The Delights of Diversity: The Rhetoric and the Reality

Civitas, 16 February 2010

‘We believe that diversity is good for society—socially, culturally, economically.’

So runs the vision statement of the Institute of Community Cohesion, which last year received from the Department for Communities and Local Government almost a quarter of a million pounds ‘for a range a work aimed at helping local partners build more cohesive and integrated communities’.

One wishes in vain from this Quango for some account of exactly what the basis is of its guiding philosophy, when the truth so manifestly belies the exact opposite.

A glimpse of the harsh reality concealed behind the up-beat rhetoric was revealed in a piece in yesterday’s Times about what life is like today in the London Borough of Tottenham.  Recalling a time past when protracted games of cricket were played in the street there, each side growing by the hour, a Tottenham resident who moved there from Jamaica with his family in 1962 reportedly stated:

‘Now… you have lots of different people from different types of background, and everyone stays away from each other.’

These days, with pubs largely having closed down (presumably, in part, because diversity makes frequenting them such a joy), the only public places in which local residents apparently fraternise are the many betting shops to have sprouted up there in recent years.

Said Mr Sanussi Ngoy, a 19-year old Tottenham resident who reportedly enjoyed the atmosphere in these monuments to modern-day British culture:

‘I’m friends with the people who work there.’

Meanwhile, if you’re hungry in Tottenham and fancy a bite, one of the much vaunted benefits of diversity — a plethora of different varieties of cuisine – seems conspicuous by its absence. All on offer is a choice between an array of different fast-food outlets, all selling fried chicken. As Mr Ahmed Khan, the Pakistani proprietor of one, reportedly remarked:

‘They are on every corner of every street. Everyone eats fried chicken. We get West Africans, Somalis, West Indians, Turks, and lots of Poles.’

Well, if multi-cultural diversity has not added much sparkle to the cuisine on offer in Tottenham’s diners, what about the ambience inside? Surely, diversity will have spiced up the conversation that flows within them, if not the cuisine. Here is how the Times news reporter concluded his piece, by writing about his experience of one:

‘It was getting dark outside.  A young Asian man came in and ordered chicken and chips with a Fanta and ate alone at a table by the window. A middle-aged black man was at the next table, a Polish woman at the next, and it was as if they were all living in their own separate worlds.’

That is the harsh truth about diversity. It inexorably breeds estrangement and withdrawal,  or ‘hunkering-down’ as the American sociologist Robert Putnam was forced to recognise to be the lasting effect on neighbourhoods of their becoming demographically diverse.

Only when bodies like the Institute of Community Cohesion admit diversity to be a social problem to be overcome, not a benefit to be celebrated, can the task of addressing how to re-establish community cohesion in broken Britain begin.

Until then all we will have from bodies like iCoco is only more Newspeak, and ever less civility and community in our towns and neighbourhoods.