MC-DIP

Just came across the words below and it gives a feel for the climate in the UK. Issues of interest for me here are cultural pluralism and the notion of integration being put forward in the UK. Roy Jenkins' classic definition, integration is 'not a flattening process of assimilation but equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance' is what we should be thinking in Europe and move away from the push to assimilation. A Sivananda provides invaluable insight and I suggest check out the full interview where the quote below can from.

There's a new ballgame here - with the 2001 riots in Britain and 7/7, the government has been thrashing about for answers as to how to handle its ethnic minorities. First, with the riots, it blamed the self-separatism of Asian communities for the disaffection between Asians and whites - never acknowledging that successive governments' policies of culturalism, combined with their neglect of the inner cities, had created the enclaves which had turned Asians against whites and vice versa. Thus, the government's thinking this time was not on the lines of 'ethnic disadvantage', as Scarman had it, but of (too much) ethnic advantage, too much 'multiculturalism', not enough integration/assimilation or the much more euphemistic term 'community cohesion'. And now, after 7/7, despite the discovery that the suicide bombers were home-grown and wholly British, the thinking in the UK is to embrace the backward and undoubtedly Islamophobic discourse that is issuing from mainland Europe. Cultural pluralism has gone too far, it threatens our values and our very national safety. A line has to be drawn on difference. Ethnic minorities have now, in the domestic context of the War on Terror, to effectively subsume their cultural heritage to Britishness.