Let's not bow to the book burners of Brick Lane

The actors are so good you forget they're actors. The director, Sarah Gavron, shows on her first feature that she can handle the loneliness of immigrants and Muslim fears of a backlash after 9/11 with intelligence and irony. As Nazneen thinks about having an affair, Brief Encounter plays on the television screen in her deck-access flat in the East End. And I left Soho thinking that objecting to Brick Lane was indeed as absurd as objecting to Brief Encounter.

How little I understood my own country. I picked up the papers yesterday to find that the spineless Prince Charles had cancelled the Royal Film Performance of this sensitive and in the end rather traditionalist story, for fear that the gala performance would attract protests.

Policemen who leave children to drown in ponds show greater courage than the man who would be king. Even if there were grounds to protest against a film, it should be defended to the hilt, but there are none.

True, self-appointed "community leaders" stopped the crew filming in Brick Lane and threatened to burn Ali's novel last summer. They claimed the film would show Bengalis infested with lice. It doesn't. That it would insult them. And it doesn't do that either. Their bluff was called during one demonstration, when a young Asian man stepped forward to ask if the protesters had actually read the book. Their furious reaction suggested they hadn't.

As so often, the intelligentsia behaved worst of all. Presented with the sight of old men demanding the censorship of the ideas of a young woman, the former feminist Germaine Greer came out on the side of the book burners. She explained that Monica Ali was deeply suspect because she wrote in English and thus inflicted her sinful British sensibility on the hapless Bengalis of the East End.

Salman Rushdie, who has been at the sharp end of lethal attempts to silence novelists, accurately accused her of a kind of racism. "To suit Greer, the British-Bangladeshi Ali is denied her heritage and belittled for her Britishness," he wrote, "while her British-Bangladeshi critics are denied that same Britishness, which most of them would certainly insist was theirs by right."

After all this time, do you still need to know what is wrong with Germaine Greer and Charles Windsor? The short answer is that if we don't take them on, London will be balkanised into mono-cultural ghettos too frightened to tell stories to each other for fear of offending opportunist reactionaries and their royal backers.

To read the whole of Nick Cohen's column, buy Wednesday's Evening Standard