Culture

 

Multikulti kaput?

 

John McGrath

 

Kelvingrove museum, Glasgow
Photograph by Islay McLeod

 

If Karl Marx were alive today he would be saying I think 'TV repeats are the opiate of the masses' and for that very opiate effect I watched 'The Story of Are You Being Served?' on the BBC. You would never guess it but 'Are You Being Served?' was an entirely formulaic programme. A joke a week about Mrs Slocombe's pussy, Mr Humphries shouting 'I'm free!' and the department store elevator getting stuck, trapping various characters.
     They rapidly cut together clips of theatrical business involving the lift. In one scene a woman in a niqab appeared to be bending over deliberately sticking her bottom between the lift doors and as they closed on her rear a member of Grace Brother's helpful staff used a tailors measuring tape to measure the size of the gap. The scenario wasn't explained in the programme but I suppose that the woman's religious modesty was such that they couldn't measure her size directly and this innovative use of the lift doors solved the problem. So fleeting was the scene that I wondered if the BBC was unsure about showing it at all. I also wondered whether it suggested that the 1970s were happier days for British Muslims or whether it was just crass. These things are hard to figure out.
     It reminded me of a wee scene involving a Scottish Asian student in a class I taught – an Islamic man I presume as his name was Mohamed. As was the routine before any lecture the students were chatting away to each other perhaps a little more animated than normal. They were a polite enough lot and there had never been any need to ask them to be quiet. I simply opened my mouth and began to talk and halfway through the first sentence they would shut up. Not on this occasion.
     Some dispute at the back of the class kept going on and after two sentences I had to stop to ask what the problem was. That morning a communications lecturer had set them an exercise – an interpretation involving the script of an old Marty Feldman sketch. Meaning to finish the debate quickly I asked to see this script and Mohamed came to the front of the class and handed it to me.
     The sketch involved a football commentator commenting on a match between England and (I think) Spain. At kick off the commentator speaks like an English gentleman but with each goal scored by Spain his language degenerates, becoming more and more racist and abusive. It had been given to the students as an example of using humour to – no pun intended – tackle racism.

 

     Mohamed alone in the class thought it was simply racist. Like other contemporaneous comedies – 'Till Death Us Do Part' and 'Love thy Neighbour' – it hadn't aged well and with the Wisdom of Solomon I took Mohamed's side and agreed that I could see what he meant and with that we returned to studying Simple Harmonic Motion.
     It was not over – in fact the disagreement went on for weeks. At the end of one lesson Mohamed waited behind to approach me to make the point that it was his opinion that everyone was racist. This time I couldn't agree but he pursued the point all the way to the car park, feeling it only polite to offer him a lift, all the way to his dad's shop and for a good 30 minutes sitting outside it and in the end, perhaps simply bludgeoned into it, I could see that at least for any person to think that they are not themselves racist is probably, if not a bit dishonest, at least complacent. People have preferences for everything else after all, food, cars, architecture, music, why should race alone be the exception? It was a difficult argument to refute.
    David Cameron's pronouncement at the Munich security conference that 'Multiculturalism has failed' was of course an echo of the same observation made by the German chancellor Angela Merkel last year and at that time many a comic cracked that it was not the first time a German chancellor had come to this conclusion. It did not make any sense to me at all. It sounded like someone saying that in December the weather had failed.
     It's not so obvious from the BBC website but if you read the text at 'number10.gov.uk' he was not talking about a multitude of cultures at all, he was talking about only one. What would David Cameron regard as a success? What does he think the British Muslim should be doing? – perhaps going around quoting John 8.7: 'If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone'. If he feels that way, and it sounds like he does, perhaps he should consider becoming a Christian missionary in Bradford.
     As Mohamed (the student) taught me, the problem with reflecting on another person's culture is that whatever we come to believe about it, like all images in a mirror, what is seen is the wrong way around. What we as outsiders perceive a culture to be, what it actually is, and what the members of that culture think-we-think it is, rarely correspond. Multiply this by the number of cultures in the UK and you get a matrix composed mostly of misunderstanding, prejudice, racism and so on with just the occasional glimpse of how things really are.
     I can of course see my own reflection in my perception that David Cameron is like a teacher who is dissatisfied with the whole class as a result of the misbehaviour of one disturbed pupil. Let's hope he does not turn out to be more like the deranged commentator in the Marty Feldman sketch who in the end is carried off in a strait-jacket babbling about fascism. I think he is wrong. Multiculturalism has not failed. Given the potential for conflict, the general peace that we enjoy on this island is a great tribute to the wonderful people who make up the patchwork that is the condition of being multicultural.

 

John McGrath taught physics and maths for 20 years. In 2004 he set up Chalk and Talk e-learning support – an independent consultancy supporting online education and training projects.