders. This perceived threat to national cohesion, in turn, challenges the cultural identity of the White Englishman as being homogenous and unitary. The response of the dominant culture to post-colonial immigration has been what Stuart Hall calls a "defensive exclusivism. . .an embattled defensiveness of a narrow, national definition of Englishness, of cultural identity" ("The Local" 177). From the National Front to Norman Tebbit's "cricket test" an enormous amount of ideological energy has gone into defining and safeguarding what the dominant culture sees as the end product of its national narrative: true Englishness--and Englishness, by extension is the default culture of the British state."
This is partly my point. A lot of you American posters don't get what immigration to Britain is about. You're missing the colonial dimension, and the history behind the situation.
when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley
agreed.
Did the victims of Hurricane Katrina have the choice to move to the Houston Astrodome? Barbara Bush seemed to think so.
Before you say that the cataclysmic, slow-flooding economic effect of colonialism is just metaphorical, and doesn't compare with a natural disaster situation, think. There are a lot of people fucked over, for generation after generation, by colonialism. The spiritual and psychological levees broke a long, long time ago for many of these people.
Rhetorical arguments aside, I'm happy with putting up a further reading list, to encourage informed and inspired counter-arguments to my point.
Cheers,
Fins