Separate Lives
A couple of weeks ago, an imam from London appeared on the radio singing traditional Irish folk songs; the reason for this curious cultural anomaly was due to his cosmopolitan childhood. He explained he had been brought up in something of a melting pot community, his ears exposed to more than merely the usual Mosque melodies. He struck me as a good advert for a kind of genuine multiculturalism that usually works in theory but not so much in practice.
As someone once pointed out – I’ve a feeling it emanated from an episode of ‘Yes Minister’ – the Transport Secretary never uses public transport, the Health Secretary never uses the NHS, and the Education Secretary doesn’t send his or her children to state schools, yet the people in these posts oversee the services the rest of us rely on. Similarly, I think a lot of the ministerial notions of ‘positive’ immigration stem not so much from first-hand experience, but something they derived from ideological government think-tanks. After all, unless they originally come from an immigrant background, chances are they reside in an exclusively white middle-class neighbourhood, and always have. I’m reminded of ‘the black man’ David Cameron claimed he met during the last election campaign. Dave must have felt like Dr Livingstone.
Most immigrants who have arrived on these shores over the centuries have instinctively grouped together, whether Irish, Jewish or Bangladeshi, eventually creating not necessarily ghettos, but distinct districts that gradually became defined by their immigrant population – think Kilburn, Golders Green or Brick Lane in London alone. This in itself is entirely understandable; the ex-pat enclaves of Spain and France are a good example of how Brits abroad also fall into this pattern – rigidly refusing to learn the language and preferring to socialise with their own kind, drinking in British theme pubs, reading overseas editions of British newspapers and opting for British cuisine over the local dishes. If you were setting up home in foreign climes, chances are you too would gravitate towards the familiar as a means of easing yourself into an alien culture. Actual integration usually comes with the next generation, mixing and mingling with the natives once they start school.
I was at junior schools in the 1970s and remember a mix of perhaps 80% white kids, with maybe 10% each of black and Asian kids. For a while, the kid I hung out with most at home was Pakistani; my first ever ‘best friend’ when I stepped onto the education treadmill was a mixed-race boy (as I now recognise), and I later also had a similarly close friendship in the playground with a boy who was nominally black, but had a white mother. He once showed me a photo of her (she looked like Dusty Springfield) and I was puzzled how he and his mum were so different. Sounds very quaint and innocent now, but this was my first real introduction to a world in which black and white adults were not separated. It seemed natural for children of different races to interact on a level playing-field, but it wasn’t so common in the adult world.
This pattern, that the first wave of immigrants tended to stick to their own whilst their offspring blended in easier because of their egalitarian schooling, was the general pattern from the 1960s to the end of the twentieth century, and was something I believe prevented the kind of serious racial troubles that have afflicted America in recent decades. Yes, there have been occasional explosions – 1981, 2001 and 2011 spring to mind – but the integration of immigrants into British society has certainly bore fruit in the fields of sport and music to name but two areas, showing that an absence of educational apartheid led to eventual absorption into society. Who but a bigot would even notice how many black players line-up in an England football team these days?
However, something has changed in the past ten-fifteen years, and the source of so much of the alienation many youngsters from immigrant backgrounds have felt this century I think stems from that counterproductive, insidious innovation – ‘Faith Schools’; this, to me, is apartheid in all-but name. Technically, faith schools already existed as a system funded by government before the advent of New Labour, and I’m pretty certain some of the regular visitors to this blog endured/enjoyed ones of the Catholic or Jewish variety. But when the messianic Mr Blair ascended to office, he mirrored his own religious bent by sanctioning the expansion of specialised government funding for faith schools to encompass the Muslim establishments that had previously been privately funded. Even so, by 2011, the statistics bear out that the new faith schools were relatively small in number – 68% remained Church of England, with 30% Catholic; there were a mere 12 Muslim, 3 Sikh and 1 Hindu, whereas Jewish faith schools numbered 42.
What the statistics don’t reflect, however, is the legacy of these changes to the law. Any Muslim child beginning school in the late 90s, when New Labour’s reforms were introduced, would by now have already been released into the big bad world. They will have spent the best part of a decade exclusively indoctrinated in the same culture that had originally been the preferred province of their parents (or grandparents); they will have been cut-off from the country beyond their imported and enclosed community; they will have missed out on the exposure to other cultures that the immigrant children of the 70s and 80s were exposed to prior to the advent of state-sponsored faith schools, instead experiencing very little of Britain other than their own immigrant ghetto, insulated from influences that would render other races and religions less alien. There wouldn’t have been an Us and Them attitude had they been allowed to mix. The results of sectarian separation from an early age had long been highlighted in Northern Ireland, though that didn’t occur to Blair, not even when he was taking the credit for the Good Friday Agreement.
The revelation that some Muslim faith schools, particularly in Birmingham, were allegedly infiltrated by hardcore Muslim extremists, teaching Radical Islamic propaganda masquerading as the curriculum, underlines the problem with faith schools when left to their own devices. They can become effective training camps for legitimising ideology more suited to a terrorist agenda; for all their faults, Catholic schools in England were hardly renowned as recruitment centres for the IRA, yet many of the Muslim establishments have engendered a mistrust and suspicion of outsiders that contradicts any concept of true multiculturalism. By separating the people into groups based around religion, the state has dealt a severe blow to integration, something that was, give or take a few notable exceptions, largely working before Blair decided divide and rule was a policy worth investing in.
Should we really be surprised when some of the graduates of New Labour’s faith school programme have been raised to believe anyone not belonging to their religious clique is perceived as the enemy? Should we really be surprised that journeying to Syria has become the young British Muslim backpacking holiday of choice? It’s a cliché, yes, but you do reap what you sow, and the expansion of faith schools post-1997 has been a disaster for racial harmony in this country. For one thing, it provides ammunition for the far-right when the negative consequences go public; for another, it spawns home-grown bombers of the suicide variety. The bleedin’ obvious fact that the latter were rare to the point of nonexistence before 1997 should emphasise the dangers of splitting children along racial and religious lines; but there doesn’t appear to be any attempts to end the social experiment by any of the parties jostling for your vote at the moment.
Ebony and ivory may live together in perfect harmony, side-by-side on my piano keyboard – but don’t expect the people to follow suit when they are singing from a different hymn sheet as soon as they’re capable of reading.
Petunia Winegum
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April 14, 2015 at 9:54 am -
The Americans have it right: there should be no religion in schools.
Faith schools of any kind (including CofE) should receive no subsidies from the taxpayer.
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April 14, 2015 at 10:32 am -
Gosh, that’s a compelling, closely reasoned argument.
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April 14, 2015 at 8:51 pm -
Seriously? Have you ever been in an American school? Just the other day, an atheist girl was refused treatment by a school nurse for not believing in god! Get a grip!
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April 14, 2015 at 9:57 am -
Another excellent article that sums up in a few words what politicians couldn’t do in a whole manifesto.
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April 14, 2015 at 10:03 am -
I’m with you on faith schools – they certainly should have no place in state education.
I would go further and treat all religion like alcohol, porn, gambling and other potentially dangerous adult activities, banning exposure to it for anyone unber 18 – including within the family. I decline invitations to attend Christenings, letting the parents know that I consider it a form of child-abuse.
If an adult decides to embark on religion, that’s their choice, but to indoctrinate malleable young minds with a mix of myths, fairy-tales and establishment-approved lies is offensive.-
April 14, 2015 at 10:17 am -
Richard Dawkins would be proud of you!
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April 14, 2015 at 10:33 am -
Thanks for sharing.
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April 14, 2015 at 10:17 am -
I don’t agree with faith schools of any kind for the reasons you have expounded, but from my own personal experience (as a volunteer from when I was investigating becoming a teaching assistant), it’s not nearly the whole picture.
Where I volunteered in London, the school was 95% Muslim, not because it was a faith school, but because the school was localised to one of the “ghettoes” of which you write. So it became a de-facto faith school although nearly all the staff were what I perceived as mostly white British. However, the children were taught aspects of all faiths, assemblies were more cultural than religious with a strong emphasis on British experience and celebrating different aspects of the community by singing folk songs from different parts of the world from which they came.
What struck me was although the children were for the most part fun and open-minded, was how closed some had already become, between the ages of 6 – 8, to new ideas. We took down the celebrations after Eid, on which children had copied words from the Koran. I accidentally stepped on a piece that had fallen down. A little boy (8 ish) was shocked:
“You stood on the Koran!”
I replied it was just a piece of paper with words on it.
“But it’s the Koran!” he repeated.
I asked why he was all upset, considering not 10 minutes earlier I had needed to reprimand him for punching another pupil.
He replied again “But it’s the Koran”.
I told him that I thought treating other people decently was more important than a piece of paper and ended the conversation..I talked to another girl who asked me: “Is it OK to ask questions about anything?”
I told her not only was it all right, but that in life, you should never give up asking questions because sometimes people make new discoveries and that sometimes old ideas got worn out.These two incidents persuaded me that sometimes it is impossible for 2nd/3rd generation to integrate because they have been indoctrinated even before the school can attempt to change the process. This was 10 years ago.
By the way, after a year of volunteering, I was never asked if I wanted to return – nor did I want to. The whole staff was female except for me and one other teacher who did 1 to 1 tuition for special cases. It was also noticeable how some teachers were especially disrespected by the boys.
This is NOT a criticism of the school – it did its best to be as open and challenging to the pupils as possible while keeping parents on board.
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April 14, 2015 at 10:17 am -
The revelation by Andrew Neather, exposing the deliberate ploy to subvert British traditions and culture:
This should be compared with Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. And who but a bigot would support one, whilst censoring the other?
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April 14, 2015 at 8:53 pm -
Funny how that speech is always quoted, in this context! I suggest you listen the the WHOLE speech to understand what it was actually about!
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April 14, 2015 at 10:25 am -
I can only say that attending a Catholic school, with inevitably a highly Irish Catholic cohort in the staff (including nuns), I was never inculcated into the IRA. In fact the only political lesson I recall was a very popular science master who, in the very last lesson of term gave us an entire lesson on the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Socialist Republic, instead of the Physics we had expected. There was another teacher who I recall once informed our impressionable minds that the Christians were the first Communists. All clever stuff. You can take the faith out of the school but you’ll never take it out of the school-teachers.
My mum has always said that the main reason she wanted us in the Catholic school was because the local CofE State schools were known to be very very dangerous places to be. That was then. I became the first year of the adoption of the Comprehensive ethos in my secondary education. That was all very socialist too until the Headmaster noticed the chaos and quickly introduced “Streaming”. We even had a “remove” class, which made the place almost feel like a Public School for a while. That Head was a bit odd actually, never married – lived with his sisters and fond of the cane. If he hadn’t died young, he might well be in prison now.
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April 14, 2015 at 10:44 am -
Now I come to think of it, there was another teacher who made a political statement once. She was as Irish as they came and as “The Troubles” began to erupt in out Ulster Damascus, she went to great lengths to tell us that what we were hearing about on the News just then was not about religion, it was politics and she should know because she used to live there. To be honest, I thought she was talking bollocks and just making excuses back then because we were all soaking up the notion that religion was a terrible corrupter of humanity, but I have to say that now I am as old as she was then, and have read all about the very Catholic Marxists of the IRA, I think that at the very least, she had a valid point.
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April 14, 2015 at 10:52 am -
No-one is being radicalised by the CofE. It’s unfair to lump Christian faith schools – which have been part of our society for years – with the problem of Islamic extremism. The problem, then, is not of faith schools but of a particular type of school.
It must also be remembered that the Christian churches were largely responsible for starting our education system.
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April 14, 2015 at 9:57 pm -
Well said William xxx
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April 14, 2015 at 11:19 pm -
Seconded.
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April 14, 2015 at 10:59 am -
The backwater I grew up in had a tiny percentage of non-caucasians – in fact it wasn’t until a Libyan lad moved to the area for the last year of Junior school that we had any at our school, and he copped for a fair bit of immature racist flack (very little of it was malicious though) – he moved away again a couple of years later, though I have been in contact with in recent years via social media and we discussed that (along with current topics such as America & the ‘Arab Spring’ etc)
In contrast there was a Pakistani family living locally a few years and they were terrorised by some of the local thugs – this is the middle of a nice area, a private estate – all of whom were nasty pieces of work who were in and out of jail.
Further contrast – there were quite a number of Asians in my brothers year of school (he’s 10 years younger) but they were predominantly the wealthy families of Doctors and surgeons.
Now, thirty years later, whilst the affluent suburbs are much the same the city itself has been flooded with twenty years of immigrants and asylum seekers – which instead of reactionary name-calling from ignorant whites has imported racism and sectarian gang culture.Probably the sharpest contrast between West/South Yorkshire and the East Riding was the uneven levels of immigration in the last half of the 20th century, though we’d probably win an insularity contest
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April 14, 2015 at 11:08 am -
“Who but a bigot would even notice how many black players line-up in an England football team these days?”
It’s official then – I am a bigot. Yes, I can’t help but notice the number of non-white faces appearing in any group of people who are selected to represent the UK. Whenever images are shown of UK classrooms I can’t help but notice the number of non-white faces among the students – whether or not certain schools are chosen for the purpose I have no way of knowing. I can’t help noticing, what seems to me a disproportionate number of non-white faces appearing on the BBC on the odd occasions I catch a glimpse of a TV screen. The ability for the eye to take in information from the outside world, and differentiate between colours is surely a useful thing for humans to have. It’s what you do with that information that’s important.
Regarding faith schools, I agree with others who have said there should be no such things here. I’m with Mudplugger, religion should be treated the same as pornography – not allowed any until age 18. It’s always struck me as odd, how some in society have blamed pornography for causing sex crimes, and have called for pornography to be banned. Well, surely the same applies to the Bible, Koran, Torah and all the other religious books – how many, sometimes very serious, crimes have been committed as a result of reading them?
Mudplugger also mentions that he/she considers Christenings as a form of child abuse. It’s always struck me as very odd that I’ve never heard anyone say the same thing about male circumcision as a religion’s requirement – plenty of noise about female circumcision and rightly so – but not a peep about the male form.-
April 14, 2015 at 11:35 am -
April 14, 2015 at 11:44 am -
““Who but a bigot would even notice how many black players line-up in an England football team these days?”
It’s official then – I am a bigot. Yes, I can’t help but notice the number of non-white faces appearing in any group of people who are selected to represent the UK+
.—- because, well, here’s a thought, maybe those non white faces belong to people who are better in their chosen field than those people who have white faces?
Media representation is another thing entirely. But I don’t see why the views of non-white people should not be represented.
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April 14, 2015 at 12:04 pm -
Factual media representation tends to be skewed by broadcasters being based in major cities. For the BBC this obviously used to be London, but that’s just been replaced with the less diverse, but still pretty diverse Manchester.
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April 14, 2015 at 12:20 pm -
I watched some TV the other week as I was house-sitting. It was noticeable to me that all the advertising was multi-racial. Black daddies, white mummies, curly-kink kids … I felt like Blue Mink should be the backing track, y’know y’know, what we need is a great big melting pot… Walking around the neighbourhoods that week with the big black dog I was fostering, I never saw a human face that wasn’t white caucasian, but that’s not to say there weren’t Poles to the left of me, ukrainians to the right. There I was, stuck in the middle with me.
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April 14, 2015 at 12:45 pm -
… reminds me of the Midsommer Murders is racist controversy a few years back, now I think of it. Funniest thing about that media furore was that if anyone had done any research they would have found that the programme HAD included black characters. But nobody was interested in the facts, they just wanted to fight.
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April 14, 2015 at 1:13 pm -
There is an argument for male circumcision on health grounds, which is probably why those Middle Eastern religions adopted it originally, rather like ritual ablutions, an early form of public health policy for the ‘unwashed’, disguised as religious teaching.
Male circumcision improves cleanliness and inhibits the development and transmission of diseases to partners. There is evidence that transmission of HIV and STDs is less common where the male is circumcised. Sexual function is not compromised by it.There is, however, no medical justification for deliberate excision of sexually-sensitive components from the female genitalia. That process is unnecessary, inexcusably brutal and indicates a medieval approach to gender in those male-dominated societies.
I don’t believe the Koran instructs it to be done, rather it is the ‘creative interpretation’ by ‘scholars’ over the years which is used to justify/excuse it – those ‘scholars’ are, of course, all men.-
April 14, 2015 at 2:18 pm -
FGM also prevails in some non-Islamic cultures (and predates Islam anyway), and in that context has attracted crackpot feminist support in the past. The actual process of cutting is, of course, almost entirely a female preserve.
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April 14, 2015 at 3:27 pm -
I’m sorry Mudplugger I’m not convinced of the claims made in support of male circumcision. I can’t think of any other part of the human body that is routinely removed for perceived health benefits. To automatically inflict this operation on babies is in my view child abuse. If a male reaches 18 and decides that they want it done then that’s their choice. Unfortunately as far as I know the process cannot be reversed.
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April 14, 2015 at 5:55 pm -
I accept that the jury’s out on the medical benefits, especially in hygienic cultures such as our developed part of the world – I also agree that, in the absence of any clinical proof of benefit, any such voluntary surgery should be restricted to adults only.
It’s interesting that around 80% of American men are circumcised, regardless of religious issues – but these too are ‘clipped’ as young children, thus devoid of any choice in the matter – Land of the Free, eh ? -
April 14, 2015 at 7:47 pm -
May sound like a silly question, but does anybody know what it is precisely that Jews and Muslims have against the humble foreskin?
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April 14, 2015 at 8:15 pm -
If they’re lucky, what they’ve got against it is a clitoris.
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April 15, 2015 at 9:10 am -
If the woman’s lucky enough to still have a clitoris it might well be miscegnation.
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April 14, 2015 at 8:06 pm -
It can be reversed to some extent. Google “Foreskin restoration”.
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April 14, 2015 at 8:36 pm -
With Alex on this one, leave well alone until 18, if they want it removed then they can properly consent to circumcision .
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April 15, 2015 at 9:14 am -
One big difference between male and female chopping is that they only do it to the girls at puberty when it can hurt the most, bleed like hell, and probably put them off sex for life. The boys will have no memory of it all and would likely think it the best way to be. That they then discover the woman don’t really want it because it hurts must make for the most fucked up sex lives on the planet.
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April 14, 2015 at 11:58 am -
Growing up in Hull in the 1970s was a very white experience, despite its long history as a port. My mother always said that if you saw a non-white face in the city, it was more likely than not to be someone professional, such as the NHS or connected to the university. This was certainly reflected in my Catholic schooling experience. One of my best friends at primary school has a white father and an indian mother, both Catholic and – I think – lecturers – but while he didn’t got to the same middle school, we did reunite at senior school. One weekend, when we were walking along the street when a car full of yobs sped past, and one of them shouted, “go home,” and the inevitable racist epithet. That’s the only bit of abuse I recall being aimed at him, include at school.
I still visit the city, as I still have family there, and it’s clearly more diverse now, although to the eyes of someone who is very much an adopted Londoner, not that much. One of the last time I was there, by coincidence the EDL turned up en masse for a rally, but seemed to find little local support for their extremism. Hull folk are reticent people, so while in many ways the city is as socially deprived as the likes of Liverpool, they’re not as vocal about it in the same way. They might grumble to each other about it, but they don’t need outsiders to do that for them.
As to my schooling, the only actual Catholic element seemed to manifest itself in assemblies. Even RE, while obviously picthed as, “this is the version we believe,” still acknowledged other forms of Christianity, and other faiths.
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April 14, 2015 at 1:09 pm -
Funnily enough, I remember my introduction to the Koran came in an RE lesson when I was roundabout eleven; it was the subject under discussion for about three weeks. Wonder if Muslim faith schools mention the Bible?
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April 14, 2015 at 1:17 pm -
They possibly do – after all, Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet, but a very junior prophet compared to their own ‘top man’. In educational terms, Jesus was merely a ‘Prefect’: Mohammed is the ‘Head-Master’.
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April 14, 2015 at 1:34 pm -
That’s an intriguing metaphor for organised religion. Must be an interesting collection of staff working beneath the Headmaster – Buddha, the Virgin Mary, Odin, Zeus. I feel a sitcom coming on…followed by my name being shuttled to the top of an ISIS hit-list.
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April 14, 2015 at 6:44 pm -
Judas selling exam answers behind the bike-sheds ….. only 30 pieces of silver for a GCSE in Cruciform Woodwork.
(That’s me firmly on the hit-list from the Provisional Wing of the Methodists).
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April 14, 2015 at 2:19 pm -
We certainly got the line that the Koran lifts wholesale from the Old and New Testaments.
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April 14, 2015 at 3:50 pm -
I think we worked out a while back that we are separated by a decade. I had never really heard of the Koran. The only Muslim I knew about was Cassius Clay.
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April 14, 2015 at 4:11 pm -
In the case of Mr Ali, it was interesting that whenever I watched one of his fights on TV in the 70s, my parents still referred to him as Cassius Clay, even though he changed his name shortly after winning the world title in ’64. I had no idea why he had changed his name at the time, especially when his original name was such a bloody corker!
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April 14, 2015 at 4:20 pm -
What’s my name… What’s my name…
http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles-frontpage/20025-the-myth-of-qwhats-my-nameq-rip-ernie-terrell
I recall my old man got up at 2am or somesuch, to listen to the first Ali-Frazier fight on the radio…
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April 14, 2015 at 3:37 pm -
Presumably it’s a lack of local work opportunities coupled with high property prices but my largish South Downs village remains remarkably white, even has a few white South Africans. The Tandoori owner (seems a nice bloke) & family live up the road; the Chinese restaurant staff I think live on site, & that’s about it apart from one black I’ve seen now & then. The kids swarming on & off the school bus seem pretty much white too. We have every shade of Christian church or chapel, even a female C of E priest, but I don’t think there’s any other organised religion. We do have an infestation of Probus members though I don’t think they’re a threat to anything except plated food.
Back to Islam, some years ago I and my late lamented did an intensive Arab culture course for work reasons. I really don’t think the lefty liberal multiculturalists have any idea what they have done with their idealistic meddling.-
April 14, 2015 at 5:15 pm -
Jimmy Savile spent some time with the Muslims. This was his take on it all.
I remember once standing alone of the sea wall of the harbour in Casablanca. There were Arab traders on the harbour floor doing deals and short-changing everybody and the usual business of the Middle East. They were no better and no worse than a lot of British businessmen who occasionally fiddle a little or give a touch of the short-change… the thing that impressed me tremendously was the fact that they broke off five times every day and went to a quiet corner of the harbour… and got out their prayer mats. They knelt down and prayed.
This sort of thing throws me into turmoil… I look at the lifestyle of these believers. They have bad sanitation, bad business management, incredibly bad land husbandry. My turmoil arises with this question. Is God working well for these Muslims because they seem to be giving him plenty of attention and plenty of prayer and devotion? Perhaps not, because they are living in squalor. Their life expectancy is only about 55 even now. So I have been trying to find the answer to this particular question. I mean, I personally say my prayers once a day… But I don’t go down on my knees five times a day on a prayer mat! Yet my prayers are answered… Now the Muslims seem to be putting in far more prayer time than I do. But is that what God wants? Perhaps God doesn’t want you to go down on your knees five times a day; maybe he would rather see a little more practical action. After all, look at the gaols in the Arab world. I’ve been to one of them. If the next of kin does not take food into the prisons, the inmates just about starve to death… It doesn’t matter if you go down on your knees five times a day for me, but it’s the way you treat prisoners, people, that matters; that is your prayer.
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April 14, 2015 at 6:39 pm -
As the old saying goes – “God helps those who help themselves”.
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April 14, 2015 at 8:02 pm -
All I can say is this:
My late wife was confirmed, and although not a regular churchgoer- I hatefully wouldn’t even go to midnight mass on Christmas Eve with her, & she took these things seriously. I still have her ‘The Sanctuary of God’ prayer book, with the entries in the front made by the priest; St Andrews Day 1959.
Was He there when she died?
I was.-
April 14, 2015 at 8:39 pm -
Good that you stood by her, sad that you are left with a loss
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April 14, 2015 at 3:41 pm -
The Birmingham schools (most notoriously Park View) were not faith schools, but ordinary public sector schools. Much of the problem at Park View stemmed from the enthusiasm of the (white, female, non-Muslim) head teacher for academy status and her peremptory management style. (I have a friend who was defenestrated from this institution).
Also worth bearing in mind that in inner-city areas, faith schools may have a significant proportion of pupils who are NOT of the nominal relgion of the school. e.g. In Brum, S. Saviour’s C of E primary school, attached to a traditional, Anglo-Catholic parish, has 95% Muslim pupils. S. Alban’s secondary school is probably not dissimilar.
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April 14, 2015 at 5:34 pm -
This is just the point that I would have liked to make.
The original post makes no mention of the massive change in numbers of immigrants and their descendants in recent years.
I recall taking a bus through the Small Heath district of Birmingham as a child and seeing a ‘black’ man. This was so unusual that I asked my mum ‘what’ he was. Ten years later and the Afro-Caribbean people would have made up 40% of the people on the streets. Now it is near 95% ‘Asian’. There are Islamic bookshops, Islamic banks, Islamic centres. The writing on the shop signs and the dress of the customers would make one think they were in Pakistan.
And this is, of course, reflected in the schools. The 100% ‘white’ grammar schools changed to having one or two Afro-Caribbean then became ‘colleges’ with 99% children of Pakistani heritage. In theory secular, but by dress and practice clearly Muslim.
Swathes of Britain have been culturally ethnically cleansed. A few faith schools won’t make much difference.
Keep repeating the mantra, “it’s just a tiny minority”, except that ‘minority’ is on the verge of becoming the majority in many of our cities.
And we can’t even ask “why?” without being shouted down. I can’t see Pakistan or the Sudan becoming ‘multi-cultural’ or ‘multi-racial’ can you?
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April 14, 2015 at 6:41 pm -
Well said!
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April 14, 2015 at 8:24 pm -
My late quite some time ago mother in law (originally from Kings Norton I think) remarried & joined her new husband in Alum Rock. Next door were a Welsh couple. Relatives of a tv celeb I think.
A walk down the High Street was like a trip abroad- there were no indigenous Brits, only what the Brummies called the ‘Pakistans’. The pavements were as they say vibrant with the dress & the produce. Funny thing was, going to the Ward End Club down the road, a pretty big establishment, for pint or five of Drum bitter, all faces were white.
The in-laws later moved up market to Stechford.
I’m not making judgements, part of my job in RSA was Black advancement back in the ’80’s, Mandela wasn’t released without a decade of preparation, but I do understand the discomfort. I used to take the view that the incomers were only occupying homes that the aspirational whites were abandoning for the suburbs.
I may have been wrong.
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April 14, 2015 at 8:47 pm -
“Any Muslim child beginning school in the late 90s, when New Labour’s reforms were introduced”
Any? I’d love to see the numbers. I doubt faith schools account for one in ten muslims in the school system. It could well be one in a hundred.
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April 14, 2015 at 9:06 pm -
You must have misread that line – what I’m saying is that any Muslim child who started school between circa 1998 and 2000 would by now have left school, not that they would have all attended a faith school.
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April 14, 2015 at 9:22 pm -
The only statistic I can easily find via Google is this one (albeit somewhat out of date): “the total proportion of Muslim children educated at Muslim schools [is] an estimated 3 percent (Halstead, 13 2005)”:
http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/london/03682.pdfSo, just to be quite clear, when we talk about muslims and faith schools we are talking about the experience of a very small minority. Which begs the question why muslim faith schools should be seen as so much more of a threat than Catholic or Jewish ones.
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April 14, 2015 at 9:59 pm -
I’d say they were more of a threat because the segregation is along racial as well as religious lines – a potentially combustible mix.
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April 14, 2015 at 10:03 pm -
Racial? Religious? So Judaism is a religion and Islam is a race? Sorry, I am lost. Clearly too close to last orders …
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April 14, 2015 at 8:51 pm -
“Should we really be surprised that journeying to Syria has become the young British Muslim backpacking holiday of choice?”
Again, numbers numbers. There are statistically tiny numbers of British citizens fighting on both sides in Syria. Most are very young. Many will not come back. I’ll bet those that do will be much the wiser for their experience. British people fought on both sides in the Spanish civil war and a small handful of the young and idealistic will be drawn to foreign conflicts in any generation. I’m inclined to the view that if they want to throw away their lives they should be given the opportunity to do so.
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April 14, 2015 at 9:08 pm -
Again, misread misread. It doesn’t say every Muslim teen heads for Syria.
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April 14, 2015 at 9:14 pm -
You don’t say it but you imply it! ” the young British Muslim backpacking holiday of choice”. What is to misread there?
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April 15, 2015 at 8:44 am -
Interesting to compare when folk from Nepal choose to leave their home country and fight for someone else, they are rewarded with riches beyond the dreams of your average yak-herder, locally generous pensions for life and, thanks to La Lumley, a right to bring their families live in the country to which they had sold their vicious mercenary services.
When someone decides to leave their home country and fight for someone else on principle alone, they are considered to be criminals.
It’s an odd world at times.-
April 22, 2015 at 4:51 pm -
If you think there is a moral equivalence between the British Army and ISIS you need to think again!
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April 22, 2015 at 8:32 pm -
I can’t imagine that many, if thinking objectively and without the emotionally spun clap-trap, would consider a career as a murderous mercenary to be a particularly moral calling.
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April 14, 2015 at 10:01 pm -
No. ‘scuse me for being so slow.
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April 14, 2015 at 11:39 pm -
Listen to “In Search of Moderate Muslims”, by Sarfraz Manzoor, who thinks of himself as an ‘integrated’ Muslim, and be very afraid.
We have created Islamic enclaves and the youth now want to reclaim their roots that their parents partially abandoned. Children of Muslim parents don’t need ‘faith schools’, they have out-of-hours madrassas, relatives, satellite TV and the internet to keep them ‘on message’.
I’m afraid the original post is just a fraction less naive than our ‘never seen an immigrant’ politicians. The ‘traditional’ immigrant started in the slums and moved out and ‘integrated’ as they became more wealthy. These immigrants and their descendants have achieved the critical mass to create a defendable bridgehead. Parts of Birmingham are now in reality a detached province of Pakistan. Houses are being rebuilt to suit their needs, gardens ripped out to make Pakistani courtyards. The wealthy move out to the suburbs and repeat the process. The inner districts aren’t abandoned, they are for the children and the second cousins. Shops, schools, banks, doctors, local government, you name it, there is no need to go outside of the Pakistani community.
We have committed cultural genocide. A few ‘faith schools’ make no difference either way I’m afraid.
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April 15, 2015 at 3:12 am -
Reminds of my first husband who ran away from Ireland aged 14 to Liverpool in the late 50s. Went into a cafe for something to eat and for the first time in his life saw a black man. In total ignorance he asked him where he got that tan, realising he was just a kid the guy burst out laughing and actually ended up taking him under his wing and got him an apprenticeship in the shipyard where he worked. In later years my sons best friend from primary school was Pakistani but they lived locally, there were no ghettos then, and although the mother didn’t speak much English the children were well integrated. We thought no more about him being Muslim than if he had been Catholic, it just wasn’t an issue except he was always complaining about having to go to the mosque on a Saturday for Koran study. Sadly that same respectable working class area is unrecognisable now having been turned into an area of largely Pakistani shopkeepers, many are slum landlords to asylum seekers and Roma. Walking up some streets you could just as well be in a foreign country, it is very sad to see what has happened to the area I grew up in. I left long ago but still visit a very old friend there, now retired and who will not go out after dark.
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