Future Of Multi-Ethnic Britain Research Articles

Comparing the Political Functions of Independent Commissions: the Case of UK Migrant Integration Policy

UK governments have frequently set up commissions to produce reports on complex policy problems, especially following “crisis” focusing events. Such commissions are ad hoc, limited in duration, and engage external actors in providing policy advice and expertise to governments. This problem-solving function is prominent in the literature: commissions are valued as a means of producing useful knowledge to inform policy responses. However, we believe that the problem-solving rationale does not adequately explain the decision to set up a commission, given the additional resources required, and the risk that governments take in allowing quasi-independent bodies to produce recommendations. Instead, we argue that the value of commissions may lie as much in their symbolic functions as their problem-solving ones: they are valued for their capacity to signal that governments are taking appropriate action to address policy problems. This article explores how important these different functions have been with regard to integration policies for migrants and ethnic minorities, comparing three commissions which reported since 2000: the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000), the Community Cohesion Review Team (2001), and the Commission on Integration and Cohesion (2007).

Researching Up? Interviews, Emotionality and Policy-Making Elites

AbstractThis article recounts the methodological story of a qualitative research project that investigated the work of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain and the news media's deconstruction of the Commission's report – theParekh Report– which was published on 11 October 2000. Our project used a multi-method fieldwork approach, combining textual analysis of news media coverage and the extensive documentary archives of the Commission, along with semi-structured interviews with Commissioners and other figures involved in the publication of the Report. The article attempts to offer a reflexive account of the experiences of interviewing a particular public policy-making eliteandexamines how a particular ‘public trauma’ – that is, the damaging political fall-out of extremely negative news media coverage of theParekh Report– inflected our research encounters. We argue that the openness with which many of the participants spoke about this traumatic experience suggests that the production of policy documents can constitute highly emotional labour for participants. We extend this argument by examining how this openness also reveals the instabilities and uncertainties of power within the research interviewee/interviewer relationship. In this way the article seeks to contribute to debates about the problems of defining the category ‘elites’ in both public policy and social research worlds.

Making a Case for Multiculture

The horror of 7/7 and the radicalization of young British Muslims have prompted a flurry of obituaries gleefully chronicling the demise of multiculturalism. This article turns the clock back to revisit Bhikhu Parekh's Rethinking Multiculturalism, the scholarly cousin of the report by the Runnymede Commission on The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain, both published in 2000. It argues that multiculturalism has never been as universally acceptable as recent critiques would lead us to believe, but also that philosophical multiculturalism (of which Parekh's is totemic) is the unfortunate victim of a lazy conflation with political multiculturalism. While Parekh's multiculturalism is worryingly sympathetic to the prevailing management of cultural diversity, it also illuminates the orthodox Left's elective disengagement with questions of culture, ethnicity and religion. Recent events have brought home the message that neglecting the complexity of belonging only strengthens the impulse for sectarian collectivism. They awaken us to the fact that Britain's emerging political actors will be multiculturalism's children: citizens who refract their interests through the lens of their inherited cultures. The question is whether we constitute the fact of cultural diversity as a full stop, as Parekh does, or whether we creatively seize it to enable `multicultures' of social justice, as this article advocates.

Misrepresenting the multicultural nation

The Commission for the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain was launched by Jack Straw in January 1998 to provide a blueprint for a progressive, multi-culturally constituted ‘post nation’. The long awaited Commission report – the Parekh report – was published two years later and was met by a torrent of negative news media coverage and government handwashing. Academics and policy makers working on sensitive issues of race, ethnicity, culture and national identity are still attempting to learn the lessons from the failure of the Parekh report to capture the national-popular imagination. A series of important research questions are raised in this article about the role of the media in public policy agenda-setting; the most significant being whether the negative news coverage and political response to the report signalled the end of New Labour's ‘post Lawrence’ attempts to re-imagine Britain as a twenty-first century multiethnic nation. In its account of the report's production to publication narrative, the article considers the continued power of the news media to confound and unsettle the plans of policy makers, academics, public relations companies and government ministers working on race matters. In the broader context in which the nature of the relationship between policy networks, social policy documents and the news media remains relatively under-scrutinised in both policy and media debates, the article explores how, and on what terms, policy makers can and do engage with the process of making race-related policy documents ‘known about’. Drawing on data collected through a qualitative study of the journey of the Parekh report into the public domain, this article analyses the news media strategy developed to launch and promote the report and reveals the limits of attempts to manage the news media. It argues that the report was destabilised not only by the news media and its political reception but by competing sets of demands that mystified the purpose of the Commission and its beneficiaries.

From the Crick Report to the Parekh Report: multiculturalism, cultural difference, and democracy—the re‐visioning of citizenship education1

This paper attempts to develop a more sophisticated notion of multiculturalism in Britain. It starts by examining the philosophical basis of the Crick Report on citizenship education to resolve the theoretical tension between liberal and multicultural approaches to the subject. To achieve this resolution, it compares the Crick Report to the Parekh Report on the Future of Multi Ethnic Britain, published on 11th October 2000. The Parekh report is then used to critique the Crick report and re‐theorise the practical imperatives of multicultural citizenship education. I claim that the Crick report, typical of liberal analyses, is suspicious of departure from the presumption of a unified social structure, and represents citizenship education as the imposition of a uniform standard applied to all groups and peoples. On this basis it is claimed that, although the Crick Report’s conception of citizenship fails to adequately take account of cultural difference, it need not do so, as there is room within liberal approaches to citizenship education for a recognition of difference. The paper explains how such a resolution can be effected.

On the Intellectual Histories and Political Theories of the 'Multiculturalist Perspective'

On the Intellectual Histories and Political Theories of the “Multiculturalist Perspective” Sankar Muthu (bio) Lord Bhikhu Parekh brings to the issues concerning what has come to be known as "multiculturalism" a distinctive and valuable expertise. His view is grounded in [a deep knowledge of] political philosophy and informed by the empirical dimensions of policy debates in the UK and elsewhere about the rights of ethnic communities and the definition of national identity. His role as the Chair of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain and as a longtime participant in British political debates and government-sponsored inquiries testifies to his experience and authority in these matters.1 Parekh notes that his primary arguments in Rethinking Multiculturalism (hereafter RM) are of three kinds. He begins the book with a selective examination of intellectual history in order to investigate the philosophical insights as well as the errors of previous thinkers' accounts of cultural difference. He then investigates the theoretical underpinnings of his approach toward multiculturalism, especially the concepts of "human nature" and "culture." Finally, he applies these historical and conceptual insights to a variety of social, legal, and policy debates about whether and how to accommodate cultural pluralism within the framework of a just democratic society. Given the wide-ranging nature of Parekh's thoughtful and provocative arguments, I will focus here upon (i) his interpretations of the history of modern political thought and (ii) the relationship between his account of a multicultural perspective and the broader political theories that are presupposed, or that follow, from it. On the Intellectual History of Theorizing Diversity In the opening chapters of RM, Parekh discusses two ideal-types of philosophical accounts of society: monism (or naturalism) and pluralism (or culturalism). Parekh contends that while both capture something important about the human condition, each account is partial; moreover, he maintains that what is left out or even denigrated by such partial perspectives generates significant moral and political pathologies. Parekh treats Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, and J.S. Mill as examples of monistic thinkers, and Vico, Montesquieu, and Herder as exemplars of pluralistic thinkers. Not surprisingly, Parekh's theory of multiculturalism is meant precisely to combine the insights of each of these approaches without taking on any of their shortcomings. His general claim about European intellectual history is that it leaves us bereft of the conceptual resources that we need today in order to address cultural diversity. Parekh emphasizes at the outset of RM that the intellectual history he outlines, while necessarily brief, is not a scholarly tangent to an otherwise theoretical and policy-oriented account of contemporary societies, but rather is "integral" to the theory of multiculturalism. (11) Given the importance that he himself attaches to the intellectual history section of the book, one is compelled to note that alternative and equally plausible interpretations can be given about many of the historical traditions and thinkers that he discusses. A detailed counter-narrative to what Parekh provides cannot, of course, be given here, but a brief discussion of his treatments of John Locke and Johann Gottfried Herder can serve to illustrate that there may be more robust sources of theorizing diversity in the history of political thought than what Parekh implies in RM. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that contemporary political thinkers should engage in the absurd anachronism of treating an eighteenth-century text, for example, as a source of answers to our most pressing contemporary concerns. There may, however, be a set of intellectual dispositions that one can discern in a variety of historical thinkers and texts that enriches our own sensibilities; to be sure, in order to cull such resources, one would have to do the philosophical work of retheorizing many of the elements of such accounts in order to make them the bases for our own responses to current dilemmas. Notwithstanding Parekh's contentions that earlier accounts of politics and society are not without their insights, his arguments in RM run the risk of foreclosing the above possibilities with regard to cultural diversity. In his introductory comments about European intellectual traditions of theorizing humanity and diversity, for instance, he writes that "[m]uch of traditional political theory...

THE FUTURE OF MULTI-ETHNIC BRITAIN: REPORTING ON A REPORT

This article outlines the basic theses of the Report on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain . It then goes on to explain why and how it was misunderstood and misrepresented by the right-wing press, and draws important general lessons about the nature of political discourse.

Reform of United Kingdom Discrimination Law: Philosophy, Principle or Pragmatism?

United Kingdom sex and race discrimination legislation has been in place for 25 years. There is general agreement both that the legislation has had some degree of beneficial impact but that change is long overdue. There is a need to take greater and more sophisticated account of the limits of law as a medium for the promotion of social change. At the same time, international and other developments continue to press for the extension of legislation to different grounds of discrimination. The University of Cambridge Centre for Public Law and the Judge Institute of Management Studies recently published a report entitled ‘Equality: a New Framework.’ At approximately the same time the Runnymede Trust (which is concerned solely with racial justice) published a report entitled ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain.’ This review article examines both reports, concentrating on the issues relevant to the legal control of employment discrimination. It congratulates the authors of both reports for their detailed and sophisticated understanding of the issues, and their proposals for law reform, but remains somewhat sceptical of the capacity of even a reformed law to transform the behaviour and attitude of employers, especially small and medium-sized employers.

Monolingual ideologies in multilingual states

In multilingual, heterogeneous societies language ideologies are constantly constructed and re-constructed in discursive interactions at micro and macro levels. When the dominant, majority group in a society, nation, nation-state or community considers that the ideal model of society is monolingual, monoethnic, monoreligious and monoideological (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998a), we immediately encounter questions such as 'who is in?' and 'who is out?'. A dominant ideology of monolingualism in multilingual societies raises questions of social justice, as such an ideology potentially excludes and discriminates against those who are either unable or unwilling to fit the monoglot standard. In this paper I review recent research which has illuminated our understanding of language ideologies and social justice in multilingual states, and I offer an analysis of everyday discourse practices in Britain, including monolingual practices in a multilingual educational setting, a language ideological debate in local news media, and the liberal academic discourse of a recently-published report into the future of multi-ethnic Britain. My analysis suggests that in each of these contexts the many minority languages of Birmingham, and of Britain, are being written out of public discourse, as a monolingual ideology continues to prevail.