Our House

The Panorama documentary on Blackburn last Monday on BBC1 was, as John Lloyd said in the Financial Times yesterday "vastly skilful and unrelievedly bleak" in showing Blackburn as a town divided by fear and distrust between the white population and the 'Asian' population.  It gave voice to the worries of both populations and demonstrated how rarely they integrate, by, for example, showing the entirely different (apart from central shopping areas) runs that two local taxi firms, one all white drivers and one all Asian drivers, mapped in the course of a day.

For a bit of light relief I then watched BBC4's Music Hall Meltdown, but with my mindset still influenced by the Panorama programme, was immediately struck by how 'white' it was, and wondered whether anyone who wasn't born and bred, several generations British, would get the point of it.  First up was Madness, who are an 'English' band par excellence, and yet of course influenced by Jamaican ska.  They sang 'House of Fun', about a boy trying to buy condoms.  I had my beer goggles on by this stage as well, so started to think, maybe that is the root of this 'lack of integration' - Brits with their social dis-ease (as Kate Fox puts it) can only socialise and integrate with outsiders through giving riotous expression to the basest or most fundamental human drives, of sex, drugs/alcohol and rock and roll.  And of course for hardline Muslims, none of these routes is acceptable.  The extraordinary Channel 4 programme the next night, Seven Sins of England, made the point even more clearly.  I remember when I was canvassing ten years ago, talking with one angry white East Ender, lifelong Labour supporter threatening to vote BNP.  "They don't even come to the pub" he said.  "Well Muslims can't drink alcohol", I said. "Yeah but they could have an orange juice" he retorted.

Maybe there is some scope for integrative activities such as sport or music without the sex, booze and rock n roll. I'm not convinced though.  I am always recommending to the Europeans in Japanese companies that I do training for that they find more ways of socialising, with beer, with their Japanese colleagues if they really want to become trusted insiders in a Japanese company, because the Japanese are similar to the British in this need to have the excuse of a few beers before revealing their true selves and thoughts.

In case I am coming across as a total telly moron, I am also reading a lot at the moment, incuding Julian Baggini's Welcome to Everytown, and he makes the point that in fact even white Brits are not integrating with each other; "England is a patchwork of almost hermetically sealed sub-worlds, in which class as much as race is a crucial factor."  He then goes on to say how his friends joked that they would have to send food parcels to him when he moved to Rotherham, with balsamic vinegar and buffalo mozzarella in them.  I winced, as we had some friends round for dinner last Friday, and although we were all able to join in a minor version of 'more working class roots than thou', balsamic vinegar featured on the menu, albeit with halloumi cheese, not mozzarella.

I'm intrigued by Baggini's assertion that "all sorts of social groups don't mix very much, yet we don't chastise them for it. The trouble is not caused by not mixing, but refusing to do so in ways which seem to threaten other groups."  Baggini thinks that the extent to which Muslims dissent from the fundamentals of British democracy is overstated.  He may be right, but of course the probem is that we are dealing with perceptions.  Wearing a face covering veil may be simply an act of religious observance to the woman who chose to do it, but it is perceived as being an assertion about not wanting to communicate fully, and accusing men of being unable to control their primitive urges if a woman were to show any flesh.  Not joining in with drinking also is perceived as a criticism of those who do drink, and an unwillingness to even enter a place where people socialise and mix.

Baggini says mutual tolerance is the best we can hope for, rather than respect or acknowledgement.  He acknowledges we need shared values to glue society together, but these shared values are in his view pretty minimal and civic.  Above all, and I most definitely agree with him here, as it is a fundamental British value, "we have to promote a sense that everyone is being treated equally under the same rules".  This was certainly at the root of East End anger 15 years' ago and I would suspect to this day.  There was a perception that the Bengalis were being treated favourably when it came to housing.  Of course mostly this came about due to the fair application of rules that large families got priority.  So the Liberals took over the council on the promise of introducing a new rule, of priority for "sons and daughters" of East Enders.  So the problem is not just equal treatment, but how the rules are viewed in the first place.

Sunny Hundal at Pickled Politics also has a post on perceived threats to white culture, and in particular the class angle, pointing the finger at the middle classes for failing to support or understand white working class culture. He's a bit vague on what exactly supporting white working class culture might be, other than better funded sports facilities...