Don't blame multiculturalism

Both men are prominent, powerful public figures and their views make front-page news. The damage they are causing to good race relations cannot be underestimated.

Serialising his book A Home from Home in the Daily Mail, Alagiah warns that what he calls race relations diktats have created "ring-fenced" communities and "may be fuelling homegrown terrorism". Given that Alagiah is seen as a distinguished journalist, one might expect a robust analysis of why he believes multiculturalism has gone so badly wrong as to possibly produce terrorists.

He bases his thesis on a number of local authorities that have spent public money promoting - shock horror! - equality, and diversity. Worse still, according to Alagiah, some have put money aside for British-born Bangladeshis, so that they can maintain their parents' mother tongue, for example.

These are his only concrete examples of what he sees as negative multiculturalist policies; the rest of his examples as to why communities are segregated have more to do with racism and social inequality than with the ideals of multiculturalism. A whole page, for example is dedicated to Joshua Theobold, whom Alagiah describes as a "white" child and "a stranger in his own land". This is because 92% of Joshua's fellow students at the Mayflower school in East London are Bangladeshi, and unlike his own and other white parents, Bangladeshis do not allow their children to have "sleepovers".

But surely a more pertinent question for Alagiah to have investigated would have been: how did a white, working-class area with some of the poorest housing in the country become predominantly Bangladeshi? The answer would not be found in the ideals of multiculturism but rather in social mobility and the phenomenon of "white flight".

Running with the premise that multiculturism has isolated communities, Aligiah travels to Bradford, where he finds a Pakistani taxi driver who has lived in Bradford for 15 years and whose command of the English language can only be described as poor. "English no good," the driver laments. "All man in textile is Asia."

"All man in textile is Asia "might have been a clue for a seasoned hack to investigate a little more; not so for Alagiah. That route would have led him to see what was a commercial imperative for the northern textile industry during the booming 80s, in which companies sought cheap labour from abroad to keep their machines running 24/7. The policy of many companies was to employ Pakistanis to work the unpalatable nightshift while the indigenous employees worked by day. The local authorities exacerbated community segregation by housing the migrant workforce in the already rundown Victorian terraced houses while re-housing white communities in what were then new council estates. There was no multicultural dream for the northern mill towns; just old-fashioned racism and exploitative factory owners.

What Alagiah and Phillips have done with this "straw man" debate about multiculturalism has been to shift the emphasis away from the real challenge, which is fighting social inequality, intolerance and racism, as well as the unprecedented demonising of Muslims for what can only be described as not being British enough. Alagiah and Phillips both know there are many isolated or enclosed communities: Hindu, Jewish, Sikh and Chinese, not to mention gated white communities and countryside ones. The fundamental difference between these and many Muslim communities, which may help us understand why the politics of extremism finds fertile ground, is gross social inequality and the feeling of being constantly under attack.