'Bake-Off soothes White Fright'...or how the media creates the 'integration' myth

In a recent Panorama programme, the team returned to Blackburn ten years after airing ‘White Fright’, a discussion about the ‘segregation’ of white and non-white communities in the town.

Unfortunately, Panorama’s simplistic treatment of the issues inflames the very problems they claim to deconstruct. Their programme is part of the problem identified by Professor Ted Cantle, a former government advisor on race issues, that of ‘homogenised Islamic communities’ created through ‘the eyes of the media.’

Despite calls for ‘integration’, integration seems the last thing that many of those calling for it really want. Panorama missed an opportunity to consider how fear of a different culture is hidden behind false arguments about ‘integration’. The real problem is that promoting a fear of the unknown is threatening the very values which those who ‘want their country back’ claim to hold dear.

In Blackburn, 100,000 white Britons live not quite side-by-side with 40,000 non-white Britons. And Britons they are, mostly born in the UK into families who arrived in the 1950s and 60s at the invitation of the British government. The latest census information, not quoted by Panorama, reveals that 86% of Blackburn’s population were born in the UK.

The problem identified by Panorama is that of the segregation of the non-white, predominantly Muslim, community from the white community. Should we assume that the white community are ‘predominantly Christian’? The religious denomination of the white community wasn’t stated. Indeed, the media tends not to automatically identify white communities with any particular religious beliefs, whereas ‘non-white’ and ‘Muslim’ are often assumed to be synonymous.

Of course, one might reasonably argue that this is often the case, that the non-white inhabitants of Blackburn are predominantly practicing Muslims. Why is their religion relevant? It becomes so when the media merge ‘non-white’ and ‘Muslim’ and then merge that with the implication that Islam is a religion that comes with principles and practices that are inherently threatening to ‘British values’. Perhaps this is what was meant by one white resident who was concerned that ‘they’re taking our culture bit by bit.’

All of this is so familiar that we no longer stop to consider such problematic statements. What exactly is it that is being taken away from such non-white residents? What is it that they wish to do, think, or say, that non-white or Muslim residents are preventing? There is an obvious difference between cultural or religious expressions which non-Muslims find uncomfortable and different, and non-Muslims being prevented from exercising their own freedom of expression, which is clearly not the case. Panorama started with the claim that integration was the issue, yet the evidence suggests that the last thing many white residents want, is to integrate in any way with the non-white population. They seem more concerned with restricting non-white and/or Muslim freedom to exercise religious and cultural expression.

This can border on the ridiculous. For example, one complaint is that pubs and nightclubs have shut down in non-white areas, as the predominantly Muslim population are mainly non-drinkers. Why is it important that outlets selling alcohol are left open in areas where there are no customers for them? Panorama reported the comments of a white resident who complained that areas of Blackburn were becoming a ‘ghost town’, with the strains of The Specials hit tune overlaid.

They accepted that actually, ‘business was booming’ in terms of outlets in Asian areas, but this was surely an opportunity to discuss how ‘integration’ often masks an insistence that ‘they’ must synthesise ‘their’ cultural expressions with ‘ours’. If there is one ‘western value’ which overrides most others, it is the sacred nature of market forces, and in this respect, the non-white areas of Blackburn seem to have ‘integrated’ very well.

Another failed opportunity was a chance to discuss the obvious lack of enthusiasm for integration among the white community, despite their complaints about the lack of it. Time and again came the observation that houses for sale in certain areas were bought by non-white people. There is an obvious point here, that a lack of integration is often not the result of non-white actions, but about white people partially creating non-white areas by choosing not to live in certain parts of the community.

A good example was Mary, who was selling her house to a ‘lovely [Asian] couple’ and who currently lived next door to ‘lovely [Asian] neighbours’, but had ‘hung on for as long as possible’ and was now choosing to leave to live in a ‘white’ neighbourhood. When asked why, particularly considering that Mary is surrounded by ‘lovely’ people, Mary had little response other than to vaguely gesture at a building across the road which had been a pub but was now an Islamic Support Centre.

If white people do not want to live in non-white areas, perhaps ‘Muhammed must move to the mountain’ and the onus put on non-white people to move to white areas? Mr Khan did just that, and consciously moved to a predominantly white area, placing his children in the local schools with mostly white kids. Unfortunately, he was ignored by his neighbours and made to feel unwelcome in the community. A Blackburn resident echoed Nigel Farage’s sentiments, lamenting ‘we just want our country back’.Yet as he sadly says, ’we’ve been here generations, this is our country’.

One white local commented regarding different cultures that, ‘we’re laid back about it, but they are not.’ This statement went unchallenged by Panorama, but the evidence from the programme would suggest the very opposite. Although the common concern from the white community, and the way the debate is framed by the media generally, is one of integration, I suggest that this not the problem.

The very last thing that the white residents of Blackburn seem to want, if Panorama have been representative anyway, is integration. They do not want to live in areas where they are unfamiliar with the culture, yet nor do they want non-white people to express their own culture, even well away from white eyes. They want pubs and nightclubs to be open, even in areas where they don’t go, and for which there are no customers. Pubs and nightclubs are surely not emblems of national identity that must be present, even if empty and unused. White people don’t want to move to non-white areas, but object when non-white people buy the houses they don’t want to live in themselves. They bemoan the lack of ‘integration’, but don’t want ‘them’ moving into ‘our’ areas.

But have Panorama been representative? Are the views they chose to air from the non-white population really representative of the majority of Blackburn or the country? I suspect they are not. I suspect that when a flagship current affairs programme implies such views are representative, they tend to create the very ‘problem’ they claim to be analysing.

The problem is not so much one of integration, in fact it’s a fear of it, a fear of a culture which seems strange and even threatening. Nowhere is this more obvious than the discussion of the hijab or Muslim veil. Take the comments Panorama aired from Dame Louise Casey, the author of a report into ‘integration’ for the government. The problem with the veil says Casey, is that it makes ‘us’ ‘feel uncomfortable with it’. This is an interesting statement in itself, because we are so often told that no-one has the right to be excluded from feeling uncomfortable, and to offer that right is the unfortunate consequence of virtue signalling ‘political correctness’. Get over it we are told. Still, Dame Casey feels in this case that the delicate sensibilities of ‘us’ should be protected. She says, ‘if a man walked in here with a balaclava, I’d be uncomfortable with it.’

Of course you would, because a man walking into a room wearing a balaclava is associated with violent assault! This seems a million miles away from the elderly Muslim lady back in Blackburn who tearfully asks ‘why do people not like us Muslims’? For wearing the veil she says she ‘feels very bad, they speak very bad words to us’. Dame Casey employs the timeless tactic of associating that with which we are not accustomed, with something strange and threatening.

Casey illustrates one of the more unhelpful conclusions of the ‘Muslim values’ debate, that Islam inherently promotes religious extremism. It is exactly this argument, deployed by the far-right and used opportunistically by politicians such as UKIP’s Paul Nuttall, who said ‘if you want a jihadi for a neighbour, vote Labour’, which is potentially dangerous. As noted by a senior Asian police officer, it is just this type of homogenisation of British Muslim citizens as potential terrorists which angers the Muslim population and drives some into the hands of radicalisers.

In Blackburn, a Muslim man asks what British values are. The lady running the ‘integration’ workshop looks down at her manual and gives the ‘official’ definition. They are ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and tolerance of other faiths’. The shallow debate on ‘integration’ is holding up a mirror to Britain, and the reflection gives the lie to the very ‘values’ which are being used to beat communities who have been productive British citizens for decades. What Britain will not discuss, is our fear of the unknown, and we hide it behind talk of 'integration', even though we create the very environment that makes such integration difficult.

Strangely, there is little talk of British 'ex-pat' integration into Spanish communities, or Britons leaving what's laughingly called the 'G & T belt' in Cyprus.

What many proponents of ‘integration’ really want is to make the unfamiliar feel comfortable. As Professor Cantle notes, Nadiya Hussain’s victory on The Great British Bake Off, with its gentle portrayal of Britain as a bourgeois and slightly eccentric nation of cake-bakers, ‘did more for British-Muslim relations than ten years of government policy.’ Interestingly, Nadiya and her husband had only met once, before their arranged marriage in Bangladesh…and she wears a head-scarf...