Examination of Witnesses (Questions 460-479)
MR TREVOR
PHILLIPS
11 OCTOBER 2006
Q460 Chairman: Are you evading something
that would interest this Committee particularly, being the Education
and Skills Committee? Some teachers have certainly said to me
that it would be very difficult if people in their classroom or
in their lecture room were wearing the veil because it is difficult
to teach and to communicate with someone. You cannot have that
relationship—alluded to by Jack Straw—of a face-to-face
relationship.
Mr Phillips: I am not evading
the point at all. I am really trying to say that the issue here
is how you take a decision about it. It is not what the decision
is. In that specific case, I would say that this cannot be a matter
for the individual teacher. There has to be a school policy. A
university, of which I am a member of the court, last year took
the decision that certain kinds of garment, including the veil,
could not be worn on campus, because it is in a particular place
where there are issues of security and people need to be identified.
That I think was probably the right decision. The manner in which
it was taken was probably not quite right because it was not discussed
in campus and so on. The problem there was that they should have
had a proper discussion, and I suspect that if they had had that
proper discussion there would never have been any issue at all.
All staff and all students would have agreed on that basis. I
think the answer to your question in relation to schools is that
if that is raised it should be raised as a matter of school policy.
So that I am not at all accused of evading the question: if I
were the headteacher or a teacher in that school, I would probably
say that veils should not be worn in the classroom.
Q461 Mr Wilson: In the same way that
hoodies should not be worn in the classroom, I am sure.
Mr Phillips: Exactly.
Q462 Mr Wilson: Obviously these are
very thorny issues that we have come to now and I wonder what
you think the overall impact of citizenship lessons could be on
these sorts of issues, because they seem in some ways so remote.
Mr Phillips: I do not think they
are remote at all. I think citizenship lessons are not the only
thing we need to do but they are one of the things we need to
do which is to develop a way of negotiating difference. I am not
competent to talk about the wider issues of citizenship; I am
interested in the way that citizenship, education in citizenship
competence, helps us to deal with the problems of diversity. In
practice, this is the thing that people talk about, this is the
thing that kids talk about in school: why is he or she different?
What are they up to? I think citizenship can help people in the
real world to find ways of negotiating those differences. That,
to me, is one of the great values of it. It is not just about
bits of information; it is about how you behave. The citizenship
curriculum talks about democracy. It is not just about 649 people
or a local council or whatever it is; it is a very basic lesson
that says in any society of this kind the way that we deal with
the fact that we do have differences, we want different things
as citizens, is that we discuss it, we vote. I think that is the
lesson, and it is a lesson that people exercise in their own lives.
That is why I think it is so important. That is the sort of reason
why I think it is so important.
Q463 Helen Jones: I would like to
take you back to this issue of segregation in schools and try
to clarify, first of all, exactly what is happening. If I understood
what you said correctly, you seemed to indicate that the problem
was not particularly in faith schools but in normal state schools.
Would that be correct?
Mr Phillips: Correct.
Q464 Helen Jones: How then do you
see things proceeding as we institute a number of Muslim schools,
Sikh schools and so on? Does that have implications for how we
deliver citizenship education in those schools—and a knock-on
effect in other schools in the area, clearly, if we are looking
at why schools are not mixed?
Mr Phillips: Let me clarify on
the issue of faith schools and segregation. If we are talking
about faith schools, as opposed to Muslim schools, we are talking
about Roman Catholic and Church of England schools, nearly 7,000
of them. Andrew Adonis reported last week that the average ethnic
minority participation in non-denominational schools is about
16.5%. In Church of England schools it is rather higher than that,
towards 18%, and in Catholic schools it is round about 21%, so
there are more ethnic minority pupils, on average, within denominational
schools than in non-denominational schools.
Q465 Helen Jones: Could I ask you
to clarify something for the Committee before you proceed to the
second part of your answer. I come with a bias. I was taught in
Roman Catholic schools and have taught at them myself. Are those
figures in some sense skewed, because in some areas of the country
the churches have made a particular effort, particularly where
the education of girls is concerned, to attract more ethnic minorities
in their schools? Do they, as far as you know, vary from one part
of the country to the other? In other words, is the average any
use to us?
Mr Phillips: I am not aware of
the answer to that question. I doubt, to be honest, if anybody
knows. I think it reflects something quite different. It reflects
the fact that the catchment area for denominational schools is
always wider than that for non-denominational schools. The Catholic
school across the street from my house takes its pupils from miles
away, whereas the primary school the other way down the street
takes its children from, I think, within a radius of about 400
yards. I suspect this is much more a reflection of two things:
residential segregation and the pan-ethnicity of certain faiths.
That brings me on to the second point. The difference we have—and
this is why we have to make the distinction—is with those
faith schools which are not in practice pan-ethnic. Not all Muslims
in this country are South Asian, but two-thirds or more are, and
Jews, as well as being a faith group, are also an ethnic group
by law. There are two things about this. One is that when talking
about faith schools I always find myself in difficulties, because
people bring it up—and I know this is not what you are saying—because
they really want to say, "Let's get rid of all faith schools"
but they do not want to say "Let's get rid of the Catholic
schools" because that is all very difficult and middle class
parents would go bonkers and so on.
Q466 Helen Jones: Everybody in my
constituency.
Mr Phillips: If people wanted
to say that, I wish that is what they would say and let us have
that argument. But that has nothing to do with ethnicity; that
has to do with one's view about faith and its place in public
life. Secondly, there are people who argue that faith schools
are ethnically exclusive, and the reason I gave you the numbers
is that, to my surprise—I did not really expect this when
we did the work—it is exactly the opposite. The explanation
I have given you is the one that I think is the right one. What
implications does this have in the ethnically exclusive faith
schools for Muslims, Jews and Sikhs in relationship to citizenship?
I would have thought the implications are that they should be
expected to do exactly the same as everybody else. I do not think
they can and ought to be expected to have different standards
in relation to citizenship from any other school, bearing in mind
my answer to your earlier question, which is that I think head
teachers need to be given latitude to meet those standards but
they should meet the same standards as everyone.
Q467 Helen Jones: The problem in
any segregated school, whether it is a faith school or whether
it is a school that has become segregated on racial lines because
of the residential area, is that, as you said to us earlier—and
I think all the Committee agree—part of citizenship is how
we learn to live with one another, how we learn to negotiate differences.
Is there not then a real problem in schools which are segregated,
for whatever reason that segregation has come about, and how do
you propose that we tackle that problem? It is a problem, I suppose,
that applies equally in certain areas, like my own, which do not
have a large ethnic minority population at all. It is over 99%
white. Learning to live with people in your own town is not the
same as learning to live with people in the wider community in
Britain. We all face a problem in dealing with it. Do you have
any suggestions as to how it is best dealt with?
Mr Phillips: You have anticipated
my first glib answer, which is that I think it would be a good
idea if we worried more about the 70 or 80% of schools which are
pretty much all white and how the children in those schools come
to terms with a more diverse Britain. I think we should spend
quite a lot of time worrying about them, rather than the 100 or
so schools which are specifically based on faith. My feeling about
this—and I do not want to seem complacent about it—is
that we get a little bit too worried about it. My experience of
those schools is that they are the ones which really most want
their children to understand what it is like to be, let us say,
a Hindu or a Jew in British society. I think you can put requirements
on them in the same way as you do to other schools. You can ask
them—if you are a local authority and they are voluntary
aided and so on—to do things with other schools, to participate
in borough-wide activities and so forth. I think that is as much
as you can do. I do not think you can ask too much more. I think
there are things you can do aside from the school. For example,
this summer the CRE funded a pilot summer camp. We took 80 kids
to Cumbria on what was called a leadership course but which was
really a way of giving them an opportunity—which they wanted,
which most kids would want—to go somewhere away at somebody
else's expense, where they could do things—climb up and
down cliffs and all the rest of it—with kinds of people
that they would never meet in their own area, so that, after that
week, they would go back home and, rather than saying, "What
is it about those Muslims?" they can say, "Actually,
I met a Muslim" and "He was like me. He likes football"
or "She likes art" or whatever it is. I think there
are extra-curricular things we can do, particularly with the extended
school day, which will account for those kinds of schools. My
biggest worry, to be perfectly honest, in relation to the issue
of segregation and social segregation, is not faith schools. The
most seriously segregated schools in most cities are non-denominational
community schools. That is where you have 75 or 80% ethnic minority
and 100% white. That is really where we need to be exercising
our ingenuity.
Q468 Helen Jones: I have a two-part
question for my last question. Bearing in mind the problem you
have outlined, segregated community schools and what you have
said about extra-curricular activities, two things seem to arise.
Why do you think there is the kind of white-flight that you have
described in inner cities? Is there anything that you think can
be done in tackling some of the fears of parents who move out
of faith schools? The second question is really about the role
of volunteering. I am one who believes that citizenship has to
be active: we have to have people doing things. Is there not much
more scope in using active citizenship to get people working and
volunteering outside their own communities and what do you think
LAs can do to facilitate that?
Mr Phillips: I am not sure I have
a sensible answer to the second. Let me think about that one for
a second. On white-flight, here we have to deal with the rude
realities of the world. We cannot say to people: "You must
not" as long as we offer them choice. Of course this is one
of the core issues; is basic school choice leading to greater
segregation or not? There is a prior question there: even if it
is, is it right to take it away or reduce school choice to parents?
My own view—and this is a personal view entirely, it is
not something on which the Commission has formulated a view—is
that every parent should have the maximum level of choice. I do
not think it is the place of the state to reduce the level of
choice available to families because the bureaucrats of the state
are worried that they are going to make the wrong choice. That
leads us in all the wrong directions. If we start from the premise
that people do have choice and they will exercise it in a particular
way, what can we do to make them exercise it in a way that does
not have this segregating or separating or, more precisely, polarising
effect? I think there are a couple of things that we can do. In
the end, people will choose schools because they are successful.
I think I said very early on in this conversation that it is not
entirely the case that separate schools end up being unequal schools.
There are some signs that in some areas, for example, in North
West London, the success of some ethnic minority communities at
GCSE and A level is attracting white families because they see,
for example, a school which has a majority of Gujarati Indian
children is doing extremely well and they want their children
to be there as well. There are no numbers on this, this is all
anecdotal, but you can see why that would have a reverse effect.
The first thing is to ensure that the performance of those schools
where there is this possible effect is as high as it could be.
That might mean—that might mean—ensuring that there
are more and better resources funnelled to those schools. Because
that is what will stop white-flight: parents believing that their
children will do well. There is a separate issue, which is of
course a straightforward social one. Ethnic minority families
have had to live, for certainly most of my life, with the possibility
that their children, by definition, will be the only ones in the
class or one of the very few. That is something you just get used
to. For a lot of white families, that is something they have "not
yet got used to" and it is not something they feel comfortable
with. How we get over that, I do not know. I think that it has
to begin with some kind of dialogue. They have to get used to
the idea that maybe that is sometimes the way it is going to be.
I cannot give you a straight answer to that, because I do not
know, to be perfectly honest, how you persuade white parents that
their child being in a minority of 20% is acceptable. That is
not the society that we live in. In a fair society, it would not
be a problem, because a lot of us have had to live like that for
all our lives, but it is not something we know how to deal with.
On the issue of local authorities giving greater opportunities,
I think I would go back to what I said earlier on: I would like
to see local authorities being more proactive really in giving
young people and parents, particularly mothers, more opportunities
to meet each other in places not necessarily outside of schools
but outside of school hours. This is not a direct parallel, but
one of the most interesting things I saw a year and a half ago
in the United States was schools which attracted black fathers
back to support their sons by offering them evenings of black
fathers. I do not suggest that is exactly what you want to do
here but I think that there may be a parallel. If we could be
more imaginative about using the schools for opportunities for
parents to find something useful to do there, they might meet
more, and they might begin to establish higher levels of trust
across the race and faith lines.
Q469 Chairman: One of the things
this Committee would urge you to look at, in parallel with the
Adonis figures you gave on the percentage of ethnic minorities
in faith schools, is something which has absorbed this Committee,
the percentage of pupils on free school meals and with special
educational needs in the same schools. It would be of some interest
to your Commission, I would have thought, if the faith schools
were creaming off the highest achieving ethnic minority children,
because what that says about other schools is quite significant.
I do not even know those figures, but in the past we have looked
at that and that has been a cause for concern.
Mr Phillips: I think that is a
very, very fair point and certainly one that I will look at, but
I will just give you this note of caution: if you look at DfES's
Key Stage 4 performance graph, corrected for free school meals,
there still are huge differences by race. Huge differences. Particularly
for some groups: Afro-Caribbeans, Pakistanis, Somalis.
Chairman: We are familiar with those
figures.
Q470 Stephen Williams: You have talked
about worries about segregation and that sort of implies that
you would prefer society to be integrated. I read somewhere else
in our brief that that was part of the mission of the CRE, to
build an integrated society. In the context of teaching citizenship
or discussing these issues in schools, how does integration sit
easily with multiculturalism and celebrating diversity? Is there
a conflict?
Mr Phillips: There does not need
to be one. First of all, what exactly do we mean by integration?
Technically, we mean no aspect of an individual's experience,
life chances or opportunities should statistically be related
to their ethnicity. That is to say, aside from our differences
in ages, a perfectly integrated society would be one in which
nobody could predict on the basis of our difference in colour
what job, what salary, what likelihood of us getting a job there
is between you and me. There might be other things that determine
that, but our colour would not be it. That, by the way, would
be the same for our choice of friends, who we marry and so forth.
We are very far from that in this society because, on virtually
every index you can name pretty much—housing, health and
so on and so forth—you will find that there are differences
correlated to race, even when you correct for class and for location.
That is what we mean by integration, that essentially your race
and your colour should not mean anything more than what you choose
to make it mean. Does that conflict with multiculturalism? Answer:
unfortunately it depends what you mean by "multiculturalism".
If you mean does that conflict with the existence of a society
in which there are people who come from different backgrounds,
contain different heritage and profess different traditions and
so on, then there is no conflict at all. In fact, that is the
point of integration: to make a diverse society one in which those
differences do not mean anything more than what the individuals
want them to mean. I think where it comes into conflict—and
this has been our issue—is where, as part of our official
policy (the way we divide resources, the way we accord status
and so forth), we overemphasise the need to reward and recognise
difference compared to the need to treat people equally. These
two things are always in balance. Twenty-five years ago—and
I refer to the work of Bernie Grant—it would probably be
true to say that everybody across the political spectrum thought
about equality and did not think about recognising difference
at all. Our concern is that policies of multiculturalism have
now reached a place where we recognise difference even if it is
at the cost of equality, and we think that has to be wrong.
Q471 Stephen Williams: You mentioned
in answer to an earlier question that you should worry about the
schools that are overwhelmingly or entirely white and concentrate
on those, rather than on the rather small number of schools that
are overwhelmingly ethnic minority. What guidance does the CRE
give to what would be the vast majority of schools in, say, rural
Devon, Somerset, Hampshire, about multicultural modern Britain?
What guidance do you offer those schools and is that different
from what you might offer to the schools in inner city Bristol
that I represent?
Mr Phillips: I think the principles
of it are no different. Bearing in mind that we are a statutory
authority and our business is to promote and enforce the law,
the sort of guidance we give is that, first of all, every school
needs to have a policy. It needs to recognise, whatever the composition
of its current student body, that they live in a society which
is ethnically, racially diverse. In the way the school does its
business and in the way it teaches, it needs to recognise that.
What in practice does that mean? It means that all the children,
even if it is an all-white school or an all-Asian school, in what
is taught have to have—coming back to my earlier usage—competence
in managing difference. This means very simple things. You know
that there are people who do not look like you racially and are
likely to have a different religious code. Even if you do not
know exactly what the religious code is, you respect that that
might be the case, and at least you look out for it and you try
to understand what it might be and therefore how you might relate
to that person. On a deeper level, we want to make sure that schools,
in what they teach, do not just teach whatever it is—history
or even maths or chemistry—as though they were teaching
it in a society which was all white and, indeed, all male. Simple
things, like the examples you use and so on, are different. If
I may give you a small example: seven years ago somebody that
I know wrote a book about parenting which was translated into
French. There were lots of examples and she used a variety of
names: English names, French names, Muslim names and so on. In
France, they took out all the Muslim names and replaced them with
Jean, Patrice and so on, and there was a great dispute about this.
That is what we used to do. We do not do that any more. That is
the kind of thing. This matters, even if you are in a school which
is not multi-ethnic. So the guidance at that level is the same
wherever you are. I would not expect a school which is 95% Muslim
only to teach as though everybody in Britain were called Mohammed
or Ahmed. The guidance is the same. The specific advice to, let
us say, inner city schools might be a bit different from what
you might advise in, say, Sedgefield—which I read the other
day is the whitest constituency in the country—but the principles
are pretty much the same.
Q472 Stephen Williams: Are you satisfied,
in those areas such as Sedgefield that are overwhelmingly white,
that your guidance has been followed and schools adequately teach
that curriculum?
Mr Phillips: I am not satisfied
that schools in general are following the law. The last survey
we did of schools' compliance with the data equality duties imposed
on them—which is to have a race equality policy under the
2000 Amendment Act—showed that they were pretty poor. I
think there is a lot of work to do.
Chairman: One bit of light at the end
of a certain tunnel was that yesterday, when I presented prizes
at the Arts and Minds NASUWT celebration of ethnicity through
art and literature, across all the 800 schools competing, two
of the schools, one in Wales and one in Scotland, had no ethnic
minority population at all. It was rather nice to see them having
produced art and literature. It was very high class.
Q473 Mr Carswell: I would like to
probe multiculturalism and what is meant by it. I have just been
reading The New East End, that fascinating book, and, reading
that, I wondered if multiculturalism, in reality, had perhaps
not turned out to be a bit of a one-way street. Do the high priests
of multiculturalism perhaps not seem to disprove of monoculture
where it happens to be white working class but approve of it where
it happens to be something different? I wonder: Is multiculturalism
perhaps in danger of being in a transitional phase, between one
form of cultural primacy in one locality being replaced with another?
Mr Phillips: I do not think so.
I am not quite sure about the high priests of multiculturalism.
I suspect I would have been described as one not so long ago.
I do not want to repeat what I said earlier on, but, look, the
fundamental point about this is very simple: it is a matter of
balance. We must recognise difference. Increasingly, because of
the sort of diversity I outlined right at the beginning, it is
important for us as a society. Otherwise we cannot function. We
cannot expect people—and our French neighbours discovered
this recently—simply to dump all their baggage at the door
and become something else. The real issue for us in this society
is how we negotiate the way that we live together so that we have
enough in common to allow us to share experiences, ambitions,
and to work together communally, but preserve the things which
are essential to us as individuals. This is not just an issue
of ethnicity, by the way. You can cut this in many, many different
ways. It is faith; it is gender; and so on. The multiculturalism
argument is very entertaining and all the rest of it—and
I know that I am partly responsible for it—but I think we
need not to get into a place where somebody has to win this. This
is not a battle about: Do the multiculturalists win or do the
integrationists win? In response to the Chairman's question earlier
on about the Mayor of London's remarks I made the point that we
have moved on, and in a different situation we need to have answers
which respond to that situation. In response to your question,
I really would not like to frame it like that. I do not think
the recognition of diversity is damaging to our society. What
is damaging to our society is the recognition of diversity without
the recognition of commonality, and getting those two things out
of balance. The balance will change. The point of equilibrium—which
is how we sometimes talk in CRE—will change according to
what society you are in and what the traditions are; so the point
of equilibrium in the United States or France will be rather different
from here and the point of equilibrium today in the United Kingdom
is different from what it was 20 years ago.
Q474 Mr Carswell: What specifically
is the CRE doing, in schools in particular, to deal with challenging
issues of cultural and religious differences? Is there something
that you are doing specifically in the schools?
Mr Phillips: Our principal job,
to come back to what I was saying a moment ago, is to ensure that
the law which was brought in in 2000—the 2000 Act, which
is a framework in which schools are meant to find a way of dealing
with these things—is enforced; to make sure that schools
are thinking about that; that they have a policy; that they are
thinking about what they teach; that they are thinking about how
they treat pupils. They are simple things. We know, for example,
particularly in secondary schools, that all children feel very
strongly about unfairness and the form of unfairness they are
most concerned about today is racism. One of the things schools
can look at, coming back to a point we discussed at much length
earlier on, is their own behaviour. So with exclusions, discipline—a
very big issue in many schools—do schools know that that
they are treating all children equally? This, again and again,
has been a trigger issue for conflict within schools, where one
particular ethnic group—not always black, but often—feels
they are being given harsher punishments, more frequent punishments
and so forth. Schools now have numbers which tell them whether
they are treating one group differently from another. That is
the kind of thing that, in practice, schools need to do defensively.
There are positive things they can do, which I have referred to—what
they do with their curriculum, the way they relate to parents,
the way they relate to communities and so on—but the very
basic thing they need to do is to ensure that they are treating
all their children fairly and equally. Aside from that—and
this takes us off into slightly different territory, so I do not
want to expand on it—the biggest thing for most schools
which are ethnically diverse is to make sure that their levels
of achievement are less and less correlated with ethnicity. That
is a big job.
Q475 Mr Carswell: As the debate is
moving on from the traditional multiculturalism and the implicit
cultural relativism that goes with it, if you are talking in terms
of a citizenship curriculum should that be seeking to teach people
that there are certain aspects of certain cultures that are unacceptable:
the unequal treatment of women, prejudice against homosexuals,
child brides? Should we be active as a matter of public policy
and say "This is not British"?
Mr Phillips: First you have to
define which cultures you are talking about and identify if you
really think that is what that culture believes. I would prefer
the words I have used in the past: "an assertion of a core
of Britishness". I think it is smarter to do this positively.
It is smarter to say, "This is how we do things. This is
how we do things in this country" if at some point a concrete
issue arises about the conflict between the way that we express
those core values of democracy, freedom and so forth, and the
way that some traditional cultures are expressed. For example,
my family comes from the Caribbean. Lots of us are typically rural
people and a lot of the things that are true about us are true
not about Caribbean people as such, but they are true of rural
people. Does that mean there may be a conflict there? In which
case, sometimes we have to say, "Okay, that might have been
true back in the village but it cannot be right in Peckham."
But we negotiate that. That is why, by the way, what was happening
last week is so important. We can only negotiate these things
if we can say the words, if we can speak about them openly. But
what is absolutely essential is that we do not speak about them
openly in the way—and I am sure it is not what you were
trying to suggest—that is implied by some people, which
is to say, "You must buckle under. You must abandon what
you were." I think it is reasonable to say, "What your
parents might have been and what your grandparents might have
been, in the situation we are in is not appropriate or does not
work here." Actually, most people in ethnic minority communities
are the first people to recognise this. I think there are ways
of doing this which are smarter and more productive than simply
having a war that says, "We've got a way, you must look at
it." This is what I should have said right at the very beginning:
integration is a two-way street, where people are talking to each
other. We always need to remember that there are British ways
but what we call British ways today are in many respects hugely
different from what were British ways 200 years ago or even a
century ago. The process of integration does not just change the
minority, it changes the majority. That is why the conversation
and negotiation is so important.
Chairman: Thank you for that. What was
acceptable and common in 1966 is very different from today.
Q476 Mr Marsden: Through what you
have said to us today we come across two recurrent themes or words.
One is "balance" and the other is "phasing".
You have talked about the way in which things need to be phased
and all the rest of it. I wonder what you thought, in the context
of integration and multiculturalism, about the relative balance
and phasing that there needs to be. Robert Putnam has done this
major study, Bowling Alone, in which he talks about the
atomisation of society—and, incidentally, he is about to
do a major new project between Harvard and Manchester universities
on this. I wondered what you thought the balance should be. Obviously,
the bonding within communities, particularly communities that
have come into this country, is very important, as is the bonding
of traditional communities. But there is also an aspect of bridging.
Speaking as a Lancashire MP who has seen some of the downsides
of bonding in the disturbances we have had in Oldham and Burnley,
I wondered where you felt the balance between bonding within societies
and bridging across societies comes in.
Mr Phillips: Robert is saying
two different things, both of which are important. The measure
he is really using is trust. That is what he is talking about:
Do we leave our doors open? Would we trust our neighbours to look
after our children? and so on. He is working with us on some specific
projects and we have talked a lot about this. His work in the
United States suggests pretty clearly that more diverse communities
tend to have lower levels of trust—not just, by the way,
between different ethnicities but even within one's own ethnicity;
that is to say, in more diverse communities white people do not
trust each other and they do not trust the police and so forth.
I think this is all helpful to know. The issue of what it tells
us about the process by which we arrive at an equilibrium, by
which we get a balance, is less clear to me. I guess the answer
that I would give to your question is as follows: first of all,
in this country, which is different from the United States, where
our cities are not binary but are basically several different
groups—rather than black/white or Hispanic/white—the
dynamics are quite different. We are embarking on some projects
in what we call "plural cities"—and I am thinking
of Leicester and Birmingham, for example—which will quite
soon be cities where there is a minority of whites but there is
no single majority. This is a whole new phenomenon which is at
the moment largely European. This issue of balance is not about
Muslim and non-Muslim, it is about several different groups. Here,
again—I may be sounding a bit like a stuck record—what
becomes important is not the outcome but the process of negotiation.
It is the fact that everybody in that community feels they have
a voice in working out, for example, what the schools' policy
should be. Should there be a uniform policy? If so, what is it
across the city? How do you arrive at that? I was in Holland on
Monday. They have a great tradition of this, which unfortunately
they have abandoned in the last five or six years. That is one
of the reasons they are in such trouble: they are not doing that
negotiation. My answer to your question about balance is that
the first thing is not to worry so much about where we get to
but worry more about how we get there. At the moment, one of our
difficulties is that we do not have really good ways of talking
about these things. Typically, in a local authority, you might
say the focus for this is the local council shop. The problem
is that local councils are not always as representative of the
diversity of the city as they should be. If that is not the case,
we need to find other mechanisms to bring different groups in.
If there are no Somali councillors, how do we talk to Somalis?
Who are the Somalis we talk to? The other point I would make is
this: we should not talk about these processes as though they
are all static. Everybody changes. This has been the thing that
bedevils a lot of this conversation. We talk about communities
and groups of people as though they never change. We are talking
about the veil at the moment. I bet everybody in this room a tenner
that in 10 years the issue of the veil will be no more significant
than the Sikh turban was 15 years ago—and remember what
a fuss we got into over that. We found a way. I think people change.
The example I always use is that, when I was a kid, being black
was different. I was different. As it happened, I grew up in the
Caribbean, so in some ways I was even more different. If I go
to the Caribbean now and I stand in the street, nobody can tell
I am different, but if I start walking, everybody knows I am different
because I am walking faster. I go into a shop, I look for the
queue, and everybody knows I am from England because I look for
the queue. What being black British is has changed hugely in my
lifetime.
Q477 Mr Marsden: I accept all that
and I accept the fluidity but how realistic is it to embark on
a series of bridging initiatives, which is the sort of thing obviously
you and the CRE have been trying to do and will do, if we do not
look at the broader issues—again, to come back to Putnam—the
atomisation, which sometimes—to take, for example, your
white community in Burnley, where traditional social, industrial
and other structures have been disrupted—makes them feel
they have to spend more time bonding than bridging?
Mr Phillips: There are two things
here—one, a prefatory remark. May I say—and I would
like you to take this as the most important thing I say this morning,
if you do not mind, because I realise I have not said it—none
of this works if they think they are unequal. The precondition
for any of this to work is equality—which is why I say the
CRE's first role is to enforcement of the law and so on and so
forth—because it does not really matter whether it is whites
or blacks or Asians and so on, you are never going to get them
to have this sort of conversation at all if they think they are
going to be second-class citizens. Speaking to your point about
white communities, one of the hypotheses—and I put it no
stronger than that—we have is that one of the reasons this
is happening is not so much about atomisation but our pet name
is the "identity spike". We think that one of the things
which is happening in some white communities, which makes some
vote for, let us say, far right extremist parties, whilst identical
communities just down the road have no interest in that kind of
politics, is that sometimes communities have a kind of spike of
identity which is provoked by some kind of trauma. The best known
concerns a story which got around in Barking that people were
paying Africans £50,000 to move from one part of London into
Barking. For white people in Barking, not unreasonably—what
is unreasonable is that people believed it, but let us leave that
aside, they did believe it—started to take the view that
local authorities were so fixated with race that it determined
everything they did and all their policies. White people in Barking
began to believe—and to some extent still do believe—that
all the things that happen to them, happened to them because they
are white. There is a very good example of that concerning two
identical housing estates in the North, identical in every respect
in their specifications and so on except that one set had lamps
outside and the other one did not. The estate that had lamps was
largely Asian and the one that did not was white, and all the
whites on this estate were convinced that the people with lamps
also had Jacuzzis inside and so on. The next thing you know, five
BNP councillors. The point I am making here is that we can do
all the other things—and I understand the point about atomisation
and so on and so forth—but one of the things we have to
try to do is to makes sure in our policies that we do not create
the conditions for this kind of identity spike. That is one reason,
by the way, why the CRE has recently launched an investigation
into regeneration, because we know from our people on the ground
that one of the problems that is creating this, again and again,
is that billions are being spent on regeneration and it is improving
areas but one of the side effects of this is that different ethnic
groups think that another ethnic group is getting all the goodies.
It is almost never true, or, if it is true, it is nothing to do
with ethnicity but the needs of the town or locational possibility
and so on, but people believe it, and that then sets off a chain
of events which does exactly what you are talking about.
Q478 Fiona Mactaggart: You spoke
right at the beginning about your belief as a chemist that there
should be a theory that underpinned stuff. I was wondering: what
is your theory which underpins the values that you think are at
the heart of citizenship teaching and Britishness?
Mr Phillips: That is a question
which is slightly above my intellectual pay grade, but I will
try to answer it in this way. I think there are some givens—and
I have spoken about some of them today: democracy, an attachment
to freedom, individual liberty, certainly equality—but these
are generalities and you are inviting me not to go straight to
the specifics and the practicalities. I think there is something
in between that, and, as you will know, since I have recently
been given a new task by the Secretary of State for Communities,
I have begun to take an interest in human rights. It seems to
me that, though there is a lot of conversation to be had about
this, we will usefully begin to think about what a human rights
culture means and its relationship to citizenship—because,
if we get it right, and we have a human rights culture which is
not individual and legalistic but socially just and one that gives
the right place to social solidarity and so on, then we have the
beginnings of a platform for an underlying idea of citizenship
that properly expresses not something new but the things that
we do value as a society. The best way to answer your question
is to say that I think we have some givens, I think we have some
practices and some traditions which we should value and we should
transmit, but in between, if you are thinking about, if you like,
the kind of policy filling between the abstract and the here and
now, the development of a human rights culture might be part of
the approach to underpinning the idea of citizenship.
Q479 Fiona Mactaggart: I am glad
to hear that, because I think it is at the heart of any concept
of citizenship. One of the things that I am interested in is this
focus on Britishness. One of the things about human rights is
that they are universal. The United Nations Declaration and the
European Convention, these are transnational, and in a globalised
world it seems to me that the values of citizenship should be
thus and that much of what you are talking about in terms of Britishness—and
you used etiquette and manners earlier—is more what goes
on top of that. I want you to look into this and to tell me what
you think is substantially different about the theory of citizenship
in—to take two countries you know well—France and
Guyana and the British one.
Mr Phillips: I have a very firm
view on this. If I may put in a plug here, I think the running
down and abandonment of history as part of the school curriculum
is a disastrous proposition—disastrous—for this reason:
I think that the answer to your question is that Britishness in
its pure form is not something abstract but the expression of
those values that we hold. I am quite interested in the idea of
a written constitution if it can help us to crystallise this,
but, in essence, the notion of Britishness tells us how it is
that we in this country have expressed those values in our history.
I talked about the tradition of dissent. That is part of our expression
of freedom. Other people do not do it that way. If I were to think
about, as you say, Guyana, I would say that the expression of
the idea of democracy—though I have to be careful what I
say about Guyana—is much more strongly inflected by the
history of slavery and specifically by the history of multi-ethnicity
in a way that would be unimaginable in Europe. Guyana essentially
has political parties which are ethnic political parties. There
is no way of getting away from that. It is just a fact. That is
the way that the Guyanese express their politics. They express
their politics in that particular way because ethnicity does determine
the choices that they make in a way that is just not true in Europe.
When I talk about Britishness, I am talking about the accretion
of history, the accretion of events, the accretion of ways of
doing things that are peculiar to our country and that express
those values. I talked earlier on about the American idea of freedom.
One of the things you might think about—and this is going
to be for scholars and so on to talk about—is why in this
country, for example, it is a particular idea of the land. The
Americans have the frontier myth; we have what they called the
Robin Hood type myth and gardens and all this kind of thing. What
is it that attaches us so strongly to the land? So much of our
wealth, I suppose, is bound up in land and so forth. This might
seem a little bit abstract but I am trying to say that we express
these values in a particular way that arises out of our history.
For example, our history is not revolutionary but it is evolutionary
and so on. That is why, for example, the way we handle the integration
issue is much more to do with negotiating, it is much more unspoken.
We do not, generally speaking, set down codes—although,
frankly, I am beginning to think that we need to move more in
that direction—but my point is that Britishness is not abstract.
It is an expression of the way that through time British people
have expressed those values that we talked about earlier.
|
