Multi-culturalism questioned.

Ruth Kelly, Communities secretary in the Blair government has been speaking on "multi-culturalism". M-C has long been an article of faith on the left and anyone challenging it is met likely to be met with ritual howls of "racist"; but Kelly, one of the few Labour MPs who can be described accurately as "intelligent", is now suggesting that it might not be such a good idea after all. In a speech marking the launch of a new Commission on Integration and Cohesion she said

...there are white Britons who do not feel comfortable with change. They see the shops and restaurants in their town centres changing. They see their neighbourhoods becoming more diverse. Detached from the benefits of those changes, they begin to believe the stories about ethnic minorities getting special treatment, and to develop a resentment, a sense of grievance.

The issues become a catalyst for a debate about who we are and what we are as a country. About what it means to live in a town where the faces you see on the way to the supermarket have changed and may be constantly changing.

I believe this is why we have moved from a period of uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism, to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is encouraging separateness....
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In our attempt to avoid imposing a single British identity and culture, have we ended up with some communities living in isolation of each other, with no common bonds between them?

I think we face the clear possibility that we are experiencing diversity no longer as a country, but as a set of local communities. Each experiencing changes in a different way, with some being affected more than others...

.... I agree with the Home Secretary: it is not racist to discuss immigration and asylum. There are challenging, legitimate issues we need to talk about and debate. That debate, however, must be based on fact, not myth. How do we establish the necessary trust and maturity to allow this? It is also clear that our ideas and policies should not be based on special treatment for minority ethnic or faith communities. That would only exacerbate division rather than help build cohesion. And as a society we have to have the confidence to say no to certain suggestions from particular ethnic groups. But at the same time, to make sure everyone can be treated equally, there are some programmes that will need to treat groups differently. We must, again, be unafraid to say this plainly when it is plainly the pragmatic truth.

It is odds-on that nothing will worthwhile come of the new Commission; in addition to wasting vast sums of public money, it will merely agree to whatever demands Muslim leaders choose to make on it. However, it is remarkable that a member of the remote government elite (RGE) has admitted publicly the existence of such social problems.