THE PAREKH REPORT [10]

‘The future of Britain lies in the hands of ... descendants of slave owners and slaves, of indentured labourers, of feudal landlords and serfs, of industrialists and factory workers, of lairds and crofters, of refugees and asylum-seekers.

From a response to the Commission

2.1 The movement towards a multi-ethnic, multicultural Britain has been decisive. However, it has not been the result of a concerted decision. Nor is it yet an accomplished fact. It has evolved as an unplanned, incremental process - a matter of multicultural drift, not of conscious policy. Much of the country, including many significant power-centres, remains untouched by it.

2.2 Attitudes towards multicultural drift vary widely. There are people who warmly welcome, to quote the resonant phrase used in the title of recent and influential documentation about it, “the irresistible rise of multiracial Britain”. The new Britain was vividly seen in the Windrush celebrations of 1998, commemorating the arrival of Britain’s Caribbean and Asian communities 50 years earlier. In those celebrations Britain was affirmed as a place where people of different cultural, religious and ethnic backgrounds live together on a permanent basis, and strive to build a common life. However, there are those who accept multicultural drift grudgingly as a fact of life, regretting the passing of the good old days when, they believe, Britain was a much more unified, predictable sort of place. There are also those who militantly resist and oppose it. The Windrush celebrations represented the good side of multiculturalism. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report, with its disturbing finding of institutional racism in the police service - and by extension in all public bodies and institutions - was a sombre reminder of the challenges that must be faced.

2.3 As noted in Chapter 1, Britain confronts a historic choice as to its future direction. Will it try to turn the clock back, digging in, defending old values and ancient hierarchies, relying on a narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation? Or will it seize the opportunity to create a more flexible, inclusive, cosmopolitan image of itself? Britain is at a turning point. But it has not yet turned the corner. It is time to make the move.’

The second chapter of the Parekh Report is entitled: Rethinking the National Story. In other words, the report intends to re-write British history.

It starts off in style, with an extract of a response to the Commission, which is a nice bit of communist theory. It divides Britain along class and racial lines, and even treats so-called asylum-seekers as if they were a normal part of life. In fact the vast majority are out-and-out illegal immigrants and have no business being here.

No asylum-seeker enters this country from an unsafe country. They travel across many other countries and even entire continents to get here.

The extract does not refer to Liverpudlians, or Yorkshiremen, or Cockneys. Of course, they are all English. The report’s aim is to create division.

The report then reveals its intolerance of a free society. It is contemptuous towards those who do not share the report’s obsession with race.

It is to be noted that the report condemns ‘all public bodies and institutions’ as being institutionally racist. Every single one. This bigotry and race war politics is easy for the twisted minds of the politically correct.

For most of the last century the communist term of abuse against English society was in reference to the ‘class system’ or the term the ‘capitalist system’ which could also be applied to the West generally. Now the term of abuse is ‘institutional racism’.

Paragraph 2.3 moves towards the real thrust of the report, with its attack on ‘a narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of a nation’. Britain is English dominated as 85% of the British live in England. The English are by far the most populous nation. Being so, is not something to be ashamed of and nor is it racist.