Trying Something New

[Ibtisam]

David Cameron has spent the last week living with a Muslim family in Birmingham, following recent arrests and unrest in the communityAlthough it is a good step in the right direction Do you guys think he is sincere, if so is he not opening himself up for abuse and lobbying from pro Israel lobby, BNP, Gay rights, you name it!

 

With Blair and Labour as unpopular as ever amongst Muslims, this is very much Cameron's opportunity.

 

 

Anywa Below is a bit form his Blog

 

Trying Something New

 

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.

 

Spelling mistake David That should read, "We’ve got to do much more to make sure that those are the values that win out"