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Suddenly the liberal charge that we're all racist is lifting
Suddenly, surprisingly, hastily, all sorts of people have started grasping the stinging nettle of immigration. But how late it is, how late.
Last Monday the home secretary announced that people coming to Britain from the new member countries of the European Union will be welcome to work here, but not to immediate welfare benefits. On Thursday the first British citizenship ceremony was held in northwest London for 18 new citizens, in the presence of Prince Charles and Mr Blunkett.
A combination of Handel and Elton John in Brent town hall, with tea and sandwiches to follow, might not have been the most glamorous of occasions, but it was certainly very British, and extremely significant.
For several days now an impassioned debate has been blazing among members of the liberal intelligentsia, mostly in the pages of The Guardian, about the tension between diversity and solidarity, between multiculturalism, immigration and the welfare state. At last.
So many people have taken so long to pull their heads out of the sand. The usual explanation is liberal guilt. Well-meaning people were overwhelmed by guilt and shame about our colonial past and by racism in this country including, perhaps, stirrings of racism in themselves. The liberal establishment ought not to have tried to impose its own shame and confusion upon everyone else, and silence argument. But that is what it did.
Until recently, almost everyone was terrified of the accusation of racism. It became almost impossible to speak frankly about immigration or multiculturalism without being derided as a paid-up member of the British National party. That is what happened to Michael Howard after his entirely respectable speech in Burnley earlier this month.
We moved astonishingly fast, in my adult life, from a time when we were all innocent of racism until proved guilty to a time when we are all assumed guilty of racism. That was a finding of the Macpherson report, and has rapidly become an assumption in many places, particularly in the public services.
But this bitter, guilty muddle was no state of mind in which to think about serious questions such as immigration, assimilation and the welfare state - questions that do not, any of them, necessarily have to do with racism.
Recently, though, there have been signs of change. It may partly be that the atrocities of September 11 have, tragically, concentrated people's minds and woken them up to some painful questions. We now have a Labour government brave enough, if only at the last minute and inadequately, to try to protect Britain's welfare system and the taxpayers from mass benefit tourism.
We have a Labour home secretary brave enough to create a ceremony welcoming new Britons, while insisting on their new responsibilities. David Blunkett has also been brave enough to raise, very gently, the subject of arranged marriages overseas. And in David Goodhart, editor of Prospect magazine, we have a prominent, self-confessed "sensitive member of the liberal elite" daring to argue (in a long essay reprinted in the Guardian) that cultural diversity and mass immigration can undermine the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests (and much else besides, I would add).
My first reaction on reading Goodhart's piece was anger. It is all so obvious, and has been obvious for years, particularly to the poor. So now the liberal elite is saying it! Yet I suppose we should all welcome the lost sheep to the fold.
Needless to say, his arguments were immediately trashed by none other than Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, with the usual slander - racism! But if one thing is clear from Goodhart's writing, no single point he made had anything to do with race, though many had to do with culture.
It seems worth asking why such a clever and influential person as Mr Phillips feels justified in hurling such abuse. In recent years the word racism has significantly changed in meaning, or rather different people have come to mean different things by it, consciously or unconsciously.
What I was taught to understand is that racism means discriminating against (or for) someone purely because of his race, or more simply his colour. That is clearly wrong. However, a conflation has developed between racial discrimination and cultural discrimination.
While the first is wrong, the second is not. Cultural discrimination is both right and reasonable. Yet racial discrimination and cultural discrimination are now called racism. This is the agenda of multiculturalism; all cultures must be treated with equal respect and have equal status. Why? Do we think cannibalistic cultures or misogynistic cultures are as good as any other? Obviously not. Equal respect is not something to hand out uncritically.
The Parekh report of the Runnymede Trust's Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain seems to me to use the word racism in this dual way. This matters because the commission was made up of some of the most influential people in the field of race relations, including Phillips.
Its remit included proposing "ways of countering racial discrimination and disadvantage and making Britain a confident and vibrant multicultural society at ease with its rich diversity".
The preface defines racism. "Racism is a subtle and complex phenomenon. It may be based on colour and physical features or on culture, nationality and way of life; it may affirm equality of human worth but implicitly deny this by insisting on the absolute superiority of a particular culture."
There you have it. Racism is a concept that has been seriously stretched.
Discriminating between cultures and ways of life is racist. Questioning diversity is racist.
I think it follows that questioning multiculturalism is racist, though I am never quite sure what the word means. I take it to be the doctrine that all cultures are equal and therefore (among other things) that there can be no overarching host culture, whose values everyone must share to some extent and that there can be no expectation of assimilation.
I believe that more and more people have come to appreciate that multiculturalism is a divisive and demoralising doctrine. It is -truly -cultural relativism, and nobody in his or her heart is truly a cultural or moral relativist.
Multiculturalism, like that other dangerous "ism", communism, is based on a mistaken idea of human nature. Multiculturalism has accentuated the differences between people, not their similarities and shared purpose.
And too many differences make people strangers to each other. Diversity, in fact, tends to pull away from solidarity, and solidarity is essential to a healthy society. Now people are beginning to say so openly.
We may be a multiracial society, and increasingly so, but we may not want to be a very multicultural society. That is the important significance of last week's citizenship ceremony. Let's hope this recognition has not come too late.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 29, 2004 | Comments (0)
Let them eat carrots: the call of a patronising ruling class
As you were, then, with the fatty food tax, the brilliant new idea leaked from the prime minister's strategy unit last week. It is not to be -at least not yet. What a tragic waste of the brainpower of Geoff Mulgan, head of the strategy unit, who dreamt up the idea.
We can only guess at how much cleverness, care and concern went into this cunning scheme to tax fatty food and junk food such as burgers, pizzas, chips, full fat milk and even certain cheeses, meticulously laid out in a paper rather confusingly called Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour. Your government will fight your flab for you if you are too greedy to do it yourself. Fantastic.
However, it was all for nothing. No sooner was it outed by the press than the Treasury denied any knowledge of the scheme.
No10 swiftly declared that Tony Blair had not seen the paper. One can understand that. He cannot be expected to attend to everything. He is a busy man. Even on matters more important than obesity, such as the invasion of Iraq and the 45-minute-to-launch weapons of mass destruction, we know that he cannot know every detail of what's going on.
The government does not think the fatty food tax is a goer, after all. However, if it cannot fight our flab one way, it will fight it another. So last week saw another brave new initiative -veggie vouchers.
Despite the enormous sums of money that the government has already poured into its five-a-day propaganda, people just are not eating their greens properly.
So now John Reid, secretary of state for health, has announced a scheme to give free fruit and veg to toddlers in poor families through a voucher scheme. All pregnant women under the age of 18 will also be eligible for veggie vouchers, regardless of income. The government estimates that about 800,000 people will benefit from this scheme.
Altogether the government seems very worried about our obesity epidemic, as it is called in some circles. Actually it is not an epidemic, or likely to run riot at all, but a question of class. Obesity is an underclass disorder.
The government feels determined to "address" it, as we say these days, and one government scheme after another keeps appearing to lead us all out of temptation.
It would be unfair to blame this Labour government alone -the Conservatives were often just as interfering about health "issues".
Virginia Bottomley, when health secretary, used to lecture us about the number and size of the potatoes to which we should restrict ourselves each week. And every time the usual cries of protest go up against the intrusions of the nanny state.
I would like to add my usual cry of protest to all the rest. All the mistakes of statism are to be seen in these ludicrous proposals and others just like them.
First of all, most people are not obese, nor even fat; statists tend to impose universal solutions upon minority problems. There is, indeed, a minority of people in Britain who are extremely fat or even obese and horribly unhealthy as a result, and this minority is growing.
According to government figures, 20% of the population is obese, compared with less than 10% 20 years ago. But they and everyone else know exactly why they are horribly fat. They and everyone else have been lectured for years -not just by the government and the late, unlamented Health Education Authority, but by every newspaper, magazine, radio and television show, about what's good for you and what's not.
We have a national obsession with our bodies and with bodily perfection, like every other country in the developed world, and it is impossible to be ignorant about what makes you fat, unless you are of disablingly low intelligence.
The same applies to sexual diseases or pregnancy or smoking. It is absolutely impossible not to know how to avoid pregnancy and how to avoid sexual diseases or why smoking kills. Yet the more we all know, the more money that the government pours into universal health and sex education, the more teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases rocket and the more young people smoke.
The only conclusion must be that people are choosing to take the risks knowingly.
I am convinced, and there's quite a lot of evidence, that young girls who get pregnant actually want to do so. They want babies, partly because not much else is going for them and they know they'll manage somehow, probably with a lot of state support. Equally, the people who get and spread sexual diseases, or who make themselves sick smoking, know that they will get free treatment. The same applies to overeating, or eating the wrong things; people know what they are doing.
Statists find this hard to believe but so it is, and any policy that ignores this obvious fact is doomed to expensive failure.
Statists love taking our money away and then giving bits back to us, according to their obsessions. That's bad enough for the prosperous. But there is something absolutely shocking in giving veggie vouchers to the poor -handing them back a couple of measly pounds' worth a week -when the poor are so shamefully taxed.
To our national disgrace, income tax kicks in once you earn £79 a week, whereupon you enter the Alice in Wonderland world of credits and allowances and benefits. No wonder that the poor cannot afford expensive fruit or vegetables. An orange costs 30p, an apple 20p, a bunch of grapes £2. Feeding children healthily on a low income is impossible, particularly for most poor people who know almost nothing about thrifty and nutritious cooking.
It seems to me an insult to chuck back to such people, in the midst of all their difficulties, a fiver or so a week with the sanctimonious cry of "let them eat vegetables". Of course they prefer something quick and easy, sugary, fatty, comforting and above all cheap.
George Orwell wrote very movingly of the do-gooding prigs who wanted the poor to eat healthy raw carrots instead of comforting sugary tea and biscuits. The idea of taxing food like that, the staples of the miserable, hitting the poor hardest, seems to me unforgivably cruel. How Orwell would have despised anyone who suggested it. Their problem is not primarily their diet, but their poverty and their taxes.
Statists don't really wish to intrude into our shopping trolleys out of the goodness of their hearts, or even out of their compulsive desire to interfere.
It's largely to do with clinging to power. The problem with obesity is that it costs taxpayers a lot of money, because the obese need lots of expensive healthcare. And healthcare is a state monopoly.
This presents obvious dangers to politicians who want to stay in power and don't want to have to bump up taxes to treat more and more fatties more and more expensively, because that might cost them votes. If obese people didn't cost the exchequer anything, the government wouldn't give a single solitary damn about them.
It is time to stop taxing the poor and the lowly paid. It's time to stop talking of "personal responsibility", while meaning just the opposite. And it is time to stop patronising us all.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 22, 2004 | Comments (1)
St Valentine's ghosts wail in the chains of a myth
According to the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, a man much interested in affairs of the heart, "True love is like seeing ghosts; we all talk about it, but few of us have ever seen one."
Perhaps that is why there is always something rather spectral and sad about St Valentine's Day. There seem to be so many ghosts in the air, of romance long gone, or romance that never was or never will be.
There's endless talk of romantic love, but talk, or overpriced flowers, seems often to be all it amounts to. Tired middle-aged men in suits carry home bunches of roses that are themselves already tired, in the name of romantic love; these flowers are often laid not on the altar but in the graveyard of romance, among the ghosts.
Apart from the lucky few who are still in the brief grip of romantic passion, for most people it must be rather a relief, every year, when the anxieties and the dutiful hypocrisies of the day are over.
That is not to say that couples do not feel deep affection for each other. Many do. But that is not the kind of love Rochefoucauld meant, nor is the love of St Valentine's Day. Rochefoucauld was talking about intense erotic love, about being in love, about the single greatest obsession of western culture, romantic love.
It is nearly as elusive as the Holy Grail, or the unicorn, and historically speaking sprang from the same fevered part of consciousness. Once it was pursued only by the rich and leisured, and the adulterous. Now romance has been democratised, and made respectable, and is heavily mass-marketed.
Romance is must-have. But this is a destructive obsession. For all its intense joy, romantic love has proved to be a snare and a delusion and the bane of western society -a social disease, even.
The terrible problem with romantic love is that it doesn't last. While it does, there is no greater pleasure, as far as I know. It's a kind of delicious madness, as poets have always insisted, which gives joyful meaning to everything. The other becomes indispensable, part of oneself.
People deeply in love even start to resemble each other. And it is in fact true that all kinds of extraordinary physiological changes take place in the body, so that we are truly in an altered state of consciousness. Even if it does not find sexual expression, romantic love is intensely erotic, obviously enough. But the sad truth is, in one of nature's nastiest tricks, romantic sexual passion does not last long.
My own researches into this have, I admit, been amateur and all too narrow.
However, I have asked many people of wider experience, and there also is a great deal to be learnt on this subject from the pages of Hello!, from any gossip column and the whole of western literature.
The verdict seems to be that intense sexual interest normally lasts anything from 45 minutes to three years (at least if gratified). After that, anyone insisting on romantic love will have to turn his or her attention elsewhere. We seem to have evolved that way, for reasons that might suit the survival of our DNA, but do not suit the western institution of romantic marriage.
It is truly tragic that in our culture love and marriage are expected to go together, in the words of the old song, like a horse and carriage. If you shackle Eros between the shafts of the heavy old carriage that is wedlock, weighed down with pots and pans, mortgages, blocked sinks, dirty nappies, children's dental appointments and decrepit grandparents, the poor horse will either lie down and die, or bolt.
These days bolting is not nearly as shocking or as difficult as it used to be. On the contrary, we are encouraged on all sides to think that sexual pleasure and the gratification of our desires are things we positively owe ourselves.
If we can no longer find this gratification in marriage (or pseudo-marriage) then bolting is probably best and certainly not wrong. So it is that our obsession with romantic love is directly responsible for our disastrous divorce rates, and all the troubles that follow. It is an obsession that is almost pathological, and certainly unhealthy for society as a whole.
The traditional solution to this problem, to avoid home wrecking, was adultery. Everybody's got a hungry heart, as Bruce Springsteen pointed out, and those for whom the pangs of romantic hunger grew intolerable could satisfy them discreetly, without any thought on any side of divorce (and there are at least four sides to adultery).
It wasn't a perfect solution, but it was a great deal better than divorce.
Unfortunately it depended on a stable society with common assumptions. (It also depended on wealth; civilised adultery was much easier with several residences and separate bathrooms).
In such a society a husband and wife who fell out of romantic love still had many things in common to support their marriage -shared values, interests, friends, relations and even lovers sometimes. With any luck a more enduring married love would develop.
That was the point of the social season marriage market here; it didn't really matter too much which deb's delight you fell in love with and married. They were all pretty much equally suitable as husbands, with or without romantic love.
Now things are more difficult. Adultery is generally regarded as quite unacceptable, and as obvious grounds for immediate divorce, as in the brutal American model. The gentler old-fashioned European cynicism is, oddly enough, now seen as barbaric. And I suspect that romantic love has become more subversive now even than it used to be, for another reason; society is increasingly diverse and unstable.
Networks and traditions and assumptions are breaking up fast; it feels like sitting on a melting cultural ice floe, listening to the sound of cracking.
People can meet and fall violently in love with almost nothing else in common but their coup de foudre.
The less you have in common with the object of your passion, socially and culturally, the less you will have to bear the burden of your marriage (or pseudo-marriage) when romance has disappeared.
Arranged marriages, the alternative solution at the other extreme of the cultural spectrum, do not appeal to me either. I have talked to many people who argue that eastern marriage conventions work better, and that husbands and wives expect far less and gain far more from each other than westerners, while avoiding the social disaster of divorce.
That may be so, but I doubt it will be so for long. It is dangerous to ignore so completely the universal longing for romantic love -think of Bollywood movies or eloping Muslim girls - and it can only be done by powerful cultural repression, something young people will come to put up with less and less, even in the east.
There does not seem to be any satisfactory way of dealing with Cupid's darts and the grave vision of Venus.
Rochefoucauld's ghosts will continue to torment us, one way or another, and especially on February 14.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 15, 2004 | Comments (0)
Cry freedom and accept the Muslim headscarf
An unkind wag once said that Salman Rushdie's only significant contribution to the English language was the word "fatwa". It has indeed become part of our everyday vocabulary since its sensational appearance in Britain's news. The same process seems to be overtaking the Arabic word "hijab".
Hijab hit the news following the decision of the French government to introduce a law to stop Muslim schoolgirls wearing headscarves (or veils) in school. Angry Muslims staged demonstrations on January 17 all over France and across the world. All the obvious arguments were made about religious freedom, but 70% of the French population, including some prominent Muslims, said they supported President Chirac's ban on "ostensible" religious symbols in schools.
In this country there seemed to be a smug, unspoken feeling that this sort of problem would not arise in tolerant, sophisticated, multicultural Britain.
If so, it is a badly mistaken feeling. Last week a British teacher was accused in front of a jury of religiously aggravated common assault, a charge created in 2001. She was accused of making a Muslim girl remove her headscarf because it was not of the school uniform type, of scratching her with a safety pin in the process and insulting her religion. The case was halted but will start again in March.
Also last week a school in Luton felt obliged to review its school uniform rule forbidding headgear in classrooms (including headscarves). Members of the radical Islamic group Al-Muhajiroun started handing out leaflets outside the school, and the governors gathered to reconsider. The hijab problem is already here.
The solution might seem relatively simple. Britain has a tradition of tolerance of which we are rightly proud and our presumption must be in favour of freedom and of the free expression of religious belief. Unlike the excessively rational French, we have never insisted on keeping schools strictly secular; on the contrary, we have overtly religious schools, some of them exclusive to members of the faith in question, yet paid for by the public.
Why not let Muslim schoolgirls wear their headcoverings to school? It is not as though they are demanding the right to flaunt themselves, like many other British girls, in microskirts and navel studs and behave like teenage jailbait.
Yet the truth about the hijab is far from simple. It presents a serious challenge to the West. It challenges our ideas of what's most important in our own culture and the points at which we draw the line of tolerance.
One such point is the equality of women with men. The sight in this country of women, and particularly of young girls, heavily swathed and covered up as if they were not capable of going about as freely as a man, as if there were something about them which needed hiding, is genuinely offensive both to the informed and to the uninformed. The big headscarf is not quite so startling as the enormous burqa or the birdlike Arab masks, but its message is the same.
It immediately suggests a belief system in which women are inferior to men, which is intolerable here. It is, objectively speaking, strongly associated with cultures and countries which deny women the vote, equality under the law or in marriage and the freedom to work or to travel unchaperoned, and which frequently circumcise girls to control female sexuality (even though these practices are not necessarily Islamic). The insistence on the headscarf here (or in France) is quite clearly an insistence on identifying with those cultures. As a result it looks like a rejection of British culture.
Even in Britain there are Muslim children who are not allowed to draw or play musical instruments or do sports at school for supposedly religious reasons. Apart from those associations, the appearance alone of heavily swathed women suggests that there is something about them which must be hidden, secluded, controlled and kept private; their clothing is a barrier between them and the world and between them and us.
This is a central part of the problem. Hijab means curtain, and barrier is an important part of its meaning. It doesn't at any rate mean headscarf. (The Arabic word for that is khimar.) Hijab is commonly used to mean Muslim dress, although there is a great deal of argument about that. How to interpret the use of the word in the Koran, how to understand its spiritual or practical meaning, is something I could not presume to suggest.
The Muslim world and Islamic scholars have different views themselves. Many argue that veiling is not a religious obligation for Muslim women. What's clear to a westerner, however, is that the hijab suggests division and is divisive even if it is only a headscarf.
That in turn touches on another of the points in British culture where we are beginning to be inclined to draw the line of tolerance. We are beginning to feel, after years of misguided multiculturalist propaganda about diversity, that what we must emphasise is similarity. There is a growing feeling that the host culture should stand up for itself as the common culture and be less tolerant of the intolerant.
The traditional British approach to such problems has been to ignore them in the hope that they will go away. It might still work in this case. It could be that in a couple of generations the hijab may be just a memory in this country. But there seems to be some evidence that it's being exploited by minority Islamic pressure groups.
It is striking that the demonstrators with leaflets outside the Luton school were from Al-Muhajiroun, the group which notoriously celebrated the slaughter of September 11 and which wants to establish a worldwide Islamic state. What were they doing there?
Some French commentators have said that Islamic extremists are taking over the debate. The protests in Paris were organised by a tiny group called Party of French Muslims with an openly anti-Semitic leader.
It's my impression that far more schoolgirls in Britain wear the headscarf now than used to; there seems to be a new interest in it. (Some strange confusions appear. Recently a girl emerged from a local comprehensive wearing a headscarf and at the same time a rather un-Islamic tight short-sleeved T-shirt with a Playboy logo on it.) Young British Muslims show some signs of resisting assimilation more than their parents. According to a Guardian/ ICM poll, those under 34 are more likely than their parents to say that their community is too integrated (my italics) and to define themselves first as Muslims.
For this reason it is essential to allow Muslim schoolgirls to dress in whatever way they think their religion demands, rightly or wrongly, and however much liberals may illiberally object.
It is essential that all Muslim children are welcomed and assimilated into ordinary schools. They should have no temptation to opt out of mainstream society.
Henri IV of France, showing judicious flexibility in religious matters, said, "Paris is well worth a mass." The unity of Britain is well worth a headscarf.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 01, 2004 | Comments (0)
