Multiculturalism: Is Cameron going to be like his predecessors – all talk and no action?
What are we to make of Mr Cameron’s speech on the failure of “state multiculturalism”? Are we to cheer that, at last, a senior politician has had the courage to jump in feet first and open up the debate? Or are we to groan that here comes the next one who knows there’s a problem but hasn’t got the guts, or the will, to follow through with the radical solution that is needed?
And if he does follow through – what would he actually do to tackle the problem of radical Islamism that has established itself in Muslim communities throughout Britain?
I suggest that Mr Cameron starts by watching the Dispatches programme to be broadcast on Monday on Channel 4. He will see that within “Muslim schools” there is a widespread culture of separatism and an outright rejection of Western values, not to mention hate-mongering on an epic scale. In such places, the “muscular liberalism” that the Prime Minister espouses is easily overpowered by the unchecked steam roller of Islamism.
Several commentators have asked how Mr Cameron is going to challenge the growth of dangerous Wahabi Islam in this country when he allows schools to use state money to create ghettos of religious separatism. Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent was one of them. She wrote:
“This Government is enthusiastically funding schools for separatists – from snooty white middle-classes, to pedantic, purist Hindus, nutty, evangelical Christians, and introverted, uncompromising Muslims. How does that foster integration? Michael Gove has just been accused by Bradford City Council of encouraging segregation by funding a new free school started up by Ayub Ismail, who wants to ensure his pupils are not “absorbed into the dominant culture”. Saudis are allowed by our Government to brainwash Muslims who are then despised. The Tory party’s right and left buttocks move in different directions. Not clever nor consistent with the PM’s Big Message of the week.”
Writing in The Times, Philip Collins said:
“Are faith schools the embodiment of the shared national values that David Cameron wants us all to sign up to? Or are they institutions that organise us into separate lives?
Mr Cameron says that just obeying the law is not good enough and that we need to promote a series of values such as freedom of association and equal rights. A faith school that is attended only by Muslim children could and would certainly claim to uphold these basic values. Yet it would also encode separate living, which Mr Cameron says is the source of the problem.
A spokesman for the Department for Education told The Times that Mr Cameron’s comments had not affected policy on faith schools. “The Government supports faith schools. We’ve been talking about the admissions system generally to make it a bit fairer and simpler to navigate, but there have been no changes to policy.”
Mr Collins makes the point that much the same speech had been made before Cameron by Tony Blair – and Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears, too. Like him, they had said that public money given to Islamic groups of dubious character would stop. They sidelined the MCB for a time, and then brought it back. Now it seems it may be sidelined again. Hopefully this time for good.
There was no real radical change in approach in all the previous cases. The Islamists continued to spew their hate unimpeded in mosques and street corners and on websites and blogs, and many of them pocketed public money in the process.
The National Secular Society has been consistent in its argument that “faith schools” must take their share of the blame for this inability to fuse communities into a working whole. Not to try to create Mr Cameron’s fantasy of a mono-cultural Britain, which is equally unrealistic, but a nation that at least feels as though it knows itself and accepts itself in all its myriad varieties, while at the same time aiming for the same goal.
What we have at the moment is a collection of communities living dangerously apart from each other, aided an abetted by the state that doesn’t know what to do about it.
One of Mr Cameron’s demands is that everyone in this country is able to speak the same language. We agree with that, but in the same week, his Government cut in half the funding for ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages).
It is dawning on the Government and other opinion formers that religious conflict could become a major issue in Britain if we don’t act to stop it now. But the Coalition is hog-tied by fear of a backlash from those with a vested interest in keeping immigrant communities under their own iron control – the mullahs and the imams.
Mr Cameron’s talk of “muscular liberalism” caused one commentator to reach the conclusion that the NSS reached in 1866. Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent said: “The word Mr Cameron is looking for is secularism.”. The Economist, on the other hand, called the speech an “unconvincing muddle”.
But one blogger, Mats Tunehag, noticed a small point in Mr Cameron’s speech which will set alarm bells ringing among those religious believers who imagine they have a divine right to run the world. It concerns the difference between “freedom of worship” and “freedom of religion”. In his speech, Mr Cameron said:
“…I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality.”
Mr Tunehag noted that the term “freedom of worship” has occurred previously in speeches by Hilary Clinton and President Obama. He asserts that freedom of worship is not the same as freedom of religion. Freedom to worship, he says, means little, but freedom of religion means “the right to have a faith, to manifest it and propagate for it, alone or together with others, also in the public arena. It also gives the right to change beliefs and religious affiliation. This is what democracies would adhere to.”
This point was expanded upon by another Christian blogger, Archbishop Cranmer, who said:
“The practice of religion – true religion – permeates every fibre of our being and enters every fabric of our lives. After centuries of constitutional theo-political development, the British arrived at a notion of tolerance and an understanding of liberty which the Prime Minister appears to be intent in limiting to state-approved expressions. By advocating ‘freedom of worship’, he adopts the narrative of the ‘aggressive secularist’ who seeks to relegate faith to the private sphere. This is antithetical to British ‘core values’, for it is as totalitarian as the approach taken by Saudi Arabia, and as illiberal as the banning of crucifixes by the European Union.... The Gospel of Christ is paramount and pre-eminent: it is not for the state to re-write the Word of God or to impose a uniform theo-political exposition.”
This may have been true in the sixteenth century when the original Cranmer was alive, but it is not true now. We “aggressive secularists” will continue to insist that religion must know its new place in the scheme of things. If it continues to seek to regain the temporal power it lost after centuries of warfare, then resistance will be absolute from those of us who regard liberalism to be the real indicator of progress in our civilisation.
If you want to read more about this debate there is a wealth of articles and commentary from the press and online resources available in our What the Papers Say section of the website. They represent all points of view because we feel this is a debate that needs to be opened up completely and not constrained by the diktats of those who want critics silenced. We also feel strongly that it should not become a party political issue – it is an important topic that concerns us all. What the Papers Say is updated each day.