What does our shared future look like?
Community cohesion and intercultural tension is the defining issue of our time. It was a hot debate five years ago, and it’s as hot, if not hotter today.
Five years ago the Cantle Report was published in an effort to investigate the roots of a series of race riots across the UK in 2001. Today, whilst Hamas captured Fatah’s HQ and overran Gaza, the Commission for Cohesion and Integration in the UK published ‘Our Shared Future’ (http://www.integrationandcohesion.org.uk/Ourfinalreport.aspx).
So what does our shared future look like and how are the debates different today to those of 2002? Some debates remain the same, such as the call for greater citizenship and the controversial ‘lessons in British-ness’ and more English language lessons for immigrants. We’ve seen this manifest itself in citizenship education in schools. Is it working? Or is citizenship the new General Studies – a seemingly pointless qualification that we all had to get, but never quite knew what it was or how it would help us?
Provision for immigrants to learn English (never mind Englishness) still seems to be sadly lacking. My own experience of working with refugees and asylum seekers is that many are desperate to learn English, but the classes available to them are so few and far between, that a meaningful education in the English language is nigh on impossible to get, making getting into employment even more difficult.
An interesting new twist in today’s report is the emphasis on localism. The new fear for tension in communities due to mass immigration is in our rural communities, with a wave of migrant workers making their way to our country towns and villages to work in service industries in tourist areas, and on farms and in factories. Whilst there is definitely apprehension about the changes this will bring to communities that have remained relatively unchanged for generations, there is also starting to be some murmurs of optimism from commentators who recognise that this could be the very thing to reinvigorate our rural economies. Personally, I think it’s high time our rural renaissance got underway, and if handled positively this could be a great opportunity for rural communities.