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Searchlight Educational Trust’s Fear and Hope report is now online. There’s quite a lot of it so a good read will have to wait.
A quick look at the ‘tribes’ (see previous post and another on cultural confidence) shows that the Cultural Integrationists of the pre-publicity material has been renamed as the Culturally Concerned.
I seem to be mainly a Confident Multiculturalist (8% of the population) although I hope I’m not as smug as this sounds . . .
Most likely to be graduates or post graduates, these people are predominantly professionals and managers. They are more prevalent in London and the South East, and among people who identify with Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green. Outgoing, social and happy with their lives, they are confident about their own, as well as their country’s future, and think Britain has benefitted from immigration.
. . . but with a dash of Culturally Concerned (24% of the population) . . .
Generally older and more prosperous than other groups, many are (or have been) professionals and managers. They are more likely to view immigration as a cultural issue with concerns about the impact of immigration on national identity and about immigrants’ willingness to integrate. This group forms the largest segment of those identifying with the Conservative Party.
. . . because immigration is, amongst other things, a cultural issue. How well people are welcomed and encouraged to get involved in local life – and how individual and community identities evolve – has long been something I’m concerned with and working to improve.
I skipped – as you do – to the last page to see that Searchlight will be
establishing a project to explore, understand and tackle the rise of right-wing nationalism and extremism in Britain and Western Europe.
Good! Maybe we’ll be able to link them up with our emerging network of European grassroots groups which are building trust between communities. And even persuade them to extend their project to other parts of Europe beyond the West.
H-C Strache, leader of Austria's Freedom Party (from Viennese Jesse Alexander's blog it ain't bunk)
A matinee idol is how the Vienna Review described Heinz-Christian Strache’s appearance on campaign posters in June last year. His Freedom Party went on to win 27% of the votes in Vienna’s October election.
Well dressed, articulate and on the rise – continental Europe’s far right leaders produce slick and sophisticated material. BBC Radio 4 has a two-parter Driving on the Right and this Tuesday’s programme (4pm) will cover Austria and Germany.
Last week the focus was further north. A Mexican, who has lived and worked in Denmark for 8 years and is married to a Dane, is finding it impossible to obtain a permanent residence permit. The new regulations have been brought in under pressure from the Danish People’s Party, who hold the balance of power in parliament. In Sweden, a member of the Sweden Democrats took the BBC reporter to a part of town with a higher proportion of Muslims, but stayed in her car – with her two Great Danes – out of a mixture of reluctance and fear.
Concern over migration to Denmark and Sweden (in particular by Muslim migrants), a perceived lack of integration and pressure on welfare benefits, and what came over as a sentimental longing for their culture to stay the same seemed to be at the heart of the populist parties’ appeal.
It wasn’t clear how these two countries welcome new arrivals nor what opportunities there are to become part of Swedish or Danish society.
The leader of the English Defence League, Stephen Lennon, was interviewed on BBC TV’s Newsnight before the EDL’s protest in Luton on 5th February. EDL protests have a history of violence – boots not suits – and their followers are not generally described as matinee idols. Jeremy Paxman’s rather sneery interview manner pointed up the class gap between the likes of Paxman and the EDL’s membership; it did little to tease out what Lennon’s underlying concerns were or why a whole raft of worries – from crime to the protection of gay and women’s rights, drugs, terrorism and prostitution – appear to be fixed only on ‘militant Islam’, rather than the usual wide and complex range of wicked issues that exercise policy makers.
The Swiss referendum on the building of minarets and niqab bans in other parts of Europe have knock-on effects in the UK, but we have yet to see much mainstreaming of far right politics: the British National Party’s seat in the European Parliament is about it. Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, may be a hero to his followers but has very little credibility as a national politician.
Heinz-Christian Strache, 2009 (Manfred Werner, Wikimedia Commons)
It is hard to imagine anyone in the UK taking seriously someone who waves a large cross at a proposed site for a new Islamic centre – but Heinz-Christian Strache has found it a vote-winner in Vienna.
So why are significant numbers of voters across Europe falling for it?
I was talking last week to someone who works ecumenically in Nordic, Baltic and other European countries. His view is that when Christians become less confident in their own faith they are more susceptible to feeling threatened by people with a more secure and informed identity. So insecure, ‘cultural’ European Christians find it difficult to accept Muslims from other parts of the world – who seem to be more confident in who they are and why they live the way they do.
If this is true, it could also be true of people of any religious or philosophical tradition – a received set of values, whether religious or not, is not as useful as a worked-through, fully-owned religious, ethical or moral position in being able to relate positively to people from a different tradition. The differences (perhaps because between two known positions they are measurable) are therefore seen to be rather small in comparison to all the commonalities, and appear less significant. If you’re not quite sure where you stand, the distance may seem that much greater and even unbridgeable. It might also prompt you to define your own identity in relation to the ‘other’, rather than in a more rounded way.
Listening to the Danish politician on the programme speak about the necessity of listening to far-right concerns and responding to them, rather than dismissing them out of hand, I hope that Newsnight’s next interview with the EDL rightly condemns the violent protests, but engages more fully with their concerns.
Euroblogger Jon Worth has written an informed reflection on the programme, Nordic politics and culture which is well worth a read.
The next programme is on Radio 4 on Tuesday 15th March at 4pm.
Counter terrorism cutlery at Gatwick
A fab birthday treat – a weekend in Vienna :)
This time (last visit was July) I had the brilliant company of my husband (WWI, second hand books, Freud). I doubt I’d have visited the Museum of Military History if he hadn’t suggested it. The WWII rooms are harrowing.
On Saturday morning, the Kunsthistorisches Museum café produced a sausage and grated horseradish breakfast which sustained us through most of the day (was absorbed by Breugel’s Babel having seen David Mach’s Babel Towers at the Royal Academy this summer).
Service sheet for St Ruprecht - loads of music for everyone
Later I called in to St Ruprecht, a beautiful little church tucked away in its own courtyard in the old town, and heard singing – they were having a run-through before the Saturday evening service. So I stayed. I thought I’d been given the wrong service sheet because there was so much music printed on it – but no.
In an odd way, it was very inclusive – I have about four words of German, but I could join in most of the service this way, singing along with everyone else. Lay women took as prominent a part as the lay men and (little) children carried candles up to the altar at the offertory – there was a bowl of sand for them. Communion was shared with everyone gathered around the plain stone altar and the bread was substantial, unleavened, chewy stuff. It was a heavenly combination of my old parish church, St John’s Clapham (which was so brilliant at involving everyone) and an Iona Community service – at the Abbey or anywhere else. I felt wholly restored.
The Anglican/Episcopal Church has a branch in Vienna and I joined them on Sunday morning. Their magazine, Crossways, had a piece on Jewish-Christian activities. The congregation is involved in a Vienna city initiative to encourage people of different religious traditions living in each district to get to know each other – just ordinary people, not theologians or religious leaders. One member of the congregation most involved in this told me one of the best ideas I’ve heard of yet – add a short sentence to each church’s, mosque’s, temple’s, synagogue’s noticeboard saying that everyone of whatever faith or none is welcome to come inside and meet the people there. If we were popping in and out of each other’s places of worship and atheist/humanist association’s premises we would soon get to know each other. The last event for this district was a visit to the local mosque and the next is tomorrow evening, when they’ll be visiting the local Polish Church.
I met my husband for a dreamy slice of über-light cheesecake at the Jewish Museum. There’s an good exhibition on at the moment Turks in Vienna which traces the history and geography of the Sephardim from 1492 onwards.
It’s pretty much a potted history of Europe over that period – the jigsaw of empires and alliances, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, and a salutary lesson in who provided refuge, who did not and how overlapping allegiances enabled the Viennese Jews to act as go-betweens across the different cultures – East and West, Orient and Occident, Asia and Europe.
Sculpture by Hrdlicka at Albertinaplatz
The second time I passed the Hrdlicka sculptures at Albertinplatz I noticed a fresh rose had been placed on the strong, sad depiction of a Jewish man scrubbing the streets. Nearby there is a monument with a declaration carved into it from 1945 which includes “the freedom of all religious traditions”. The place still seems a bit of a walk-through rather than a destination. I found a young Hungarian graphic artist there. He produces some great cartoons - Amy Winemouse, the Zion King – and it was a pleasure to meet him.
Just like Sarajevo - Turkish coffee at the Jewish Museum, Vienna
I found out too late that there was a Klezmer Festival on – I love it. The Austrian Folk Song Society has heaps of information – it used to collect folk music from all around the empire, but now collects from within Austria itself, including its minority cultures.
It’s an odd mix, Vienna. Plenty of intercultural initiatives and good people involved – but the FPO (Freedom Party of Austria) polled 27% at the local elections in October.
The English Defence League were busy yesterday in Preston and Nuneaton and it’s hard to see anything as crude as this building momentum in the UK – but it’s as well to make sure it doesn’t. Hats off to Hope Not Hate and other campaigners.
