Interesting recent article from IWCA on the issue...
Motion sickness
Main parties still lack stomach for open debate on multiculturalism writes Stuart Craft
For the third time the IWCA has submitted a motion (below right) to Oxford City Council, calling on the authority to refrain from allocating tax-payers money along ethnic and religious lines and to ensure that it only funds projects that are open to all citizens regardless of their ethnic or religious background.
Once again councillors from all parties, including Blackbird Leys Labour councillor Rae Humberstone, pledged their further support for racial and religious segregation by voting against this proposal.
The motion itself could hardly have been laid out in a more simple fashion.
I even explained the intention behind it for those who still failed to grasp the straightforward concept of equality of access to council resources and the inherent danger of a strategy that encourages applicants to exaggerate their cultural differences in order to secure council funding.
But even though the progressive politics behind the IWCA’s proposal had been exhaustively explained on two previous occasions, councillors from the other parties once again refused to seriously confront this important issue.
In place of debate they whipped up the usual contrived smokescreen by attacking and misrepresenting the IWCA.
These attacks ranged from deliberate falsehoods to outright stupidity.
Dan Paskins-Andrew Smith’s right-hand man-first claimed that there is in fact no city council funding of projects along ethnic/religious lines but then went on to fatally undermine this claim by assuring us that ‘there is no cause for alarm as only a tiny percentage of the council’s total expenditure’ is used on such schemes.
Obviously Cllr Paskins feels that segregation in principle is perfectly acceptable.
Paskins’ colleague, Oxford Labour Party’s deputy leader Ed Turner proclaimed loudly, ‘I never take any IWCA motion seriously!’
However, he was then reminded that he had previously supported IWCA objections, at an area committee meeting, to funding for a Muslim-only Eid party on the grounds that council funds should only be spent on functions open to all residents.
At this, Cllr Turner fell silent and turned purple with embarrassment.
Labour Leader Bob Price was, notably, also silent.
Under a separate agenda item earlier in the meeting Price had asked the council to consider funding exclusive free swimming at Hinksey pool for ‘Muslim mothers’.
Yet he voiced no opinion on the IWCA motion.
Matt Sellwood of the Green Party voiced what everyone else knew but would not admit as it ran contrary to their anti-IWCA agenda-that the motion is anti-racist in intent.
Yet when it came to the vote, Cllr Sellwood, along with half his Green colleagues, voted against (the rest of the Greens abstained), on the grounds that he sees ‘much good’ in the political strategy of multiculturalism.
The Lib Dems failed miserably to articulate any credible arguments against the motion.
The ruling group’s feeble attacks against the IWCA were summed up by Clark Brundin’s ludicrous suggestion that the IWCA is ‘out to stop the Chinese New Year celebrations.’
More seriously, the Lib Dems’ Alan Armitage accused the IWCA of playing into the hands of the BNP, a claim which is more irksome in the context of (unattributed) whispered allegations that the IWCA is itself somehow ‘fascist’.
Given the BNP’s support for separatism (and its anti-working class, ultra-conservative politics) this ridiculous statement reveals either a severe lack of political insight or a desire to undermine genuine working class organisation at all costs. Of course these two explanations are by no means mutually exclusive.
With a general reduction in the allocation of local and national government funds to the working class (regardless of ethnicity), the political strategy of multiculturalism plays an important role.
By encouraging people to exaggerate their cultural differences in order to ‘win’ funding for youth clubs, schools, and other amenities, different sections of the working class are dissuaded from working together for the common good.
Meanwhile, middle class careerists from ethnic minority backgrounds are placated through potentially lucrative positions within the ‘race relations industry’ and through a myriad of state-funded separatist projects across the country.
Yet these schemes provide little benefit for working class members of ethnic minority groups.
The perception of special treatment, however, encourages resentment not just within the majority white working class, who understandably feel aggrieved at the injustice of racialised funding from which they are excluded, but also between different minority groups battling each other over funds.
In the confusion created by this complex situation, most overlook the fact that the slice of the pie that the working class receive, across the board, continues to be reduced at an alarming rate.
This, from the establishment’s point of view, is the whole point of course.
The promotion of multiculturalism was never intended as a stepping-stone to universal social justice-but as a replacement for it.
Whatever the view of individual councillors, New Labour’s enthusiastic adoption of multiculturalist ideas such as schools segregated by religion is less motivated by a concern for ethnic minorities, or even winning votes, and more by the desire to ensure that the working class remains divided and demoralised while they continue to drive through their devastating right-wing agenda.
For us, the choice for the future is stark: either we draw together progressively-minded working class people in pursuit of our common interests, or we sit back and allow the seeds of their right wing political strategy of multiculturalism to produce its bitter fruit-the disintegration of our communities and the growth of political and religious extremism.
The inherent dangers within multiculturalism have been chronicled for many years.
But more recently, concerns about where the strategy is leading us have been raised in more unexpected quarters.
Both the Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, and the first black Bishop of York, John Sentamu, for example, have expressed concerns over the way multiculturalism is increasingly leaving our society fragmented and divided.
But perhaps more pertinently, in the aftermath of the handing out of life sentences to members of an Asian gang who killed Isaiah Young-Sam, a 23-year-old Afro-Caribbean man, in riots in the Lozells area of Birmingham last October, a local ‘race campaigner’ has blamed the allocation of resources along racial lines as a major component in the polarisation of Lozells into separate Asian and black communities.
Multiculturalist projects, it is argued, have contributed to much of the resentment and hatred that festers within these communities, a hatred for which an innocent young man paid the ultimate price.
The city councillors of Oxford who continue to deny that there is any problem with a strategy that produces such devastating results should, if they are not prepared to listen to the IWCA, at least listen to these disparate voices of dissent that are at last challenging the current, bankrupt orthodoxy.
Leys Independent, issue 33, August 2006
