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Classical rhetoric gives us the concept of kairos, or "timeliness". The PM could have done with some of that, having just given a talk on how multiculturalism fosters militant Islam within hours of English Defence League thugs stomping through Luton shouting "Who the f*** is Allah?"
Timing does matter in the race relations game. An unimpeachably theoretical discussion, depending on context, can be incendiary. Defenders of Enoch Powell rightly point out that he didn't say "One, two, three, four, I declare a race war!" He said (to paraphrase): "I'm worried it will all kick off if we carry on like this." But the two aren't as easily separable as all that. Think of the man in the pub who tells you: "Look, this is a rough old boozer and your face don't fit. Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't lay a finger on you. But I can't vouch for my mates over there..."
Mr Cameron, mind you, speaks in good faith. And he articulates a widely held anxiety: that the passage from separate to separatist, separatist to extremist, extremist to terrorist, is an established one; and that the "hands-off tolerance" of bien-pensants eases that passage.
Personally, I'm quite in favour of "hands-off tolerance". In fact, I'd say "hands-off" is pretty much the definition of tolerance. "Hands-on tolerance," or perhaps "clear-off tolerance", is the sort of tolerance the EDL wishes to extend to Muslim Britons.
When the PM says we shouldn't fund jihadi youth clubs, or treat Islamic fascists as spokesmen for their co-religionists, we're as one. But where he says we need an "active, muscular liberalism" that "believes in certain values and actively promotes them", we part ways. Insisting that people hold certain values is not the job of even someone as important as the Prime Minister. It's an impertinence to imagine it's in his gift, and dangerous folly to seek to achieve it by state fiat. "Britishness" is the sum of everything British people think, say and do: not a handful of ideas politicians decide are good for us and administer like a dose of cod-liver oil.
Closed ethnic communities may not be to your taste but unless you can imagine a policy remedy that isn't insane - racial housing quotas or banning the public speaking of Urdu, say - you have to live with them. Separatists are citizens too.
What you are entitled to expect is that the law of the land - not some idea, or some "British value", but the law -applies as absolutely within them as it does everywhere else. And the law, lest we forget, forbids violence, hate-speech, oppression of women and the building of bombs out of fertiliser.
It's frustrating to think that it's only at this point that the state can intervene, but there are good reasons why we don't have "pre-crime" police. You can't make people love each other, and you shouldn't try to.
Spare us Heston's diet of worms
To improve nutrition at an NHS hospital, Heston Blumenthal has been serving children pizza with - wait for it - deep-fried worms. He saw the cheese-and-tomato pizzas, he says, and thought: "Where's the protein?" What's more natural, easily come by and nutritious than worms? Apart from mince, obviously. To dispel the suspicion that he was more interested in the connection between worms and column inches than between worms and child nutrition, do you think there could be a week or two in which we don't hear anything wacky from Mr Blumenthal? As all great chefs have known, "surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die".
It's not worth getting in a tizz over Top Gear
At the more absurd end of the culture wars comes the attempt to make Top Gear a test case for new anti-discrimination laws after its presenter Richard Hammond suggested that Mexicans are "lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus".
Steve Coogan has condemned the show while the head of the Equalities Commission, Trevor Phillips, has said that the commission "does not need to respond to every bit of schoolboy provocation on the BBC".
The way this is presented is as a choice between one of two things: a pro-Top Gear and an anti-Top Gear position. But that's to miss the most important distinction. Coogan expressed disappointment and irritation with what was said. That's right on: but it is very far from endorsing the idea that such remarks should be banned by force of law, and the programme taken off the air.
Mr Phillips isn't any more impressed by the joke. But he makes to me what seems the reasonable point that if we can't tell the difference between puerility and hate, we're likely to waste a lot of ammunition shooting at paper tigers.
A refreshingly erotic journey
Isabella Rossellini's series of explicit short films about the sex lives of animals are now being shown at the Natural History Museum. Dressed in paper hats and body stockings, she impersonates the erotic transports of bees, barnacles, a duck, and an anchovy.
How lovely it is to see the dotty
old thing thriving. Her example should be a beacon to TV presenters cashiered by sexist dinosaurs at the BBC.
Reader views (4)
"You can't force Britishness on everyone, Dave"
If immigrants don't come to the UK to be British, what DID they come for? To colonise? If the Brits did it in the past and "It was 'bad'", how is it right in reverse? Vengeance? "Fair's fair". "Tit-for-tat"?
Here's another one for you, "Two wrongs don't make a right".
Did they come to milk the system, as suggested in the headline grabbing examples we're all so familiar with, unrepresentative though they probably are!? Or did they come because even living on the bottom rung socially in the UK is better than the life they left behind. Unfortunately, the aforementioned bottom rung IS benefits supported and thus DOES affect the tax-paying host population. Said host population MUST therefore have a say in who comes and who does not, it is THEIR house after all - the least requirement logically being that they come to Britain to BE British, not just an enclave of the nation they left behind but in more amenable surroundings.
Each foreign enclave that demands recognition as other than British is a hole in the social fabric that IS Britain. That isn't a race issue. It isn't a religious issue. It isn't a '(s)he speaks with a funny accent', or 'wears traditional clothing designed for life elsewhere' issue. It is one of people coming and telling the host how they, the newcomer EXPECT to be treated, no matter how it affects the host's own lives, no matter the cost.
Yes Sam, they should be required to be Brits.
- Rogan, Irving, 08/02/2011 00:01
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Leith, you are a fool. Nobody is saying if I go to live in Münich I have to ponce up and down all day long wearing Lederhosen and a hat with a feather in it.
- Gresham, Marbella Spain, 07/02/2011 22:57
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You tell him Terry!
As I,a foreigner living and working in the UK, feel it is my duty to abide by the laws and customs of this country. Because this country allowed my legal entry and helped me get my feet on the ground; so I don't bite the hand that feeds me.
Respect UK.
- Katerina, London, 07/02/2011 19:12
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Aye Leith,
And why the frig not? If you were anywhere else in the world and you tried to impose your customs or values on someone else's culture you would get short shift, and would be told, if you were not banged up first, where you could stuff your views, why should we as a nation, accept anything less.
- terry, london, 07/02/2011 17:08
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