Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), has become the latest troubled liberal to criticise multiculturalism. 'Multiculturalism suggests separateness', he told The Times (London). 'We need to assert that there is a core of Britishness.' (1)
| Phillips' comments have been seized upon by the political right, keen to spin it as a lesson in why the left was wrong all along - from Lord Tebbit, infamous for his proposal in 1990 for a 'cricket test' to show immigrants' loyalty to Britain, to Ruth Lea of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). Some on the liberal left, meanwhile, have reacted by insisting upon the need for the left to reclaim the discussion about the pitfalls of multiculturalism. Among them is David Goodhart, editor of Prospect magazine, who recently expounded at length a similar view to Phillips - to find himself condemned, by Phillips, as a xenophobe of the Enoch Powell school.
| But what does it really mean for Phillips, whose entire role as leader of the CRE relies on promoting multiculturalism and 'separateness', now to start pitching himself against it? The answer is, not much. Whatever the delusions harboured by those on the right of the race debate, the current press-friendly liberal-left critique of multiculturalism is almost impossible to distinguish from the promotion of multiculturalism itself.
| Multiculturalism is one of those phrases that is more meaningless the more ubiquitous it becomes. Following Phillips' comments, BBC News did a round-up of four experts on the question, 'Does anybody know what thinkers mean by multiculturalism - and is it a good or bad thing for Britain?' Respectively, the answers seemed to be 'no - and don't know' (2).
| 'I see no incompatibility between multiculturalism and Britishness. Britishness must be part of multiculturalism', said Professor Sir Bernard 'Having it both ways' Crick, pioneer of UK citizenship education. 'Britain is and should remain a vibrant and democratic multicultural society that must combine respect for diversity with shared common values', said Lord Parekh, chair of the 2000 report on 'The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain'. 'To understand multiculturalism is to appreciate that it means many different things', said Karen Chouhan, chief executive of The 1990 Trust, a black-led human-rights organisation.
| Ruth Lea at least tried to clarify matters - distinguishing between multiculturalism as the 'destructive' notion that 'every culture has the right to exist and there is no over-arching thread that holds them together', and the no-problem 'diversity', 'where people have their own cultural beliefs and they happily coexist'. But her attempts to bracket the CPS with Trevor Phillips in having a common objection to the 'destructive' side of multiculturalism somewhat stretch belief.
| Whatever Phillips means by multiculturalism, it is not going to be the same as Ruth Lea - for the simple reason that multiculturalism means whatever you want it to mean, according to whatever political agenda you are trying to push. Debates about everything from immigration to education, from terrorism to school uniform, are conducted within the framework of multiculturalism - as though the declining sense of national identity can be explained as a direct consequence of the number of successful asylum applicants, the proliferation of faith schools is somehow the reason for the crisis in British secondary schools, or the existence of mosques in inner-city areas is responsible for al-Qaeda. Blaming multiculturalism for the proliferation of all kinds of social problems evades both an upfront discussion of these particular issues, and a real appreciation of the role that multiculturalism plays in today's society.
| Multiculturalism is not about ethnic diversity, linguistic pluralism, faith schools or culinary variety. It is certainly not, as is often assumed, an enlightened approach to running a multi-ethnic society. Multiculturalism is an official response to the identity crisis within Western society, brought about by the collapse of common values, national institutions and traditional political solidarities. It attempts to provide a positive cultural sheen to this crisis, re-presenting the lack of common identity as a new cultural pluralism, and the fragmentation of communities as an enriching kind of diversity.
| The official promotion of multicultural codes and policies weaves the notions of multiculturalism into everyday life and politics. By refusing to allow claims that any one culture is superior to any other, by carefully allocating resources to community projects engaged in entirely different, and often contradictory, activities, and by encouraging members of society to take pride in their different beliefs and identities, multiculturalism pretends that the hole at the heart of Western culture is in fact something positive and enriching.
| An elite that is unwilling to make judgements about why any one cultural practice is better than another, to set universal standards about what role individuals should be expected to play across society, and to promote a distinct set of values that a society should agree upon, finds a useful tool in multiculturalism. This is why it has been so well-suited to Western societies in the past few decades, increasingly disorientated by the erosion of cultural and political certainties. Clearly, the official promotion of multicultural policy has not provided any solution to this disorientation - indeed, by actively encouraging expressions of difference and divisions between communities, it may well have fuelled the process of fragmentation. But despite the problematic character of multiculturalism, this is not what caused these problems - and it is not as if coming out 'against' multiculturalism now promises any solution in itself.
| From the Bradford riots of 2001 to the ongoing panic about asylum seekers to the preoccupation with Islamic extremists, recent years have brought sharply to the fore the depth of fragmentation within British society. Every new crisis fuels an exaggerated sense of things falling apart, and is seen as yet another blow to Britain's already fragile sense of self. Casting about for something to blame for this state of affairs and a quick-fix solution to it, commentators from across the political spectrum are increasingly alighting upon the issue of multiculturalism.
| But just as it would be nonsensical to blame Halal meat in schools for the collapse of British identity, it would be wrong to suggest that the official policy of promoting multiculturalism is something that could be scrapped just like that, thereby providing some magic sense of unity. It was the vacuum at the centre of British society that gave rise to multiculturalism, rather than the other way round. Far from being an add-on policy option, the official codes and rules of multiculturalism are now intimately ingrained in cultural life, informing the everyday running of institutions and providing the framework for policy discussions.
| While it is welcome to see criticisms of the negative consequences of such policies, the ubiquitous character of multiculturalism means that it is unrealistic to imagine that Britain could simply jettison multiculturalism in favour of a distinct national identity. Similarly, just as talk of a 'PC backlash' usefully draws attention to some of the excesses of political correctness, it is hard to imagine today's Britain operating outside of the confines of this stifling etiquette.
| But then, the self-styled new critics of multiculturalism, like Trevor Phillips, are not proposing a robust debate about Britain's identity crisis - let alone any solution. Phillips may talk of the need to 'assert a core of Britishness' across society, thereby winning plaudits from the voice of Little England - but he is hardly promoting some kind of monoculture. He means celebrating the country's 'tolerance, its eccentricity, its parliamentary democracy, its energy in the big cities' - oh, and Shakespeare. What are these, but the values of multiculturalism - where all is tolerated except for intolerance (and the burqa)?
| To Phillips, Britain's core national values consist of the unwillingness to promote core national values - a sense of national pride in non-judgementalism, provided the line is drawn on certain key law-and-order issues ('[P]eople should not be allowed to smoke dope on the street because it is part of their culture', says Phillips. 'That is nonsense. It is against the law.').
| Phillips sees this apparent dumping of multiculturalism in favour of a core of multicultural Britishness as recipe for an 'integrated society'. It looks more like a re-statement of every New Labour pronouncement on citizenship, every left-leaning tract on the problem of social fragmentation, every desperate attempt to address the problems within Western culture, while still praising the virtues of diversity and the important contribution of the politics of difference.
| Yet with all this discussion, there remains an unwillingness to face up to what it means to create a new, coherent, national identity with a core sense of values. This is particularly the case when the proposals for manufacturing such an identity rely on evading the hard questions and offending nobody. We should recognise that the issue is not multiculturalism, but society's struggle to agree about basic matters of good and bad, right and wrong, or life and death. There is clearly an openness to having such a discussion - maybe now is the time to go beyond the phony debate about 'scrapping' multiculturalism, to ask the more fundamental questions about who we are.
| Read on:
Backlash against multiculturalism?, by Munira Mirza
(1) I want an integrated society with a difference, The Times (London), 3 April 2004
(2) So what exactly is multiculturalism?, BBC News, 5 April 2004
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