As published in today's Daily Express:
The conflict between Russia and Georgia rings some ominous bells from our collective past. The nationalist and territorial claims and counter-claims which tore apart the Balkans in the 1990s are now echoing in the Caucuses.
Like the tearing apart of the former Yugoslavia, the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1990 led to a confusion of tribal demands. Then, as now, multiple claims to the same pieces of land baffled outsiders. South Ossetians, North Ossetians, Russians, Abkhazis, Georgians – when nations break-up the attention-span of other nations is troublingly short. Who knows whose claim is greater or whose grievances are nobler?
In Britain we look at scenes like those emerging from Georgia in the last week and congratulate ourselves that at least we do not have to worry about such conflict. But the truth is Britain, like any nation, should observe the feuding in the Caucuses and reflect on whether we really are that different. Some warning notes have already sounded.
It is now seven months since the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, warned of the existence of “no-go areas” within Britain. The reaction from leading politicians was dismissive. Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, described the comment as “inflammatory” and “a gross caricature of reality.”
But the fact is that the Bishop was onto something. If Westminster elites want evidence of breakdown in the UK they ought to simply get out more. Because the more successive government policies unwind, the more terrifying the mess appears.
Instead of fostering integration and cohesion between communities, successive UK governments and local authorities have encouraged separatism between ethnic and religious groups. Instead of being strong and standing up to the grievance-mongers and activists, they have pandered to such people.
People may remember Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford, who was hounded from his job in the early Eighties by a media and political class which thought that arguing for immigrants to integrate was “racist”. But Honeyford who was proved right. The 2001 Bradford riots demonstrated this with brutal clarity.
Telling people communities could run parallel lives in Britain ended in disaster. Immigrants were given no incentive to adapt to their new home; those already in the country resented the separation of their new neighbours and so the walls grew.
But whenever people highlighted the dangers of segregation it was their comments rather than foolish government policies that were denounced. When the inquiry into the Bradford riots was published local Labour MP Ann Cryer described a situation where Asian gang members “have no fear of the law as they assume the Asian community’s loyalty will protect them.”
Gang culture was enforcing ethnic separation and violence. Yet for pointing this out Shahid Malik (now a Labour MP but at the time on the party’s national executive committee) attacked Cryer, saying she had an agenda for “damaging race relations”.
Last year the Commission for Racial Equality wound up. When several years ago its Chairman Trevor Phillips admitted that the multicultural experiment had failed he was hailed for his bravery in speaking out. Would that he had done so earlier!
In its dying days his commission admitted that decades of multicultural policy had left Britain a fractured nation at risk of splitting up. What a legacy! I sometimes wonder if the people who enforced the divisions in our society for so many decades by crying “racist” against anyone who argued for integration feel any responsibility at all.
I wonder if they feel pride at the different standards with which women are treated in Britain. A study last year estimated that up to 65,000 women in the UK have undergone some form of genital mutilation. To date there has still not been one prosecution for carrying out this barbaric act. Does anybody think that if 65,000 white women in Britain had been mutilated in this way there would be no prosecution or such silence?
And the lessened life chances which multiculturalism has imposed on women from parallel communities could not be more starkly demonstrated than in some of the “honour crime” cases revealed in a report by the Centre for Social Cohesion published this year. Among the terrible were examples of women who had been abused by their families, who had gone to the police for help and who the police - thinking such things were a “community issue” - returned to their families only to be beaten again.
One woman, whose case was reported, tried nine times to run away from her family and nine times the police returned her to them to be once again abused.
For many years now there has been an often deliberate, often ignorant, attempt to elide criticism of multiculturalism with racism. The lives this has wrecked will never be counted. Most of us feel blessed to live in a multi-racial society which welcomes people from all across the world to join in the future of one of the greatest nations on earth.
But government complacency and the attempt to silence those who question what this means for our nation’s future are things we should be constantly alert to. Meanwhile, we will have to hope that the people who led Britain in recent decades never see the precipice they unforgivably guided us towards. A fortnight ago Georgia was peaceful.
Your implication is that government policies are encouraging separation: in fact, in the case of the Muslim community there appears to be a considerable measure of deliberate self-segregation going on with a policy of setting up semi-autonomous enclaves. When the Koran tells you not to take unbelievers as friends and that your daughter cannot marry a non-Muslim (while your son may)the only requirement there is to have anything to do with the host community is economic.When your cultural baggage includes a complete legal system and social and political theory who needs the nation state?