BRITAIN: The chair of Britain's Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has voiced fears that polarisation is feeding "a growing and dangerous tribalisation" in some communities where "separateness" encourages inequality.
Welcoming the Blair government's appointment of a Commission for Integration and Cohesion, Trevor Phillips also acknowledged that today's "new migration" to Britain from eastern Europe is "very different to the post-empire wave".
Having provoked controversy last year with his warning that Britain was "sleepwalking to segregation", Mr Phillips told the Royal Geographical Society the UK desperately needed immigrants to sustain her workforce, while suggesting the effect of migration in changing the composition of the nation was being overlooked.
"In this new world of more rapid and more diverse immigration, coupled with an unprecedented threat to global security, we cannot continue to pretend there are no costs faced by our changing communities," said Mr Phillips. And he described last week's call by the communities secretary, Ruth Kelly, for a national debate on how to assess and manage those changes as "timely and bold". Mr Phillips said Ms Kelly's words were especially courageous because "she knew she would be tilting at the unquestioning acceptance of the doctrine of multiculturalism" in most of the political, media and academic establishment.
At the same time, however, Mr Phillips said "heretics" like himself and Ms Kelly, in arguing for greater integration, risked attracting "allies we'd rather not have". He said the minister's call for honesty "should not be the excuse for every anti-immigrant, Muslim-baiting wingnut to hijack the debate to advertise their latest assault on some part of the community". And he coupled this with a warning to government itself against policy informed "by anecdote" or "driven by panic, political expediency or whim".
The CRE chair cited the current passionate engagement about faith schools as an example of debate where the participants chose, he said, to disregard the facts. The case was being made that "if we want social integration we cannot have faith schools", said Mr Phillips, who acknowledged that "unlike Anglican and Roman Catholic voluntary aided schools, the few Muslim, Jewish and Sikh schools that exist tend to be monoethnic.
However, describing this argument as "hypocrisy dressed up as a leftish concern for integration," he said: "What the proponents of this view really want to say is one of two things. One, a perfectly valid view, is that religion should be banned from the public sphere and practiced only in private if at all. The other, not at all valid in my view, is that Muslims can't be trusted to run schools, like Christians have done for centuries."
Opposing calls for racial profiling of terror suspects in the wake of the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic aircraft, Mr Phillips said security measures must reduce rather than increase the terrorist threat "and since Muslims, like Christians, come in all shapes and colours, I can't for the life of me see how religious or racial profiling will deal with so-called Islamic terrorism".
Mr Phillips also recalled that when police had used racial profiling to tackle street robbery in Britain "they ended up arresting six times as many young black people - but convicting the same proportion of the black men as of white men". The profiling didn't have any particular impact on crime, he said, "but it did sour race relations for a generation".
The CRE's agenda for integration was based on the need for equality, participation and interaction between communities. And Mr Phillips said he was optimistic that Britain was equipped in the long term "to move from its current position of sleepwalking to segregation" because the majority knew that the freedoms, lifestyle and mutual tolerance they enjoyed could not be matched anywhere else.