In Munich, recently, a visiting leader of another country, a master of public relations, although with some anger management issues, delivered a speech that made the far right cheer and those of foreign descent fear they are once again to be persecuted for the actions of a minority.
David Cameron’s speech at an international security conference has rightly received a lot of attention. Fox News in the United States has shown repeatedly. Sadiq Khan, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, described Cameron’s remarks and the timing of them as unwise.
As for myself, it upset me to see the Prime Minister of my country asking 2.5 million Muslims to take responsibility for people
they don’t know, don’t want to know, while all they really want is to sit andwatch television while eating a kebab. Yes, just like real Englishmen.
In focusing on imposing behavioural norms, Cameron is harking back to falsified halcyon days of British monoculture. It never existed. As one of critics put it: “Where does he think the Angles and Saxons came from?” It is an utterly facile interpretation of our country.
In modern Britain, all of us engage in a reflexive process of creating identity that steals shamelessly from other cultures. The white youth who is a Buddhist vegetarian, loves rap and kung fu movies, for instance. The son of Muslims who went to Cambridge, loves bacon and cried when Ross broke up with Rachael in Friends, for example.
Multiculturalism, for me, is not so much a political philosophy but rather a literal description of most of our lives. And
that includes heterogeneous cuisine, music and literature, and our sporting, cultural and political figures.
London, in particular, is an exemplar of the successes of British multiculturalism. It is a city of hugely diverse cultures. As Ken Livingstone has observed, it exemplifies the highest aspirations of Millian liberalism. It is a city that crams eight million individual stories into a tangled web of interdependence and, for the main part, mutual respect.
And in the capital we are broadly tolerant. The London Underground, where people’s gazes tend to criss-cross so that no one has to suffer the indignity of meeting another’s eyes is one extreme of our culture of “let each live without interference”.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have cultural phenomena such as the Notting Hill Carnival, exhibitions of exquisite Muslim art and tapestry attended by people from all faiths and cultural backgrounds and sweaty New Year’s Eves in Trafalgar Square where numerous languages mingle, sharing universal joy for the year ahead and a desperate need to go to the loo.
But let’s be straight. That wasn’t what Cameron was attacking. He wasn’t really targeting multiculturalism. He was attacking political extremism. And that’s where his speech unravels and its pernicious intent is so clear. By conflating religious identity with political extremism in such a fluid and lazy way, and not least of all against the backdrop of hundreds of far-right extremists chanting: “Allah, Allah, who the fuck is Allah?” in Luton, he gave credence to the widespread view that Islam is somehow antithetical to Western liberalism.
It’s an old tale. Richard Hofstadter’s essay on the paranoid nature of American politics is instructive. Or is drawing on the arguments of an analysis of American politics too multicultural for some tastes? In his analysis, the hysterical rants of a few misanthropic malcontents from one part of society (whether Freemasons, Roman Catholics, socialists or militant blacks) are conflated with genuine threats from extremists and then the broader group. It is legitimised by semi-respectable institutions conducting their own “inquiries”. That’s what happened with the McCarthyite witch-hunts in the US, for example. And then this is sold by a craven media that thrives on the oxygen of scandal and fear-mongering.
Those who are genuinely scared in our society should be assured of a few things. Most of the “divergent” or “alien” cultures in the United Kingdom love this country. We don’t denigrate our home by calling it “Broken Britain”.
Let me, as the son of immigrants who were shown love and acceptance by their adopted home, and whose children were given every opportunity, regardless of the colour of their skin, say to the people who are scared that I know this is truly a Great Britain. Just as you fear terrorism, we fear terrorism. We get the same trains, the same buses and the same planes.
Political extremists who want to impose their demented worldview on all of us are as terrifying to me as they are to you, whether they happen to be Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Taoist, Buddhist or Sikh. Or members of the British National Party. Like you, we want lives – the sort of lives that Londoners share with people from all parts of Britain (Manchester for me) – people from all religions, all colours and all races.
For David Cameron to pretend otherwise – and imply that you or I could possibly do something to stop extremists that we don’t know or have anything to do with – is the most pernicious of lies.
Imran Ahmed is a Labour activist in Hammersmith
