David Cameron and multiculturalism

It's not very often I wholeheartedly agree with a Guardian editorial - usually a bit too wishy-washy - but I think this just about nails it.

Of course, as the leader writer kind of says, it's become difficult to even talk about this in a sensible way because on this issue we're all Humpty Dumptys. Multiculturalism means exactly what we want it to mean. But two particularly problems I have with the 'anti-multi-culti' brigade are these.

First, the fetishisation of Britishiness and 'British values'. If you look at the evidence, people from almost all ethnic and religious minorities, including da Muslimz, feel more British than those from the majority White British group, who are increasingly likely to say English, Welsh etc. Two exceptions tend to be White folks from the US, Australia etc. and Buddhists, a large number of whom are, er, White British, but nobody seems to worry too much about them. Can't think why.

What does this tell us? Perhaps that 'British' is such a broad church (no pun intended) that it's almost meaningless. In a sense this is obviously true and always has been. National identities are imagined communities that enable people who otherwise have absolutely nothing in common (think welders in Tyneside and hunting squires in Devon) to feel a sense of togetherness. But more likely I think is that British is an aspirational term for people from minority groups - saying you feel British is part of making it so. People in the US have always seen this - part of becoming/being American is hyphenating your original identity to Irish-American, Italian-American etc. On this measure alone 'multiculturalism' has been a resounding success. An overwhelming majority of people from minority groups want to and indeed do feel British.

The second issue is the implicit, and increasingly explicit, suggestion that if 'they' don't accept 'our' values they will be excluded in some sense (this is ultimately of course a go back to where you came from argument, but we'll leave aside the difficulty of sending people born in Walthamstow or Lancashire  'back'). Cameron mentions women's rights and democracy. But the essence of living in democracy is precisely that we don't expect everyone to think the same. We expect them to act according to the law, but that is something different. So it's admissable to think that women should be chained to the kitchen sink, but not to act on that belief and, for example, deny women jobs on the basis that they might get pregnant at some point. If people are going to get pulled up or excluded on the basis of a dubious commitment to gender equality we'd have to sack the entire editorial staff of the Daily Mail, for a start.

The suspicion must be that 'they' are being held to a higher standard than 'us' because they are inherently different and have something to prove, while being one of us means automatic inclusion whatever the particular views one holds. I think you'd be hard put to find a better way to proving to people they're different, excluded, and dissuade them from entering in open and rational discussion of differences of opinion.

I don't wish to sound panglossian here - there are problems with some young Muslims in terms of violence extremism, and more widely in terms of some pretty antediluvian attitudes to gender, sexuality etc. But with regard to the latter at least that makes them no different to some Hindus, Sikhs, Catholics, or right-wing Tories. To blame multi-culturism for linking political incorrectness (which is, of course, what Cameron was talking about, even though he'd never say it in those terms) with violent extremism seems to fly in the face not only of the evidence concerning how multiculturalism 'works' but also any sensible consideration of the actual distribution of 'wrong-thinking' in our society.