Class,
race, wealth: Britain is a nation blighted by divisions
Rafael Behr
With
a new report expected to trigger fresh concerns on integration,
Theresa May has a duty to rise above the outrage and lead a serious
debate
Tuesday 29 November
2016 20.35 GMT
Communication is
stilted as a gaggle of listless teenagers assist a group of disabled
adults on an art project. But nervous shoe-gazing gives way to more
confident engagement and, after a couple of hours, something close to
natural socialising. By the time the glaze is applied to pocket-sized
ceramic snowmen and the awkward silence replaced with lively chatter,
the visit is over. Farewells are made; hugs are exchanged. The
teenage delegation moves to an adjacent studio for a session of
“reflection” on their experience.
“When I heard we
were coming here, I started to panic,” says one young woman. “But
it turns out they are just like us.” This feels partly like a
classroom effort at the “right” answer. The group has been
brought from nearby Sandwell College, in the West Midlands, by The
Challenge – the leading charitable provider of courses that form
the National Citizens Service (NCS). The participants want to
demonstrate their newly acquired citizenship skills, whatever that
means. But there is no doubting the underlying sincerity. Many of the
group say the prospect of an afternoon outside their generational
comfort zone had provoked feelings of dread.
The fear dissolved
quickly, but it took an act of social engineering. Without the NCS
intervention, the presumption that “they” are not like “us”
would persist. The superficial differences are stark, even setting
age aside. The older clients of the council-run art project are all
white; most of the young people are from black and Asian communities
that have transformed the demographics of the region in recent
decades. NCS alumni speak enthusiastically of unexpected friendships
struck up across cultural boundaries.
Critics of the
scheme query how far teenage horizons can be broadened on a taster
course. I’d say a taste of something is better than starvation. And
the effect of inaction is accelerated segregation and the dissolution
of any sense that Britain is a shared national endeavour.
That prospect will
be the focus of heated debate next week with the publication of a
report by Dame Louise Casey, who was commissioned in 2015 to lead a
review into “integration and opportunity in some of our most
isolated communities.” Casey has worked in this field for
governments of different stripes since the late 1990s, giving her
ample opportunity to upset people across the spectrum. She is no
mincer of words.
In a speech earlier
this year, Casey warned that the review would demand “brave
conversations” on a range of issues: the educational
underperformance of white working-class children; misguided
squeamishness around “causing offence” that inhibits efforts to
support women and girls held back by “patriarchal and misogynistic
attitudes”; the normalisation of Islamophobia; and social
conditions that incubate jihadi and far-right fanaticism.
There will be
something to ignite outrage wherever dry ideological tinder is
stored. On the left there will be sparks of fury when it is suggested
that some communities nurture insular habits of self-segregation.
Tricky cultural questions will be overlooked in the rush to locate
social exclusion as a consequence of discrimination, inequality and
austerity.
On the right the
muscle memory of finger-wagging blame will kick in: open borders as
the root of national decline; the lazy conflation of religious
conservatism and terrorist sympathy; the demand that minorities
demonstrate commitment to “British values”, which will be
ill-defined and muddied with a presumption that civic virtue is the
automatic inheritance of an indigenous culture to which less
enlightened newcomers must swear fealty. Those precooked positions
will emerge as vituperative charges of racism and counter-charges of
potty political correctness.
If the past is any
guide, there will be a ferocious exchange of fire across the old
trenches followed by a return to political stalemate. It will take a
formidable effort of imagination to avoid that outcome, and the prime
minister must lead the way. The long delay in releasing a report that
was complete months ago suggests she does not relish the prospect.
It will be tempting
to narrow the focus through a counter-terrorism lens, treating
segregation as a precursor chemical in the manufacture of extremism.
That is an argument where Theresa May, as a former home secretary,
feels comfortable. But if that is the nub of Downing Street’s
response next week we will know that the challenge is being ducked.
Extremism is part of the story, but the route by which a tiny number
of individuals turn alienation into murderous intent is one crooked
alleyway on the periphery of a labyrinthine problem that affects
everyone. Terrorism was not the reason those Sandwell teenagers
dreaded an afternoon volunteering in unfamiliar company.
Britain is strangled
by barbed-wire fences of class, region, wealth, faith, age, the
urban, the rural, leavers and remainers. This is a national disease
for which there is no remedy in singling out a specific group of
people and issuing the vacuous imperative: “Go integrate!” Into
what?
The test for May is
whether she connects segregation to her declared interest in social
mobility. She claims to understand stagnating living standards and
economic insecurity. She says government must more actively restore
ladders of opportunity that have fallen away over decades. Does she
understand how the problem of immobility also operates on the
horizontal axis? Confinement by monoculture is the enemy of
aspiration and prosperity. Segregation breeds mistrust of neighbours
and of national politics in a vicious cycle. If government is not
seen as representing the collective interest in the broadest terms,
people deposit their hopes with politicians who offer the narrowest,
most divisive sectional agenda, peddling them-and-us rhetoric.
May must explicitly
reject that tone. No one expects her to have all the answers, but we
will know next week if she has understood the question. We will know
it by her readiness to eschew the admonishing tone, by her
willingness to make integration sound like a collaboration and an
invitation not an order or a rebuke. The noisy artillery of polarised
debate will start up quickly. But a prime minister’s voice carries.
She must raise it in the service of tolerance and unity.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário