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Identity
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Monday, 29 January 2007 |
Paul Goodman is Conservative MP for Wycombe.
Last summer, my Wycombe constituency found itself in the media
spotlight after the alleged airplane bomb plot. Four of my constituents
were held. Two have been charged with serious offences. As I write, a
local school which bars the niqab or veil for both educational and
social reasons is facing a human rights court battle with a
legally-aided parent.
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Identity
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Monday, 29 January 2007 |
Evening Standard
By Joe Murphy
David Cameron today attacked radical Muslims as "the mirror image" of the neo-Nazi British National Party.
He used a keynote speech on race and integration to signal plans for tough measures against extremists on both sides.
Attacking the BNP for preaching "pure hate", he went on: "And those who
seek a Sharia state, or special treatment and a separate law for
British Muslims are, in many ways, the mirror image of the BNP.
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Identity
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Sunday, 28 January 2007 |
Conservative Party
David Cameron
David Cameron today delivered a keynote speech on community cohesion to local residents in Lozells, Birmingham. He said:
"It's
an honour to be here with you today, to pay tribute to the work that
you're all doing to bring this community together and to keep it
together, to move forward together.
What you're doing here, we have to do all across our country.
And that's what I want to talk about today.
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Identity
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Saturday, 27 January 2007 |
Prospect Magazine
Francis Fukuyama
Modern liberal societies have weak collective identities. Postmodern elites, especially in Europe, feel that they have evolved beyond identities defined by religion and nation. But if our societies cannot assert positive liberal values, they may be challenged by migrants who are more sure of who they are
Modern identity politics springs from a hole in the political theory underlying liberal democracy. That hole is liberalism's silence about the place and significance of groups. The line of modern political theory that begins with Machiavelli and continues through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the American founding fathers understands the issue of political freedom as one that pits the state against individuals rather than groups. Hobbes and Locke, for example, argue that human beings possess natural rights as individuals in the state of nature—rights that can only be secured through a social contract that prevents one individual's pursuit of self-interest from harming others.
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Identity
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Friday, 26 January 2007 |
The Independent
Who, recalling how Cherie avoided VAT on pearls, would think it wrong to snaffle a BMW gearbox?
Comedy, so the Glaswegian comic Arnold Brown used to tell his audiences, and perhaps still does, is all about timing. "You're here tonight, I'm here tonight," he'd go on. "Perfect timing!" Politics, on the other hand, in these dog days of this dismal administration, is all about mistiming. So it is that New Labour chooses a gruesome low point in the country's self-esteem to revisit the matter of "teaching the core values of Britishness".
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Identity
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Friday, 26 January 2007 |
The Independent
How come such an ugly and ill-defined word as Britishness has come to occupy such a central place in ministerial thinking? The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, has been harping on about Britishness for more than a year now. David Blunkett was very partial to the concept, introducing the citizenship test when he was at the Home Office. And yesterday it was the turn of the Education Secretary, Alan Johnson. He accepted the findings of a review by Sir Keith Ajegbo, recommending that "understanding core British values" should be at the heart of a new school history syllabus.
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Identity
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Wednesday, 24 January 2007 |
The Guardian
National identity
Britishness is extremely important to the Scot Gordon Brown - but on the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union between England and Scotland it means less and less to the people whom he aspires to lead. That is the uncomfortably disjunctive finding, for the chancellor at least, of the latest British Social Attitudes survey this morning. It is less than two weeks since Mr Brown made his latest flag-waving call for a Britishness defined "at its core by common values and shared interests that in turn shape our institutions". This morning's new survey, however, finds that the tide of modern feeling is moving in a very different direction indeed.
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Identity
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Monday, 22 January 2007 |
The Guardian
Martin Jacques
The foul-mouthed abuse on Big Brother shows how little we understand about prejudice, and the world judges us for it
So, thank God, Jade has been evicted. Imagine if she hadn't, that Shilpa had walked the plank? It would have represented a popular endorsement of flagrant racism. The extraordinary fact, of course, is that no one, or virtually no one, ever owns up to racism.
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Identity
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Friday, 19 January 2007 |
The Guardian
Mark Lawson
Celebrity Big Brother
Racism may have been outlawed from our TV screens, but that doesn't mean it has gone away
Imagine that, earlier this week, the duty producer on Celebrity Big Brother, editing the tapes for that night's highlight show, had called over a superior and said: "Better look at this, guv." Listening to the conversations between Jade Goody and Danielle Lloyd, the executive utters that sacred word of broadcasting caution, "Ooh-er!", and decides that these scenes violate the regulation warning television against screening racially inflammatory material.
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Identity
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Friday, 19 January 2007 |
The Guardian
John Pilger
The social regression and flag-waving promoted by Australia's neocon prime minister may come unstuck in Guantánamo
The Australian writer Donald Horne meant the title of his celebrated book, The Lucky Country, as irony. "Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck," he lamented in 1964, describing much of the Australian elite as unfailingly unoriginal, race-obsessed and in thrall to imperial power and its wars. From Britain's opium adventures to America's current travesty in Iraq, Australians have been sent to fight faraway people with whom they have no quarrel and who offer no threat of invasion. Growing up, I was assured this was a "sacred tradition".
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