[lg policy] UK: Ethnic policy: reining in the mad horse

Tue Dec 22 15:58:19 UTC 2009

Ethnic policy: reining in the mad horse
 Jerome di Costanzo, 21 December 2009

It is a real shock for a secular Frenchman like me to see how
omnipresent ethnic policy is in the daily life of a British person. In
France, I was never considered an Italian-French or a white French or
even a Catholic by my boss or by the administration. The Republic, for
historic reasons, doesn’t recognise race, religion, or behaviour as
political, but as private and intimate, just like your sexual
orientation. It was only when I started to live in the UK that I
discovered I fitted the box of White other, even having to admit to
being heterosexual in certain application forms – and no buts, just
tick it!

It was in the early seventies that the first ethnic classifications
appeared and were used by the UK police as information for security.
But 20 years on it has become quasi-obsessional. Everywhere, for every
daily routine, you must declare your background, you must constantly
respect our multicultural society, and be made better by a magical
multicultural or racial quota. Shazam! Better results for the police
if they are more multicultural; fewer terrorists if they have better
political representation; better children if the multicultural society
is represented in school. Less racism? With the BNP now at 5% is the
policy working?

The theory that in ethnic variety we find a universal remedy for all
our problems has formed an absolute dogma – all communities must be
represented in their singularity. An ethnic group can be defined not
just on racial or religious criteria but also by history and
behaviour, but where does this end? If you follow the logic, why not
have cricketers and Morris dancers forming their own ethnic group if
they can reproduce themselves? With more cultures and more and more
communities pressing to be represented year on year, nothing seems to
stop the course of this mad horse. No longer liberal or Marxist, our
society is multicultural and the politics of the Greek ‘agora’ is
substituted for a representative and codified working market.

Why do we need this dogma of multiculturalism? Hasn’t Britain always
been a multi-ethnic society? Picts, Scots, Saxons, Normans, Vikings,
Gauls, Danes, even the offspring of Sudanese legionaries from the
garrisons on the northern border, are the genetic roots of today’s
British. And hasn’t Britain been multicultural too: when continental
Europe was fighting over which Christian doctrine would be supreme,
John Locke in his Letters of Toleration defined a model for a
multi-religious community united by law and the Crown. The genius of
Locke’s proposition was to state that every individual is free to
practise his own faith if he continues to obey national laws and
recognise national values. (He did exclude Roman Catholics from his
vision of religious tolerance, for the simple reason that they were
perceived to be loyal to Rome first and then Britain, and atheists
because they shared no common values with a Christian state.) With
individual freedom the national identity of the British Isles was
built, and it was one of the responsibilities of the state to preserve
this freedom. So, always multicultural and always multiracial.

Today individual freedom is preserved; however, this no longer means
being integrated into the Nation. Indeed in practice, we see the
contrary. No longer a Nation of communities, but a community of
Nations. Why has the political process been inverted?

The colonial experience has been a determining factor. When you look
at ethnic classification, you’ll notice that ex-dominions have a more
important place compared to the Polish, French or Australian white
others. Somehow British ethnic policy is a direct continuation of the
Imperial one, but now we don’t call it Indianisation or
Africanisation. The colonial doctrine, which wanted to preserve
cultures and give them representation in order to preserve peace in
the Empire, is still present. But Britain is now a nation and not an
empire. To confuse the two is a dramatic mistake for the simple reason
that Imperial ethnic policy had to push and help communities to
independence and not find their place in the Empire. Today’s
communities in Britain aren’t invited to join and participate in the
national identity, but are encouraged to cultivate their differences
and gain more and more autonomy. Britain rules as a small, stretched
Empire: where are the Nation’s values? With parliaments or assemblies
in North Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, is England the last British
colony?

Criticism of British imperialism inspired independence movements and
the “colonial guilty memory” has hampered any chance of changing the
relationship between the community and its nation. It is not the
communities rejecting Britishness but the state itself saying that our
imperial past was terrible and our history deplorable and so we must
deny its reality. Britishness and its inherited values must be
reduced, reformed, changed, criticised or erased to give more and more
significance to the new individual communities. Locke’s ideal balance
between Nation and personal belief is but a distant memory. The
tendency to reject Britishness also explains why the multiplication of
identities is so virulent. The alienation of a common set of values
gives triumph to particularity and flies in the face of the fact that
we live in the same country - these ‘sceptred Isles’.

The mad horse that is our ethnic policy continues its run, cheered on
by the egotistical independent’s desire to destroy the common
identity. Ego! Ego-warriors, self-styled leaders of communities, lead
the charge against the “system”, hoping to emancipate an abstract
ego-identity!

The policy, if there really is a clear one, must be reviewed or
rebalanced for this reason, to preserve that which still exists and
has worked for centuries, the British nation. It must be reformed
because our multicultural obsession is expensive to maintain and gives
what benefit? Are we better integrated? Or less racist? How can a
group of representatives with no common or supreme set of values ever
hope to reach consensus? If we don’t sort this mass culture out, the
Ego-identity – in the name of any rediscovered ideology or mystic
mythology – shall proliferate with no sense of concrete reality, but
with an obstinate sense of eccentricity and sectarianism. Why continue
to exalt the differences if they are not in the general interest? What
makes us individual and where do we have things in common? Shouldn’t
we aim to live peacefully by sharing the same supreme values? These
were exactly Locke’s questions in the early 18th century.

This does not mean that the state should substitute mass culture with
totalitarianism, but to find a balance between them. With this
sensitive complexity, we can preserve the legitimate and necessary
liberties of every individual. If we can’t find or restore common
values, we should pray, not for the return of a Churchill, Gladstone,
Disraeli, Thatcher or Cromwell or any other iron Duke or conqueror,
but for the return of a Simon de Montfort to establish a new national
parliament and rein in the mad horse of the ego-warriors. The point is
that however a nation arranges its internal political system, with
local government in whatever form, the importance of the nation itself
is still valid. It is the testimony of centuries of shared history,
language and culture. De Montfort for me was trying to bring back to a
central parliament a shared law and therefore common values. The idea
of nation was established to prevent civil war – on this peaceful
basis our society built its system of values.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jerome-di-costanzo/ethnic-policy-reining-in-mad-horse
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