In any liberal democratic society there can be no dictatorship of the majority; there must be constitutional safeguards for the rights of minorities. In Britain, which has no written constitution, legal precedent or “common law” takes the place of a constitution. The downside of this system became increasingly apparent under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Blair had learned well the lessons of the Thatcher years that with a sufficiently large majority in parliament and the increasing use of patronage he could silence criticism and overturn any constitutional safeguard with a simple majority vote in the House of Commons.

The most egregious example of this exercise of power was Blair’s success – if one can call it that – in leading Britain into the war in Iraq. The consequences of this folly have been a massive loss of Britain’s international prestige, a widespread belief that Britain is “at war with Islam”, and the increasing alienation of a large part of Britain’s Muslim population – a problem exacerbated by the government’s inability to address the influence of hate-preachers on Britain’s young Muslims. These problems have been accompanied by a new and widespread mistrust of politicians and government – a virtual rupture in the social contract between government and the governed. Britain is now facing a vicious spiral of increasing radicalism among its Muslim population and growing support for the far right among the “old English”.  But the most worrying aspect of the growing alienation of Britain’s Muslims has been the failure of any of the mainstream political parties to seriously address the problem.

Indeed, any suggestion by a senior politician that there is any problem at all is likely to be jumped on by the media as an example of “Islamophobia”. A perfectly reasonable statement by the former Home Secretary, Jack Straw, following reports of the targeting of young girls for sexual exploitation by Pakistani gangs, that this was an issue that needed attention was described by the BBC as “controversial”.

The de-facto policy that has been in place since immigration to Britain took off after the Second World War is multi-culturalism. Multi-culturalism, the idea that everyone be permitted to live the way they choose in a pluralistic society, is based on the admirable concept of live and let live. No one should be able to dictate to anyone else how they should live: what food they should eat, what religion they should follow, what clothes they should wear, or even what language they should speak. But there are two over-riding requirements for multi-culturalism to work effectively. The first is that society must be secular – that is, non-discriminatory in matters of religion, belief and culture. But the second is that there must be mutual understanding of that first requirement and some over-riding principles, a common language, in which to deal with issues as they arise. And it is here that the breakdown has occurred. There is no agreement on the ground rules for discourse. Every attempt to even discuss differences between Islamic and British values is greeted with cries of “Islamophobia” –  a politically-inspired misnomer for what is not an irrational fear of Islam, but simply a belief that there is a problem here that needs to be discussed.

The failure of multi-culturalism in Britain is nowhere more evident than in the rise of Shari’a courts and Islamic tribunals – in effect a parallel legal system – which in many of Britain’s cities have replaced the regular courts for the settlement not only of family issues such as divorce, child custody and inheritance, but criminal matters such as domestic violence.

All three main political parties in England have bent over backwards to try to appease the increasingly radical Muslim spokesmen who, of course, are invariably men. The ruling Conservative party, for example, appointed a young Muslim woman, Baroness Warsi, as party chairman. But even she recently sided with those who claim that Britain is becoming increasingly Islamophobic. Certainly there has been a rise in anti-Muslim feeling in Britain. Whatever the Conservative hierarchy may be doing to build bridges with the Muslim community, the experience of another young Muslim who stood as a Conservative candidate in the local elections in the London Borough of Hillingdon may be more typical; she was completely shunned by other members of the local party. It is significant that young Hindus standing for election in London have not in general experienced a similar reaction; there is no evidence of a corresponding phenomenon of Hinduophobia. What this tells us surely is that what we are seeing is not just another manifestation of Britain’s endemic racism but something specific to Islam and Muslims – what the comedian Pat Condell has called “Islamo-nausea”.

The far right with its blunt-instrument rhetoric has consistently failed to recognise the difference between Islam, the religion, and Islamism, the political movement based on radical Islamic values. The BNP, like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, seeks to demonise all Muslims as Islamists inherently opposed to traditional western values. But this fails to recognise that most Muslims, just like everyone else, simply want to live a quiet life without tension where they can raise their children in peace and security.

But hard-line Islamists now control more than half of the mosques in Britain. Any Friday one can hear imams with little or no experience of life in the West calling for the overthrow of decadent western norms and values – the very values that enable them to spout their hatred of their host society in the first place. Multi-culturalism in Britain has failed because “live and let live” has morphed into an unwillingness to recognise that there are no longer any common values shared by all, and that English law no longer applies within many immigrant communities. One result has been that many Muslim women are denied their basic human rights and recourse to English law and the English courts. Worse, some parts of Birmingham, for example, have become no-go areas for the police. The wife of a Christian minister recently described how they were spat on in the street and had their cars and home damaged simply for daring to come to a mainly Muslim area.

The situation in Germany is similar to that in Britain but with one important difference –  politicians and other leaders there have actually begun to address the issue. Faced with similar problems to those we have seen in Britain, the Chancellor, Angela Merkel, recently spoke of the failure of “multi-culti” to adequately address the divisions in society.

What is needed is for far greater support for immigrants to learn the language and values of the host nation, rather than being allowed to create parallel societies where the illiberal values of rural Pakistan, for example, are allowed to take precedence. We need a wider appreciation that the norms, values and laws of the land apply to everyone in society, regardless of race, religion gender, sexual orientation or any other distinguishing characteristic. No community has the right to impose an alternative system of laws and values on its members. Group rights do not trump human rights.

Resistance from “community leaders” to such “interference” must be met head on. Government must ignore the self-appointed community leaders such as the Muslim Council of Britain and deal directly with the elected local councilors. At first there may not be much apparent difference, but the fact that democracy and the rule of English law are again seen to prevail within the inner cities will lead in the end to better integration of these communities with mainstream society.

But no solution to the problem of creating a cohesive society will be found until mainstream politicians and the government recognise that there is a problem.

-- Roy Brown

Roy Brown is a former president of IHEU