Off its perch

“Multiculturalism is dead. Long live interculturalism,” squawk the parrots. It’s official. Multiculturalism is off the twig. It’s kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible; it is an ex-ism.

In their report ‘Engagement with Cultures: From Diversity to Interculturalism’, which they launched on the 7th of July ‘06, researchers Bill Law, Tim Haq and Asaf Hussain conclude that “.multiculturalism has failed.” The report details a ‘unique experiment’ carried out in Leicester to test whether or not interculturalism works. Bill Law is a regional director of the East Midlands Economic Network, Tim Haq is a consultant on inward investment, Asaf Hussain is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester’s Centre for the History of Religious and Political Pluralism. All three are members of the Society for Intercultural Understanding (SICUL). Ah yes, the usual suspects.

Interculturalism? Don’t mock. It’s the latest idea from the ideas people. They define it as, “.a sharing of cultural experiences with people from a different culture. It contrasts with multiculturalism which celebrates diversity.” And guess what, the three intrepid researchers discovered that interculturalism does indeed work! Now fancy that.

Published by the Institute of Lifelong Learning at Leicester University, the report covers the setting up and observation of various events which encouraged contact between ‘communities’, and guess what, “.the results proved the success of interculturalism”.

This, say the researchers, “.sounds the death knell on the policy of multiculturalism which has seen communities develop separately in cities and co-exist with parallel lives. It was a concept and a social re-engineering policy with the best of intentions, but with little debate at the grass roots. It failed to recognise or ignored the dangers of religious fundamentalism with deadly consequences. It was yesterday’s message conveyed by yesterday’s men and women. Our message is simple. Britain’s population has to become integrated.”

Tomorrow’s message from yesterday’s man

It’s interesting that Law, Haq, and Hussain should be so cruelly dismissive of multiculturalism and its proponents, “.yesterday’s message conveyed by yesterday’s men.”, yet at the same time invite one time high profile advocate of multiculturalism Ted Cantle to write the foreword to their report.

Cantle is a 1970’s sociology graduate (say no more) and former lefty housing officer who successfully climbed the greasy pole and now has a finger in many pies. A very useful idiot, he was at the forefront of the imposition of multiculturalism on the British people until his investigation into the race riots in Burnley, Bradford, and Oldham in 2001 (and the subsequent Cantle Report) after which he began to shift his feet and the concept of ‘community cohesion’ took root.

In an interview with the Guardian (21.09.05), Cantle admitted that during a 30-year career in local government, spanning housing officer to chief executive, he was guilty of promoting this ” .now outdated model of race relations. We built community centres for Bangladeshis and other groups, but what we forgot to do was to find common bonds between them.” It just sort of slipped his mind.

Shortly afterwards, writing in the Times (18.10.05), Cantle further exposed the limits of his thinking, “The events of recent years, stretching back to the race riots and the atrocities of September 11 in 2001 to the London bombings in July, have shattered our multicultural consensus. We had expected that our communities would be growing together, not becoming more distant.” In other words, he and the other ’scientists’ managing the multicultural experiment got it wrong, big style. Cantle has been undone by his own reckless naivety; while he and his ilk were doing all they could do to encourage diversity they were doing it with the expectation “.that our communities would be growing together.” Duh! How on earth did he miss that contradiction? If ever there was an example of a man promoted to the height of his incompetence it is that of Professor (sic) Ted Cantle.

The multiculturalism that he and the liberal elite once promoted “. was a concept and a social re-engineering policy with the best of intentions, but with little debate at the grass roots.” There was no debate, the liberal establishment just took the decision to “re-engineer” British society on multicultural lines and then called it a “consensus”, and on his admission Cantle took the lead in this – so much for his democratic credentials. Of course it was all done with the best of intentions – and thus Cantle et al paved the way to hell.

Yet in spite of his short sightedness and stupidity, instead of being laughed out of existence, the Prof (as he no doubt likes to be known) has been put in charge of “re-engineering” British society, again. He’s already “re-engineered” it once and he made a complete balls-up. Where’s the evidence to suggest it will be different this time?

Oh yes, I forgot, the evidence comes from the men from the Society for Intercultural Understanding. They proved it with their research, interculturalism does work – no, it really does. And Cantle is going to lead us away from multiculturalism towards social cohesion by way of interculturalism. Now why didn’t I think of that?

The Cantle Empire

Ted Cantle and the organisations he fronts occupy a powerful position. On matters race, culture, and community they are the experts. And by virtue of this alleged expertise, they have been given roles in policy making and in its implementation.

The Cantle Empire consists of a research wing, the University of Coventry-based Community Cohesion Institute which he chairs, and an executive wing, the IDeA (Improvement and Development Agency – a sort of supra local government organisation) where he is Associate Director. The Community Cohesion Unit defines race/culture/community problems, and advises central government of their solutions in order to inform policy. The IDeA advises local government on ‘best practise’ in the implementation of that policy, ‘best practice’ being the promotion of egalitarian ideology.

It seems that the IDeA was created to ‘guide’ local government in its transition from multiculturalism to interculturalism. With breathtaking arrogance, Executive Director Lucy de Groot writes, “As community leaders, local authorities have a crucial role to play in ensuring community cohesion principles are embedded into local life.” In 2004, along with the CRE, Home Office, The Inter Faith Network, and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (that must have been some party – you really couldn’t make this up) the IDeA helped write ‘Community Cohesion – an action guide for local authorities’.

It’s all very neat. After his report on the 2001 riots the concept of “community cohesion” was subsequently adopted by the government and Ted Cantle was asked to chair the panel that advised ministers on its implementation. Five years later Ted has the Community Cohesion Institute saying what he’s been saying ever since he ditched multiculturalism, that communities now need to be brought together, and he has the IDeA making sure it happens by getting local government to play it by his community cohesion book.

“Community cohesion”

That the liberal establishment can gloss over their multicultural mess and change direction as though the mess had nothing to do with them is a measure of their contempt. They act as though multiculturalism just happened and they appear oblivious to its relationship with the ideas they’ve been promoting and the policies they’ve been implementing since the end of WWII.

The Leicester University study “Engagement with Cultures: From Diversity to interculturalism” is little more than a rose-tinted view of the effect of inter-cultural events on what has been termed community cohesion. interculturalism brings cultures together and thus aids community cohesion – it’s obvious, innit?

This is their big idea. It’s going to get us out of the hole that they’ve been digging for the past fifty odd years, they hope.

All you have to do, they say, is bring together groups of people from different ethnic/religious/cultural communities and engage them in joint activities such that each will learn more about the other and in consequence each will understand the other better and thus like them more. Is this puerile rubbish the best that academia can do?

In practical terms they seek to encourage for example such events as Pakistani women getting together with British women for joint chapatti and Yorkshire pudding making sessions, the rationale being that while they’re together they’ll see how much they have in common – provided of course all the ingredients conform to Muslim dietary requirements.

But nowhere in all their blather is there any evidence to show that knowing someone better necessarily makes them more likeable. It’s just more wishful thinking from the airhead ideas people. The more I learn about Ted Cantle the more I dislike him; where once I saw him merely as a useful idiot I now see him as an egotistical, self righteous, and dangerous fool. And I don’t doubt for one second that the more he were to find out about me the more he’d dislike me too. So where does that leave the interculturalism/social cohesion thesis?

Forward to the past

Cantle’s investigation into the cause of the 2001 race riots was an exercise in fudge. They didn’t need investigating; their cause was obvious. They were the natural result of competing cultures occupying the same living space. But of course Ted Cantle couldn’t arrive at that conclusion. It questions the logic of mass third world immigration and through that questions the logic of egalitarianism. He might have changed his mind about multiculturalism, but he still believes in the equality of man.

It was a difficult call for him. After all, he helped devise the multicultural agenda.

Yet there’s no getting away from it, diversity does exactly what it says on the tin; it divides. Cantle’s solution attempted to unite the best of both of his worlds – he proposed a sort of ‘united diversity’ and called it community cohesion, and he kept his face straight too!

It is a measure of the establishment’s multiculti predicament that they latched onto the community cohesion idea so uncritically. Had they given it a second thought they’d have seen it for the nonsense that it is. The term ‘community cohesion’ tends towards the tautological; if it’s not cohesive, it’s not a community. And anyway, since Cantle means it in the sense of the connectedness of communities it would have been more accurate to use ‘communities cohesion’ rather than community cohesion, although you can well imagine that the liberals who put this together would be the sort of people to baulk at the plural because of its ‘divisiveness’.

Yet the term is now part of the politicians’ lexicon, and it’s beginning to influence policy too. Just a couple of weeks ago I was talking with one of our BNP councillors Colin Auty who told me about a community cohesion project his council was setting up. I phoned the council and asked whether its adoption of the community cohesion idea meant that it now regarded multiculturalism as passé. Nope, multiculturalism is still de rigueur in Kirklees.

This highlights the mess that the establishment is in. The essence of the administration of local and central government is still multicultural, yet the executive wants to replace this with the community cohesion idea. interculturalism is their new theory for happy ever after. But the effort invested in maintaining the multicultural ideal has been so massive that these great bureaucratic machines continue to be driven by it; the inertia is proving difficult to overcome. Community cohesion got the official green light in 2001 yet it’s only just breaking the surface.

To make matters worse for the community cohesion converts, they appear to have missed the obvious: Multiculturalism and the multicultural society are not one and the same.

The multicultural society preceded multiculturalism. Third world immigrants arrived in such numbers that third world cultures became sustainable within our own culture. The multicultural society is a consequence of mass immigration and it represents the failure of integration. Multiculturalism is the establishment’s attempt to cover up that failure and it was born of the establishment’s need to legitimise the transformation of Britain into a multicultural society. Do they really think that the multicultural society will disappear just because they announce the demise of multiculturalism? Maybe they do – after all, self delusion is their greatest attribute.

It seems we’ve been here before. Ted Cantle says he’s not an ‘integrationist’ yet according to the research that his foreword endorses, “Britain’s population has to become integrated.” And Cantle’s idea of community cohesion is in the final analysis an exercise in integration; it seeks to increase the connectedness of communities and by so doing to diminish the differences between them. That’s integration isn’t it? If it fails to work, again, has anyone any idea what plan ‘B’ is?