Revolutionary Conservative Party?
BBC Question Time is, in many people’s rosy-tinted hindsight, a shadow of its former self. The same old routine platitudes are spouted week in, week out by members of the two major parties, like the same episode of a bad soap opera set to constant repeat. Occasionally there’s a comic turn from some fringe figure or other who at least has the value of winding everybody else up, but by and large the standards of debate are not high. I usually have it on in the background whilst reading something else, like televisual wallpaper.
However this week my attention was drawn back by Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi’s spectacular attack on the Government’s community relations strategy, specifically their habit of giving out grants to projects and bodies run by self-appointed “community leaders” from minority groups in the UK. This was all in the light of the Al-Muhajiroun (cough, sorry I mean “Ahle Sunnah al Jamah”) demonstration in Luton earlier this week, where that particular miniscule group of weird extremists once again achieved the feat of making themselves even more unpopular with all communities in the UK by staging a protest which included such incisive slogans as “”Anglian soldiers go to hell”, and other not-at-all stereotypical remarks.
Warsi agreed that Al-Muhajiroun did have the right to protest, but made it quite explicit that she thought they were “fringe nutters” who had nothing to do with the sentiments felt by most people in the UK who define themselves as Muslim, including those (the majority) who opposed the war in Iraq. Indeed, she herself opposed that war, and by her own testimony has marched against it. What she did object to however was the way in which groups proclaiming themselves as representatives of “mainstream” Muslims, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, are feted by the Government and legitimised in that role of “community leaders” via patronage, consultation and project funding. Muslim people in the UK do not have a “leader” she said, any more than white people do or indeed than any other community does. In fact, at this point I had to remind myself that I was in fact watching a Tory rather than a progressive raging against the patronising nature of a “multiculturalism” which thinks that people from minority communities can only enter general political discourse via a “gatekeeper” who is almost always a religious or political conservative bigwig of one kind or another. Then she used an interesting word – “state multiculturalism”.
“State Multiculturalism” is a favoured term of some amongst the members of the ex-Revolutionary Communist Party who went on to found the Manifesto Club, the Institute of Ideas and various other libertarian political bodies after that party’s Leninist-disciplined turn away from its own structures in 1997. Specifically, one of their number, Munira Mirza, who now works in the Mayor of London’s office under Boris Johnson, has written specifically on the subject. Her 2007 report “Living apart Together:British Muslims and the Paradox of Multiculturalism”, co-written with Abi Senthilkumaran and Zein Ja’far, specifically calls for British Muslims to be engaged with as individual and autonomous citizens rather than as a “faith group” via those self-appointed “community leaders” of whom the Government (and some of the left) are so fond. Another ex-RCP’er, Kenan Malik, has an article on a similar subject in this week’s New Statesman, referring to the historical consequences of the Satanic Verses affair. In the course of the article Malik argues that the furore following from Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie gave various groups affiliated to Jamaat-i-Islami the impetus to form the core of the Muslim Council of Britain, and also gave both Government and liberal commentators the spur that they needed to accept the entirely unrepresentative MCB as “the voice of British Muslims”.
Sounds remarkably like Warsi, does it not?
In many ways it’s quite unremarkable that a libertarian social policy which has the added attraction of being better than the utter sham which constitutes the Government’s desperate attempts to preserve reservoirs of inner city votes which are under threat following the Iraq war community relations strategy, would appeal to the Tories. After all it can only be appealing to the great untapped reserve of educated, socially liberal, economically right-wing voters in the 20-35-ish bracket who constitute a huge bloc which would already be voting Tory if they didn’t still have a certain aversion to slogans like the infamous “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” campaign.
What is interesting though, is why they appear to be taking an ex-Trot group of right-wing libertarians so seriously. I’d always taken the employment of Mirza to be a stunt on the part of Boris Johnson’s publicity-hound press office, but to see Warsi mirroring her terms in depth brought to mind the question as to who is playing whom. David Cameron has used the same language as Warsi in the not-too-distant past, and I certainly find it a stretch to believe that such terminology comes naturally to him. Could this be a case of entry politics gone rootless? Enquiring minds want to know.
Shiraz Socialist 
Dr Paul said,
March 15, 2009 at 12:13 pm
I have no memory of Ms Mirza as a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party. I was still attending the occasional meeting of the (by then) severely depleted RCP in the mid-1990s, including the last summer school in 1997, and I have no memory of her being there. I imagine that she joined the ex-RCP afterwards. I may, of course, just have not noticed her. Having seen her on the telly, she certainly possesses or has adopted all the charming mannerisms of the ‘old firm’, so that side of cadre-training still is in operation.
I don’t think that there are more than two dozen actual old RCPers around Spiked; they are either the bulk of the core of the latter-day leadership along with the odd partner or friend with nowhere else to go, or people, very few in number, who were attracted to the RCP when it was clearly going off the rails in its death-throes. They have since picked up a few students at colleges where the elders are teaching, and a few strays via the internet.
Actually, much of what the ex-RCP says about official multiculturalism is sound stuff. Kenan Malik’s book The Meaning of Race has a very good analysis of the theoretical background to it, showing that in its treatment of ‘cultures’ as immutable, discrete historical factors, it shares the same basis as the now-discredited ‘scientific racism’. The British National Party shares the same theory, as it also sees British culture (whatever that is) as an immutable, discrete historical factor.
The Tories are critical of official multi-culturalism on the grounds that it helps to dissolve national cohesion; Britain becomes a conglomerate of discrete cultures with nothing to hold it together. Socialists should be critical of it because it splits up the working class along non-class lines; it denies that, say, Bengali Muslims have any shared interests (other than a vague idea of a shared humanity) with, say, Christian West Indians.
Spiked, of course, with no political programme and no perspective other than trying to get its ideas adopted by anyone who wishes to hire its writers, has no alternative to official multi-culturalism, other than the vague idea of a shared humanity promoted by the multi-cultural lobby — now that’s a real irony. But that does not invalidate its critique of official multi-culturalism, which is theoretically sound.
voltairespriest said,
March 15, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Absolutely.
I think what’s interesting about the ex-RCP is precisely that it seems to still be operating on a cadre basis, albeit all the while claiming to have disbanded etc. I can remember when I was a student (and for years thereafter) they kept popping up on Channel 4 – which according to people who were formerly around that group from my university, is also no co-incidence.
I do wonder though if that’s what they’re doing with the Tories. Obviously the roots of the two groups’ motives for critiquing state multi-culturalism (I quite like that term) are different, however they do dove-tail remarkably well in practice.
As I say, listening to Warsi at points I could actually have been listening to a member of the ex-RCP, rather than a Tory. I’m wondering whether that is entirely a co-incidence or not.
MH said,
March 15, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Dr Paul, I think you’re mistaken about that. If you look at the Battle of Ideas organizing committee, there’s got to be two dozen former RCP members on there.
By the way, since the government’s crackdown on prostitution is a concern of this blog, here’s Spiked’s commissioning editor at Comment is Free: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/13/prostitution-humantrafficking