This morning's Sunday on Radio 4 closed with a discussion about the Government's Green Paper on integration.
It featured Professor Ted Cantle of the Community Cohesion Foundation and Miqdaad Versi of the Muslim Council of Britain.
Mr. Versi broadly welcomed the Green Paper but was concerned about its "inappropriate" focus on the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities (particularly over poor English language skills).
This (particularly thanks to presenter William Crawley maintaining that focus) became the main talking point of the whole discussion.
Professor Cantle agreed with Mr. Versi about the inappropriateness of singling out the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, calling the media's focus on 'Muslim communities' "very unfortunate".
They both agreed that integration should focus on "all communities" and be "a two-way street".
William Crawley also invited Miqdaad Versi to discuss "Sharia courts", saying there has been "a lot of press coverage of that section of the report this week".
Mr. Versi liked what the Green Paper says about them.
A comment I saw elsewhere sums up my view of this discussion: "If only BBC Radio 4 Sunday had asked some more testing questions (ie proper journalistic questions) rather than a series of invitations to be politically correct".
I was wondering whether this was another case of the BBC providing "balance" by basically have people from either side of a narrow band. I wasn't familiar with Ted Cantle and have been researching him on the internet. It appears he was a big cheese under New Labour. He appears to be the inventor of "community cohesion" and "interculturalism" which are supposed to be differentiated from "multiculturalism".
ReplyDeleteThis is a bit like those fiercly debated disputes in the Reformation between Lutherans, Zwinglians, Anglicans, Calvinists and Anabaptists... all ostensibly on the same "side", in opposition to Roman Catholicism.
As far as I can tell Cantle has never uttered even a word of caution over mass immigration. He appears in fact to be a fan of mass immigration because it increase something called "diversity" which of course is "good" in and of itself.
Cantle's schtick appears to be to want to enforce community cohesion through state led action (basically money showering) to encourage people to mix with each other!
It's a very depressing, dispiriting societal vision that Cantle has if the state has to intervene on a massive scale to avoid some sort of (unstated) societal meltdown. Doesn't suggest diversity is quite such an unalloyed joy.
I've just watched a BBC One advert that basically says, "British Asian? What are you doing watching this stuff? Come and join us on 'your' Asian Network!"
ReplyDeleteYep, always makes me laugh when BBC interviewers go on about Brexit being "divisive", when the BBC actively attempts to ghettoise parts of the population and split up the country into regions that don't talk to each other.
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