“On Thursday the Commission on Integration and Cohesion is finally expected to publish its findings, but the project is based on some big misunderstandings. There is a widespread anxiety that we are ‘sleepwalking into segregation’, as Trevor Phillips put it in 2005 when he was chair of the Commission for Racial Equality….

“The whole debate about race in this country has shifted from multiculturalism, tolerance and anti-racism to integration and this sticky notion of cohesion. The onus of responsibility has shifted from tackling the white community’s racism to assessing the ethnic minority community’s state of integration. The latter is supposed to indicate the likelihood of extremism – the most dubious connection of all in this debate riddled with misconceptions – after all, Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the 7/7 bombers appeared to be ‘integrated’ with a job in a primary school, a wife and child.

“This anxious, nervy debate has little connection to the evidence being turned up by UK demographers. Academics like Ludi Simpson, Danny Dorling and Ceri Peach say that the UK is going through a process of desegregation as established ethnic minorities move out of inner-city neighbourhoods into surrounding suburbs.”

Madeleine Bunting at Comment is Free, 13 June 2007

Read Commission on Integration and Cohesion report Our Shared Future here.

For the controversy surrounding one member of Ruth Kelly’s commission, Ramesh Kallidai, see Andrew Gilligan’s article in the Evening Standard (reprinted here). The issue is not so much Kallidai’s alleged association with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh but rather that he has deployed Hindutva myths about Muslims forcing young Hindu women to convert to Islam in the UK. It seems that while Kelly excludes representatives of the Muslim community on the basis of links with Jamaat-e-Islami or the Muslim Brotherhood, even though these links have no adverse impact on community relations in this country, she has no problems working with a Hindu admirer of the fascist RSS.

Political figures, religious leaders, trade unionists and human rights campaigners are amongst the individuals that have signed up to a new coalition aimed at defending freedom of religious and cultural expression.

Speakers at the launch included the Mayor of London; peace campaigner and activist Bruce Kent; writer Ismail Patel from the British Muslim Initiative; Dr Daud Abdullah, Deputy General Secretary, Muslim Council of Britain; Edie Friedman, Director, Jewish Council for Racial Equality; Andrew Stunell MP; and Steve Sinnott, National Union of Teachers.

The coalition is being set up in the light of continuing media and other claims that different communities and faith groups openly expressing their culture or faith threaten community relations in Britain. Such claims have been most recently and strongly directed at the Muslim community, particularly focusing on the right of Muslim women to wear the veil.

A Greater London Authority commissioned report into Islamophobia in the media showed that 90 per cent of reports on Islam were negative. However, the majority of Londoners – 94 per cent – support freedom of thought, conscience, speech and religion.

The coalition will put the case that that multiculturalism, especially in London, enriches society and that division will flow from repression of these rights, not their expression. And that it is necessary for individuals and different communities to come to gether to defend freedom of religious and cultural though that have been established over hundreds of years.

The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said: “I am proud of London’s reputation as the most diverse city in the world where the contribution all communities is celebrated and people’s freedom of religious expression is respected as it is one of the most essential of our civil liberties. Attacks on the rights of Muslim people to express their faith as they choose are ultimately a threat to everybody’s rights to freedom of religious and cultural expression.”

GLA press release, 6 June 2007

See also British Muslim Initiative website.