Opening remarks to Leeds Salon debate: Multiculturalism and its Discontents

Multiculturalism has come in for increasing criticism lately. Policies that first arose in response to the riots that erupted in Britain’s black inner-cities in the 1980s as an answer to problems of discrimination and inequality have come to be seen by many as the cause of ‘myriad social ills’. Recent comments by UKIP leader Nigel Farage in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre that multiculturalist policies ‘wilfully segregate us’ and Prime Minister David Cameron that they have encourage ‘different cultures to live separate lives’, echo those of the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, that such policies are out-dates and have legitimised ‘separateness’ between communities. In particular, such separateness, some argue, is reflected in both the increasing disengagement of both Muslim youth and the growing attraction of ‘radical Islam’, and of sections of the white working class and the growing popularity of right-wing and anti-immigrant parties such as UKIP. However, many would argue that not only have such policies helped make Britain a fairer and more tolerant nation, but to do away with them would risk taking Britain back 30 years - pointing to the rise of UKIP and racist incidents on social media and in sport as evidence of the ‘unwitting racism’, if not outright prejudice, that still lurks just below the surface of British society making the promotion of multiculturalism as necessary as ever. So are the criticisms of multiculturalist policies fair? Do they threaten to re-create and reinforce a more divided Britain? Or are they still essential to delivering a fairer, more tolerant and egalitarian society? And if multiculturalist policy is a problem, what would we put in its place

Britain’s Prevent Programme: An End in Sight?

This chapter critiques the UK’s Prevent programme since its inception in 2006, and argues that it has been significantly flawed and counter-productive from the start through its partial, monocultural focus on Muslims as an entire and undifferentiated ‘suspect’ community. This focus on, and interference in, British Muslim communities may well have fuelled precisely the separation from and suspicion of the state and wider society which Prevent claimed to address, fatally damaging the flow of human intelligence vital to countering domestic terrorism. This approach has provoked resentment within Muslim communities and ‘resource envy’ from other communities, so perpetuating exactly the sort of divisive policy approaches to ethnic identity which the post 2001 riots analysis of ‘community cohesion’ identified. The chapter suggests that Prevent, for those reasons, has been contradictory and damaging to parallel policy attempts to promote ‘cohesion’ and that the 2011 Prevent Review’s attempts to differentiate Prevent and Cohesion made things worse, not better. The Chapter argues that Prevent is a fatally damaged and ineffective programme that needs to be allowed to die a natural death. Instead, the only meaningful approach to ‘preventing violent extremism’ amongst young people must be one of promoting genuine democratic engagement and political debate amongst young people through processes of ‘contact’ that enable real learning and understanding of difference within society

Prevent and Community Cohesion in Britain – The Worst of All Possible Worlds?

This chapter offers a critical analysis of the UK’s Prevent programme to date, and argues that it has been ineffective, or even counter-productive because of a number of conceptual flaws and contradictions. In particular, the monocultural focus on entire, ‘suspect’ British Muslim communities has arguably hardened feelings of antagonism towards the British state and wider society amongst sections of those communities, damaging precisely the flows of human intelligence needed to combat the Islamist terror threat, whilst failing to actually engage educationally with the various drivers of radicalisation. This Prevent approach has created envy amongst other communities at the significant resources directed at Muslim communities, whilst ignoring the growing right-wing/racist terror threat symbolised by the British connections to Anders Brevik. All this has shown Prevent to be in fundamental contradiction to the analysis and concerns of the parallel policy agenda of community cohesion/ integration. The Chapter argues that the Prevent Review of 2011, which was designed to differentiate the two policy programmes, has actually down-played but exacerbated their tensions. Instead, the Chapter argues, Prevent needs to develop a synergy with cohesion work, basing approaches to preventing terrorism or attraction towards it on educational programmes of cross-community contact and meaningful democratic participation and engagement of young people

Moving on from ‘anti-racism’? Understandings of ‘community cohesion’ held by youth workers

‘Community Cohesion’, and the apparent lack of it, was rapidly offered as the explanation for the 2001 disturbances across northern England, and has since become a cornerstone of government approaches to race relations policy. This article explores what Community Cohesion means to welfare practitioners in Oldham, one of the affected towns. Academic discussion of Community Cohesion has been largely hostile, focusing on the language and assumptions of the government reports. While highlighting important issues, these debates have been virtually free of empirical evidence on how Community Cohesion is actually being understood and operationalised by welfare practitioners. Drawing on in-depth research with youth workers in Oldham, I argue that the Community Cohesion analysis of the state of race relations is largely accepted, and supported, by those youth workers, and that it has enabled a significant shift in the assumptions and operations of their professional practice. Within this ‘modal shift’ in practice is a moving away from the language and assumptions of ‘anti-racism’, as it has been largely understood and operationalised by youth workers on the ground, towards what I argue can be seen as ‘critical multi-culturalism

Method of up-front load balancing for local memory parallel processors

In a parallel processing computer system with multiple processing units and shared memory, a method is disclosed for uniformly balancing the aggregate computational load in, and utilizing minimal memory by, a network having identical computations to be executed at each connection therein. Read-only and read-write memory are subdivided into a plurality of process sets, which function like artificial processing units. Said plurality of process sets is iteratively merged and reduced to the number of processing units without exceeding the balance load. Said merger is based upon the value of a partition threshold, which is a measure of the memory utilization. The turnaround time and memory savings of the instant method are functions of the number of processing units available and the number of partitions into which the memory is subdivided. Typical results of the preferred embodiment yielded memory savings of from sixty to seventy five percent

What should schools do about Radicalisation?

Opening remarks as Invited Panellist at Westminster Faith Debate ‘What should Schools do about Radicalisation?

The efficient provision of public goods through non-distortionary tax contests

We use a simple balanced budget contest to collect taxes on a private good in order to ?nance a pure public good. We show that-with an appropriately chosen structure of winning probabilities-this contest can provide the public good efficiently and without distorting private consumption. We provide extensions to multiple public goods and private taxation sources, asymmetric preferences, and show the mechanism’s robustness across these settings

Local Passion, National Indifference: Implementing Community Cohesion policies in Northern England

The emergence of Community Cohesion (Cantle, 2001) as national policy from 2001 was portrayed as the ‘death of multiculturalism’ in Britain (Kundnani, 2002). However, empirical evidence on how Community Cohesion policies were actually understood and enacted at the local level by front-line professionals (Thomas, 2011) suggested that Cohesion was actually a ‘rebalancing’ (Meer and Modood, 2009) of British multiculturalism, not its death. Such evidence aids understanding of a situation now where national government is officially disinterested in Community Cohesion or ‘Integration’ of both settled and new minority communities (DCLG, 2012), and where some local authorities are consequently passive (Jones, 2013), whilst others remain passionate and proactive on Community Cohesion (a term the passionate refuse to give up). This localised passion is arguably driven by the highly racialised experience of local space (Amin, 2003) and significant physical segregation (Finney and Simpson, 2009) in certain localities. This paper draws on recent empirical evidence from research around cohesion implementation in West Yorkshire to analyse both the nature of this continuing local passion and the challenges it faces in relation to ‘cohesion’. Crucial here are the concepts of local ‘policy enactment’ (Braun et al, 2011) and the commitment of the ‘street level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky, 2010) in shaping this passionate commitment to cohesion whilst the agenda withers on the vine in other local authority regions. The paper argues that such local variations have always been an inherent part of British multiculturalism, with local agency central to understandings of local/sub-national variations from national policy