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Sayeeda Warsi: We need to be colour blind over social needs
Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, seemed to be saying last week that the forthcoming Equalities Bill should be used to help disadvantaged white people.
If so, it's yet another indirect attack on the Government's discredited social policies of the last 10 years. State multiculturalism has not only damaged the social fabric of Britain today, it has pitted communities against one another, focusing on our differences to the point that more and more people are prepared to admit that these policies have had damaging consequences.
As David Cameron said at Neasden Temple this week: "State multiculturalism means cutting the common threads that bind us in this country – fair play, the English language, respect for the rule of law. By entrenching difference it has actively discouraged fellowship and fraternity, and that is no way to strengthen our society."
On Monday in the House of Lords, I asked the Government what advice they'd been given by the Muslim Women's Advisory Group they created a year ago. They couldn't give me a straight answer about what it was doing or even what advice they were using. Yet last month they set up another group, this time a handpicked Muslim Youth Advisory Group, which included a member of the Socialist Workers' Party.
It's these cynical attempts to grab headlines that appeal to minority voters, rather than a real attempt to address the issues, which lead to marginalisation across our communities.
If Trevor Phillips is beginning to question this, and admit that "immigration has fuelled resentments that are real and should not be dismissed – resentment felt by white, black and Asian", then perhaps what the Conservative Party has been saying for so long has not been in vain.
White communities up and down Britain have not only been ignored, but systematically shut out by this Labour Government, as Trevor Phillips says. Underachievement in education among white boys is a national disgrace, according to the Department for Children, Schools and Families' own figures: white British boys entitled to free school meals performed worse at GCSE level than any ethnic group last year.
A recent report published by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills revealed that only six per cent of white boys eligible for free school meals went on to higher education, compared with 24 per cent of young men from ethnic minorities.
Political engagement among white communities is at an all-time low: according to the Government's own citizenship survey, 80 per cent of white Britons feel locked out, unable to shape the direction of their country or Government.
In trying to address the issues of disenfranchisement and deprivation, the Government has sought obsessively to focus on race and religion, rather than on the basis of statistical evidence of need. This has tipped the balance so far that it has been left blind to the needs of communities that do not neatly fit within an ethnic or religious minority box.
Gordon Brown's clumsy attempt to redress the balance by calling for "British jobs for British workers", a cynical and politically motivated intervention, must stand out as one of the most misguided and irresponsible interventions by a politician for years.
We have to get beyond this Labour obsession with trading favours on the basis of which group people belong to. Instead, we must focus on integration. We must not go on just playing on differences.
While Trevor Phillips's analysis has made people sit up and think, I do not believe we should now go down the line of specialist "white" funding and "white advisory groups". This will simply repeat the mistakes of the past and fuel a "white relations industry", just like it has fuelled a black relations industry. For years I have campaigned against the setting up of advisory groups and engagement groups which are race and religion-specific.
I have argued that such groups divide communities, pit them against one another, make them vie for the attention of policy-makers and fight for scarce funding. And having spent years fighting against the Government for creating black and brown groups, I do not want to spend the years to come fighting against the further creation of specific groups. It will divide us even further, and hamper our attempt to form cohesive communities.
While in the past there has been a need for targeted help to integrate new arrivals, and in the future there may be exceptional cases, that is what they must be: an exception. We have a responsibility to meet communities' needs because they have those needs, not because they belong to a particular bloc.
An ideal situation would be for the government to be truly colour blind, simply to fund on the basis of need, not race or religion. At the same time, we must recognise that it is only by real long-term solutions, through mainstream education and skills programmes, social and housing programmes, that we can really tackle yet another feature of our broken society.
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi of Dewsbury is Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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