which has caused extensive controversy across the political spectrum. As a key and long-standing ally of Tony Blair, Phillips' words not only indicate his own thinking, but that of his friends in government. TERRY CONWAY reports. A want the who point of the CRE. sked whether multiculturalism
Phillips responded "The word is not useful, it means the wrong things."
Shall we kill it off? "Yes, let's do that," he replies. "Multiculturalism suggests separateness. We are in a different world from the Seventies. "What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society, one in which people are equal under the law, where there are some common values - democracy rather than violence, the common currency of the English language, honouring the culture of these islands, like Shakespeare and Dickens" he continued.
Is he right?
Has the world - or even Britain - changed for the better since the 1970's?
Ask the families who lost loved ones in the New Cross Fire where yet again, 23 years after the fire, an open verdict was returned? The movement in response to the New Cross fire was one of the triggers of the subsequent black uprising in Brixton that followed on its heels.
Ask Doreen Lawrence, who heard this week that the Crown Prosecution Service will not be charging anyone with Stephen's murder despite the fact they say they know Andrew who killed him. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry is frequently trumpeted as being a turning point in race relations, but no one has been brought to justice for this racist murder.
Ask anyone who saw the Rough Justice programme on the last eleven minutes of Christopher Alder's life as he lay dying in a Hull police station. Christopher's sister Janet and other supporters have been fighting for justice since his death in 1998.
Ask the Kurdish Manchester, where 10 people picked up on suspicion of terrorism were all released without charge. Their "crime" was being in possession of Manchester United tickets - in fact for games that had already happened!
Ask the families and friends of those detained without charge in Belmarsh on suspicion of terrorist activities
Ask asylum seekers and migrants, imprisoned without charge, deprived of both benefits and the right to work.
Ask the Chinese cockle pickers forced back to the treacherous sands Morecambe Bay for lack of any other way to scrimp together even the most basic income.
These are just some of the stories of racism that have headlined in the national press in the last month. The reality is that racism is as much a problem today as it was thirty years ago. The ultimate logic of rejecting multiculturalism is brutishly spelled out by the far right: they don't want integration, either!
some things have got worse. Those that have community
roots of racism are much deeper than individual prejudice but lie within class society and in particular its imperialist phase. turalism was not something that was particuthe black communities or the left when it first became common parlance in the 1970s and early 80s. wanted to see explicit opposition to racism of and its imperialist roots as part of the curriculum. allow us that victory, but on the other hand black self-organisation was strong enough that the establishment could not get away with merely waxing lyrical about the civilising" effect of British imperialism.
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22 soclalst resistance May 2004 rejection of capitalism as such but of the support localisation, of course. We don't renationalisation does not appear in the