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| "Say waaa?" |
A Guardian post by author Daniel Trilling named ‘10 myths of the UK's far right’, highlights common myths about the far-right. Below is an interesting excerpt.
It can be tempting to see the BNP as evidence that Britain is becoming a nation of ethnic and cultural ghettos, where there are no-go zones for non-Muslims, and that communities are living increasingly parallel lives. In fact, as the statisticians Nissa Finney and Ludi Simpson argue in Sleepwalking to Segregation? the trend is in the opposite direction: ethnic minorities are spreading more evenly across Britain. What's more, areas of cities with concentrated ethnic minority populations tend not to be ghettos: think of Burnley, where even the Asian areas of Daneshouse and Stoneyholme are still around 40% white.
Yet the idea that Britain is a nation divided by race and culture, rather than wealth, persists across a wide range of rightwing and liberal opinion, with multiculturalism named as the culprit. Beneath these anxieties, however, exists the everyday, thriving multiculturalism of modern Britain; the result of our daily interactions with one another. Each one of us is unique, yet each one of us has habits and customs and ways of seeing the world that overlap. Culture is not a fixed set of attributes, nor is it handed down by decree; it's what we do. This is a fact that even the BNP was forced to accept.
That's why Griffin had to set up an ethnic liaison committee, and it is why, in the end, he had to tell his party to "adapt or die" and accept non-white members. The EDL is further evidence of how the far right has had to accommodate to the reality of modern Britain.
Read the full article here.
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