Integration for the nation

It’s Britain in 2025, and a Muslim woman has been made mayor of Rotherham. Tell this to a person from 100 years ago, and they might be surprised, but not necessarily shocked. Not only was the Suffrage movement well advanced, Britain had already had a number of non-white MPs, such as Dadabhai Naoroji, often known as “India’s unofficial ambassador”, and the most famous conservative statesman of the 19th century was of course Disraeli, a Jewish convert to Christianity. What might shock them, however, is the fact that Rukhsana Ismail, Rotherham’s new mayor, took her office clad in a hijab, and addressing a member of the Muslim press in Urdu, spoke of being proud to “represent my Pakistani people, and the Muslim women of Pakistan”. 

It is this sort of thing that embodies the problem of integration in Britain today. The ascension of a Muslim woman to a leading office in an English city should be a high point of successful and peaceful integration. It should reflect an individual and a community that has gone far down the path of adapting to British institutions and English culture. Yet what should be an important symbolic step seems, increasingly, to occur without clearing any of these basic hurdles. 

The British Pakistani community remains deeply tied to its homeland. A group of MPs recently wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, urging him to build an airport in Mirpur. Tahir Ali, a Birmingham MP who represents the largest Kashmiri community in the UK, explained that “There has been a long-standing promise for an international airport in Mirpur, which has yet to be met. This causes significant issues to a number of my constituents, who are having to drive over three hours to get to the nearest airport in Pakistan.” There is a growing and widespread sense that many democratic representatives are standing up for sectional ethnic interests, a feeling confirmed by the timing of Ali’s lobbying, occurring in the midst of the Birmingham bin strikes. Matters were hardly helped by the fact that many of the MPs who signed the letter calling for an international airport in Pakistan were at the same time vigorously opposing Heathrow expansion in parliament.

Pakistanis also continue to travel back home for marriages, which are typically arranged and within their kinship networks: 48 per cent of British Pakistani men and 57 per cent of British Pakistani women are married to Pakistani nationals, and 55 per cent are married to first cousins. “Honour” based crimes remain persistent, and Pakistan itself remains under the heavy influence of a fundamentalist form of Islam, a situation that is only set to worsen as its government further deregulates religious education. 

In this context, what should be major milestones on the path to a well-integrated British Muslim and Pakistani community, are instead forms of “synthetic integration”. Rather than new entrants to British culture and institutions having to struggle to demonstrate their ability to fit in, they instead are given an easier time if they are perceived as adding to “diversity”.

Yet this sort of integration sugar rush has severe problems. It does integrate a section of the minority group into British institutions, but it frequently does so on a very particular political and ideological basis. Rather than encouraging minority candidates to become more English, they are encouraged to shape their background into an individual “identity” which can be weaponised towards progressive ends. On the Left especially, there is an increasing tendency to “dis-identify” with inherited British culture and institutions, and minorities are well-placed to accelerate and serve this agenda. 

Many Muslim MPs become experts at “code-switching”, knowing the right thing to say … to their own communities and to the English liberal establishment

But in this instrumental, power and identity-based politics, there is vast scope for hypocrisy and mutual manipulation. Many Muslim MPs become experts at “code-switching”, knowing the right thing to say (often in different languages) to their own communities and to the English liberal establishment. In this double-language game, hijabs are at once a symbol of feminine modesty and a sign of feminist liberation. Kashmir is an ethno-religious crusade and a socialist liberation struggle. There are occasional flashpoints when the worlds are allowed to intersect, as with Humza Yousaf’s confused stance on gay marriage. Was he going to do what the liberal SNP expected of him, or represent the views of the most socially conservative religious group in British society? At some points, the contradictions are strained to breaking point, as with a succession of electoral upsets in which Green and Independent candidates unseated Labour councillors and MPs by running on the issue of Gaza.

If there are oceanic depths of liberal reluctance to even acknowledge this obvious and growing problem, there is also no shortage of opportunistic right wing hysteria. Fears of an Islamist fifth column are ridiculous, and inattentive to the dynamics at play. The problem of poor integration does not lead to some coherent state within a state, but rather a general breakdown of cohesiveness and clarity in British culture and politics. It means more parallel and private lives, and probably less contact with our neighbors from other cultures and backgrounds. 

History has instructive lessons here. Jewish and Irish migration in the 19th century are often now presented as success stories in the face of ignorant prejudice. Then too there were outsized fears that Irish Catholics would be loyal to the Pope, or that Jews would subvert Christian Britain. What is strikingly different to today (apart from the greater relative cultural compatibility), were the strong expectations of integration, and the reciprocal enthusiasm of incoming populations to conform. And even success was far from without cost or consequence. To this day, 25 per cent of Britain’s Jewish community are Haredis — living lives of extreme cultural alterity and isolation. The sectarian violence that Irish migration led to in cities like Liverpool and Glasgow has taken generations to recede, and has not fully departed. If integration “success” looks like 25 per cent of British Muslims living parallel lives and still having issues with honour killings and Islamism 150 years in the future, this should give us serious pause as to the scale of the challenge and the extent of the potential consequences. 

One reason for the differential nature of the challenges, apart from the scale of migration and of the cultural gulf to be overcome, is that it is also less obvious as to what we are asking British Muslims to integrate into. It was obvious, in the 19th century, that Protestant Christianity was the cultural norm with which incoming religious and ethnic groups must accommodate themselves to. Jewish and Catholic religious leaders worked hard to develop an indigenous English religiosity, and British society was replete with well-enforced social norms and rules that could be learned and adopted. But today, the ersatz progressive rainbow thrown over the shoulders of traditional Pakistani Muslims (and other new arrivals) may be all that our present leadership can agree on as a hallmark of British belonging. The government’s guidance on the “British values” which must be promoted include “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect & tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. Since these values are extremely vague, and slanted in favour of the interests of minority groups anyway, they are easily adopted, and if anything encourage identitarian ethnic politics. There is no mention, of course, of British history, culture or religion, only institutional liberal neutrality and human rights. 

This situation is not stable, or good for either the host country or the minority community

Faced with this system, it is hard to fault any immigrant community for simply living out their customs and religious faith, whilst easily conforming to the abstract statements of liberal egalitarian values demanded by our institutions. Yet this situation is not stable, or good for either the host country or the minority community. The contradictory gulf between the individualism and consumerism of modern British society, and the traditional culture and faith of many immigrant communities, produces a degraded hybrid culture, the parodically presented YooKay aesthetics. Young men go from fundamentalist sermons in the mosque to partying, drug taking and porn in their private lives. And in Rotherham, as we sadly know, 1 in 73 Muslim men over 16 was prosecuted for grooming offences, and even more were arrested or questioned. A system of faux-integration designed around covering up tensions has badly failed, and we have not seen British-Pakistani leaders step forwards to address the culture that drove this behaviour, with groups like the Muslim Community Forum Alliance deciding to “cut all lines of engagement” with South Yorkshire Police following the Jay Report into the grooming scandal. The MCFA is a part of the Muslim Council of Britain, which has called ethnicity and culture “a red herring” when it comes to this issue, despite the overwhelming majority of victims of Pakistani gangs being young white girls. 

Whilst it is wrong and disingenuous to attack individual Muslims, including the new Mayor of Rotherham, for failing to integrate in the absence of any clear expectations to do so or in what fashion, the failure of Muslims organisations to accept responsibility, engage in self-criticism and their tendency to denounce any external criticism as “Islamophobic” is pathetic, and in the context of systematic child abuse, morally abhorrent. The Muslim Council of Britain is a uniquely bad actor in this context, with reports that “Wajid Akhter, the frontrunner to lead the MCB after elections this month, says UK Muslims should teach their children to identify primarily as Muslim, not as British” (Wajid was indeed subsequently elected to lead the MCB). 

The status quo is not working. Growing ethnic divides and tensions are not going to go away by themselves. Minority communities are not going to prosper or take on a full and productive role in British culture in the absence of clear guidance and a well-established road towards integration. As a society we need to reconnect to our common history and culture, and tell a story beyond the hollow message of liberal individualism. At the same time, we must be far tougher on separatism and ethnic self interest. Most of all, British people need confidence that our political leaders are concerned with the national interest, and not special interest groups.