So officially, everybody is pedalling furiously away from multiculturalism. Not only government ministers and opposition leaders but even figures such as Trevor Phillips of the Equality and Human Rights Commission have proclaimed the need to dismantle it.

But somehow all of this opprobrium does not filter down to the classroom or to public sector agencies (such as the BBC, local government bureaucracies and the NHS), which are still explicitly committed to “diversity programmes” that positively encourage the continuing separateness of ethnic communities.

It would be easy to see this as simply an accident, a kind of absent-minded philosophy creep in which the original good intentions just got out of hand, as things so often do when they are administered by bureaucrats. So deeply entrenched - and so embedded in the employment practices of the public sector - was the idea of “tolerating differences” that nobody noticed for the longest time that it had slipped over into “encouraging differences”.

If that were the case, this would be a relatively easy problem to solve: a few stern ministerial guidelines and departmental directives (”URGENT: the word ‘diversity’ to be replaced by ‘unity’ in all official policy pronouncements”) could, over a period of a year or two, turn the situation round.

But everybody recognises that it is not that simple. Which is to say that everybody knows that we have a far more profound dilemma: Britain does not have a unified, coherent, identifiable self-image, either as a people or as a political entity, which it can offer to incomers as an inspiration and a ready-made value system.

There is a reason why all the attempts to define Britishness seem to end in fatuity: not only because they dribble off into nebulous virtues such as tolerance and decency, which should be common to all civilised people, but because the British opinion-forming classes tend to find the whole concept of national identity either sinister or risible.

And it is perfectly plausible to see this as a virtue: a strong, cohesive sense of national loyalty certainly can transmogrify into blood-and-soil nationalism of a horrifying kind, and the ironic distance which the British maintain from even their most important historical institutions has the unmistakeable ring of grown-up wit.

Even in my more sentimental American-expatriate moments, I can see why, to most British eyes, flag-waving US patriotism seems childlike and naïve. In many respects, the American model is peculiarly unhelpful, even though it is the one to which Gordon Brown and now Jack Straw cleave as they desperately seek a way out of the crisis that their own party’s policies have created.

Due to an unhappy combination of a timing misfire and the mail not being delivered yesterday, Peter and I had no Netflix so had to choose a movie to watch (why does PBS insist on playing Antiques Roadshow every time my hand creeps too close to the remote control?). So we watched Grosse Pointe Blank, which one of a stack of DVDs Peter got for Christmas from his parents. And I kept thinking that, even though it’s only from 1996, it would never be made nowadays. Even with John Cusack, committed Socialist, in it. RC2’s been talking about the hidden moral/political message in Oklahoma! so here I am jumping on that bandwagon:

John Cusack’s character, a hit-man whose back in suburban Detroit for his 10-year high school reunion, finds himself explaining his career choice to the high school sweetheart he left behind. In high school he was one of these too-intelligent, mouthy types always quoting philosophers and poets, and when he joins the army (on his prom night, incidentally), he takes a psych exam which indicates a certain “moral flexibility” which flags him as a potential CIA candidate who then goes into business for himself, as it were. And he’s rambling on about all this to Minnie Driver’s character, sounding like a perfect liberal. No such thing as “countries”, really, everything’s relative, etc etc. But instead of making him an ideal citizen of the world, it’s made him a psychopathic killer.

Which, well, is interesting, no?

Date: Feb 19th, 2008 · Comments RSS · Tags: People and Current Events