A New Muscular Multi-Culturalism Is Needed Now

Multi-culturalism, like slow growth, is out of favour in Britain. Although Germany seems to have thrived on slow growth, its Chancellor, and new iron lady, Angela Merkel, has also been critical of multi-culturalism. Indeed, it seems to have been Merkel's recent comments that have prompted David Cameron's invocation of a new muscular liberalism, whereby Britain's core values are to be set out to its citizens and other residents. Yet the challenge to such values hardly comes from the post-war multi-cultural legacy. Rather it is the apparent monoculturalism of certain representations of Islam that have challenged the pluralism and tolerance which the British have generally espoused.

Interviewed earlier this week on BBC Radio 4's "Thinking Aloud" programme, Professor Stuart Hall of the Open University, and formerly head of cultural studies at the University of Birmingham, responded to the current debate about multi-culturalism with a muscular intellect for such matters which those on the right, and, arguably, even on the centre, of British politics seem unable to muster. With a Caribbean and colonial heritage, Hall described the changes which have occurred in Britain since his arrival in 1951; also noting that his education in the West Indies enabled him to recognise our native trees.

The fact that many indigenous Britain's, let alone migrants, struggle with such a task today is a reflection more of the decline in this country's general standards of education in the intervening period than the fault of multi-culturalism. Although there is a strong tendency amongst politicians, and other commentators, particularly on the right, to confuse these two issues. In fact, multi-culturalism tends to be invoked as the "bete noire" of all sorts of problems which have beset British society since the 1950s, including rising levels of family breakdown and crime, nothwithstanding that, judged proportionately, these were just as great in the past.

However, it is the overall growth in the population of this country in the intervening period, and more especially increasing population growth elsewhere in the world, which does pose a real and major challenge. A new muscular multi-cultural response to this situation is required, which recognises the strengths of different national heritages and social groups, because these must be harnessed to tackle present and future problems, particularly those arising from environmental change and economic uncertainty. In this context, muscular liberalism, I would suggest, resonates too much with the laissez-faire international outlook which has contributed most to the crises in which global capitalism now finds itself.