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Subj: RE: Transcript of latest programme
Date: 03-Dec-99 3:11:12 PM GMT Standard Time
From: analysis@bbc.co.uk (Analysis)
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RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS


ANALYSIS
NATIONAL PORTRAIT
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY

Presenter: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Producer: Ingrid Hassler
Editor: Nicola Meyrick


BBC
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0181 752 6252


Broadcast Date: 02.12.99
Repeat Date: 05.12.99
Tape Number: TLN947/99VT1048
Duration: 27'25"


Taking part in order of appearance:

Paul Goodman Comment Editor, The Daily Telegraph

Stuart Hall Emeritus Professor of Sociology, The Open University

Brendan O'Leary Professor of Political Science, The London School of Economics

Michael Ignatieff Writer and Historian

Naseem Khan Policy Officer at the Arts Council

Iqbal Sacranie Secretary General of The Muslim Council of Great Britain

Will Kymlicka Professor of Political Philosophy, Queens' University, Kingston, Ontario,Canada



Scottish and English football supporters boo each other's anthems. Black
Britons play in the England team but in cricket, India, Pakistan and the
West Indies have huge numbers of supporters in Britain. Does sport tell us
anything about the changing nature of post-devolution, multi-racial Britain?



GOODMAN: I think actually sport is an extremely good example of how things
change. I think your first and second and third generation of, say, West
Indians will cheer for the West Indies. What's happened after four or five
generations, what about intermarriage? I think it then begins to look very
different.


Paul Goodman, the Comment Editor of the Daily Telegraph. According to this
view, the core identity of the British nation is strong and compelling
enough not only to survive change but to absorb difference, all in good
time. This idea has been around for a while, and it's fairly commonly held.
Many black Britons share some, if not all, of these assumptions. Stuart
Hall, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University.


HALL: I used to be an Afro-Caribbean. And now I would call
myself Black British. I've been here since I was seventeen or eighteen, I
regard the British, the English especially as intimate enemies. I know them
from the inside, I know every move they make. You know I am part of them
and yet I am not part of them. I am you know one of the new cosmopolitans.
There are millions of us.


But something is changing. Many among these millions of cosmopolitans and
others with more traditional views of Britishness are less confident today
about their place in the kingdom. My son, Ari who is in his final year at
university in Edinburgh calls himself English in Scotland and black or Asian
British in England. Scottish and Welsh devolution, and the peace process in
Northern Ireland, have led to discussions in books, articles, radio and
television programmes about what it means to be "English". A recent poll in
the Economist newspaper found that Britain commands less loyalty than its
constituent nations among the majority of Scots and Welsh people. Only a
tiny minority of the English now put Britain first. But does it matter if
the concept of "British" identity is lost, and if so, to whom?


HALL: What is it that still connects Scotland, Wales, you know
with England? What is it for example that connects one region in England to
another? And something has to express that and I think Parliament still, a
kind of common Parliament in which all the different bits are represented,
does continue to express that. So I think Britishness still has a future,
if I can put it that way. Curiously paradoxically it has a future
especially amongst the ethnic minorities. None of these identities are for
ever, no, but the ethnic minorities have a kind of instinct which is that
there is some simple way in which they can express the fact that they do
have a stake here. They mean to stay here and they are somehow committed
to what this place is going to become and Britishness is currently the
signifier of that.

Stuart Hall surely speaks for many when he says that Britishness is the key
way that black and Asian Britons express their stake in this society. For
me, Britishness represents a long and painful history of colonialism of
course, but it also means Shakespeare and Dickens, probity in public life,
the Constitution, democracy, internationalism and justice. I'm glad there
are newer symbols too: Goodness Gracious Me, the hugely successful Asian
comedy programme; Chicken Tikka Masala and Reggae are British. They could
never be Welsh, Scottish or English. But how likely is that sense of
Britishness, that attachment, to survive? And why should it? Brendan
O'Leary is Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics
and has written widely about Northern Ireland, nationalism, and ethnicity.

O'LEARY: It seems to me that the likelihood of a successfully
flourishing culturally rich great British identity is low. Britishness will
be a thin citizenship identity but not have strong cultural content, so the
question that arises out of that is what role might the new ethnic
minorities have to play? Are they going to be lost, the ones most keenly
attached to the British identity, whilst the others are departing from
British identity? And that of course fills lots of the new ethnic
minorities with deep anxiety and this is normal because whenever you get the
partial decomposition of a state, then the smallest minorities are generally
the ones that have most to fear because the rules of the game have changed.
To be a small minority in a big heterogenous society is much less precarious
than being a small minority in a more homogeneous society so it's not
surprising that the new ethnic minorities sometimes fear the arrival of
Scots and Welsh and possibly English forms of national identity. When I
first started teaching on this subject, it was very clear that there were
only two groups that were really strongly British as their primary identity
and they were the people whom the real British didn't regard as British,
namely black British and the Ulster Protestants. That's now changing. The
data on the young, particularly second or third generation descendants of
the new Commonwealth immigrants, there's a greater willingness on their part
to identify with their locality and not simply to have a British identity,
and I would expect that to continue.


Brendan O'Leary may be right, that some younger black and Asian people do
feel comfortable with devolution, and are even beginning to identify as,
say, Scottish rather than British. But many aren't, and the fact is that
neither the new Scottish Parliament nor the Welsh Assembly managed to elect
a single representative from these communities. And there's also the worry
that there's something which says you just can't be black and Scottish: that
to be a Scot you have to have red hair, and wear a kilt. Does all this
bother the writer and historian Michael Ignatieff?


IGNATIEFF: Scots nationalism has always been a civic nationalism,
inclusive, based on human rights, based on legal equality. In principle,
Asian and black and Jewish Scots have nothing to fear from a Scottish
nationalism but there's always that cry of blood beneath the civic
nationalism which you hear on the terraces of football matches and you
suddenly think I don't belong to this. Where is this coming from? All
nationalisms have that tension. One of the reasons I'm a devolutionist is
that I feel that's a way of reconciling this desire for self-government as a
nation with the kind of institutional linkages that keep it going ethnic.


YASMIN: I disagree with you. I think that the devolution has
already produced these, these nationalistic impulses of the Braveheart sort.

IGNATIEFF: What's so bad about nationalist emotions of a Braveheart
kind? I mean --

YASMIN: It excludes.

IGNATIEFF: Well not necessarily. I'm half-Scottish as it happens, just
one of those contingent bits of genetics of no particular importance but my
heart stirs to Braveheart emotions about Scotland and kilts and all that
junk. I have no problem with that. I mean there is no more mordant critic
of Braveheart and tartan kitsch than a Scot, and yet the same Scots who are
mordant about that kind of kitsch also are moved to tears by it. Then the
business is to make sure that you could have a black man wearing a tartan
and people think - why not?


YASMIN: Well that'll be the day.

IGNATIEFF: Or a Jew - or a Jew wearing a tartan as some Jewish Scots
have done. Inclusiveness requires a moral stretch, that's all. But you
don't get a genuinely inclusive community by kind of banning certain
emotions.


So the Braveheart spirit is fine, as long as it doesn't get out of hand.
But isn't there a danger that all this celebration of Scottishness is
overshadowing the civic identity? That the emphasis is on difference,
rather than on equality? Yet both sets of values must be upheld in a truly
integrated society, whether it's in Scotland, Wales, England or anywhere
else. But this, says Stuart Hall, is a tall order.


HALL: British multiculturalism poses what I would call an
impossible demand. That is the demand for equality and difference. Now we
know the politics of equality, we've had it for a long time. We know
something about the politics of difference but the politics of equality and
difference - that is to say that local authorities or courts or the police
recognise that Muslims are different from Gujurati, are different from
Afro-Caribbeans and yet that the outcomes have to be in some sense equal in
order to make them equal citizens. This is a testing time for traditional
classic liberal values, you know. Which have tried to evade this problem of
difference by saying oh well they can be different in private but as far as
the public authority is concerned we don't recognise cultural differences.
Everybody is a citizen. Everybody is not a citizen in quite that way so I
think one of the things that multiculturalism has done is to problematise
some of the traditional political ideologies, both cultural pluralism as
we've seen it operate elsewhere and actually traditional liberal democracy.


So there is a problem for liberal democracy in trying to reconcile equality
and difference through the British approach to "multiculturalism", which has
made it much too easy for politicians to deal with self-appointed "community
leaders", and much too difficult for black and Asian Britons to have rich,
multiple identities. Worse, it has enabled white Britons to carry on
excluding us. What's more, even when it's well-intentioned,
multiculturalism can produce serious misunderstandings. Naseem Khan is a
policy officer at the Arts Council who's been given an OBE for her work on
cultural diversity.


KHAN: One example that I remember very clearly because at that
point it quite foxed me was an arts administrator cited an example of how
they, they had a particular fund for community arts and they were very
pleased when a Muslim group had applied to it but then they were completely
puzzled, bewildered, at a loss about what to do because the group then said
well I'm sorry but we're going to have to segregate audiences because we
don't, our custom is that men and women should never be together! Now the
basic rules of the Arts Board in this case was actually equal opportunities
against you know anything that they thought was going to reduce the
horizons, the opportunities for women so they said, well what should we do
about this because we're in a state of immense conflict between the desire
to be sensitive to one cultural tradition while at the same time having our
own absolutes, our own rules of behaviour and the two things seem to be
contradictory. But it ended in a state of liberal confusion.


This is a benign, even amusing, example of different bits of worthiness
finding themselves in collision. But what happens when the disagreements
strike deeper? The Queen's Speech included a bill to reduce the age of
consent for homosexual men, and plans to repeal Section 28 of the Local
Government Act which bans the promotion of homosexuality. This is anathema
to many British Muslims, says Iqbal Sacranie, the Secretary General of the
Muslim Council of Great Britain.


SACRANIE: As far as homosexuality is concerned, certainly this is an
issue that we feel extremely concerned about because the manner in which it
has been projected, the manner in which it is promoted is something that
Islamically it is not acceptable. Now we believe as Muslim this is a
concern. It is a problem. It is something that needs to be treated. It is
not something that needs to be promoted in the way like the recent
abolishing of the section in the Local Authority Act which would give now
clear direction to the local authorities to promote homosexuality. Now this
we believe is to the detriment of the society which we live in. Now if we
fervently believe this, it is a duty, it is incumbent on us to convey this
message why it's not healthy for the society which we live in, and we need
to come out and I think sadly this is a trend that is now becoming more as
an acceptable, as a norm.


Many white liberals will be tempted to say at this point, "Here we go
again", and cite the Satanic Verses affair and forced marriages as further
examples of how far British Muslims are removed from the ideas of a liberal
society. But they'd be wrong. There are many British Muslims - including
me - who disagree with Iqbal Sacranie about homosexuality, and many white
Britons who would probably agree with him. And Mr Sacranie is opposed to
forced marriages, which he says are un-Islamic. But he's sure he has allies
among people of other faiths, including Christians, who believe that society
has become dominated by a liberal secular elite.


SACRANIE: I think there are values which are very common to the other
faith communities and this is I think quite clear. We are living in a
secular society, we must respect that. It's there, it's a dominant body but
I think there's a place for all of us. The secular society have no such
exclusive right over us and we believe that as much as we recognise that we,
our own faith has a very important role, so has other faith communities and
just because the mainstream faith community, the Christian community has I
think at times been attacked as perhaps on the marginal and they have not
played the due role they ought to play, other faith communities have also
been banished into play a sort of subsidiary role. That I believe is not a
healthy sign because we have in our society believers and non-believers and
why should the people from the faith communities be excluded? So the whole
emphasis is that the faith communities who have a very important role and a
message to the society for the benefit of the society at large should be
given the same opportunity as any other group.
O'LEARY: You will see, I think, an attempt to put together a
coalition of all the religious against the secular, emphasising certain
common traditional values against the secular. If that does happen, I
predict they'll lose. Any strong linkage between British Muslims,
Fundamentalist British Christians and revanchist Catholics would I think
consolidate the rapid secularisation of the formal political institutions.


Brendan O'Leary. So while some British Muslims may see their best chance of
influencing the shape of the state as lying in alliances with other faith
communities, they may end up achieving the opposite of what they intended.


O'LEARY: The United Kingdom like other member states of the European
Union has a very clear integrationist contract with new immigrants. You
have a right to be here, and in return for the opportunity to acquire
citizenship or to sustain your citizenship, you accept the fundamental
nature of the institutions of the states of the European Union and those
fundamental institutions are liberal in character, broadly construed.


YASMIN: So you don't think liberalism needs to change at all?

O'LEARY: Absolutely not. No, I think that one of the key
difficulties with British liberalism has been its failure to understand that
not all matters can be dealt with through individual human rights. I think
classic liberalism says the state should be neutral on culture when in fact
the state is never fully neutral on culture. It can't be.


If the state is never culturally neutral, don't we need to do more to thrash
out a commonly understood and consensual culture? Can this really be based
on non-negotiable liberalism? We all have to accept the principle of
individual human rights - and that means concessions on the part of some
ethnic communities, who will have to accept an end to forced marriages, for
example, and greater rights for women. And a good thing too. But the
hard-line defence of liberalism seems to deny even the possibility that the
traditions of many black and Asian communities have something to teach the
wider British society as well. And it's the despair of ever being able to
influence the culture that reinforces demands for greater acknowledgement of
group identities and group culture - a trend that Paul Goodman of the Daily
Telegraph thinks would be disastrous.

GOODMAN: I think this is essentially an apartheid idea. It's saying
that people's views of history and culture are shaped by their race or their
colour or their ethnic background. I simply don't think that is so and that
as the generations go on, you go down to the third generation, fourth
generation, fifth generation of those who originally arrived, you find or
will find rather what has happened in the past which is an identification
with Britain's way of doing things and I think to try and create some kind
of artificial radical project, a sort of society where it's held that being
of a certain colour or of certain ethnic backgrounds means that you hold
certain views, is a route to disaster.

YASMIN: At the moment there doesn't seem to be any attempt to have
an exchange with these people, to ask them to surrender some of these things
in exchange for greater equality, greater influence, whatever. Is there a
way you could do that?


GOODMAN: What's important here is the rule of law. If the protest
outside a theatre is peaceful, then it's a peaceful protest. If it's not,
then it isn't. That's the best means whereby a society can find a way of
living together, is for the rule of law to be paramount.


Of course, the law is important. But the law on its own can't be enough of
a glue for the future. Surely, we need to re-imagine what Britain might
become. Canada, for example, has re-invented itself in recent years to cope
with not only enormous demographic changes - more non-white immigrants
arrive there than ever before - but with the ongoing tensions over Quebec
and whether the region will one day go its own way. Will Kymlicka is
Professor of Political Philosophy at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario,
and has published widely on multiculturalism and ethnicity.


KYMLICKA: We have in Canada always had a pro-active promotion of
Canadian citizenship. There have been sort of public campaigns promoting
the idea of becoming Canadian in some sense. Even alongside the policies
that tell immigrants that they don't have to hide their ethnicity or be
ashamed of them and rather should expect that public institutions will
respect and accommodate their ethnic identities and the result of the shift
towards a more pluralistic conception of citizenship is, has not been I
think on the ground to divide people into isolated groups who don't interact
with each other. But the statistics are completely the opposite in the
Canadian case and in the American case, that we have increasing rates of
intermarriage, we have decreasing rates of residential segregation,
decreasing rates of racial prejudice and ethnic stereotyping.


It sounds encouraging. Pluralism AND integration, apparently working hand
in hand. But has it solved all Canada's problems, and how do you persuade a
country's majority communities to accept it?


KYMLICKA: I have absolutely no magic formula for that and Canada would
not be a model in this respect because we have failed quite miserably to
develop a public consensus, particularly with respect to Quebec and to a
large extent with respect to indigenous peoples, more so with respect to
immigrants but there continues to be strong resistance. Of course we live
in a multicultural country, of course we live in a bilingual country, of
course aboriginal peoples have a special status and we need to respect their
historic rights. These things are so much a part of the everyday life of
younger Canadians and indeed it's not just that they accept it. They
actually take pride in it.


Nevertheless, a notion of citizenship which contains and in some ways limits
ethnic difference has important lessons for us. But it doesn't get to the
root of the cultural problem, which is: how far will black and Asian Britons
be allowed to shape the future identity of Britain itself? How much can we
influence the culture of the nation? If the future is to be something other
than assimilation, or old "laissez faire" forms of multiculturalism, or
tribalism, then what will be required is compromise, surrender, and
re-thinking of values on all sides. How much would Michael Ignatieff, for
example, be prepared to concede?


IGNATIEFF: Oh, I surrender no space, no power, no privilege and the
expectation that other people will do so seems to me an illusion, and it's
also an illusion to suppose that people will surrender to collective groups
of any kind. Liberal institutions in this society have not been inclusive
enough. They need to be more inclusive. I think a just society has to be
extremely tough about removing all glass, fibreglass, concrete ceilings of
any kind but I think that the struggle to make society more inclusive
through a kind of political gerrymandering - now a favour to this community,
now a favour to that - ends up destroying the legitimacy of the institutions
and eroding the legitimacy of the person who's being rewarded.

YASMIN: But you just said that space and power will not be given up
easily.

IGNATIEFF: Of course not. Of course not. These societies are
extremely competitive places. People with privilege will not surrender it
up voluntarily and they will not do so in order to be thought nice.

If niceness is a quality rarely found among powerful groups, what is the way
forward?

IGNATIEFF: I don't want a community of communities. I don't want
tribalism. I want a kind of moral individualism. This frankly is not very
popular. It has zero appeal. Everybody wants tribalism of some kind,
everybody wants Britain to be a big warm bath in which we you know - curry
on Monday, and Chinese food on a Tuesday. We all worship each other's
differences. I don't like any of that talk and we've got into a society
which talks about race and difference insistently and obsessively, never
talks about class. So the poor white stiffs sit there and, and watch their
white kids failing, getting lousy services, feeling left behind by a society
when the rest of the society is talking this language of racial inclusion
which doesn't include them at all. I actually want a society which agrees a
very very clear firm civic minimum which is: all individuals are equal
worth, all individuals are entitled to fairness before the law, and the
society comes down like a ton of bricks when it doesn't live up to those
promises, Stephen Lawrence being the classic example. Where what you feel
is that the hurt and offence done to Stephen Lawrence's family is not hurt
and offence to the black community. It's hurt and offence to every single
person in the country because that's what we live by - end of story in my
view.


But it can't be the end of the story, only the beginning of it. Michael
Ignatieff is right when he says that previous discourse on race needs to be
questioned. We cannot carry on talking about race and ignore the problems
faced by the white underclass. He's right, too, that the injustices of the
Stephen Lawrence case were a threat to the whole of society, not only to the
black community. But we shouldn't let the white establishment off the hook
completely. It was a long time before most white people woke up to the
issues in the Lawrence case, and racist attacks continue on a virtually
daily basis. Equally, though, we black and Asian Britons need to be
involved in all the debates in our society and that can only happen if we
move out of the physical and mental ghettos we've been accustomed to for too
long. Stuart Hall.


HALL: I think as a consequence of all that we're saying, there are
some things that need to be said back to the ethnic minorities now about
multiculturalism, you know. People in the ethnic minorities tend to think
multiculturalism is a problem which the government must solve, somebody else
must solve, but they are implicated in this. They can't make a demand for
recognition without having a view, you know. One of the problems about
multiculturalism is that in this country still the ethnic minorities have a
view about the issues that touch them most directly but they don't seem to
care about Europe. How can they not care about Europe? Europe is a source
of jobs, it's a source of technology, you know it's going to affect their
economic prospects. People like them are struggling for the same sort of
rights in France, in Germany and Italy and Spain. They must have a view
about everything so they can no longer have this kind of vested interest
relationship to politics and selective relationship to politics. The cost
for them is to enter fully into the citizenship debate. But the room to do
that comes first from those people who govern citizenship and have to make
it possible but then ethnic minorities have to seize that opportunity to
participate of course.


Citizenship and participation. Black and Asian Britons need views on
Europe, views on England, Scotland or Wales, views on taxation, views on
globalisation and yes, views on the family. And we won't all agree, either
amongst ourselves or with everyone else. But we must be part of the
discussion. There may be irony in the fact that it's the sons and daughters
of those who celebrated the end of Empire who now have the strongest stake
in breathing new life into Britishness. But it's a challenge we must rise
to - so that we can help to shape the 21st century forms of music and
literature, justice and internationalism. And so that Britain can be both
integrated AND diverse.