By Roy Hattersley (THE GUARDIAN, 28/08/06):
Strange that a government that wants to make choice the watchword of its social policy should doubt the desirability of ethnic minorities choosing to be different. Stranger still that the minister chosen to express the doubts about social diversity should be a passionate advocate of faith schools, a major divisive influence in the areas where they flourish. The fear must be that the contradictions are less the result of intellectual confusion than a willingness to pander to the prejudices of the people who, according to Ruth Kelly, "do not feel comfortable" with the changes that have transformed their neighbourhoods.
Kelly is right to say that stories abound about the benefits enjoyed by immigrants - a term still often applied to the black and Asian British - which are not available to their homegrown neighbours. The only way to deal with that often calculated libel is to meet it head on and dismiss it for the malicious invention it usually is. My father was taught at the English College in Rome that "it is not by running away from evil that we overcome it, but by going to meet it". Nobody should be surprised that some people have developed the "resentment and sense of grievance" to which the secretary of state for communities referred. Nobody in authority ever tells them that their anger is unjustified.
Newspapers, reporting Kelly's speech, have related it to the present cause of encouraged concern - the admission of workers from the new member states of the EU. Questions about cultural diversity do not apply to them. They come here, work for a few remunerative years and then return - just as the builders in Auf Wiedersehen Pet came back to Britain after a stint in continental Europe. Cultural diversity raises questions that apply to settled communities. In the interests of the honest debate for which Kelly called, let us agree that the complaints about the voluntary isolation of some ethnic groups usually add up to the demand that British Muslims stop behaving like Muslims.
Muslims, the argument runs, neither speak our language nor worship our God. The further indictment that they eat strange food used to be added to the list of complaints. Then we experienced something that might be called reverse assimilation. The "host community" discovered that it liked what the newcomers ate. But the taste for balti did not dispel all the crude superstitions and vulgar errors. In an age when women were, at last, achieving their proper place in society, the greatest mistake was the confusion of arranged and forced marriages. Even people who made the proper distinction committed the unforgivable sin of thinking that because they would not like the arrangement for themselves, nobody else should choose to be betrothed in that way.
Marriage customs, brought here from Pakistan and Kashmir - another error is the assumption that all Muslims behave in the same way - are mostly a matter of custom. Much of the behaviour that makes Muslims different is a question of conscience. Islam is an all-purpose religion. The Qur'an answers every question. That is why alienated Muslim youths increasingly argue that the political parties - by which they feel rejected - are superfluous.
It is immensely inconvenient for believers to insist on praying at set hours during Ramadan. But it is an article of faith. Attempts to make believers change their ways is an assault upon their religion and inconsistent with the rules of a free society.
Most young Muslims agree that to enjoy the full benefits of British society they have to accept most of its conventions and adopt its mores. Since they were born in this country, they have little difficulty in behaving as British by birth and upbringing. It was their grandfathers who were often reluctant and their grandmothers who sometimes refused to read and write (or even speak) English. For the new generation, it is as much their mother tongue as Urdu.
But that generation wants to make its own decisions about how to mix and match the two parts of their lives. The more they are told to drop Islam in favour of Britain, the more alienated they will feel. Islam is essential to their identity and self-respect. They want to be integrated but they are not prepared to be absorbed. And assimilation - which is absorption by a fancy name - is what most of the critics of multiculturalism really want.