Sunny Hundel’s new project, the New Generation Network, has certainly got off to a flying start with not one but two articles on Comment is Free to mark the launch of the project’s manifesto (and to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Race Relations Act); the manifesto itself (naturally) and a commentary from Sunny that is, as always, both thought-provoking and well worth the few minutes of your time necessary to read it.

Now I should say from the outset that I have a lot of time and regard for Sunny, for all that I know him only through his writing on CiF and at the excellent Pickled Politics and from the occasional exchange of comments either here or at PP. To my mind he’s not only one of the most perceptive commentators on the politics of race, ethnicity and identity that you’ll find anywhere but he’s also very much one of the good guys out here in the blogosphere and always worth a listen.

So I start out here from a point of being predisposed to listen to what he has to say, anyway, and from there he does himself no harm in my eye by carrying forward into this project one of the more notable themes of themes of his work over the last year or so that I’ve had PP on the RSS feed, that of actively challenging the position and status of what passes, in minority communities, for the ‘establishment’; the present coterie of self-styled ‘community leaders’ who tend to dominate much of the current debate on the politics of race, ethnicity and identity; often for no better reason than they serve as a convenient bunch of ‘talking heads’ for the political establishment and the media despite their being precious little evidence to support their contention that the have a mandate to represent their particular community.

At the heart of this project, at least for the time being, lies one the most fundamental questions that any citizen of a democracy can, and should, ask whenever someone pops up in the media claiming to represent a particular community:

Who elected to you to speak for…?

Sunny, to his credit, doesn’t shy away from naming names here, and many willl, I suspect, be familiar to many of my regular visitors: the Hindu Council UK and Hindu Forum of Britain; the Network of Sikh Organisations, the Sikh Federation and Sikh Human Rights Group; and the Muslim Council of Britain and Muslim Association of Britain; all crop up from time to time claiming to speak for their respective communities without ever demonstrating quite where it is that they’ve acquired the mandate necessary to support such claims.

You’ll note that I said ‘for the time being’ back there - this is not to suggest that I doubt either Sunny’s intent or motives here but a recognition of one of the great imponderables of a project like the New Generation Network; in a system geared up towards working with largely unaccountable ‘community leaders’ can such a network avoid being sucked into the system it seeks to challenge to the extent that it becomes, itself, no more than another set of unaccountable talking heads?

It’ll be interesting to see exactly how Sunny, and others in the network, set about tacking that central paradox; that no matter their intent, the present system will inevitably seek to treat them as yet another set of ‘community leaders’ to be tapped into on demand as ‘representatives’ of their community, co-opting them into the system in the process. I dare say, from what I know of him, that this is something to which Sunny has already given a fair bit of thought (and also not a question he’ll mind me asking) and if anyone can manage to square that particular circle successfully then it is going to be Sunny.

Do I have any specific criticisms of Sunny’s comments? Only one and a slight one at that; the appearance of the dreaded ‘M’-word, “multiculturalism”.

We need to wrest the debate away from the extreme ends of the spectrum and provide a voice to the silent majority. The true purpose of “multiculturalism” should be to help people from differing cultural backgrounds to understand each other better and overlap productively. Instead it has come to mean increasing separation. Sometimes this is a case of deliberate misrepresentation by the media. It has not been helped by the government entrusting power to so-called community leaders and other umbrella groups who claim to be the voice of minority groups. Such organisations should be working to put themselves out of business not expand their remits.

Don’t get me wrong here, its not that I disagree with Sunny’s definition of the real purpose of ‘multiculturalism’, the problem is the word itself, which has become overpoliticised to the extent that any positive meaning it might once have held has become hopelessly and irretrivably degraded. Whatever else multiculturalism might once have meant, today, as Sunny points out, it has come to mean increasing separation and, more to the point, has been invested with an exaggerated and highly politicised form of ‘respect’ for other cultures that seeks to put them beyond even rational criticism.

This is not a problem confined to this one word/concept but a characteristic of the entire public discourse on race/ethnicity/identity, part of a political culture of pre-emptive victimhood that seeks to exploit white, liberal anxieties/guilt about their own (alleged) racism both to gain political, and sometimes material, advantage and deflect criticism by seeking to label contrary opinions as intrinsicly racist.

Only last week, in an awful piece of blatant propaganda, Melanie Phillips provided a classic example of the use of pre-emptive victimhood to stifle criticism:

He’s [Kofi Annan] right about one thing, though: the problem is nothing to do with the Christian faith or the Jewish faith in whose name no violence is being perpetrated (and to any Jew-baiters who start enumerating the crimes of Israel, please try a little harder to grasp the moral difference between the attempt to exterminate the Jewish nation and the attempt of the Jewish nation to defend itself against extermination); it’s nothing to do with any faith except one, a little detail that seems to have escaped the UN Secretary-General’s notice.

Phillips quite blatantly (and crudely) equates any and all criticism of Israel and its conduct and actions with anti-Semitism without any regard for the validity that any such criticism might hold and, in doing so, is seeking both to prevent such criticism being voiced at all by playing on liberal anxieties - no liberal wishes to be thought to be an anti-Semite - and to ensure that any criticism that is made is immediately labelled as proceeding from the anti-Semitic views of the critic and, therefore, of no value whatsoever.

This is a central feature of the politics of victimhood, the use of a generic ad hominem attack on actual, or potential, critics in an effort to shut down the debate.

Even allowing for the fact that Sunny uses the term “multiculturalism’ in quotes, which rather suggests that he uses it in his article for lack of something better to put in its place, my feeling is that if we are to make a fresh start here and move the public discourse towards a ’saner dialogue’ then this is a term that needs to be rapidly discarded, after openly acknowledging its failings, and the debate recast in terms of pluralism and, especially, the concept of value-pluralism, set out by Isaiah Berlin.

With multiculturalism having fallen into disrepute due to the overt relativism of those of its proponents who have sought to exploit it for their own ends, the obvious risk is that it engenders a backlash suffcient to ensure that it comes to be replaced by an aggressive form of cultural monism, signs of which are already creeping into the public debate around ‘Britishness’. One thinks immediately of Jack Straw’s recent comments regarding the wearing of the ‘niqab’ (veil) in which a matter of personal preference rapidly became inflated into a debate that near-dominated the press for two weeks to the extent that one might almost have thought it to be the defining characteristic of Islam and not simply a religious/cultural practice adopted by a minority of British Muslims.

The manifesto of the New Generation Network is clearly and unmistakably a pluralist manifesto and, in my view, needs to be both clearly identified and promoted as such, if only to differentiate it from both the tendentious relativism that has come to dominate the public discourse around multiculturalism and the half-witted cultural monism of, in particular, the right-wing press.

That admittedly minor quibble aside, this is one of those rare occasions that someone manages to put forward a manifesto that I’m happy to support because the principles are right, even if I do reserve just a little of my judgment until I’ve see a touch more of the execution.

Oh, and Sunny - if there’s anything I can help you with on this, you just have to let me know…

Posted by Unity on 20 Nov 2006 at 17:11 pm

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