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Fed up with the way that touring the country works in politics
10/05/2007
I’m already rather fed up with the way that touring the country works
in politics. You charge around having to meet deadlines imposed by the
media and the Parliamentary timetable. An hour here an hour there
(frequently half hour, in fact) with snatched conversations, half
learning things but not getting to the bottom of a problem and often
failing to gain a proper understanding of what’s going on.
There’s too much of people telling you what they think you want to
hear, and too often the boldest or loudest voices dominate, rather than
the most considered and thoughtful.
So I’ve decided to spend some proper time out of Westminster. For the
last couple of days I have been in Balsall Heath in Birmingham, living
in the house of a British Asian family.
I’m staying with Abdullah who’s 37 and married to Shahida. They have
three children: two girls and a boy, and I’ve also met many of the
extended family who live in the area. Abdullah’s a great guy - born in
Birmingham, he’s lived here all his life. Since leaving school at in
1985 he studied Business and Finance before he helped to run the family
corner grocery shop. He’s steeped in marketing, trading and knows most
of the local small business people in the neighbourhood. His main
interests are TV, travelling, enjoying family life and good food. He's
a Villa fan and enjoyed playing when he was younger.
Yesterday was pretty busy. After going to Abdullah’s house to meet the
family, we had a walk round the neighbourhood and chatted to some of
the local shopkeepers and small business owners – you can see some of
that in the films we'll be posting to Webcameron in the next 24 hours.
Then we went to the local mosque, where I had a really fascinating (and
in some respects extremely worrying) conversation with some of the
elders. After spending some more time in the local shops (including
trying my hand at serving customers – not a great success) we met up
with some parents at the Balsall Heath Forum, an amazing community
organisation led by the brilliant social entrepreneur Dick Atkinson,
then on to dinner back at Abdullah’s house, before going out on patrol
with Abdullah, who’s a community warden. We ended the day with a drink
in the local pub.
You can find out more about
Dick Atkinson and the Balsall Heath Forum here, and read the speech I
made a while back which talked about their work here.
Some impressions of my first day.
Yes it’s a cliché but people in this community work incredibly hard.
The shopkeepers I spoke to (and worked with) yesterday tend to work 13
hour days, often 7 days a week. And far from the ever-onward march of
the British Asian corner shop, they’ve been facing very tough
competition. Abdullah and his family actually sold their shop, which
was a key feature of life in Balsall Heath, some years ago. They showed
me with great pride the newspaper cuttings about their shop, and talked
about how it was much more than just a shop – more of a community
centre, really. Now supermarkets are getting more savvy at stocking
ethnic food, life is getting even tougher for small local shops here.
Another cliché is the strength of the extended family, but it really is
so powerfully true. Abdullah and family see more of their aunts, uncles
and cousins in a week than I see of mine in a year. Mum lives at home,
rather than – as is the case in so many ethnically British families –
elsewhere and alone.
Whether sitting in the Karachi Café, with its cross-cultural menu of
southern fried chicken, kebabs and baltis, or having dinner with the
family and friends at Abdullah’s home, or in the Balsall Heath Forum
itself, a lot of the conversation is around the twin issues of cohesion
– put simply, how do we live together - and the current threat of
terrorism and how we should tackle it.
Let’s do terrorism first.
It’s hard to over-emphasise the importance of language. I know it
sounds like a side issue, but it isn’t. We are just not getting this
right. Every time the BBC or a politician talks about “Islamist
terrorists” they are doing immense harm (and yes I am sure I have done
this too, despite trying hard to get this right.) Think of Northern
Ireland – “IRA terrorist” was fine because it marked them out as part
of a terrorist group, Catholic terrorists would have been a disaster.
Yet that is the equivalent of what we are doing now..
When they hear and see this kind of language, Muslims simply think –
“they mean us.” Of course it’s impossible every single time to say
“terrorists who are following a perverted strain of the true religion
of Islam” but if we’re going to use shorthand we have got to do better.
Together with the issue about language, the other recurrent theme is
the way the media handle these issues. The leaks about the arrests
surrounding the alleged plot to capture and behead a British soldier
did a lot of damage in the community here. And the perceived lack of
balance in reporting the Muslim community comes up again and again. And
it was boys at the supermarket check-out talking to me about these
things, not activists from the MCB.
But there’s another side to this. Even accepting the point about
language and the need for the media to think and act responsibly, do
these conversations show that there is a problem amongst the Muslim
community of accepting what has happened with 7/7 and other plots? Put
simply is there an issue of denial?
In some parts of the community, yes. In the mosque and elsewhere I got
the familiar depressing questions about who was really responsible for
9/11 and even 7/7. Dig a bit deeper and it all comes out. “CIA
plot…Jews told to leave the twin towers” - even when it comes to 7/7
“how do we know the suicide bomber videos are real and not fakes?”
Even if this is a view held by 5 or 10 per cent of British muslims -
and I suspect it is at least that – this is a real problem which we
have all got to get to grips with.
That said there is plenty of gritty realism too. There is a justifiable
anger amongst British muslims of Pakistani origin that so many
radicalising preachers come from abroad – Syria, Egypt and Jordan – and
yet so little has been done to deal with them.
The effect of all this on cohesion is depressing. One young businessman
told me that it had set back progress by at least a decade. Another
said that he felt constantly under suspicion and much less a welcome
and normal part of British life than before.
But after a group of us had discussed these difficult issues over
dinner, it was really striking that many of them came up to me
individually and pointed out that in fact they as a community don’t
talk about these things enough – that usually when they get together,
the conversation’s just about the normal everyday things, football and
so on, and that actually it’s really important for muslims to talk
about these issues more.
The two things that have struck me most? The first is the centrality of
education in all this. By far the most depressing meeting I had
yesterday was listening to the dedicated and hard-working school
governors talk about what was going on in their local secondary school.
That any school is only getting 15 per cent of 16 year olds through 5
good GCSE is deeply depressing and totally unacceptable. They blamed a
culture in the school which accepted low aspirations, as if kids in
poorer areas somehow couldn’t be expected to do well. That is a
disgusting attitude, and we’ve got to drive it right out of our
education system. If ever there was a case for zero tolerance this is
it Wherever such low standards and bad attitudes persist, schools
should be taken over or closed, period.
My final thought yesterday was that integration is a two way street.
Yes we can ask minority ethnic communities to work at integrating with
British society as a whole, but we have to recognise that it won’t
happen unless there’s something attractive to integrate into. Time
after time I heard people here talking about the uncivilised behaviour
and values that they see all around them. As I’ve said before, we can’t
just bully people into being more British, we’ve got to inspire them.
And frankly, there are many aspects of our society today which are
hardly inspiring – the drinking, the drug-taking, the rudeness and
incivility, the lack of consideration for others, anti-social
behaviour…we’ve got a serious fight on our hands to build a responsible
society that is the kind of society people admire and want to be part
of. I know we can do it because most people in this country, like the
people I’ve met here, are decent, hard-working and committed to their
communities. We’ve got to much more to make sure that those are the
values that win out.
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Balsall Heath photos
11/05/2007
Here are some photos from my stay in Balsall Heath in Birmingham, where I was living
in the house of a British Asian family.
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Why does a practising Muslim send his kids to a Jewish school?
11/05/2007
Spent the night staying with Abdullah and his family in Birmingham. His
children are a lot better behaved than mine (and older) so my sleep was
blissfully uninterrupted.
Breakfast with the family, before taking the children to school. Here’s
the interesting part – his three Muslim children go to a local faith
school - a Jewish faith school. King David Primary school, which is
massively oversubscribed, has a mixed roll with some 60 per cent of
pupils from Muslim families, around a third from Birmingham’s Jewish
community and the rest a mixture of Christians and Sikhs. The day
starts with some prayers in Hebrew, led by the head of Jewish religious
studies.
My obvious question to Abdullah – why do you, a practising Muslim, send
your kids to a Jewish school? – does not get just the obvious answer:
good discipline and good results. On top of that, the very fact that
the school has a faith and a strong ethos is seen, at least by Abdullah
and his family, as a positive advantage.
To those who think that faith schools are part of the problem and
prevent us from building a more cohesive society this tale has a
powerful message – far from being part of the problem, schools like
King David’s are actually part of the solution. They can promote
integration and cohesion, instil discipline, teach the basics, inspire
young minds and raise their aspirations – all at the same time.
Later in the day I visit a private Muslim school, the Al-Hira school.
Again, some Muslim schools, particularly private ones, have been
criticised for encouraging separateness, rather than shared values. I
quiz the head about this issue. She accepts that this is a problem in
some schools, but in her current job her answer is straightforward and
encouraging – her whole philosophy is about opening up the school to
the whole community, to dispel any suspicions there may be about “what
goes on there.” The school teaches the National Curriculum, and as I
walked round, meeting pupils and teachers, it was obvious – from the
wall charts about Shakespeare and Richard III to the confident and
outward-going manner of the kids – that this is a school that’s helping
to strengthen community cohesion, not undermine it.
In fact, the head teacher is totally committed to getting this school
into the state sector where it can expand, take more non-Muslim pupils
and have access to more resources The current fees are much lower than
usual for a private school, £1,500 a year, and that’s many thousands
less than the cost of a state school place.
Today Al-Hira’s pass rate at GCSE is 25 per cent. While that’s better
than the worst state schools it is still quite poor. The head is
confident that she can get it up to 50 and then 75 per cent. If she is
right then a new Muslim faith school in the state sector in this part
of Birmingham could, along with King David, play a valuable role in
tacking the acute shortage of good school places.
As for the rest of the day it’s made up of a number of visits, a few
meetings, filming a clip for webcameron about Tony Blair’s announcement
(finally!) of his departure timetable - and quite a bit of work.
The work includes cleaning up a city council owned car park with
members of the Balshall Heath Forum and volunteers, and helping take
the moss and grass off what ought to be a red dirt, all weather
football pitch. I also spend some more time behind the cash till in a
neighbourhood shop.
Cleaning the car park I come across a discarded syringe and needle.
While helping clear the football pitch I chat with an ex-con who’s now
living above a crack house which he says the police still haven’t
closed. But the story of how the Forum and its neighbourhood patrols
cleared a lot of the drug dealers and prostitutes off the streets is an
inspiring one. They literally refused to put up with them, picketing
the streets, posting the names of kerb crawlers to their wives and
offices and forcing the council to evict the drug dealers.
The ex-con (who is white) is still unconvinced, telling me the Forum is
just “Asians looking after their own.” I point out that the team
clearing the football pitch includes white people, British Asians and
Afro-Caribbeans working together, but he simply won’t listen to
anything that challenges his bone-headed racial stereotype. Depressing.
The nature of the community work raises an interesting question.
Where you have great community groups like the Forum doing things in
and for their local community, why is it so hard for them to get more
responsibility and more money?
Real devolution should mean giving them the right to say to the
council: “we’re carrying out useful work on behalf of the community
that we are doing in your place, and we’d like the resources that
should go with it.”
Put more simply, the last Conservative government gave council tenants
the right to own their council house; shouldn’t the next one give local
people, through such local forums, the right to own and run their
parks, community centres and public spaces?
It’s been a fascinating couple of days.
Saying goodbye to Abdullah at Birmingham New Street I’m embarrassed
with his gifts of T-shirts, shoes and a traditional robe which he says
will be perfect for any visit I make to Pakistan.
It’s yet another reminder that, as I blogged yesterday, integration is
a two way street and if we want to remind ourselves of British values –
hospitality, tolerance and generosity to name just three - there are
plenty of British Muslims ready to show us what those things really
mean.
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Life with a British Asian family in Birmingham
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In the shop (2/8)
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At the mosque (3/8)
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In the evening (4/8)
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Breakfast (5/8)
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The school run (6/8)
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The Muslim school (7/8)
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A new football pitch (8/8)
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