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Swamping isn't a racist term - it reflects reality
The end of the Damilola Taylor murder trial has no proper sense of an ending at all. It has merely left unresolved grief, an unresolved case and unanswered questions. Two inquiries have already predictably been set up, but the public is suffering from inquiry fatigue: we have learnt to expect very little from the public self-examination of public bodies, other than self-justification and further regulation.
I imagine that most people would like to know, but hardly expect to be told, why this case was brought at all with what seemed to be such obviously unsatisfactory evidence from such an obviously unreliable child witness. We ought to be told how it was that the police, in all their exhaustive investigations, seemed to have so little interest in alternative, quicker routes from the crime scene to the place where calls were made on the defendants' mobile phones - a crucial point to pursue, one might have thought. I would certainly like to know how it was that the defendants were spared trial on a serious assault charge, some time ago, on the basis of a four-year-old educational report. Or why persistent troublemakers in inner cities, well known to the police, are simply not removed. And so on.
What interests me most of all, though, is the picture that has emerged of the miserable place where Damilola died and how such a desperate place could have come into being in this rich and well-intentioned society. There are some answers, I believe, which we have been busily avoiding for decades.
When David Blunkett, the home secretary, stood up in parliament last week to debate the immigration and asylum bill and courageously spoke of swamping, he made it very clear that he was thinking only of certain schools and medical practices which are overwhelmed by asylum seekers needing interpreters and special services; I immediately thought of the estate where Damilola was killed. That estate is extremely mixed; according to estimates from the Peckham Partnership, the ethnic composition of north Peckham is 43.4% white, 15.9% black Caribbean, 26.6% black African, 4.1% black other, 7.9% Asian and 2.2% other.
To throw together a group of such hugely disparate people, in a deprived part of London and on very low incomes, is obviously to invite community breakdown. To speak of swamping in such a context is hardly racist; it is only to suggest that the usual ties of community and understanding must be stretched almost to breaking.
Community needs a critical mass of familiarity, shared language, shared tradition and shared moral attitudes; a strong community can accept outsiders and is often enriched by them, as ours has been, but it also needs a high degree of common purpose and common culture. This seems to me childishly obvious.
One thing that emerged most clearly from the Damilola murder trial was the breakdown of the community in which he tried to survive. There have been endless descriptions since the trial of deep fear and distrust on the estate, of intimidation by half-wild gangs of uncontrollable children, of constant theft, mugging and general misery.
Damilola himself was bullied and intimidated and told his father about it in tears. He suffered racial abuse as well. Children jeered at his African origins and these were not only white children but other black children, too; racism is not restricted to white people, here or anywhere else, and my own view is that white people generally are less racist than some other ethnic groups. What you get in places such as Peckham is antagonism between more or less every group; it is quite incredible folly to dump a whole lot of minorities together in a poor estate and leave them to get on with it.
A lot has been said about the conspiracy of silence which met police investigators, particularly from the children on the estate: it may be that they do not trust the police, but it is certain that here and elsewhere in Britain, children live in fear of semi-organised child gangs and dare not speak. A great deal of money and effort has been poured into this area recently, not least by the police, and there have been some improvements, even in street crime. But since Damilola's death the overall crime rate in Southwark, which includes Peckham, has risen by 13% and violence against the person has gone up by 7%. It was already high. Everyone, on all sides politically, seems agreed that the causes of crime lie in the breakdown of community. Yet people persist in ignoring one of the obvious threats to community: too much concentrated diversity, also known as swamping.
Schools are some of the most important building blocks in society. Yet in the most deprived areas schools are part of the problem, not of the solution. There are many schools in Britain where tens of languages are spoken under one roof in one tower of educational Babel. It is self-evidently impossible to teach in a classroom of children who can hardly understand either the teacher or each other.
When people speak of the poor achievements of Britain's worst schools, they rarely mention this obvious problem. In such an atmosphere of educational deprivation, it is hardly surprising that children resent clever, hard-working English speakers such as Damilola. It is hardly surprising that children emerging from such underachieving schools feel disaffected and angry and turn to crime.
It is hardly surprising, either, that people who have to send their children to such schools feel resentful as well. The only state school in my borough for which my son is eligible - the others being for Catholics only or for girls only - is notoriously bad. Its 1997 Ofsted report is extremely depressing: "basic levels of attainment remain low throughout the school", and reading ages are "much lower" than the national average, which is miserably low already.
I was not in the least surprised to discover that more than 100 nationalities are represented in the school, with the pupils speaking more than 70 languages; 58% are learning English as an additional language. In 1997, 300 children were refugees or asylum seekers. Does this represent some sort of policy or plan; some careful scheme of integration and communitarian social inclusion, as promised again and again by this all-promising government?
Estelle Morris, the education secretary, promised last week that she was going to do something about truancy; I can't remember what, since I usually put my memory into erase mode when I hear yet another government promise, but I remember thinking that if my son had to go to our local school, I would actively encourage him to play truant. So would Tony and Cherie Blair, I have no doubt.
All the predictable people started screaming "racist" at Mr Blunkett for using the word swamping, made notorious by Margaret Thatcher, but he bravely stood by what he said. Communities must not be overwhelmed by large concentrations of people with special needs, least of all the vulnerable communities where those people usually end up - to their very great misfortune. It is not racist to say so. Nor is it racist to talk of numbers. That is one of the lessons to be drawn from the murder of Damilola and the alarming success in France of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 28, 2002 | Comments (0)
Be careful which faiths you respect, Charles
The desire of the Prince of Wales to be seen as a defender of faith and as the prince of faiths is no doubt based on the best of all possible intentions. Otherwise his wish is naive. Would he, for instance, wish to defend the faith of the Saudi ambassador to the Court of St James in London - Prince Charles's own address, incidentally - who has written a poem of praise for Palestinian suicide bombers who die "to honour God's word"?
His Excellency Ghazi Algosaibi actually had the effrontery to have his verses published last week on the front page of a mass-market Arabic newspaper based in London. In praise of the first woman suicide bomber he wrote that the "doors of heaven are opened for her". What kind of faith is that?
More to the point, does Prince Charles really wish to endorse it? And does he wish to defend the beliefs of those British Muslims - and there are some, maybe many - who share the startling religious beliefs of this quaintly undiplomatic ambassador?
No doubt it takes great religious faith to blow oneself to bits in order to kill lots of defenceless civilian infidels, even if one can expect a substantial heavenly reward thereafter, but it is surely not a faith that should receive the three feathers of the Prince of Wales. What better example could there be of the thoughtless folly of western liberalism generally?
It is an article of modern liberal faith that all religions deserve respect, and equal respect. That is the belief that lies behind the prince's new project Respect, aimed at increasing the understanding between faiths, which he intends to launch later this month. It seems to me a dangerous assumption that all faiths deserve respect. Religions are not all the same. Faith is not necessarily good in itself. Adherents of the same religion do not necessarily all hold the same faith; the result is endless squabbling, often bloody, about what is the true faith. Self-appointed defenders would hardly know which bit or which person to defend.
Admittedly, it is not difficult to understand how those who have grown up in the gentle, undemanding and aesthetically delightful embrace of the Church of England, like Prince Charles, have come to feel that faith is something nice but vague and that religion does not have to amount to anything awkward - or to anything much at all, necessarily. This is the church of St John Betjeman, which I love myself, even though I am an agnostic.
One of the greatest achievements of western civilisation is a church that is agreeably free of rules or faith - the via anglicana. In this tradition of extreme tolerance and private devotion, it is easy to forget how many people died in agony in the reformation to achieve it and to divorce religion from politics and the public sphere. In fact, most other religions affect every aspect of life.
It has been easy in the post-reformation world to make the ignorant assumption that all faiths are pretty much the same underneath, give or take the odd cultural quirk; this was the homogenised, brown Windsor soup view of religion, which reduces all differences to a featureless sludge. It ignores the unmentionable truth that faiths differ fundamentally and are not all equally worth of respect.
If one has any strong beliefs oneself - religious or not - it is absurd to express respect for opposing beliefs or practices that seem ignorant or barbaric. One might show respect for the people holding those beliefs, or tolerance for their beliefs, but this sentimental scramble for universal respect is in reality no respect at all. It is also at odds with self-respect.
One cannot truly respect religious laws that permit the exploitation of women and require flogging or amputation or execution for adultery. There was a case recently in Nigeria where a woman was sentenced to be buried up to her neck in sand and stoned to death, under Islamic law; the wretched victim herself did not question the justice of the law, merely its application to her.
One cannot respect the views, however sincere, of those religious extremists who claim that God has granted them Judaea and Samaria and that they have a divine right to settle there. It is hard for a westerner to think of anything good about the caste system, which is enshrined in religion and which to this day condemns millions of untouchables to lives of filth and misery in their traditional role as bearers of pollution.
It is impossible to have much time for Christian creationists who ignore all the scientific evidence for the theory of evolution in favour of a world view that is quite indifferent to any evidence at all, other than the word of God, which is not what rational people consider evidence.
People of faith tend to have a cavalier attitude to evidence, as seen in pogroms and autos-da-fe. In my days in BBC television's religious programmes I used to be shocked and amazed that educated Christians in prosperous leafy suburbs would pray to God for specific items, such as a dishwasher for their leader, as marks of divine favour. Somehow they were never disappointed, whatever the outcome.
Evangelists are actually allowed to advertise miraculous healing in the western world, although in years of research I have never found a single substantiated example of it. It is hard to have any respect for such deception and self-deception in the name of faith, least of all among educated people.
Then there are what you might call the disorganised faiths. A mutilated body was fished out of the Thames recently; the dead child was allegedly killed in a voodoo ritual, performed, no doubt, by people of an extremely powerful faith; you would have to have quite strong beliefs to kill a child for them. One can only wonder whether members of the voodoo faith would be included in respectful interfaith celebrations.
Perhaps, in these non-discriminatory, non-judgmental times, druids, pagans, witches (white and black), and perhaps even Satanists would have to be invited as well. Oh, and of course the present Saudi ambassador, with his belief in God's reward for suicide bombers and the "darkness" filling the White House. What hell those interfaith celebrations would be.
One television news bulletin is - or ought to be - enough to show that most of the miseries and atrocities in the world today have to do with religion. People all over the planet have enough faith, or think they do, to kill and maim and bomb and rape and rob. It may be that humans simply use religion to justify what they would do anyway, for good and evil; it may be that religion is not directly to blame for the evil that is done in the name of faith. But looking at the world today it would be unwise to bet on that.
Meanwhile, the less said in defence of faith the better. It might be good for people to understand each other's faiths better, although familiarity does not always breed respect. But the Prince of Wales is wrong if he thinks he will find a useful feelgood function in the highly inflammable, highly politicised confusion that is faith in a multiracial society today. A brief conversation with the Saudi ambassador might help to demonstrate this point.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 21, 2002 | Comments (1)
Hands off the hated class system or you're history
The world seems to divide into those who want to consign things to history, fast, and those who don't. The first group usually wants to consign history itself to history as well, and then to oblivion. Warnings abound about what happens to people who know no history; either they are condemned to repeat it, or they find themselves in a new, modern, history-free totalitarian regime.
However, this doesn't stop the consigners from consigning. For some reason they desperately need to be modern, like our prime minister, who was unsophisticated enough to imagine that he could create a new cool Britannia out of what he insisted was our "young" country. Fortunately "the people" thought otherwise, and we no longer hear about it.
Before the Queen Mother's funeral the aggressive modernists, including the people's experts at No 10, thought that the entire thing was bound to be a very damp squib. Nobody would be interested, they claimed, just as there had been very little interest in jubilee street parties. Similarly, at the shabbiest lows of the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, the avant-garde announced a Windsor Gotterdammerung, a twilight of the royals.
After Diana's death progressive journalists were all quick to say, in the people's name, a very sanctimonious goodbye to all that. They honestly believed the people were tired of kings and queens and history, or that if they weren't, they ought to be. The people thought otherwise.
Similarly, this week, in a legal battle in the finest tradition of British comedy, a High Court writ has announced that the working classes no longer exist, while one of Britain's richest and grandest earls is insisting that they do, and their rights to housing on some of his ancestors' land in an extremely expensive bit of Chelsea must be respected.
Lord Cadogan is clearly right; his grandfather sold the land to the Metropolitan Borough of Chelsea on condition that it should only be used to provide housing for the working classes. Now a property developer, one Leslie Allen-Vercoe of helplessly middle-class Haslemere, Surrey, wants to build million-pound houses on the land, claiming that there are no longer any definable working classes to be provided for. He is wrong: the working classes are with us still and object violently to being described in any other way. Class is more a state of mind than a socio-economic group.
Even if we don't talk about the working classes any more, even if rich prats bray at house parties that we are all workers these days, and even if the people's premier is silly enough to tell us we are all middle-class now, we all know what this is about - the urban poor and affordable housing. Lord Cadogan ought to win his case.
Reports of the death of the class system are much exaggerated. It has merely been softened into acceptability, and it continues to provide hours of harmless pleasure and indignation; this is one of the best forms of light entertainment in this country and one which is available hardly anywhere else in the world, at least not in our extreme baroque form.
Most people don't want to consign things prematurely to the forgotten past, whether it is the tragic-comic adventures of the royal family, or Great Aunt Maud's distant connection to the Gore-Blymeighs of Strewth Hall, or Nan's secret affair with a pearly king. That's because most - or at least a great many - people instinctively understand that history and memory, and social differences too, are what make identity.
They're also fun, and funny; it's no accident that the British excel at both ceremonial and comedy.
Progressives are wrong to imagine that the people don't want all this. But then progressives are often rather puritanical and dull; progressive so often means repressive. It's quite clear, for instance, that what progressives object to about hunting is not the brief suffering of the fox, but the pleasure of
the toffs.
Sometimes, at moments of gloom, I admit I feel a little, fleeting sympathy with the progressives; my brief encounters with the upper classes have not been entirely satisfactory.
I was once introduced at the races to an extremely important duke; he held out two fingers for me to shake. Had I been only slightly older, I think I might have smartly presented him with two fingers in return. But I was young and shy and it occurred to me that he might have something wrong with his hand.
Besides, my late mother-in-law was standing close by, and, as well as being deferential to dukes, she was rather violent. She had acquired a reputation for hitting people who crossed her, and they were many, with her umbrella.
As a result someone referred to her in The Spectator as the Thwacker of the Racecourse, which delighted her. She thought a great many people needed thwacking, and also that a great many men enjoyed it. The Spectator even published a poem she wrote on the subject; though completely uneducated she was very articulate.
The nastiest upper-class specimen I ever met, in the 1980s in New York, was John Jermyn, the late Lord Bristol. Quite apart from his sensationally awful and short career, he was particularly unpleasant to me personally in a restaurant, for no obvious reason; having gatecrashed a table arranged for me, and complaining loudly about having to pay for hangers-on, meaning me, he then ostentatiously left me out of his generous offers of illicit substances to everyone else. One likes to be asked, at least.
Someone or other said in the 18th century of his family that there are humans and then there are Herveys. Meeting Bristol made me feel for once glad to be bourgeois, proud of my dull little middle-class manners. Perhaps that is one of the main functions of the upper classes. There's nothing like a bad example to make one feel good.
Some of royal family, too, occasionally make one think of the tumbrils. Prince Charles seems to have little feel for his constitutional duty of keeping quiet about matters political; he has every privilege but that of free speech, and his unwillingness to accept that brings out the closet republican in many who are otherwise indifferent.
I myself could hardly believe that the Earl and Countess of Wessex (as they then weren't) could actually choose and allow to be published their choice on their wedding list of silver sugar shakers at Pounds 6,135 each. Pounds 6,135. Forget a sense of perspective, what about the most rudimentary instinct of self-preservation? Well, let them sift sugar. At least they offer the rest of us the twin delights of smugness and disapproval.
The royal family at their best do stand for the best of middle-class manners and morals - the snobbish joke among all classes has always been that the Windsors are so frightfully middle-class. And the entire class system, with all its absurdities and its animosities, its fascinating shifts and ambiguities, is no longer important enough to
cause pain, but important enough to make life immensely more rich. Progressives may try to consign it to oblivion, but the people want it.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 14, 2002 | Comments (0)
