[Mb-civic] Xenophobia at election time in UK

[Alexander Harper]

Isn't it a shame that politicians always seem to feel that it is more profitable to play on the electorate's baser instincts rather than its finer ones?
AlBaraka
  

The electoral bogeyman is back 
>By Adam Kuper
>Published: March 29 2005 20:11 | Last updated: March 29 2005 20:11
>>
Tony Blair's government was briefly rattled in the current run-up to the UK general election campaign when Michael Howard, the Conservative party leader, had a go at the Gypsies. This tiny and long-established minority is hardly a national issue in the UK, one might have thought, even if the label could be stretched to include assorted itinerants, largely of Irish origin. But photogenic "bogeymen" are thin on the ground this election. Bogus asylum-seekers - another vaguely defined group that cannot be counted but is surely very small - have been making front-page news. The most frightening of the bogeymen are Muslim radicals. Yet even when the government felt free to lock up anyone who might be a danger to the state, it could only find a handful of such radicals - none of whom had done anything they could be charged for in a court of law.

These are all symbolic targets. They stand for something larger. Dodgy foreigners are accused of stealing, money-laundering, enslaving women and cheating on welfare. But there is a deeper fear, of people who not only look different but march to a different drum, support foreign cricket teams, worship other gods. They are out to rob us of our very identity.

Europeans' identity was once rooted in religion, and states tried to maintain religious monopolies. At best, a concordat could be agreed with other Christians, although often only after generations of civil war. "Ultimately, antagonistic religions mean antagonistic cultures," T.S. Eliot warned, "and ultimately, religions cannot be reconciled." He was writing in the aftermath of the second world war and probably had in mind Catholics and Protestants, and perhaps Jews. Europeans today might think of Muslims, and perhaps agree with Eliot. But religion is not an easy card to play in contemporary Europe. The true division today is between a minority of believers and a majority of secularists. The Conservatives tried but failed to raise abortion as a religious issue but found religion has no place in British politics. The mainstream parties in France criticise Muslims for not being secular enough. In reaction, people of all faiths find common cause. Some German Christian Democrats join with Muslims on issues including gay marriage and abortion, in opposition to unbelievers.

But if religion is taken out of politics, talk of cultural difference remains both respectable and effective. Culture seems to explain everything at the moment, the way gender once did or, before that, class. However, culture is a slippery term. It expands to mean a way of life, or contracts to mean the idiosyncratic atmosphere of a company's head office, and it may also still be used in Matthew Arnold's very different sense to mean high culture, "the best that has been thought and said". But ambiguity does not rob the term of its potency. People feel they can see the cultural threat as they walk the streets of European cities. That is because culture has become a euphemism for race. And, like race, it is seen as something to which one is born, and which cannot be changed.

Yet even our own home-grown culture is hard to pin down. Most English people, for example, would not even recognise half the items on T.S. Eliot's list of traits defining English culture: "Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th century Gothic churches, the music of Elgar." In Britain, there is another issue - the Scots and the Welsh. Is there such a thing as British culture?

We are even more inclined to work with muddled ideas about immigrant cultures. The very labels we use are hopelessly misleading. Pakistanis, Arabs and Somalis are lumped together as "Muslims" in Britain today. Yet until recently, Pakistanis in the UK were called "Asians", a category that included Indians, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans, regardless of linguistic, religious and ethnic differences. For some reason Chinese people were left out.

Not only are the gross cultural labels absurd. The experiences and attitudes of succeeding generations may be very different. What happens when the first language of the children of immigrants is English, and the second Punjabi or Yoruba, and when they refuse to marry the partners picked for them? The fact is that young people in large cities have more in common with each other than with their parents. If they are divided, it is by class rather than by ancestral culture, or even by religion.

But urban myths are more potent than everyday experiences. When the Channel Tunnel was opened, there was panic that it would provide a conduit for illegal immigrants and rabid dogs. The bogeyman comes back, especially at election time, the dangerous foreigner along with the paedophile and the mugger. Symbolic targets work for politicians because they play on vague, disreputable fears. Be afraid.

The writer, professor of social anthropology at Brunel University, is author of Culture: The Anthropologists' Account (Harvard University Press)
 
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