Take a train to Wickford, Essex, and then drive for a half an hour beyond the edge of the town, and you come to Dale Farm, the biggest traveller site in the country. There are almost 100 families now living on the site, half of them in small, semi-permanent chalets, the rest in caravans. A group of us went up there on Thursday, to help out with the campaign to save Dale Farm, and to show solidarity with the community there.

After waiting at the train station, we were eventually picked up by Martin from one of the local churches. The Travellers are mainly Irish Catholics, and once the Catholic church in Wickford had become involved, a few of the other congregations chimed in as well. Driving through the country lanes, his leather driving gloves neatly clutching the wheel of his Merc, Martin filled us in on the local area. ‘It’s mainly the papers who tell people what to think about the site. That, and the Tory council.’

Dale Farm has been a traveller site for over ten years now, and there have been several threats of eviction over that time. The last time it looms strong in people’s memories is 2005, but this time there’s a difference. Over the past couple of weeks, the nearby site at Hovefields has been evicted, leaving only a few families untouched, living in fear of being moved on at any time. The local paper, the Basildon Echo, had printed a vile front page and editorial the day we were there. ‘Traveller family does the right thing’ it declared victoriously, and continued with a turd of a comment-piece praising the family on the ‘reasonableness.’ Never did it cross the printed page that the sight of people digging up and demolishing their own homes is a sight of people fleeing out of fear.

Once at the site itself, almost all the residents we met were women, the men having left for work. The gender divisions in the community are deeply entrenched, and on more than one occasion we found ourselves confronted with an uncomfortable level of sexism. Sometimes we challenged it; mostly we let it go. Similarly, I think the travellers found us pretty strange at times, understanding that we were there to try and help, but not exactly how.

The Tory council claim that the travellers are a nuisance, and the paper says they’re in their neighbours’ ‘back garden’, but what I saw was nothing like that. The higgledy-piggledy concrete patch which is home to this community is far away from anyone else. Perhaps we could try and see the area as a long-standing experiment in social housing, taking an ex-scrap heap and turning it into a fully functioning, close-knit community. On one side are green fields kept for ponies, which occassionally escape and gallop around the rubbish-strewn internal roads.

We split into two groups: some to write documentation and help individual families with legal support and to make sure they could received legal aid; the rest of us to talk to some of the community about plans to resist an eviction. One of them, cup of tea in one hand, and fag in the other, looked at me through squinted eyes and explained that when the time came, they’d know what to do. It’s not just her traveller pride at having faced such adversity before but rather, a sense that a traveller can do anything. ‘We learn just like that’ she said, with a click of the fingers.

Each family owns a plot, which is demarcated by a low brick wall and, more often than not, a large cast iron gate. Some of the empty plots have bicycle locks wrapped around the black metal bars, or cement poured over the ground to keep people from claiming the plot as their own. All the land is legally owned by the travellers – but only half of them have planning permission, and it’s this point which the local council want to use as an excuse to evict the families.

‘The council say they want to put us in houses. What a cheek, no? I mean, excuse me, I have my own mind!’ Our new guide is wagging her finger and swaying her body while she shouts, with a parodic diva-like campness. Forget wooden carts and gold hooped earrings: she’s standing outside her caravan, dressed like any mum I see around London, and never more so when the children arrive back from the local school all together in a bus. She tries to explain to us, in her thick rolling Irish accent, what remains in traveller life. How she’s afraid of living in houses, of the sounds that houses make. Of sleeping alone, rather than 3 or 4 to a bed. And of how much they want to stay where they are.

‘I wanna go down to London, to that big home, the one they have for all them dogs. You know the one, in Battersea, where they keep all the dogs and give them showers, rooms, and keep them all nice and cosy. All the lovely homes for the dogs. They can sort the right kind of housing for the dogs, but not for us. Well, I’m gonna go chuck all them doggies outta their homes down in Battersea!’

Later this month,a  test case will go to court, and the family in question will either be given new land on which to live, or the council will try and rehouse them. If this happens, they will be given an eviction notice, and the bailiffs will arrive a month later.

After our work’s done, we sit in the sun, three deck chairs and lots of scruffy dogs for company. Our guide asks whether we’ve enjoyed our day of gypsy life, ‘a little bit of gypo’ as she put it. Well, we did, and I’ll be going back to make sure these families feel the solidarity they deserve.

With housing lists constantly increasingly, and prices always on the rise, there don’t seem to be many things as nonsensical as removing families forcibly from their homes. As we’ve seen with the treatment of Roma in France, and the rising Islamaphobia across Europe, we live in a time when scapegoating is becoming dangerously prevalent. Let’s ensure that this persecuting mentality doesn’t reduce Dale Farm to an empty area of concrete and scrap, one that wouldn’t do anyone any good at all.

Nine years after Oldham burned in horrific race-riots, we’re finally getting round to the only workable solution to racial segregation. The report into the incident concluded that de facto segregation in the community was a root cause of the incident, and a more recent report stated that “Segregation and divisions between Oldham’s communities is still deeply entrenched”. Now, two schools – one 90+% white, one 90+% asian – are to be merged next month in a dramatic effort to ease racial tension in an area in which proximity is no guarantee of community.

This is the subject of a Newsnight series entitled ‘Crossing the Line’, and the report aired last night shows something quite revealing about race relations in some parts of our country. (You can watch it here, if you can sit through ten minutes of thick northern accents).

In the report we meet Jean as she drops her thirteen year old daughter, Hannah, off to drama club (which requries a commute through the predominantly asian part of the town). Jean admits that she feels ‘uncomfortable’ doing this, even for a few minutes when shielded in a large metal box on wheels. ‘In Oldham there isn’t a community anymore’, she says.

Hannah’s views are a bit more strident. “People have been saying that they’re going to build better houses for asians an’ that, immigrants an’ that. It’s like they can just come into the country and get treated like they’re kings and queens…and we get treated like we’re nothing”.

This is a common view, especially, it seems, among the young. Said one boy from the majority-white school, ‘Over there, it’s like totally different; it’s, like, Muslim culture’. The feelings are returned, certainly, and the animosity of the ‘other’ side forms the worldview of the very young. One asian girl, about ten, said simply, ‘They don’t like us asians’. Impressions formed the in the minds of the young can hard to dislodge.

These impressions can only be maintained with extreme seperateness. (Remember, the BNP performs best in areas with little or no immigration).

There have been concerns that the students to be integrated are too old, and that the project will backfire. These concerns I won’t address. What I would like to focus on is the vacuous little objection always raised whenever a humane policy is proposed. The accusation is that the government is just engaging in ‘Social Engineering’

Let’s examine this twaddle.

It might seem to make sense at first. The governemt – cynically, we can presume – is engaging in policies to force certain people in society into different positions etc. (‘Ticking boxes’ one person called it in the above case.) It does this to produce certain politically correct goals, and in callous disregard for the people involved.

Picture it: There he is, the faceless, ‘rationalising’ bureaucrat, manipulating people against their will to satisfy some politically expedient goal, and to make liberals and vegetarians feel better.

Do people realise what they’re saying when they make these kinds of hollow objections, use these hollow words? Society is not a ‘natural’ thing. It is based on human institutions and human agreements which we can control. If we deem equality to be a good thing, we can implement policies to encourage equality; just as we can pursue policies to produce more millionaires. Each produces dramatic social consequences. The abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women could be described in this manner, but would we call them ‘social engineering’? We should never tolerate the idea that social relations are the outcome of human nature; more often than not they are the result of some design.

So the definition I’ve come to is this:

Social Engineering: Humane policies with which I disagree, and to which I have no morally acceptable objection.

This cry of ‘Social Engineering!’ carries with it, I think, a rather depressing worldview in which we cannot attempt to change society for the better without government failure and ill effect. Nonsense – society should be ours to engineer.

Let’s hope for the success of this schools program, and look forward to the communities of Oldham coming together in the light of day to see their common humanity. And from that glorious point on they can address their real problem: the fact that they live in Oldham.

Last week the French cabinet approved plans to ban the burqa in public places. Women who wear the veil in public face a fine of $185 dollars and compulsory classes in French values, along with imprisonment if they do not comply.

It goes without saying that a woman wearing a full face veil – her identity hidden from those whom she encounters – can be a ridiculous and depressing site. Yet the basic issue here is one of liberty and democracy. As far as possible, the state should not impose dress codes upon its citizens.

Most worrying is the way in which “french values” have been invoked. A parliamentary resolution supporting the ban justified the move on the basis that the veil was “contrary to the values of the republic.” Sarkoxy mean while insisted that:

“We are an old nation united around a certain idea of human dignity, and in particular of a woman’s dignity, around a certain idea of how to live together. The full veil that hides the face completely harms those values”

The point is that when one talks of “French values” or “British values” one usually invokes a somewhat dubious ideological construct. Modern societies are characterised by many competing and contradictory values. Those values which are deemed to reflect the essence of the nation are generally those which happen to be most popular or most powerful at a given point in time. As such, by denying people the right to express themselves – or to adorn themselves – in a manner which contradicts “french values”, the government is in reality denying people the right to dissent from that which is hegemonic. In asserting that people must conform to “French Values” the government is in reality asserting that people people must not diverge from the mainstream.

There has been a whiff of this here too in Britain. Jack Straw, a few years back attacked the veil,not because he considered it oppressive to women but because it was a “visible statement of separation and of difference” (my emphasis). Ye, people ought not to separate themselves from the rest of society. But since when was it a crime to express difference, or for an individual to indicate that they are not like everybody else. Indeed the ability to stand out from the crowd is at the heart of what makes are democracy worthwhile.

Somehow a punnet of mushrooms appeared in my house today. They bore the name “Mini Portabella mushrooms”. I should admit now that I’m not an expert on mushrooms, but the name struck me as rather odd. On closer examination the pack made very clear that these were just normal chestnut mushrooms.

The offending mushrooms

So I thought to myself, “that’s strange, I’ve been buying chestnut mushrooms for years, I wonder why they’ve changed the name?” I also took the liberty of looking up some information on portabella mushrooms on the internet, and came up with the definition “The portobello also called portabella is really simply a brown crimini mushroom in disguise. […] Once the little brown crimini grows up to be about 4″ – 6″ in diameter he is deemed to be a portobello.” Now, I’d never heard of a crimini mushroom before, so decided to look that up too. As far as I was concerned my pack said that these were “chestnut” mushrooms. I was also a bit confused by the fact that given the definition a “mini portabella” was in fact not a portabella at all. Everything seemed a bit suspect so I did some more digging

Another site told me that “Cremini mushrooms aren’t actually Italian mushrooms. “Cremini” is just a marketing name that was picked, wtiness the confusion between whether the name is actually spelt Cremini or Crimini” – personally, I reckon if any Italian had anything to do with it they’d think that “crimini” (crimes) is a bit of an odd name for a mushroom. I then thought back to good old Nietzsche, in his late work The Case of Wagner saying “Il faut mediterraniser la musique”, and wondered whether “il faut mediterraniser les champignons” would not have been more appropriate. I digress, the issue that I really wanted to discuss here was some old-fashioned orientalism and what this sort of advertising really means.

I’m sure that plenty of readers probably think that this doesn’t really mean very much. The public know that they like “portabella” mushrooms, and what one happens to call mushrooms in a supermarket probably doesn’t affect mass psychology very much. Here I agree, but it does point to a constellation of self, other, and commodity that may be of at least slight interest. In the orientalising or othering moment alongside doing damage to the product we consider (through absolute objectification), we do equal damage to ourselves as subjects insofar as we create fear, and damage any possibility of unity with that object. It is only as a consequence of the product as commodity that this becomes an irrelevance. It does not worry us if the product, already othered by being assigned an exchange value, being utterly reproducible as a commodity, is othered once again. But maybe there is ground to be reclaimed here. Maybe, if we took our food to be an element of the subjective, as a mode of our own existence seriously, then these mushrooms would pose some serious questions. Ok, probably not very serious, but hopefully you see my point.

It is the fact that these tactics in advertising remain so prevalent, that supermarkets jazz up there products with a slice of the exotic (or it’s modern-day equivalent, Tony Blair’s beloved Tuscany), that is a worry. If things are transmogrified into their own brands or slogans then we are very quickly losing the qualitative content of life.

There was an interesting judgment relating to faith schools today. The Jewish Free School was told by three senior judges that its admissions procedures were illegal, as the test of ethnicity amounted to racial discrimination. Now, I’ll start by saying that I think all state-funded faith schools are a fucking terrible idea. There’s absolutely no reason why our tax money should be wasted on indoctrinating kids rather than teaching them to think. But this is somewhat beside the point, as the fight against faith schools is long and hard, and here I want to consider this particular ruling. On first reading about this story, it sounded like a very good thing. The fact that there will no longer be kids being discriminated against on the basis of their ethnic origins is always a good thing

But there was also something rather worrying in the judgment: “The three judges – Lords Justice Sedley and Rimer, and Lady Justice Smith – said it was clear that Jews constituted a racial group defined principally by ethnic origin and additionally by conversion.” Those of us who spend our lives fighting against racism, both in theory and in practice, spend a great deal of time debunking the entire concept of “race”, so for judges to be making statements like this now is a huge step back. In fact, the movement from discussion of ethnicity to discussion of race here implies that these judges are quite happy, it seems, to use the terms interchangeably. So what happened to all those old arguments, all the ones that said that it was exactly this act of defining people racially that was racist.

The fact that racists use the rhetoric of race to explain what they do does not mean that in considering the actions of racists we should buy into their definitions. It is not necessary to define Jews, or any people, as a race, to show that some are being oppressed. Whilst this judgment is a good thing, and will have good effects, one can only see comments like that made by the judges playing into the hands of the right. If we are to be serious about defeating racism then we have to do away with the entire mode of thought, and not simply its concrete consequences.

“He thinks we’re all bloody bourgeois” scoffed Austen Ivereigh, as he puffed on his Montecristo in a trendy bar in King’s Cross, whilst reading aloud David Broder’s response to yesterday’s Strangers Into Citizens demonstration. “This looks like it was written thirty years ago,” he chortled to himself. Ivereigh is a founder of the Strangers into Citizens campaign, and seems to be a staunch reformist. In many ways I don’t think Broder’s piece goes nearly far enough, although it certainly seems to be along the right lines. The issues that this protest brought up have significance above and beyond the immediate violence of the current immigration system, as they also reflect and comment on the government’s policies with regards to minority communities living in England. Broder is certainly correct to take apart the nonsense of a one-off amnesty at the expense of having a thought-out ideological positional praxis on the structures of oppression that face refugees and asylum seekers.

The issues of minorities and the structural violence of borders are intimately connected; the way our government treats asylum seekers and refugees is subsumed in a wider context of the way that they treat minority groups. Whilst they consistently claim to value diversity and cohesion, the reality is that government policies have actually increased segregation, whilst undermining the fight against oppression both directed toward and within these communities. It is worrying that the Strangers Into Citizens campaign fully buys into this rhetoric uncritically. One of the most interesting documents on this issue in recent years was produced by Women Against Fundamentalism and Southall Black Sisters as a submission to the Commission on Integration and Cohesion (of which the first ten pages are most relevant to this debate.) It states,

We are concerned about the wider underlying … that it is the immigrant communities as opposed to the settled communities that need to be ‘integrated’. This implies that immigrant communities are somehow malfunctioning cultures whose values are intrinsically opposed to the so called ‘British’ way of life. New Labour politicians such as Blunkett, Brown and Blair, have often referred to the values of human rights, democracy and fair play – the basis of a shared British culture. Immediately the assumption is that there are a set of fixed and given (unchanging) ‘British’ values that are superior and to which all those who enter the country must subscribe.

And goes on to say

The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002 was preceded by a white paper entitled ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity.’ The assumption being that internal stability can only be guaranteed if the borders of the country are policed to prevent the influx of (undesirable) migrants and refugees. Immigration and asylum laws and polices have provided the basis for racism to flourish at an institutional level and on the streets.

This reified version of Britishness, somewhat reminiscent of Goodness Gracious Me’s The Coopers (Kapoors) and Robinsons (Rabindranaths) was present in a more pernicious version during the Strangers Into Citizens rally through the waving of the Union Jack, and the singing of God Save The Queen (not the Sex Pistols version.) Of course trying to get a bunch of impoverished immigrants and Catholics to sing this bollocks en masse wasn’t exactly successful, but that was hardly a surprise. I noted that only the first verse was sung, and the “O Lord, our God (the Anglican one?), arise. Scatter her enemies, and make them fall (how relevant to our recent colonial past.) Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks (what was that about valuing diversity?) On Thee our hopes we fix, God save us all (save to mention who does or doesn’t believe in redemption)” was omitted. The point being that this wasn’t just some silly little concession to try to get the Tories to agree with them, but rather that this treatment of Britishness is completely in line with the politics of Strangers Into Citizens. Such assimilation at the expense of cultural identity would seem rather to turn citizens of the world into strangers.

The speeches, too, failed to combat the structural problems with the government’s treatment of minorities as a whole. Time was given to the leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, an organisation WAF and SBS describe as “ha[ving] its origins in the sectarian Islamic politics of Pakistan and Bangladesh” and “claim[ing] to represent British Islam [but] has compromised the agenda on preventing extremism.” Other speeches were given to religious leaders who had nothing to say on politics above and beyond the affirmation that we were all people, God’s children to some of them, and one can assume all of God’s children have the right to be British without needing to acknowledge that such “Britishness” has been predicated on hundreds of years of colonialist oppression which continues (of course alongside hundreds of years of legacy of the Magna Carta that is slowly but surely being dismantled.) If only the Union Jack could be redeemed such that it could be value-free. If only our anthem requested that we “unite the human race” rather than “scatter enemies and make them fall.”

Maybe Ivereigh was correct in saying that Broder’s response sounded 30 years old. I personally think it may be worthwhile going a little further back to have a look at Trotsky’s work on the “Transitional Demand“. I know any reader is probably thinking “Oh no! He’s going to go all dogmatic on us now”, but rather than offering some kind of bizarre non sequitur of a defence of the Soviet Union, I just feel that Trotsky’s pamphlet on this matter offers a bit of conceptual clarity to the opposition of the No Borders movement and Strangers Into Citizens.

Trotsky’s concept of the transitional demand is that of a demand that could be met under capitalism but would not be without further consequences on the path to socialism (and I strongly believe that it is only in socialism that we’ll see the abolition of the structures that oppress refugees, asylum seekers, and minority groups.) the ‘transitional demand’ is counterposed with the “minimal demand” of reform. It is easy to map these two onto the two sides of this argument: Strangers Into Citizens maintains the nation, maintains the borders, maintains the structures that asylum seekers endure, whereas the No Borders campaign comes with the ideological baggage of an effective internationalism. On this very issue, Trotsky writes, ‘ ”Defense of the Fatherland?” – But by this abstraction, the bourgeoisie understands the defense of its profits and plunder.’ Strangers Into Citizens do this too with their economic arguments for the regularisation of those without status, rather than an analysis that cuts to the heart of oppression and racism. But Trotsky is not against reform though, as he says we should not “discard the program of the old “minimal” demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness.” But we should “carry on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct actual, that is, revolutionary perspective.”

It is fair to say that the left has often failed to work effectively within communities, and certainly has less success that church based groups. That is something for the left to work on, but I do not believe that this failure is a consequence of a failure in the politics of the left. Talking to people at yesterday’s event, many felt themselves to be in much more agreement with the “no borders” slogans. The point is that whilst organisations like the Citizen Organising Foundation may be good at getting people out on the street, that is far more a reflection of their extremely competent community work than the soundness of their politics. The crowd at yesterday’s event was a very interesting one, in that it was the true grassroots of the city, but the politics of the organisers was flimsy at best. We have much to learn but also much to add to this movement if strive to make change permanent rather than a one-off amnesty bought in exchange for the future.

A minor coup this week, in a world were power is money and money is time and time is quickly running out.

Are you trying to run a national campaign on a shoestring?  Looking to change the minds of just about ever single person in Houses of Parliament, including the catering staff?  And do you need to get all this done by Monday afternoon, at the very, very latest?  Then look no further, my friend.  I think I’ve got the answer for you.

TFL, it transpires, will actually allow pretty much any old Tom, Dick or Harry to – for a modest fee – plaster their message across ticket barriers at any London Underground station you care to specify.

“Which station would you like to advertise at, sir?” 

“Erm…Westminster, please.”

And so, for the rock bottom price of just about £1,000 for the month running up to next Monday’s demo, just about every stubbornly racist MP – whose butt cheeks clench and 2^nd home payments scream any time they so much as think of looking at the immigration debate rationally – are now forced to read our message first thing in the morning and last thing every night.  (Even if they do then proceed to ignore it for ever hour inbetween.)   

Yesterday, at the Institute of Education, there was a long public meeting organised by Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), primarily as a launch for their book of articles “A Time To Speak Out“, but also as a forum for debate and discussion amongst Jews about Israel, the war in Gaza, identity, and the relationship of Jews at the edge of the community in relation to community leaders. IJV was established nearly two years ago, and in that time has been offering a platform to dissenting Jews, although admittedly those who get to speak are often of a rather academic bent. The meeting consisted of three sessions: a panel of writers of Time To Speak Out; a presentation from Miri Weingarten of Physicians for Human Rights on attacks on medical aid by the Israeli army during the recent war; and finally a talk by Uri Avnery.

Uri Avnery speaking yesterday at the Institute of Education

Over the last few years the means by which Jewish people can speak out against the actions of Israel have been greatly augmented in Britain, with groups such as Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Jews Against Zionism, and an internet presence of JustPeace being established, alongside older Jewish anti-Zionist groups such as the Jewish Socialists’ Group. In many ways IJV exists in a different space, and rather than being explicitly anti- or pro-Zionist, anti- or pro-Israel, it exists as a body of Jews who condemn the acts of Israel and wish to say publicly that Israel doesn’t speak for them. They are relative newcomers to the scene, but they do get media coverage, and as yesterday showed, are able to get significant numbers of people to their meetings.

Uri Avnery’s speech was by far the most interesting (unsurprising given he has consistently been one of the most forceful and outspoken voices for peace within Israel for decades.) He began by giving a reminder of a time he spoke in London in 1983 alongside Issam Satawi, in a meeting organised by members of the Jewish Socialist Group and Israeli ex-patriates. Satawi was assassinated a number of weeks later in Portugal. He gave an eloquent exegesis on the history of the question of Israel and the current fight for peace. The mood was pessimistic, as he stated that with a new government that includes “real fascists”, this is a “dark time for those fighting for peace.”

Avnery is interesting because he’s so completely serious about a two state solution, which of course is rather less common amongst Western lefties. But in saying this, he also clarifies “most politicians who talk about a two state solution in Israel don’t mean it; they mean something different… Any politician who talks about two states seriously is declaring war on the settlers, 250,000 very dangerous people and their allies in Israel.” He also says in no uncertain terms “Israel must go back to the borders of 1967, and East Jerusalem must be the capital of Palestine.” Such a demand goes far beyond Barak’s so-called “generous offer” that Zionists to this day laud over Palestinians for rejecting. His belief in a two state solution is not taken lightly, but he believes that the demand for a single state would lead to the further radicalisation of nationalist separatist movements.

Avnery asks the question “What was the aim of the war?” and almost comically quips “If you go to a shooting gallery, the best way win is to shoot the bullet and then draw the bullseye later.” He talks quite candidly about his own experiences as a Zionist terrorist sixty years ago, and how he knows from this that the idea that one could attack the civilian population of Gaza so much that they rise up and overthrow their government is completely ill-founded. Of course he condemns Hamas, but he offers an understanding of how and why Palestinians have been driven into a state of supporting them. You don’t hear this sort of thing from Israeli every day, as sadly Avnery is far from the norm. He closed by saying that after the dreadful results of the Israeli election in which “the left became the centre, the centre became the right, and the right became fascist,” it is more than ever necessary to reach a solution.

In many ways, though, yesterday’s event was rather contradictory. The wish of IJV to not quite have a party line in order to entice a range of Jews to become signatories of their organisation means that often they seem woefully undertheorised. On the initial panel of writers, with the exception of Eyal Weizman (whose wonderful book Hollow Land I encourage everyone to read), the views were not so much contradictory as simply not really present. Underlying a lot of the politics of IJV is the issue of Jewish identity, and sadly many of the speakers, if asked what Jewish identity was about, would give the same sort of answer you see from Zionists: something about memory and oppression rather than anything positive. Just as the feminists and gay groups of the sixties went further than just to try to end oppression in striving to define themselves, diaspora Jews should be doing this too. We don’t want the same old negative identity reinterpreted, we should demand a new critical identity. Howard Cooper was particularly unimpressive on this matter.

I’m sure that there’s a place for IJV in the movement against Israel’s actions, but I’m not sure how far it can really go. On the one hand there are people who say that we as Israel gets more and more violent we can talk more about challenging their actions on humanitarian grounds rather than on politics. In my analysis the opposite is true: Israel’s violence is obverse of its politics, and to challenge what happened in Gaza on purely humanitarian grounds not only weakens our hand, but does a great injustice to the Palestinians we hope to defend. There is a difference between striking a balance and being noncommittal.

The integration of minority communities, particularly Muslim minorities, into majority British society has been a hotly contested subject in recent years. For all the attention it has received in the press since 7/7, however, the role of faith schools in hindering integration in multicultural societies has been overlooked too long. Last year, the NUT finally took note of this in arguing for multi-faith religious instruction in schools. They could, however, have gone much further. They could have made the case for removing religious instruction from schools entirely, followed the French ends, if not their means, of having schools as secular public spaces free from overt religious influence beyond the neutral study of world religions and cultural traditions. What is most significant about the French case, however, is that France recognised decades before Britain the importance of the state in social integration.

France has long held a very different philosophy to Britain in regards to the integration of the diverse immigrant communities it inherited as a former colonial power. Historically, the British model has been the more decentralised of the two (Layton-Henry & Joly, 2001). Under this market-orientated philosophy, the social integration of immigrant communities has been, until recently, a secondary concern. The emphasis has instead been on leaving immigrants to their own devices provided they come to do ‘good business’, integrating vertically and economically rather than horizontally and socially. The decline of manufacturing industry and an organised, homogenous working class has been mirrored, however, by the rise of Generation X, second generation immigrants cut off from the homeland of their parents and alienated from British society where integration of communities has taken a back seat. Where this has been a causal factor widely attributed to the development of religious extremism, which has served to fill the identity-vacuum of some young Muslims, authorities have increasingly, since 7/7, come to recognise the importance of social integration and France’s more centralised model.

France’s approach to religion in schools came under the spotlight of the international media through the decision in 2004 to ban the wearing of conspicuous symbols of religious affiliation, particularly the Muslim hijab, in schools. This ostensibly heavy-handed measure – falsely justified in the name of women’s rights and using the language of secularism – stemmed not merely from a commitment to laïcité, but from a recognition of a need to better integrate France’s five million-strong Muslim community for whom religion had long been intrinsic to personal identity in a way that it was not amongst the majority non-Muslim population.  As such, the assimilation of Muslims represents a challenge to the secular state operating under the idea of laïcité. The question of how to integrate this minority and to ensure their identity as citizens of the Republic first and Muslims second has plagued French governments for decades. Where up until the mid-1980s the state’s policy towards immigrant communities was a socio-economic approach to assimilating the marginalised into the national society through welfare, unionisation and anti-poverty measures, this has been replaced by a more rigid idea of political integration as interventionist social democratic policies lost favour to the rise of a global neo-liberal consensus. The rise and electoral success of Le Pen’s Front National forced mainstream politicians to take on board some of the concerns of the far-right over immigration. As a result, the assimilation of the Muslim community into citizens of the Republic was placed squarely at the centre of the agenda.

The new philosophy that emerged emphasised the need for citizens to identify and engage with French nationality above individual cultural origins. Taking schools as neutral public spaces in which people learn citizenship, the removal of religion from these spaces was seen to be a key method of integration that went hand in hand with other methods to incorporate Muslims into national politics, such as the French Council for the Muslim Religion, established in 2003. The headscarf was not only treated as though it were a viral form of proselytising, encouraging others to identify themselves as Muslims before citizens of the Republic, but as a crucial symbol of difference undermining the unity of citizens.
The French approach, in banning the hijab, has been, of course, too rigid, too inflexible to the demands of multiculturalism and too insistent on stamping a seal of national identity on its citizens. Within reason, the sphere of state intervention into society should probably not include what is permissible for the individual to wear. Moreover, the beauty of multiculturalism is precisely in difference. Diversity without division. However, despite the controversial means it has employed, the ends recognised by the French state, and largely ignored by the British until recent years, are crucial here. How do you successfully integrate significant minority communities holding a distinct, powerful, totalising, self-defining belief system into wider society? Combined with growing radicalism, the Generation X factor, alienation and anger amongst Muslims over British foreign policy, and the war in Iraq in particular, the question of social integration has never been more significant. It can no longer simply be about doing good business.

Faith schools, by their very nature, are antithetical to the integration of communities. And whilst there are those on the left who will, quite fairly, argue in favour of faith schools on the basis of parity with Church of England state schools, I would make the case for their abolition. Individual faith cannot take priority over the pursuit of the very laudable aim of a diverse, but cohesive multicultural society. Schools, primary sites of early socialisation, should, as in the French case, be neutral public spaces in which people of all faiths and none can learn together without directed religious instruction. This is not an argument for the assimilation of minority communities into a hegemonic body or an attack on privately held or even publicly expressed belief. Rather it is an argument for public spaces where people from diverse backgrounds can come together from an early age without certain sections of the community being bracketed from the rest of society. The NUT’s case for multi-faith instruction in state schools is, perhaps, a step in the right direction. But the ideal, serving the causes of religious parity and integration, would be a disestablished church, a liberal form of laïcité in Britain and the abolition of faith schools.

Reference:

Layton-Henry, Z & Joly, D (2001) Philosophies of integration Basingstoke: Palgrave