THE PAREKH REPORT [11]

'2.20 There has never been a single “British way of life”. The idea that Britishness is universally diffused across society is seriously misleading. For there have always been many, often contested, ways of being British. Outside the heartland (earlier “Home Counties”; more recently “middle England”), Britishness always existed alongside, and was strongly challenged by, the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, and also by a range of local and regional loyalties. Identification with Yorkshire, the North East, Manchester, Lancashire, the West Midlands, East Anglia and the West Country has co-existed with, and sometimes seems to override, national identity - there have been alternative versions of national identity not only within Britain but also within England itself ...

2.21 Deep differences in social and political outlook and opinion continue to exist, even in today’s less politicised climate, and reflect different, often dramatically opposed, versions of national identity. A young columnist remarked: “It could be argued that a universal sense of “Englishness” is impossible when our class system provides so many different “Englands” ... Exactly the same would be true of Britishness as a whole, as seen from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, or by people of different genders, regions and generations ... All classes were involved in and benefited from empire, but men and women related to it in different ways.

3.6 Caribbean culture has a distinct social and geographical basis and it the product of a unique historical experience ... British-born African-Caribbeans are socialised through family and neighbourhood into a migrant version of this culture. Following the rediscovery of an African and slave past at home (as communicated through reggae music), and resistance to white racism in Britain, blackness has become an essential part of their self-definition. They are conscious of their subordinate, racialised place in global power systems.

3.9 ... In recent surveys nearly all Asians questioned have said that religion is important to them, but it has not inhibited full participation in the wider society. Recently, Muslims have emerged as the principle focus of racist antagonisms (“Islamophobia”) based on cultural difference. The politicisation of Islam throughout the world has contributed to this. Often, however, what Islam means is that “new ways of living and the process of gradually becoming a part of British society have to be ultimately justified in terms compatible with Muslim faith” ...

3.10 Anti-Irish racism developed in tandem with racisms directed at people outside Europe. There are around 3 million Irish people in Britain today - by far the largest migrant community. All too often they are neglected in considerations of race and cultural diversity in modern Britain. It is essential, however, that all such considerations should take their perceptions and situations into account.

3.12 The generations of Irish born in Britain remain under-researched. However, the few available studies indicate a continuing pattern of low achievement for young Irish men and disproportionate ill health in the second generation. The position of the Irish in Britain as insider-outsiders is uniquely relevant to the nature of its multi-ethnic society. For generations, Irish experience has been neglected owing to the myth of the homogeneity of white Britain, but it illuminates Britishness in much the same way that the experience of black people illuminates whiteness.

3.16 ... Few in the Jewish community would question the significance of the Holocaust or of Israel, but many now say that the focus of communal attention must be on values, culture and religious practice, on positive images of Jewish culture and civilisation, and they are concerned with how to maintain Jewish distinctiveness in British society. Their desire for cultural recognition in a pluralist society offers probably more potential for shared goals with Asian and black people than the shared history of racist oppression.

3.17 The kinds of tension and complexity outlined above are issues also for Gypsies and Travellers. As is the case with Irish people and Jews, they are often neglected in considerations of Britain as a multi-ethnic society, or included only as an afterthought. But they too were defined in the past as an inferior race and are part of the history of British racism ...

3.19 ... Despite the great diversity between and within travelling groups, all are lumped together in the minds of settled communities. They suffer from high degrees of social exclusion, vilification and stereotyping. Anyone who does not fit the traditional stereotype (painted wagon, campfire, swarthy complexion, much gold jewellery) is assumed to be a mere traveller, to be feared and despised.

3.23 Britain continues to be disfigured by racism; by phobias about cultural difference; by sustained social, economic, educational and cultural disadvantage; by institutional discrimination; and by a systematic failure of social justice or real respect for difference. These have been fuelled by a fixed conception of national identity and culture. They are not likely to disappear without a sustained effort of political will. Is it possible to reimagine Britain as a nation - or post nation - in a multicultural way?

3.24 ... Black identities have been positively embraced. Difference now matters profoundly. However, differences are not necessarily either/or - many people are learning to live “in between”, it has been said, or with more than one identity. The famous Tebbit cricket test is not only racially demeaning but is also out of date. People today are constantly juggling different, not always compatible, identities. South Asians and African-Caribbeans support India, Pakistan and the West Indies against England but England against Australia, especially when the English team includes Asian and black players. This is just one aspect of the complex, multifaceted, post-national world in which national allegiance is now played out.

3.25 What broad strategies are shaping the ways in which people deal with this shifting situation? Hope once centred on assimilation. However, this really meant the absorption of so-called minority differences into the so-called majority - people were expected to give up everything in order to belong. But since racism has continued, assimilation has come to be seen as an impossible price to pay - blackness and Asianness are non-tradable. Cultural difference has come to matter more. The awareness that “non-recognition or mis-recognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted and reduced mode of being” has led to a politics of recognition alongside the struggle for equality and racial justice.

3.28 Does Britishness as such have a future? Some believe that devolution and globalisation have undermined it irretrievably ... It is entirely plain, however, that the word "British" will never do on its own.

3.29 Where does this leave Asians, African-Caribbeans and Africans? For them Britishness is a reminder of colonisation and empire, and to that extent is not attractive. But the first migrants came with British passports, signifying membership of a single imperial system. For the British-born generations, seeking to assert their claim to belong, the concept of Englishness often seems inappropriate, since to be English, as the term is in practice used, is to be white. Britishness is not ideal, but at least it appears acceptable, particularly when suitably qualified - Black British, Indian British, British Muslim, and so on.

3.30 However, there is one major and so far insuperable barrier. Britishness, as much as Englishness, has systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations. Whiteness nowhere features as an explicit condition of being British, but it is widely understood that Englishness, and therefore by extension Britishness, is racially coded. "There ain't no black in the Union Jack", it has been said. Race is deeply entwined in political culture and with the idea of nation, and underpinned by a distinctively British kind of reticence - to take race and racism seriously, or even to talk about them at all, is bad form, something not done in polite company. This disavowal, combined with "an iron-jawed disinclination to recognise equal human worth and dignity of people who are not white", has proved a lethal combination. Unless these deep-rooted antagonisms to racial and cultural difference can be defeated in practice, as well as symbolically written out of the national story, the idea of a multicultural post-nation remains an empty promise.'

The last two of the above paragraphs have already been dealt with in the English Rights Campaign entry dated the 22 October 2005, and the press focussed on paragraph 3.30 in particular in its denunciation of the Parekh Report.

Those paragraphs have been included again here in order to present a complete picture of the ideology which is being presented.

Firstly, the report undermines the concept that the British were ever united. To that end it tries to divide up the British and even the English. It seeks to rubbish the concept of nationhood.

We have been spared Trevor Phillips’s and Alabhai Brown’s views on the Irish as of late, but the purported anti-Irish racism was a key part of their attack. The report is trying to portray the British as being no more than a collection of different non-homogenous groups. By trying to draw in the Irish the report reinforces its assertion that the British/English are inherently racist, and that such racism is responsible for all the world’s problems [hence the quiet references to the empire etc].

Ireland was of course once an integral part of Britain. The idea that those of Irish decent born in this country do not fully integrate, and suffer discrimination and racism, is rubbish.

To speak of the British Empire being a ‘single imperial system’ is rubbish. The British were the rulers and the natives of Africa, Asia and elsewhere were the ruled. Britain was a democracy, the colonies were not. Then there were the Dominions. The British Empire no longer exists, and peoples of the former colonies have no claim on Britain or England - apart from the British ex-patriots and their descendants.

The report’s ideology is political correctness in its true neo-communist form. It seeks to create division and hatred, and exaggerate and invent racism. It is pure race war politics.

IT IS MOST DEFINITELY NOT WOOLLY-MINDED IDEALISM NOR IS IT AN ATTEMPT TO ENCOURAGE POLITENESS.

It is evil.

The report seeks to alienate virtually all minority racial groups [Jews, Irish, gypsies, Asians etc] against the English, having first tried to divide the English themselves. All these minority racial groups are, of course, supposedly, victims of British/English racism.

The report is aggressive in its assertion that Britain is now a ‘post-nation’. It also asserts that allegiances are to many different entities and not the nation [‘national allegiance is now played out’]. This is the line which Vince Cable was pushing in his outburst last year [see English Rights Campaign entry dated the 11 September 2005]. All Mr Cable was doing was parroting the Parekh Report [which shows how influential the report is in certain quarters].

A key part of the attack is the assertion that assimilation is impossible. This is not least due to the report’s denial that there is a host nation into which the immigrant minorities can assimilate into [note the reference to Britain being a ‘multicultural post-nation’]. Trevor Phillips’s recent quibbling about the problems of assimilation/integration are disingenuous on this point [see English Rights Campaign entries dated the 18 September 2005 and the 5 October 2005]. The fact is that he is opposed to assimilation/integration per se.

What he really wants is race quotas and anti-English ethnic cleansing.

Given that Labour in particular, and the British ruling class in general, adhere to such views, then it is little wonder that we are now experiencing increasing racial violence and terrorism.