The spin doctoring of the debate on multiculturalism was also taken up by Arun Kundnani, who compared it to an “Alice in wonderland effect where words don’t mean what they normally mean but what people would want them to mean”.

As an example he said people “use the word integration when they’re actually talking about assimilation”, and “attack multiculturalism when in fact what they’re attacking is ethnic separatism”, which “doesn’t really exist in the way that people talk about it”.

He rounded on Trevor Phillips for “attacking multiculturalism” rather than “multiculturalist policy” and his wish for black and Asian communities to “subsume our own cultural heritages into some idea of Britishness”. He continued that “people are playing a lot of games here”, “people like Trevor Phillips who know how to use the media”. He extended this to the “coded” nature of the debate, where the “real source of anxieties are Muslims”.

Arun then turned to the political treatment of Oldham and Bradford to illustrate the ironies and injustices of the integration agenda. He said that the “concept of self-segregation that’s been applied to those towns” betrays a “very dangerous use of language.” He went to outline the evolving segregation in those towns, caused by the outsourcing of local labour, the desertion of white children from inner city schools and white flight. All in all, “You had segregation created by the state, the institutional racism of the state and by this process of industrial decline”.

He talked about “the dishonesty” of turning around to “people who have been dispossessed and tell them that they have been self-segregating”.

Instead of the repeated attempts to define what these core values should be, he was forthright that “he only values we need are the values of democracy and human rights” observing that “they are the values that have been the most undermined by the war on terror”. “It is those values that we can most unite around that are being destroyed”.

Questions from Chair to panel

After each of the panellists had given their opening remarks, Tahir invited the panel to respond to a question of his before opening the floor. Picking up on Karen and Arun’s comments, he pressed Alveena Malik to confess whether the “problematising of multiculturalism was a direct reference to Muslims?”

Alveena deflected the question by stating her satisfaction that “there was uniform agreement across the panel that segregation does exist, whether through communities self-segregating or state segregating through policy”.

She defended Trevor Phillips by stating that he had “made the distinction between multiculturalist policy and multiculturalism” but denied that the integration agenda is “just about Muslims”, rallying that “migration from Eastern Europe has had a big effect and is important”. She went to insist that “the way that white communities are segregated is important” and that “integration talks about all communities – indigenous communities, settled communities and new communities”. She argued that sometimes the way the CRE’s views are presented in the media “suggests that there is a Muslim bias when there isn’t”.

Arun countered this, lambasting Trevor Phillips’ televised advise for Muslims who don’t accept British law to go and live in another country as “a BNP statement”, while Darcus defended ethnic minorities clusters because “you gravitate towards each other, and what’s wrong with that?” and addressed the phenomenon of white flight.

Karen likewise questioned the CRE’s definition of ghettos as an “area where 70% of the population are from one particular community”, describing that as being “most of the UK”. She attacked the double standard that exempted white people from such slurs, since “we don’t call them ghettos”. Citing David Goodhart’s argument that indigenous Brits not only live but share among strangers, she showed how this had been appropriated by groups like CIVITAS and how we are “being reconfigured as strangers in our own country”.

Questions from the audience

Questions from the audience ranged from whether the newly formed Commission for Human Rights will dilute the campaign for race equality, whether such debates recur through history cyclically, whether it was sufficient for the black and Asian to dismiss cohesion politics or actively challenge it, whether the antiracist movement was alert to the Islamaphobia in its ranks, and whether the issues of institutional racist power had been given adequate attention.

Among the responses, Arun said that the protest around the Iraq war had shown that “a lot of people were coming together, learning about each other and building solidarities” and that was the basis for the creation of a “united and progressive society”. Alveena said that we need to be alert to the “nuances” of Islamaphobia when talking about race equality, and was hopeful that the CHR would help us to do that.

Conclusions

The panel’s consensus was that Britain was definitely not “sleepwalking into segregation”. Alveena was alone in considering the statement politically neutral; everyone else believed it implicitly pointed accusing fingers at settled and new immigrants for failing to “integrate”. There was some agreement that segregation was an overblown phenomenon, that the burden of integration was falling on the wrong shoulders, and that anxiety about Islam in Britain had been displaced onto multiculturalism as a whole.

Everyone – especially Karen - lauded Britain’s multiculturalism and took pains to make a sharp distinction between it and multiculturalist policy, which was condemned by all. The CRE’s failure to draw such a distinction was the subject of considable censure. In many ways the discussion turned into a referendum on the CRE. For a body that purports to represent black and Asian interests to consistently find itself on the wrong side of the debate - as far as its constituencies are concerned - indicates a growing crisis of legitimacy.