The Centre For Social Cohesion

The headline the BBC gave to its press release about the poll runs: ‘Over a third British Asians don’t feel British suggests Asian Network poll’. And, indeed, as many as 38% of the British Asians polled denied feeling British, at all or much.

However, what is far more striking than this fact, but left unreported by the BBC, was the finding that a similar proportion of the young whites who were polled in Scotland felt exactly the same way about their own identity. Since few EU immigrants have chosen to settle there, we can be fairly certain that the view they expressed reflects the attitude of young Scots generally. What they said about themselves bears out the contention of Alex Salmond, leader of the Scots Nationalist Party, that north of the border Britishness is something that ‘went bust long ago’.

Notwithstanding the high level of disengagement from Britain seemingly felt by young Scots, it is nonetheless interesting that, as a group, young British Asians seem to feel themselves no less British than does a comparably aged group of Scots.

A second interesting finding from the poll, also unreported by the BBC, is that a larger proportion of Muslim Asians (64%) felt themselves completely or a lot British than did either Hindu Asians (46%) or white Scots (62%). A whopping 77% of Sikhs polled considered themselves British. This was even greater than the 73% of the whites polled who did.

A third interesting finding from the poll, likewise unreported by the BBC, is that a significantly greater proportion of Muslim Asians expressed themselves very or quite satisfied with their life in Britain than did their Hindu counterparts: 88% as against 80%. Sikhs in Britain had a still higher satisfaction rating of 90%.

What one is to make of all this is not quite clear, apart, that is, from it seeming to be the case that the BBC is very reluctant to publish any statistics that cast doubt on the politically correct thesis that Muslims in Britain form a persecuted minority whose young are liable to be driven to extremism by the all-pervasive ‘Islamphobia’ they experience all around them.

Indeed, a fourth finding to emerge from the poll, also unreported by the BBC, was that a higher proportion of Asian Muslims (52%) felt Britain gave them more opportunity than they would have enjoyed in their country of origin than did their Hindu counterparts (40%) .

Overall, one is left with the impression that young British Muslims of South Asian extraction have little sense of grievance with Britain. This is unlike their self-appointed communal leaders such as Inayat Bungawala of the Muslim Council of Britain who, in an interview in 2005, reportedly claimed that a climate of Islamphobia was so all pervasive in Britain, even in schools, that it was fomenting resentment and alienation among young British Muslims.

Mind you, the conditions that facilitate or impede the identification with their country of domicile by second- or even third-generation newcomers to it are a somewhat mysterious matter. They arguably have little to do with any actual or even perceived prejudice against them or any minority group to which they may belong.

This fact is well illustrated by the example of H.L.A. Hart, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford during the nineteen sixties and seventies.

No one could have seemingly led a more charmed, discrimination-free, and well integrated existence in Britain than Hart. The child of comfortably-off Jewish immigrants to Britain, he effortlessly won a scholarship to Oxford from where he went on to enjoy a highly successful career at the Bar, before returning to his alma mater after the War ended where he enjoyed a highly distinguished and successful academic career.

Hart was succeeded in his chair at Oxford by the American Ronald Dworkin to whom, at the time of his succession to Hart's chair, Hart confided that it was remarkable no Englishman had occupied it in recent times. When an incredulous Dworkin enquired of the seemingly impeccably English Hart ‘But surely you are English?’, the latter responded: ‘No, I’m Jewish.’

This remark came from a British-born member of the counytry's establishment who, as a young Oxford graduate and ex-public schoolboy, regularly rode to hounds at week-ends in Sussex among a set of English gentry from which he drew his upper-class Anglo-Saxon Protestant wife, and who during the War served as an officer in British military intelligence.

What Hart's case shows is that it remains somewhat mysterious what brings about the full self-identification by the immediate descendants of immigrants with their country of birth and domicile. His case seems to show it has little to do with their relative socio-economic success or the absence of any actual or felt discrimination against them or members of any ethnic minority to which they may belong.

What Hart's case and the BBC poll results suggest is that we should treat with a great deal of scepticism all claims by British Muslim 'spokesmen' that the radicalisation of young British Muslims is caused by the Islamophobia they experience all around them.

A far more nuanced and less self-serving account is needed of why so many British-born Muslims grow up feeling the acute alienation that a few of them clearly do, but mercifully, judged by the poll results, still only a minority of them.