WGPlus (Archive)

Time for a ’Paul on the road to Damascus’ moment for multi-culturalists

Britain is too complacent about its ability to manage diversity and urgently needs to adopt a ‘more muscular’ approach to integration, Trevor Phillips writes in a new Civitas publication.   In a new pamphlet, Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence, Phillips says that many liberals have been ‘reluctant to accept that different sets of values & behaviours exhibited by some groups present a serious challenge to the process of integration’.

‘Any attempt to ask whether aspects of minority disadvantage may be self-inflicted is denounced as “blaming the victim”. Instead, we prefer to answer any difficult questions by focusing on the historic prejudices of the dominant majority. In short, it’s all about white racism.

‘This stance just won’t do any more.  In fact, in today’s super-diverse society, it is dangerously misguided. Social liberals have to make a decision.  Do we stand by our fundamental values at the risk of offending others; or should our desire to preserve social unity be allowed to compromise much of the social progress of the past half century?

Phillips argues that the new era of ‘super-diversity’ – with more different groups of people arriving in Britain than ever before in the country’s history – requires a shift away from ‘organic integration’ towards a policy of ‘active integration’.

Researched Links:

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