Ugly talk, frank talk

Wednesday, 6th June 2007

One of the problems with discussing race and immigration is that, if you say anything that doesn't quite tally with orthodox thinking, you end up being bracketed with the likes of Sarah Standing:

We used to celebrate being British just because we were proud of our heritage. We didn't require a designated day to wave flags and put up banners.

Er, has she never heard of Empire Day? Then she goes one better:

Should British Day be enforced on us, it will mainly celebrated by illegal immigrants living in our great country thrilled to have yet another day off.

Well, I could indulge in another wild stereotype and reply that a lot of those illegal immigrants will be hard at work servicing the whims of dizzy, pampered columnists who spend their days drifting around Chelsea and Fulham in search of the ultimate strapless dress. Instead, I'll continue with what I was actually planning to do this morning, which was to post a link to an interview with former Labour MP, Oona King, newly appointed head of the Institute of Community Cohesion. What did she think of Margaret Hodge's' recent, much-derided remarks on immigration and housing? See for yourself: It's an issue that really has to be aired," King says. "Maybe if you are a family and you have been living in an overcrowded house for 15 years, but you are not as overcrowded as the seven Somalis next door, [the length of] your wait should allocate you a home. What happens - and it happens in Tower Hamlets - is that if you do it purely on housing need, anyone who was born or brought up in Britain is never going to have the level of housing need as someone who has just arrived.
"In my advice surgery every week the issue was the same - whether constituents were Bengali or white - which is their kids could not get the housing they needed and would therefore have to leave the area or become homeless, which was what a lot of them, white and Bengali, did.
"My reaction used to be that housing allocation should only be done on the basis of housing need. But what I realised was that I was ignoring other levels of need. That's what Margaret Hodge was flagging up. It's understandable that she has come under attack. I don't like the way it came across but I recognise a kernel of truth in that you have to see different levels of need. That need is not exclusively expressed in terms of housing need - it's about your community need. How do you have a cohesive community if you've just got this churn of people coming in, and others who have been here for generations having to move out?"
King is trying to create a form of multiculturalism that works. I think she's absoultely wrong to reject the idea that we need to think about "essential rules of Britishness". But at least she recognizes that she was too starry-eyed in the past. Unfortunately, it's hard to have a proper conversation about these things because there are too many idiots on both sides of the divide.