Multiculturalism? The term was foisted on us by bureaucrats of the British state

The Commission for Racial Equality was set up by the British state to ensure that racial discrimination was brought to an end. It came into being when dark-skinned, former colonial subjects resisted attempts by whites to keep them in lowly positions. It has no business telling immigrants, old or new, how they should live their lives.

So I must confess I was amused when Trevor Phillips, the CRE chairman, told the Times that multiculturalism should no longer be pursued and we should all instead "assert a core of Britishness". It was the CRE in the first place that sought to plaster the term multiculturalism across our faces. Like all bureaucracy-speak, the term remains quite meaningless to ordinary black and Asian folk.

It would be impossible for those of us who have lived here since the Second World War not to have imbibed, shared and developed the culture into which we were plunged. We formed myriad organisations to demand our inclusion in various areas of national life and, when those areas continued to keep us out, we built our own institutions. In areas where ethnic minorities are in the majority that is because, as they moved in, whites moved out. What were minorities supposed to do? Follow whites around with heads bowed and tails wagging, wailing: "Don't go, memsahib, please stay"?

What is this "core of Britishness"? Phillips talked repeatedly in his interview of Shakespeare and Dickens. If young Muslims ignore these writers, it is because their white contemporaries do the same. Phillips talked also of parliamentary democracy. There has been an enormous defection from electoral politics over the past decade. Are young Muslims to blame for that?

My suspicion is that young Pakistanis arouse in Phillips physical fear - something for which the Caribbean middle class is notorious. Travelling around the UK recently, I discovered violence among Pakistani youth on a scale I had not imagined before. They move around in large numbers beating the hell out

of West Indians and Sikhs with baseball bats and iron bars. Where

they are unable to find Caribbean or Sikh targets, they take the violence to each other. All this is done with sweet Caribbean street slang. It has nothing to do with their values; only a tiny educated elite are available as potential recruits for jihad. It has everything to do with social exclusion and poverty, as the factories in which their parents worked migrate east.

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