Immigration: 'If someone asks, I’m British, end of story’
As Ed Miliband apologises for Labour’s failure to stop segregation among immigrant communities, we look at two vastly different approaches to integration in east London
In the Eighties, journalists used to write about a south London road that
formed the border between two very different councils. One side was the then
hard-Left Lambeth, with hopeless public services and the capital’s highest
local tax bills. The identical houses opposite were in Thatcherite
Wandsworth, with highly efficient public services and at one point no local
taxes at all.
That sort of divide is much less sharp than it was. The political spectrum has
narrowed. Thanks to New Labour and gentrification, Lambeth and many other
formerly extreme Left‑wing councils have sharply raised their game.
But in the east of London, beside the Olympic Park, runs a new dividing line
between two local authorities – neighbouring councils with completely
different approaches to what may be the defining issue of this
quarter-century, as the state versus the free market was in the last. The
issue is race and national identity.
On the eastern, Olympic Stadium side of the line is Newham, officially
Britain’s least white borough. It is often said that the Olympics – when the
entire nation rooted for public-school rowers, comprehensive-school
cyclists, a Somali-born refugee and a mixed-race girl from Sheffield –
showed us for the first time who we now really are. But in the place where
the Games actually took place, even the colours of the London 2012 rainbow
are out of date.
According to the 2011 Census results published this week, just 16.7 per cent
of Newham residents defined themselves as white British. Almost a quarter of
all Newham households have no one who speaks English as their first
language. The new arrivals are not just Pakistanis, and Caribbeans, or
people from the old British Empire. They’re from everywhere now – from the
Congo, Latin America, Kazakhstan, places with no historic links to Britain
at all. In immigration, Newham is the frontline, the place where things
happen first.
Yet in Forest Gate, which is more than 90 per cent non-white, a giant Union
Jack flutters above the streets. Ethnic-language newspapers have been
removed from all the local libraries. The council says it no longer funds
any group that serves only one race or faith. A palpable, US-style policy of
integration is being pursued.
“We take a particular view of the society we want to build,” says Sir Robin Wales, the directly elected Labour mayor of Newham. “We really value diversity, but what we’ve said is that we are part of one English, or British, society. The people who have come here want the benefits of British society. Public funds should go to bring people together, not drive them apart.”
People who want to hold a community gathering, such as a street party, can get a small grant for it – but they have to invite everyone. The council itself holds much larger events that aim to encourage mixing. Despite what Wales calls “scandalous and disgraceful” government cuts to English-as-a-second-language classes, Newham is opening a language lab to teach its residents English. Anyone can have English classes for £1 a lesson. “If you can’t speak English, you’re not going to work,” says Wales. “You can’t be part of this society.”
In what may be a unique programme, every Year Five child in Newham gets free music lessons at school and a free musical instrument – which they can keep if they finish the course. The instruments available are the trumpet, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, flute, guitar or keyboard – essentially Western instruments – and the music they learn is predominantly Western.
Alan Craig was until recently a Newham councillor for the Christian People’s Alliance, and leader of the opposition in the borough. “I give Robin Wales no credit for anything, as you know,” he says. “But I think he does mean it [about integration]. My concern is not with the council. They keep doing the right stuff. My concern as a resident is the rapid growth of very traditional Islam. More and more women are wearing the full veil. I simply can’t buy non-halal meat here any more, I have to go to one of the supermarkets.”
Yet even the most ethnic-majority areas of Newham don’t feel like ghettoes. On Green Street, Upton Park, which is more than 90 per cent Asian, there are white people and Indians drinking in the Duke of Edinburgh pub and there are plenty of white faces on the street.
On the Barking Road, the main shopping parade of Canning Town, Ralph Cohen describes himself as the “last of the old guard”. His opticians, opened by his father in 1958, still has its original sign, complete with Fifties-style telephone number, ALB 4951. But on the Barking Road, almost everything else has changed utterly. ALB stood for Albert Docks: there are no docks these days, and no dockers either.
Mr Cohen now serves a hugely racially mixed clientele of current E16 locals – quite a few of whom, he says, come in with people to translate for them – and a Canning Town diaspora of white ex-residents, scattered to the four winds of Essex, north London and in one case Australia, who return to the place where they had their first eye tests in the days when Canning Town had pie and mash shops. “People who are new to a country are wary,” Ralph Cohen says. “They are naturally assuming that they are going to be ripped off. But if you can put people at ease, they learn to trust you. The minute you prejudge a customer, based on their race or whatever, you’ve blown it.”
There’s not much tension, he says, though the different groups tend not to mix. “The communities rub along. It’s surprisingly villagey.” And indeed, anyone mourning a lost East End of close-knit communities – where everyone knew everyone else’s business, where affairs were settled in extended families, where children were in and out of each others’ houses – should know that that Fifties East End has not, in fact, entirely disappeared. It’s just that the faces of the closeknit communities have changed colour.
Across the border, in the borough of Tower Hamlets, the demographics are fairly similar, and so are the problems. But the approach is completely different. The mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, has close links with an Islamic extremist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe, based at the large East London Mosque, which believes in turning Europe into a sharia state. He was deselected by the Labour Party for these links and was elected mayor as an independent, on a tiny turnout, with the heavy assistance of the IFE.
Mr Rahman’s ruling council cabinet is 100 per cent Bengali, in a borough where Bengalis make up only about a third of the population. While Newham will not fund projects aimed at just one community, Tower Hamlets pours enormous sums into Bengali-only drugs projects, arts projects, youth projects and lunch clubs – many of them run by front organisations of the IFE. Other groups are funded too, though less generously, but again more often in racial and faith silos than on any kind of general, community-wide basis.
While Newham pays for recent immigrants to learn English, Tower Hamlets, incredibly, pays enormous sums for British-born children, who have grown up speaking English, to learn Bengali. Since his election two years ago, Mr Rahman has sought to “Islamicise” Tower Hamlets, clamping down on strip clubs and a gay pub. And he has just launched a “community faith buildings support scheme” to pour further millions into religious organisations – substantially, though not exclusively, mosques.
Robin Wales, like many other Labour people, will not deal with Rahman and admits that what he sees across the border has helped spur his policy in Newham. “You look at the community faith buildings grants and you ask yourself, what’s going on?” he says. “Lutfur is following policies that will not benefit anyone in the future. I’m extremely worried that you create an enclave, and whenever you have segregation it is an unmitigated disaster.”
What is perhaps most encouraging is that Wales’s policy of integration appears to have the strong support of the people of Newham. There was relatively little push-back against the ending of ethnic grants. In Green Street, the only concern of many locals was that the policy did not go far enough. “In India, they never want to know what faith you are when you fill out a form. They do here,” said Suresh Rami, in one restaurant I visited. “But if someone asks me, I’m British, end of story.”
Last month came perhaps the most important litmus test yet for the council’s approach. A fundamentalist Islamic sect, Tablighi Jamaat, sought planning permission for a hugely controversial “megamosque,” with space for more than 12,000 worshippers, on a site in West Ham. It could have become the Newham equivalent of the IFE’s East London Mosque, in Tower Hamlets.
Planning permission was refused.
“We take a particular view of the society we want to build,” says Sir Robin Wales, the directly elected Labour mayor of Newham. “We really value diversity, but what we’ve said is that we are part of one English, or British, society. The people who have come here want the benefits of British society. Public funds should go to bring people together, not drive them apart.”
People who want to hold a community gathering, such as a street party, can get a small grant for it – but they have to invite everyone. The council itself holds much larger events that aim to encourage mixing. Despite what Wales calls “scandalous and disgraceful” government cuts to English-as-a-second-language classes, Newham is opening a language lab to teach its residents English. Anyone can have English classes for £1 a lesson. “If you can’t speak English, you’re not going to work,” says Wales. “You can’t be part of this society.”
In what may be a unique programme, every Year Five child in Newham gets free music lessons at school and a free musical instrument – which they can keep if they finish the course. The instruments available are the trumpet, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, flute, guitar or keyboard – essentially Western instruments – and the music they learn is predominantly Western.
Alan Craig was until recently a Newham councillor for the Christian People’s Alliance, and leader of the opposition in the borough. “I give Robin Wales no credit for anything, as you know,” he says. “But I think he does mean it [about integration]. My concern is not with the council. They keep doing the right stuff. My concern as a resident is the rapid growth of very traditional Islam. More and more women are wearing the full veil. I simply can’t buy non-halal meat here any more, I have to go to one of the supermarkets.”
Yet even the most ethnic-majority areas of Newham don’t feel like ghettoes. On Green Street, Upton Park, which is more than 90 per cent Asian, there are white people and Indians drinking in the Duke of Edinburgh pub and there are plenty of white faces on the street.
On the Barking Road, the main shopping parade of Canning Town, Ralph Cohen describes himself as the “last of the old guard”. His opticians, opened by his father in 1958, still has its original sign, complete with Fifties-style telephone number, ALB 4951. But on the Barking Road, almost everything else has changed utterly. ALB stood for Albert Docks: there are no docks these days, and no dockers either.
Mr Cohen now serves a hugely racially mixed clientele of current E16 locals – quite a few of whom, he says, come in with people to translate for them – and a Canning Town diaspora of white ex-residents, scattered to the four winds of Essex, north London and in one case Australia, who return to the place where they had their first eye tests in the days when Canning Town had pie and mash shops. “People who are new to a country are wary,” Ralph Cohen says. “They are naturally assuming that they are going to be ripped off. But if you can put people at ease, they learn to trust you. The minute you prejudge a customer, based on their race or whatever, you’ve blown it.”
There’s not much tension, he says, though the different groups tend not to mix. “The communities rub along. It’s surprisingly villagey.” And indeed, anyone mourning a lost East End of close-knit communities – where everyone knew everyone else’s business, where affairs were settled in extended families, where children were in and out of each others’ houses – should know that that Fifties East End has not, in fact, entirely disappeared. It’s just that the faces of the closeknit communities have changed colour.
Across the border, in the borough of Tower Hamlets, the demographics are fairly similar, and so are the problems. But the approach is completely different. The mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, has close links with an Islamic extremist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe, based at the large East London Mosque, which believes in turning Europe into a sharia state. He was deselected by the Labour Party for these links and was elected mayor as an independent, on a tiny turnout, with the heavy assistance of the IFE.
Mr Rahman’s ruling council cabinet is 100 per cent Bengali, in a borough where Bengalis make up only about a third of the population. While Newham will not fund projects aimed at just one community, Tower Hamlets pours enormous sums into Bengali-only drugs projects, arts projects, youth projects and lunch clubs – many of them run by front organisations of the IFE. Other groups are funded too, though less generously, but again more often in racial and faith silos than on any kind of general, community-wide basis.
While Newham pays for recent immigrants to learn English, Tower Hamlets, incredibly, pays enormous sums for British-born children, who have grown up speaking English, to learn Bengali. Since his election two years ago, Mr Rahman has sought to “Islamicise” Tower Hamlets, clamping down on strip clubs and a gay pub. And he has just launched a “community faith buildings support scheme” to pour further millions into religious organisations – substantially, though not exclusively, mosques.
Robin Wales, like many other Labour people, will not deal with Rahman and admits that what he sees across the border has helped spur his policy in Newham. “You look at the community faith buildings grants and you ask yourself, what’s going on?” he says. “Lutfur is following policies that will not benefit anyone in the future. I’m extremely worried that you create an enclave, and whenever you have segregation it is an unmitigated disaster.”
What is perhaps most encouraging is that Wales’s policy of integration appears to have the strong support of the people of Newham. There was relatively little push-back against the ending of ethnic grants. In Green Street, the only concern of many locals was that the policy did not go far enough. “In India, they never want to know what faith you are when you fill out a form. They do here,” said Suresh Rami, in one restaurant I visited. “But if someone asks me, I’m British, end of story.”
Last month came perhaps the most important litmus test yet for the council’s approach. A fundamentalist Islamic sect, Tablighi Jamaat, sought planning permission for a hugely controversial “megamosque,” with space for more than 12,000 worshippers, on a site in West Ham. It could have become the Newham equivalent of the IFE’s East London Mosque, in Tower Hamlets.
Planning permission was refused.
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