The real British disease.(ethical aspects)

THERE IS NOTHING in the law of unintended consequences that dictates such consequences must be unpleasant ones (though that's the way to bet, as Damon Runyon remarked of Ecclesiastes 9:11). An unintended and beneficial consequence of the London bombings is the transformation of the debate in Britain over multiculturalism and "Britishness". The discovery that the original four bombers were cricket-playing native sons of Yorkshire has alarmed people who had reasonably assumed that the children of Muslim immigrants would assimilate to "Britishness" as a natural result of growing up in the country.

The bombings on the London underground shocked everyone out of this complacency, at least temporarily. None of the usual explanations seemed to apply. The bombers were not poor; they were not "marginalised"; they were not from disturbed or broken homes; they were not living in a culturally separate world. Some fit the profile of a potential terrorist, others did not. One was the son of a successful small businessman; another had fallen into petty crime and gone briefly to prison. Outwardly, they were young Brits of "minority" appearance out on a jaunt; inwardly, they were jihadis avenging the West's supposed crimes against Islam.

These unsettling facts inevitably raised questions of political identity and allegiance. What had transformed ordinary young Brits into jihadists and mass murderers? What were we to make of the polls that showed substantial minorities of British Muslims sympathising with them? And did these polls suggest that Muslims had been diverted from developing towards "Britishness" by a multiculturalism that encouraged them to cling to a separatist religious identity? Yet though these questions were put more sharply, they were not new. The British have been conducting a debate on "Britishness" and multiculturalism for most of a decade--indeed, they have been conducting two debates.

The first debate took place among academics, civil servants, think-tanks, minority pressure groups, centre-left politicians, and what the British call "the Great and the Good". Like its doppelganger on the Right, this debate took place in response to a series of major reports on Britishness and multiculturalism--notably, the two Crick reports on education for citizenship and naturalisation, the MacPherson report on "institutional racism" in the police, the Parekh report on Britain's national identity and multi-ethnicity, and the Cantle report on the background to racial riots in northern cities. This centre-left debate shaped policy, especially at the outset, but it neither reflected nor significantly influenced public opinion.

That was not wholly surprising, because most of those participating in it did not accept the idea of a single British public. They saw a multicultural society as either inevitable in Britain or as having existed for many years. They therefore rejected any assumption that "native" British culture or cultures should be privileged over those of recently arrived minorities. Indeed, the Parekh report's sixth principle held inter alia that "insisting on the superiority of a particular culture" was simply disguised racism. And they argued that schools, the police, local government, and other social institutions should be reorganised to accommodate and reflect the culture of the different "communities" inhabiting Britain.

There was, however, a central theoretical difficulty running through this debate. Some cultural ideas and practices--the legitimacy of killing apostates, female genital mutilation, polygamy--were radically inconsistent with the broadly liberal and progressive outlook of the various debaters. (Those practices were also inconsistent with British law and culture--but these were not privileged in this debate.) So the centre-left debaters had to go in for quite exquisite distinctions in establishing why multiculturalism, properly understood, did not protect such outrages. Mark Olssen of the University of Surrey, in an essay on the re-visioning of citizenship education, explained as follows:

 
   While multiculturalists and those that advocate 
   difference want to celebrate multiplicity and a decentred 
   polis, the fundamental ambiguity results 
   from the fact that respecting the autonomy of 
   different groups--whether based on religion, race, 
   gender or ethnicity--is only possible within certain 
   common bounds ... the notion of difference must 
   presuppose a "minimal universalism" which in turn 
   necessitates a certain conception of community ... if 
   difference is to operate on anything like a level 
   playing field, whether national or global, then it 
   requires, at a minimum, that the parties are [quoting 
   New Zealand author Andrew Sharp] "equally in 
   subjection to the same normative system, the same 
   rules distinguishing right from wrong". Such a 
   presumption entails ... a common system of justice.