Ruth Kelly's masking tape won't stick  Darcus Howe
  Published 14 June 2007
    
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  The ill-conceived Commission on Integration and Cohesion is a weight around our necks
  I am completely at sea about Ruth Kelly's Commission on Integration and Cohesion and, as with all political structures, the central issue is always who is doing what to whom, how and why. I have been floundering on these matters from the moment this bureaucratic monster was announced.
  Frivolously, I have formed a picture in my mind of Kelly drifting hither and thither, dressed in a pinafore, armed with a pair of scissors and masking tape, sticking together those forces whom racism has rent asunder.
  We are told that the idea emerged after Oldham and other northern towns went up in flames. In 2000 I made a series for Channel 4 - White Tribe - in which, after speaking with Britons from the white cliffs of Dover to the Isle of Skye, I predicted, following a visit to Oldham, that some areas were tinderboxes on the verge of social explosion. Competition for public housing, jobs and school places were at the core of this mess. Bureaucrats and politicians from Oldham tore into my conclusions in a letter to the New Statesman, in response to an article I wrote. Not long after, Oldham and Bradford were on fire.
  A flurry of activity followed: reports were commissioned and produced. In sum, Asians had isolated themselves, with their minds in Pakistan and their bodies in the north of England. They must be compelled to reintegrate.
  Regeneration followed regeneration, funds aplenty were dispensed and the same old same old persists. The Commission for Equality and Human Rights was formed, which will supersede the other equality bodies, including the Commission for Racial Equality, from October. Only a few days ago, a white male popped up on my television screen telling us he was happy with Channel 4's decisiveness in expelling the airhead, Emily, from the Big Brother house.
  In the Observer of 10 June, a Darra Singh popped up to tell us what his new toy has to offer. He is the chairman of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, which he describes as "my" Commission - his personal possession, as it were. Singh boasts that he will publish tests which public bodies should apply when making decisions about whether to provide translated material for those who have difficulty with bureaucratic jargon. And where savings are made by cutting translation services, they should be reinvested in English lessons both for newcomers and for settled communities.
  Singh is not afraid, he insists, to consider a compulsory national service for voluntary work to be carried out by young people. He ought to be told that without compulsion we have, in our own communities, run supplementary schools for free, run advice centres on a shoestring, campaigned for the murderers of Stephen Lawrence to be brought to justice, raised funds to pay the funeral expenses of 13 children murdered in the New Cross fire, run international bookfairs of black and developing-world books without grants. We also produce the most socially cohesive festival of all time - the Notting Hill Carnival. We do not need his compulsion to move us to lay foundations in our communities.
  Finally, he dives in where angels fear to tread. It is fine, he tells us, to teach young people about Nelson Mandela, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but we must also teach them about Churchill, Lloyd George and the Pankhursts. History exists in his mind as nothing but a tableau of famous names. Not the Second World War, not the civil rights movement in America, not the rise and fall of apartheid but famous men and women. How dumb!
  The Commission on Integration and Cohesion is a weight around our necks. Darra Singh and Ruth Kelly should find proper jobs.

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