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To fight segregation, first you stop trying
How late it is, how late. At last Trevor Phillips of the Commission for Racial Equality has dared to point out the obvious: we are sleepwalking towards segregation.
The British have prided themselves on good race relations, at least in most places and particularly in London. But the truth is rather different, as the recent bombings have forced us to understand, and as the Burnley, Bradford and Oldham riots of 2001 and the Cantle report might have made us appreciate sooner. We are not as different from the United States as we like to imagine. We may be becoming more like them.
As Phillips said last week, there are walls going up around some ethnic communities, particularly those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origins. More generally there is surprisingly little contact between different ethnic groups and maybe less now than previously. Last year the commission found that 54% of white Britons could not name a single good friend from a different race and fewer than 10% could name two.
More strikingly, young people from ethnic minorities were twice as likely to have a circle of friends exclusively from their own community. This year the figures show even less mixing. The well-worn idea that children are colour blind and will mix quite naturally at school is mistaken. Research suggests that children are slightly more segregated in the playground than at home.
Regardless of the unintended consequences of misguided housing policies, which have flung people into ghettos, it is natural for people to want to live with their own kind. At last it is beginning to be possible to admit this obvious fact without being called a racist, because it is clear that it is not only white people who like living with their own kind, whatever that might mean. Everyone tends to. White people may choose leafy ghettos in suburbs, while according to Saira Khan, the young businesswoman star of the television series The Apprentice, the “guilty secret” of her (Pakistani) community is that “so many of us live in ghettos not because we have to but because we want to”.
I don’t think there’s any guilt attached to living with people you want to live with, and a great deal to be said against forcing people to live somewhere else. Ghettos only matter when they present problems. However, when living with your own kind turns into apartheid, when it means ignorance and mistrust and resentment of other kinds of people, then it is dangerous and can even be explosive.
By now even left-liberals admit that all this has been made much worse by official multiculturalism that encouraged segregation, separate values and even separate languages. British society has become alarmingly fragmented alarmingly quickly. The question is what, if anything, should be done about it.
I passionately believe that “doing things” — at least in the sense of government and quangos and councils actively doing things — is usually a large part of the problem. Playing with Fire, a play by David Edgar that opened last week, makes exactly this point. The subject is the complex causes of some race riots much like those of 2001. In the plot heavy-handed Whitehall interference in the running of a Yorkshire council, with intrusive targets and grants and ethnic manipulation, does a lot to inflame resentment and to light the touchpaper of the riots.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that over 25 years the race relations industry has exacerbated race relations in this country. The answers to segregation, if there are any, lie not in doing things but in stopping doing things, as far as officialdom is concerned. Phillips’s proposals to tinker with school populations and university entrance are just more of the same old mistakes — almost certain to make things worse.
My modest proposals start with the suggestion that we should stop worrying about race and racism. Crude old-fashioned colour prejudice is not usually the problem any more; when it is, there are laws to protect its victims. All the anti-racist audits and outreaches and targets and ethnic bean-counting generally should stop at once, leaving public servants to get on with providing frontline colour-blind public services. Even if the hydra-like growth of initiatives to ensure perfect numbers of ethnic representation, right down to questions about ethnic parking (like one I received from my council), were practicable — and they aren’t — they are counterproductive. They make everyone hyper-sensitive about race. They inflame grievances where few exist.
It also seems entirely obvious that we should stop creating new faith schools in the state sector. Mixed schools can do something, if only a little, to bring children and parents together in a community; schools segregated by religion promote segregation and cultural apartheid. This is unfortunately more true of Muslim schools than of others. The chief inspector of schools commented in January that some Muslim schools failed to provide pupils with the tools they need to live in modern Britain.
Yet Tony Blair is proposing to allow the number of state-funded Muslim schools to grow along with other religious schools. At the moment there are five, but there are about 100 private Muslim schools that the government wants to help move into the state sector. It intends to make that easier by temporarily relaxing certain standards. This is subsidising segregation. The solution is to create no more state religious schools at all.
When it comes to how people feel about each other, which is what counts, official solutions rarely work. If anything can be done, it will be from the bottom up, simply from people getting to know each other, recognising how important that is.
Last week the mosque nearest to me in North Kensington, London — it is also an Islamic cultural centre — invited local people for a discussion on community cohesion, followed by lunch. The centre is close to the estate where two suspected bombers were arrested in July so more community cohesion would be welcome.
We the guests found ourselves discussing all sorts of local concerns and projects and in the process getting to know some local Muslims. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of little events like this, unexciting though they might sound. If it is not too late to make a difference, then this — slow and informal though it may be — must surely be one of the best ways forward.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 25, 2005 | Comments (0)
Pity the poor children left to Blair’s care
When people come to look back on the legacy of new Labour they will feel a deep indignation that, for some reason, is expressed at the moment only by very few. Labour has always prided itself on being the caring party, champion of the underprivileged and the vulnerable. Yet the people who have done worst out of new Labour are children, particularly the most deprived children.
Despite the posturing and promises, despite the thousands of initiatives and the billions of taxpayers’ money, Britain’s most vulnerable “kids”, as the prime minister calls them, are in many ways worse off than in 1997. In others they are no better off. What a legacy. What a disgrace.
Labour’s education policies have proved a very expensive failure, particularly for the least privileged children. In August the government admitted it had failed to reach its own targets for standards in primary schools. In September it had to acknowledge the same failure in secondary schools. Meanwhile it emerged that private school children are on average two years ahead of state school children. A study also found that private day schools cost less than state schools if true costings are compared like for like. The government has also presided over a decline in social mobility.
Equally bad is last week’s startling news of the failure of the Sure Start scheme for deprived children under five. Of all Labour’s projects this was one of the dearest and most vaunted. It was inspired by the American Head Start programme and since its launch here in 2001 the government has spent £3 billion on a range of pre-school programmes in targeted areas, such as childcare, parenting classes, training to help mothers into work, health advice and various other schemes. The idea was to lift the neediest children out of the cycle of poverty by helping them and their parents, all too often their lone mothers.
However, an independent academic research project by Birkbeck College found that Sure Start isn’t delivering anything. Researchers found no discernible difference in children’s development, language and behaviour between those living in Sure Start areas and those elsewhere. It also showed that some children of teenage mothers — those often most in need of effective help — did worse in Sure Start areas than elsewhere.
It simply defies belief. This was a serious government-sponsored evaluation involving 8,000 children under five and costing £20m. Both the National Audit Office and the Commons select committee on education have already been critical of Sure Start too.
The government’s response is simply to say that it is too early to evaluate the scheme, even though it was ministers who put pressure on researchers to get some results out quickly. Almost incredibly, they are pressing on with plan A, to increase the Sure Start centres from 500 to 2,500 over the next three years, and add 1,000 more by 2010. This is so preposterous it would be funny, if it weren’t so serious. American findings about Head Start are highly debatable and inconclusive too.
Yet Tony has faith, so Sure Start must continue. There’s even an element of loaves and fishes feeding the 5,000 about his faith, because although Sure Start centres are to increase more than fivefold, the government is only planning to double its spending. But then social engineering was always a matter of blind faith and wishful thinking.
The real problem for children in inner cities is family breakdown. Programmes such as Sure Start only tackle the symptoms, not the malady. They aggravate the disease too. Until recently politicians were afraid to say that broken families and lone parenthood are bad for children, particularly for the poor, even though there has for years been an incontrovertible mass of evidence. It was seen as judgmental and discriminatory, or at any rate bound to frighten the voters.
Even now the Conservative leadership contender David Davis is wary of making this obvious point. As he said last week:
“If a Conservative politician observes that children have a better chance of living fulfilled and gainful lives when brought up by two happily married parents, he is likely to be pilloried as narrow-minded.”
That is still true, although as a lone parented child he is well placed to speak out. It may be some time before other Conservative politicians drum up the conviction to talk seriously family-friendly. Meanwhile there are a few brave voices crying out in the wilderness — some of the right-of-centre independent think tanks such as Civitas and the Centre for Policy Studies, which have the luxury of indifference to popularity. They have been saying for some time that family breakdown, and the poverty and social breakdown that follows from it, is encouraged by government intervention. The tax and benefit system provides incentives for couples to split up. They are better off apart (or “off the books”, concealing their partners). It makes it just as desirable for a teenage girl to have a baby on her own as any other option she might have.
People on the left and even on the right have passionately resisted the truth for years. But now it is beginning to be impossible to ignore the evidence. Last week Civitas published a survey showing the perverse incentives of Labour’s tax and benefits system in comparison with family friendly provisions in France and Germany. Needless to say, they have far less family breakdown and lone parenthood. We have more lone parents and teenage pregnancies than anywhere else in western Europe.
Here when an unemployed unpartnered person becomes a lone parent their financial situation improves substantially, unlike in France or Germany. Here it is financially advantageous for couples with children, where both parents are on the minimum wage or unemployed, to part. The tax credit system favours children who live with a lone parent rather than with both. Fathers who work and stay married (or partnered) are penalised. They would be better off divorced.
The figures are on the websites. Civitas publishes them. So does the Centre for Policy Studies, which revealed equally startling evidence earlier this year. We have a government that is actively promoting family breakdown and the evils that follow from it, and then applying expensive sticking plaster to gaping social wounds. Odd how few people yet feel angry.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 18, 2005 | Comments (0)
Sex and sensibility: a plain Jane guide
Interviewing film stars at premieres has turned into a contemporary version of the medieval trial by ordeal; in this case it is trial by microphone. In front of a roaring crowd, under burning, flashing lights, the poor actor is goaded, with the microphone as a jabbing cow prod, into making ever more indiscreet remarks to feed the insatiable curiosity of the fans.
No matter how silly the questions, the poor victim must remain charming and keep repeating titillating soundbites, without ever actually being injudicious or displeasing the capricious movie-going masses. One can only sympathise.
All the same I was absolutely astonished by Keira Knightley, the beautiful Lizzie Bennet in the new film of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, during her trial by microphone just before the premiere in Leicester Square last week. Maddened perhaps by a particularly annoying young man, this bewitching creature offered up to her interviewer the thought that if a man sees this new film with a girlfriend he is guaranteed to get laid afterwards.
What on earth, I immediately wondered, would the blessed Jane Austen herself have made of that? It would surely have been a great shock to hear her own favourite creation described as a sexual aid, or rather — since the term sex aid cannot have featured much in her vocabulary — to hear Pride and Prejudice spoken of an incitement to such activity.
Of course Jane Austen’s novels are about sex, or rather, among other things, about how people deal with their sexual desires within a particular social convention. But even so, I cannot imagine that she would be pleased to hear Pride and Prejudice warmly recommended as certain to inflame sexual desire forthwith. That is the function of pornography, and whatever Jane Austen may have thought about pornography, it is a fair bet that she would not have wanted to be seen as a pornographer herself, however soft.
To be fair to Keira Knightley, and to the film itself, which has already been much admired, it is actually true that going to the cinema itself does tend to lead to sex anyway. Some rather startling American sociological studies I read in the early 1970s made this point and it is the kind of point one doesn’t forget. If a great deal of sexual activity does follow hard upon the mass distribution of this film, starting this week, one need not necessarily hold Jane Austen responsible.
All the same, I did wonder very much what Jane Austen would think of the hyper-sexualised temper of the times, which that moment in Leicester Square somehow encapsulated. Wondering what she’d think is something I often do anyway. I’m one of those countless thousands who re-read her novels often, and think of her as my own particular friend. My sense that I know her well is, I admit, an illusion, but I think one can be fairly sure that Jane Austen would be astonished by the way we are, and rather contemptuous.
It’s absolutely clear that Jane Austen placed enormous value on self-discipline, discretion, modesty and reticence — a word almost never used today. All her heroines have to learn to temper their passionate feelings with these virtues. Sensibility (feeling) must be controlled by sense (reason and judgment). Those characters who don’t discipline their feelings, who don’t understand what proper feeling is, or who behave self-indulgently are mocked and even despised. So is self-centredness; Austen’s heroines have to find a difficult balance between the needs of the self and the demands of society.
It might not perhaps have surprised Jane Austen to see the masses going about drunkenly brawling, shrieking and vomiting in public, or talking ceaselessly about their tedious perversions and their tedious daily lives on reality TV. She lived at the time of the French revolution and of the notorious libertinism of the English upper classes. She wasn’t priggish or ignorant either — she gives one of her most attractive characters a notorious double entendre in Mansfield Park, when, talking about her uncle the admiral, she refers very suggestively to “rears and vices” in the navy.
What would have surprised Jane Austen is the way the respectable middle classes have also abandoned the virtues of her world, as well as the upper and lower orders. The way we live now — with people of all classes ceaselessly exposing their flesh and their secrets in public, with a licentious abuse of sexual freedom, with an unself-critical preoccupation with the self, with the fading of a sense of duty, with a coarsening of manners — is at odds with everything Jane Austen felt mattered.
It is a mystery to me why Pride and Prejudice is one of the nation’s most loved novels; apart from the romantic comedy, it seems to me to stand for everything that most people today have rejected.
I think that’s how she herself would have felt, too. What I would love to know is how the same Jane Austen would feel and think if she were a contemporary, born into our world. Then her judgments would surely be very different. Many of her 19th-century views on modesty, chastity and worldly prudence were both a conventional and a considered response to the predicament of women at the time. A respectable marriage was everything, even to an offensive buffoon like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice; the alternative was spinsterhood, dependence, loss of caste and very likely poverty.
So feelings, and sexual feelings, had to be subordinated to the need to be settled in a proper establishment, though Jane Austen herself, intriguingly, first accepted and then turned down a very respectable suitor. It would be wonderful to know how real independence from all that — financial and sexual — would have changed her and what she might still have to teach her admirers.
Counter-factual history is just guessing, of course. But there are informed guesses. And though I think Jane Austen today would have loved the freedom women have now, and would have lost her very mild and conventional Anglican faith and might even have been a lesbian, she still, I am convinced, would in a very unfashionable way, have valued self-discipline and discretion.
At least she would not have dreamt of talking in public about getting laid.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 11, 2005 | Comments (0)
Brute reality changes the liberal mindset
Occasionally some glimmers of hope appear on the political horizon. There is a great deal to be pessimistic about at the moment, particularly in the wider world, but on the narrow domestic front there seem to be one or two faintly encouraging signs. It has occasionally struck me recently, and it did last week, that it looks as though the great post-war left-liberal cultural ascendancy may be beginning to question its own certainties.
And if, like me, you are inclined to blame those left-liberal certainties for many contemporary evils, such as the approaching crisis in public services or the decline in social mobility or the dangerous uncertainties about identity and belonging, then there is perhaps some reason for a faint feeling of optimism.
What seems to be happening is that views that were once unmentionable or were voiced only by more aggressive types on the much reviled right are now beginning to be sayable; this process began, slowly, after the atrocities of 9/11 and has been gathering speed.
Last week, for instance, David Goodhart, the much-respected editor of the intellectual magazine Prospect and a self-confessed “sensitive member of the liberal elite”, published a debate on whether the Human Rights Act can undermine national security; in his contribution, suggesting that it can, he talked of “a wider fallacy” about the origin and nature of rights. “People are not born with rights,” he said; at that I almost choked in surprise on my globalised Starbucks caffe latte.
“Regrettably, many of the world’s six billion people have few or none,” he went on. “Rights are a social construct, a product of history, ideas and of institutions. You and I have rights not as human beings, but mainly because we belong to the political and national community called the United Kingdom, with its infrastructure of laws and institutions.”
Exactly so. That is what millions of people of the right, the centre right and small “c” conservatives have always believed, not to mention some of the most distinguished of this country’s political philosophers. It may be what Goodhart has always thought, too — I don’t know.
But what I do know is that for as long as I can remember left liberals have entirely rejected that view and sneered censoriously at anyone bold enough to have doubts about universal human rights; they have used the phrases “human rights” and “universal human rights” as knock-down arguments — as if just to mention the words was itself proof of their validity.
This approach is incoherent, of course; it offers no explanation of what mysterious entity has conferred such rights or how they are to be enforced or who is to decide between conflicting rights. That might not matter in itself. What matters is that this prevailing and mistaken view of rights causes all kinds of serious problems, large and small, national and international — a central one being that it prevents the nation-state, which alone can truly confer rights and shared identity, from having any control over either. This is the opposite of the harlot’s prerogative — it is responsibility without power.
However, the good news is that now Goodhart has spoken out it will no doubt soon be acceptable for the chattering classes and the BBC to adjust their views on rights. After all, when he expressed some unorthodox views on multiculturalism early last year, arguing that sharing and solidarity can conflict with diversity and that cultural diversity and mass immigration can undermine the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests, the liberal establishment soon began talk like that too. In only a few months it has become almost conventional to question or even to reject multiculturalism.
For instance, the Financial Times last week flagged up an article on the front page on “the limits of multiculturalism”; the headline inside was stronger — “When multiculturalism is a nonsense”. I would not dream of calling Martin Wolf, the distinguished author, either conventional or orthodox or establishment-minded. Yet it struck me as a sign of the times that this piece, for all its eloquence and erudition, should be flagged up as remarkable in the Financial Times when its ideas, in cruder form, have been the view of most right-wing tabloid newspapers and commentators for many years.
There have been a couple of other indicators recently. A few swallows don’t make a summer, however, and perhaps these signs of change are largely insignificant; perhaps my feeling of hopefulness is premature. My experience of the prevailing orthodoxy is that it is extremely resistant to change, partly because we have handed to Brussels so much power to do anything about it.
Only last week, for instance, the European Union’s commissioner for justice, freedom and security proposed that immigrants to the EU, and therefore to Britain, should swear an oath of allegiance to EU laws and the European charter of fundamental rights, either instead of the oath of allegiance to the Queen or in addition to it. Admittedly the proposal has not been adopted yet, but Britain will not be able to veto it because we gave up our veto on EU immigration law last year.
You almost have to pinch yourself at the folly of it. All across Europe, governments and bureaucrats and so-called community leaders have been forced, most painfully, to try to think more deeply and more critically about identity and the fragility of the ties that bind us in a shared sense of belonging and how best to strengthen them; their lazy, unexamined platitudes about immigration and celebrating diversity have been blasted, quite literally, away.
And what does Brussels come up with? A proposal that is quite astounding in its lack of the slightest understanding of feeling, sentiment, social solidarity, place, custom, ritual, symbolism or national tradition. How can a hopeful new Briton feel any emotional allegiance to a huge abstract entity with no common culture, no common language, no common political system, no common consent, no common constitution and which is riddled with corruption? And, in the face of such unfeeling, unthinking idiocy, how can old Britons remain hopeful?
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 04, 2005 | Comments (0)
