Plural Identities

Japanese dog whistle

Another Japanese minister manages to offend , this time claiming that Japan is homogenous and historically governed by the Yamato race.    Well actually Japan is relatively homogenous, with only 1% or so of the population being 'immigrants' compared to (if I remember correctly the chapter of Philippe Legrain's book I read yesterday) 8% in Europe.  Also, this sense of homegeneity was reinforced by the Shogunate's policy of closing the country off from the rest of the world for 200 years.  Nonetheless, the Yamato stuff is racist b******s and a much better description of the still very unclear roots of the Japanese is given by Wikipedia here.

Of course the minister is electioneering, a less subtle version of the Tory dog whistle.  As Terrie's Take points out, the more than 250,000 illegal immigrants in the Japan are worrying both authorities and now the voters. A recent National Police Agency (NPA) survey found that more than 55% of Japanese are concerned about rising crime by foreigners. This, despite the fact that recorded crime by foreigners fell a surprising 16.2% last year.  Various policies are being proposed, including making a certain competence in Japanese compulsory when renewing visas.  As Terrie's Take says, it would be nice to think this toughening up, or clarifying of rules, was in preparation for allowing more immigrants into Japan.

Microwaved coffee

Tom Freeman does all the necessary for Cameron's speech on 'uncontrolled immigration'.   

Bernard says bog off Gordon

"Prof Sir Bernard Crick is a former government adviser on citizenship" and likely to remain 'former' once Gordon Brown accedes to the throne, judging by his article in the Financial Times today.

"Mr Brown's disappointing mixture of rhetoric, bad history and perhaps political opportunism"

says Sir Bernard of Gordon Brown's 2005 statement that a definition of Britishness is important in defining a shared purpose across of all our society. 

"This idea of national purpose is what Goethe called 'a blue rose'. The search for it can prove damaging."

He also accuses Gordon Brown of being too English in his definition of Britishness:

"The examples he gives of our long British tradition of civic values are all English. The myth of Magna Carta’s importance is once again disinterred and nary a word on the Declaration of Arbroath. He invokes Milton, Wordsworth, Burke and Orwell as British rather than, it seems to me, typically English voices. Walter Scott and Robert Burns are ignored, though both were Unionists, powerful voices for a dual not a single identity."

Sir Bernard concludes that:

"Perhaps rather than a world role under a pretend world leader, we would be left with ourselves and our partners in Europe.  Is that too bad?  I think not."

At which point one can safely assume Gordon choked on his porridge (with salt of course).

Shining examples

I mentioned in a previous post that there are shining examples of people who were in some way an outsider or 'excluded' at critical points in their lives, but instead of then joining groups trying to destroy society, have achieved great success.  Two profiles from Saturday 13th January's Financial Times caught my eye:

Andrew Adonis, now Lord Adonis, schools minister:

The son of a Greek Cypriot former waiter and postman, he was put into voluntary care by his father after his mother walked out. He lived in a council children's home until he was 11. His lucky break came when the local authority paid for him to go to an Oxfordshire boarding school. It was this experience that sparked his "obsession with education as a life transformer". He subsequently earned a place at Keble College, Oxford, where he read history. After completing a PhD on the British aristocracy of the late 19th century, he spent three years as an Oxford don before joining the Financial Times as a reporter.

Stuart Rose, Marks & Spencer Chief Executive

By his own admission, he was a drifter in his youth. He grew up in Tanzania, where his father worked for the Colonial Office. His mother wanted him to become a doctor but he was not naturally academic. He worked at the BBC for a bit and then landed a place on the M&S trainee programme when he was 23. He says it was his mother Margaret's suicide just a year later that helped focus his mind. "My mother was fiercely ambitious for me and she taught me, if nothing else, one thing: she taught me to value myself and my philosophy."

But his rise to the top was not as linear as Sir Terry's, whose card was marked at a very early age. Mr Rose, who quit M&S just before he hit 40, having decided that he was not going to get into the senior ranks, followed a more haphazard route. He did stints in the Burton Group, Arcadia, Argos and Booker before his homecoming.

"I was never a favoured son of the business," says Mr Rose, looking back on his days under Lord Sieff, chairman from 1972 to 1984. "I was never one of those people. I sat on the edge of the plate. People couldn't decide if I was half-genius or half-mad."

One general point I see links these two - both Adonis and Rose seemed to have gained strength rather than resentment from early experiences of being an outsider which has helped them in later years to weather general disapprobation or rejection or charges of eccentricity or betrayal.  Maybe one could even say that they gained the strength or bloody mindedness to do the things which caused them to attract disapprobation or rejection.

The more specific point I take from the Adonis background, which is one that I have made many times when discussing with people about whether Oxbridge is still deliberately biased towards private school candidates is that often potential state school candidates don't even apply to Oxbridge, because they cannot imagine themselves going there, but often all it takes is one tenuous moment of contact - a visit to an Oxford or Cambridge college and meeting people there, a solitary teacher at the school who went to Oxbridge and believes in you, or, as it would seem in Adonis' case, actually living near Oxford.

Plural oaths

I'm back in North Carolina for a few days and one of the main news items is Rep. Keith Ellison taking a ceremonial oath of office using a Koran.  One comentator I saw on the news last night argued that as the United States' values are built on the bible (the Liberty Bell has biblical passages inscribed on it etc) he should have sworn on the Bible.

In the spirit of 'plural identities' I propose the solution should have been that he did both - take the oath, including whatever Christian overtones it had, and swear on the Koran, ie show that he is both loyal to US values and that because he is a Muslim, an oath on the Koran carries more weight for him and adds to his testimony to his loyalty to the US, and indeed it appears that is more or less what he did.  Apparently taking the oath for new congressmen/women is an en masse event, and you raise your hand and don't have to touch a Bible, and is not especially religious in content ("so help me God").  Then you can opt for an individual ceremony, which is what Ellison did too, for which he chose to swear on the Koran.  The issue here seems to be that certain Christians in the US are arguing that you cannot be loyal to the USA unless you are also Christian.  Ellison is clearly trying to say Muslim identity and US cultural identity are not mutually exclusive, you can have both.

Later:

After posting this I began to have doubts as to whether I really know enough about US politics to pass any comment, especially after reading some right wing blogs alleging that Keith Ellison had links to the Muslim Brotherhood, Wahhabi organisations etc etc but then found this posting by Jeff Weintraub, politics professor in the USA, which reassured me.  It was particularly fascinating to discover that America's founders had already considered and accepted the possibility that a Muslim might be a congressman, so strong an American value is religious freedom.

New Year's Resolutions for integration

A Financial Times editorial from 23rd December refers to Amartya Sen's 'Identity and Violence' and finishes with:

"Across the west, the children and grandchildren of immigrants often get cut off from their country, language and culture of origin before they become integrated into their new host country. In the case of Muslims (but others too), there is in addition the sense of a religion under siege and a lament for past grandeur. This makes the immigrant doubly a foreigner - and easy prey to bigots or jihadis who would make of their religious affiliation the basis of the identity they long for. It is often in the diaspora, moreover, that harder, more angular versions of religious and ethnic identity emerge.

Governments typically make the mistake, moreover, of addressing artificial aggregates such as the "Muslim Community". They thereby devalue other aspects of their identity, push religion to the fore and magnify the influence of religious authority.

History should remind us it is catastrophic to identify people in terms of only one facet of their identity. Emphasising religion, moreover, fosters a dangerous politics of wounded identity.

But beyond any single facet of identity, language or nation, colour or gender, class or religion, political and religious leaders need to do a far more convincing job of asserting values: the universality of human and democratic rights under the rule of law, the right of all humans to dignity and cultural liberty. These are shared values that should never be subject to any form of relativism or moral commerce."

The editorial asserts earlier that Western and developed countries have failed to integrate immigrant communities in the past half century. Have we really failed to integrate previous immigrant communities?  I vaguely remember we were having this kind of debate in the 1980s with the Brixton riots, worrying that the Afro Caribbean communities had not been properly integrated into British society.  This does not seem to be such an issue now - or maybe it still is, but has been drowned out by the issue of integration of immigrants from Muslim countries.  Is the consensus that it is all a matter of time - the next generation of whatever immigrant group will integrate and be less economically excluded? There is surely a larger Afro Caribbean middle class now than there was 20 years ago.   But then unemployment in general is far less high than it was in the early 1980s.

So should we be optimistic that the alienation of some immigrants from Muslim countries is temporary and time will be the healer? Or are conditions different this time?  I keep using the description 'from Muslim countries', so perhaps that is the key difference - religion.  There are branches of Christianity and Christian churches in the UK which are predominantly Afro-Caribbean, but they have not supported violent separatist tendencies, as far as I know.

Or is it that British society has changed?  We are more diverse, more disparate than we were 20 or 30 years ago, so there is less of an obvious common culture, ethos, establishment to integrate with.  This reasoning is no doubt behind the government policies of having citizenship tests, citizenship classes and trying to define British values.

A comment on Dave Hill's blog at commentisfree, if true, has made me wonder if the root of the problem is the non-integration of the first wave of immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan etc in the 1970s, and that their attitudes have been retained and even radicalised by their childen:

"I agreed with all the points made by Mr Blair. However, there was one point with which I disagreed with the Prime Minister with respect to his recent address. he gave the impression that imigrants arriving from lets say for example Pakistan were refusing to integrate. This is not so, ask any school teacher and you will find that the new arrivals are vey keen to integrate, they are articulate and liberal thnking. The problem is the existing BRITISH Pakistanis, born in the UK who are failing to integrate, and what makes this even worse is that these children are usually born to British born mothers. The syndrome can be likened to the 'ethnic bubble' or 'space pod'. The space pod left the mothership and stays with its last memory of the mothership (in this case perhaps a village mentality). BUT the mothership has moved on and progressed, the space pods holds on to out dated memories and does not recognise the new reality. This is not perculiar to Pakistanis but to other cultures. So Mr Blair failed to recognise this very important point and it was one of the issues raised by the muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan"

I used to live in the East End of London, and go canvassing for Labour in 1990-1992 and then again 1998-2000.   The change was noticeable even between those two periods.  In the early 1990s the door of a Bengali household would take some time to open, if at all, and be answered by a woman adjusting her veil nervously, surrounded by small children, who would do their best to interpret my questions for her.  The response was almost always 'oh yes all Labour here'.  During the later canvassing, the door would be opened by the children, now young adults, who would be fluently cagey in English and less positive about Labour. So if the problem is that the parents of alienated second or third generation immigrant youth still have an outdated view of their mothership country, and (the mothers in particular I sense) never integrated enough  with the host country to have a positive view of it, what can be done?

Tony Blair suggested some practical ideas in his December 8th speech to the Runnymede Trust. He is quite specific that it is a problem emanating from a minority of Muslims, and not a general one of extremism, which is brave, as is his non-condemnatory reference to Jack Straw's comment about veil wearing.

To summarise, he suggests:

1) we talk openly about the problem

2) we define our common values and make it clear that citizens should conform to them

3) grants to community groups who promote integration

4) equality of respect and treatment for all citizens, specifically prevent forced marriages

5) adherence to the rule of civil law, not religious law

6) stricter conditions of entry for visiting preachers

7) teaching citizenship in schools including ensuring faith schools teach tolerance and respect for other faiths (maybe someone in speech and policy writing circles did read my letter to the Financial Times after all...)

8) share a common language - English ability as a requirement for citizenship.

9) tackle low educational achievement as a means to preventing economic and social deprivation

All sound reasonable, but maybe there is some locking of doors after horses have bolted, if the problem lies in earlier generations and their impact on their children?