B.Y.O.C. (bring your own culture)

by The ALN Features team

London is proud of its reputation as a beacon for tolerance and multiculturalism and a place where different cultures can live peacefully.

Despite ethnic differences and the stereotypes that may follow them, we have succeeded in fostering a multicultural society which is admired by the rest of the world. Indeed you can see it on the corner of every street. You can find the world in London.

Yet last year, Prime Minister, David Cameron controversially declared in a speech signalling the end of the multicultural approach that: “We have allowed the weakening of our collective identity. Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.”

But to say multiculturalism is not working surely implies an alternative. Political blogger, John Rogers said: “It implies that there is this other culture, which by definition would be a monoculture. There’s never been a monoculture. The ‘50s had a wooly monoculture that didn’t really exist.”

Integration

Talk of greater integration provides some perspective on Cameron’s comments. What he proposes is a society where people of all ethnicities co-exist within a framework underpinned by British values.

The speech centred heavily on terrorism, saying a “hands-off” tolerance of communities rejecting Western values has failed our society and left some young Muslims feeling “rootless” and vulnerable to radicalisation.

Yet the mix and blend of cultures makes London the capital city as we recognise it today. It is hard to imagine what the capital would be like without these diverse identities. But what’s the story behind our multicultural society?

Rogers says that: “Although we love to define the mainstream culture ourselves, we’re a bit coy about it. We don’t particularly like waving the flag, we don’t have many national holidays, we don’t have one religion. We got rid of most of our traditions when we urbanised.”

Sociologist, Manuel Castells discovered that members of increasingly diverse communities in London are now regrouping around “primary identities” – those of race and religion – because they are encountering too much that is unknown and changing.

Rogers suggests that political systems were more to blame for this creation of division within multiculturalism: “I was involved in the Labour party in the early ‘90s. Hackney’s Labour council had spent all this money on one estate. The estate was mainly full of Nigerian people so they’d built this Nigerian kind of village.

They’d spent so much money on it and people were asking why? The Nigerian people on the estate were also asking why. They were saying, we don’t want it either, we just want our windows fixed and our lifts to work. I think this is a good example of how the policy of multiculturalism is not working.”

Closed off

Rogers gave a simple example of how immigrant communities can become closed off and create parts of London that seem to be predominantly associated with one culture. “Particularly primary schools have this policy when you’re seeking to get your child into school.

If you have a sibling in school, your child has a preference, and catchment areas in London change from year to year. My youngest child got into the school because his brother was there, but usually he wouldn’t have done, as when he was born the birth rate was higher and the catchment area smaller.

Now take Bangladeshi people in a large housing estate. High birth rates are typical of Bangladeshi culture. They operate a sibling preference in that area and so the school becomes 95% Bangladeshi. They are isolated incidents, but how do we remove the sibling policy? What do you do?”

It is fair to say that, institutionally and socio-economically, it is the norm that immigrant communities in Britain start ‘out’ and have to work their way ‘in’.

If our communities are indeed fragmenting under the pressure of multiculturalism, and “we’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values,” as Cameron stated, a new approach to integration may be seen as warranted.