Peter Wilby finds plans for integration wanting
Reading this month's report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, set up by ministers after the 7 July bombings, I was irresistibly reminded of one of those old Soviet films about the workers' paradise. The commission, looking ahead to 2020, hopes for "open communities", where "people from all different backgrounds are equal and where everyone matters". There will be a "shared national vision" and "an ethics of hospitality", community weeks and school citizenship ceremonies, belonging campaigns (with the improbably titled "We all belong to Blackburn with Darwen" campaign held up as a model) and courtesy charters, welcome packs for new arrivals and smiles all round at Diwali and Eid.
I have two difficulties with this motherhood and vegetable curry approach to community relations, along with the rest of the Britishness and citizenship agenda.
The first concerns discrimination and economic disadvantage. A report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, published in April, Ethnic Minorities in the Labour Market, concluded that: "Earnings disadvantage for men from ethnic minorities is a pervasive feature of the British labour market." The report allowed for such factors as education, experience, occupation, region, type of industry and birth in the UK, and still found substantial differences. In professional and managerial occupations, for example, black African and Caribbean men earned around 25 per cent less than whites in similar jobs.
Another recent report from the foundation, Poverty Among Ethnic Groups, found that all minorities suffer higher income poverty rates than the white British, and that the rate among Bangladeshis is more than three times as high. Is this because minority communities are, on average, younger, more likely to have large families and more likely to be unemployed? Analysis suggested these and similar factors accounted for "around half - but only half - of the 'excess' income poverty rates".
Perhaps employers impose a pay penalty because minorities hand out jihadist literature in the workplace or take veiled wives to company dinners. Perhaps they would be more generous to Bangladeshi employees if they ran into them at jumble sales in village halls. I doubt it. Talk of cohesion is so much waffle unless we tackle divisions where they matter.
My second concern about the cohesion and Britishness agenda is that it fights an unequal battle against far more powerful forces. Until recently, people derived identity and loyalty from place, class, political allegiance or religion (or from a combination of these). The first three have been enormously weakened by the rise of neoliberalism, which has substituted lifestyle and consumption.
Young people particularly identify with the trainers they wear, the football clubs they support and the music they prefer, not with a country, a trade union or a political movement. More traditional forms of identity survive best where they involve some sense of victimhood, as they do among both Palestinians and Jews and, thanks to Boris Johnson and Kelvin MacKenzie, among Liverpudlians. Exclusion still draws people together.
As the author of Jihad vs McWorld, Benjamin R Barber, observes, modern identity "is wrapped up in merchandising, marketing and, above all, branding". Citizenship, as it was understood in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was rooted in nation states and their cities, towns and villages. It proved strong enough to resist both fascism and communism but has been blown away by the global forces that neoliberalism unleashed. As Barber puts it, "There are no global citizens, only global consumers; no global states, only global capitalist firms; no commonweal, only an aggregate of what individuals and nations and consumer markets want; no global cultural or national identities. . . only the new, hollowed-out identity conferred by brands."
Religion, precisely because it is a source of global identity, has moved into the vacuum as the only force able to resist the global reach of markets. Equally, Coca-Cola, Nike and David Beckham, commanding allegiance from Lahore to Luton, often seem the most effective sources of resistance to Islamism. Britishness - or, indeed, Blackburn with Darwen-ness - seems a feeble idea by comparison. "Civic identity remains small and parochial," says Barber. It is not, to coin a phrase, fit for purpose.
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