Jayne Dowle: Let's look at the success of multi-culturalism

SO Angela Merkel thinks that multi-culturalism has failed in Germany. Not just failed, the German Chancellor says, but "failed utterly". What a damning indictment of a country which has tried so hard to put behind it a past of intolerance and political extremism. Her comments have been widely interpreted as referring to Germany's four-million strong Turkish population, which began to emigrate to Europe after the Second World War.

Leaving aside the political ramifications in her own country, this view is dangerous, because it provides justification for those who argue

that multi-culturalism has failed in Britain too. It is an easy and sweeping judgment to make. Even Trevor Phillips, that well-known campaigner for racial equality, announced a few years ago that the term "multi-culturalism" should be scrapped because it is no longer relevant to modern Britain.

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Well, I'd like them to spend a few hours with some of my students in Huddersfield. Earlier this week, I had a very interesting conversation with a young woman of Pakistani origin, born in West Yorkshire. Her family, she told me, was one of the first to come to Huddersfield from the sub-continent. They opened a shop, thrived and prospered. In her Western clothes and with her Yorkshire accent, she never questions her right to be here.

As part of her studies, she has to come up with a plan for an event to celebrate her home town. When we started to discuss ideas, it became obvious that there are two routes she could take; an "Asian" event, aimed at Asian people, or an event for everyone which happens to be organised by a person of Asian descent. And why shouldn't she? What sensible person really thinks twice now when the estate agent selling their house or the accountant doing their books happens to have an Asian name? In a pub in Barnsley at the weekend, no-one choked on their Sunday dinner at the group of men at the bar, who included a couple of black guys, a couple of white guys and a man who was probably Chinese.

It's a tricky one though, isn't it? And although I'm encouraging my student to opt for the latter approach, just so she can prove she can do it, I'm not really in a position to adjudicate. So I sent her off to talk to friends and family to see what their opinions are. And as I did, I was reminded of another girl I spoke to recently. She had wanted to study music, but coming from a strict Muslim family, she was forbidden from doing so, because this would involve her performing in public. The only way she could get round it was to take up teacher-training, which would allow her to specialise in her talents without upsetting her mother and father. So there we have just two young women, in hugely differing circumstances, both balancing their family cultures with trying to make their own way in the world. How unfair it would be to generalise.

This is a crucial – and often-missed – point about the whole issue of multi-culturalism, and perhaps it explains in part why it is becoming such an uncomfortable concept. For too long, it has been a debate led by white people, when in fact it should be a debate which everyone, regardless of creed or colour, should be engaged in. And for too long, it has been a debate which fails to recognise the subtleties which exist beneath the surface.

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I am not nave. I know that there are plenty of people in Yorkshire who hold extreme political views – I see or hear it all the time. But I would like to argue that we can also set an example to the rest of the country, if not the world, in how other cultures have merged positively into what existed before, and how they are actually shaping our

identity.

Just look at Bradford. Without the impact of Asian-led businesses, especially in the restaurant trade, where would Bradford be? When you consider the contribution to the economy of individuals such as Mumtaz Khan, who launched his multi-million pound international food business in the 1970s from a takeaway on Great Horton Road, you can't justify the argument that all Asian businesses are somehow "separate". His company is as much a part of the Bradford economy as any other. Indeed, you could argue that given current circumstances, its future might be more assured than some of the other main local economic drivers, such as personal finance. People can exist without home insurance and ISAs, but they will always have to eat.

So, rather than the blanket assumption that multi-culturalism has failed, I think we should look closely at how it actually succeeds. This cannot be measured in the success – or not– of the many and pointless politically-correct "initiatives" to encourage individuals of different backgrounds to come together. No, it has to be measured in hard economic facts, in the way that entrepreneurs find a gap in the market and the way that jobs are created. And that, in Yorkshire at least, is why young people like my student will be the ones who prove Angela Merkel wrong.