Reviews for Disunited Kingdom: How the Government's Community Cohesion Agenda undermines British Identity & Nationhood

The average rating for Disunited Kingdom: How the Government's Community Cohesion Agenda undermines British Identity & Nationhood based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-06 00:00:00 Kevin Dobie There is a problem with Britain and the social cohesiveness of the society it has become in the early 21st Century. The reasons are manifold, and the solutions may be many and varied as well. The problem is that the United Kingdom is very fragmented. Hitherto, this led to all sorts of problems, such as the alienation of youth, drug-taking, crime etc., and these things were all bad enough. But over the last decade or so, these general problems have been overtaken by one particular threat to the cohesiveness of society: the advance of fundamentalist politicised Islam. Whereas, before, a muddle of "multiculturalism" and assimilation might have been relied on to overcome such differences as might exist between the many races, religions and cultures now resident in the U.K. especially over a length of time, vide the large Jewish population which, by and large have economically and socially assimilated into British culture whilst retaining their religious beliefs, and they neither threatened to suborn the predominant existing cultural mores found in the U.K., nor saw those values as a threat to themselves. With fundamentalist political Islam, that is not the case. This book focuses on the question of religious education in schools. This is a huge topic. But, this book (although sometimes using language better suited to an academic thesis than a publication that ought to be more accessible to a wider audience) nicely puts into focus the problem, the Government's perceived solution to that problem, and why that solution is not only unlikely to obtain the desired results (community cohesion), but may well be counter-productive. The problems of lack of cohesion were perhaps best evidenced in the Northern cities' riots of the early 21st Century. The terrorist bomb outrages of July 2005 brought into sharp focus the threat posed by home-grown Islamist fanatics - let alone those from outside the U.K. Using some rather dubious American evidence, the cause of the problems were thought to be lack of interaction between various communities. The solution, therefore, was to ensure closer contacts between communities, such as by school twinning etc. Simultaneously, the number of "faith schools" of a non-Christian foundation, were on the increase, specifically, those of the Muslim faith. Whilst it was obvious to many that part of the problem lay not in the concept of faith schools, or even in Muslim faith schools per se, there was a problem in what some of them were teaching, especially when it led to a hatred of the very values most deep-rooted in British culture, such as tolerance. Instead of grappling with individual schools, the Government allowed more state-funded Muslim schools to open, and then the creation of a separate inspection authority for such schools, under the control of some of the very worst offenders in the fundamentalist regard. Quis custodet custodens! The upshot is that nobody has had the guts to tackle head on the main problem facing cohesion in Britain today: that there is a small number of religious and political zealots intent on fundamentally changing British society. They are not interested in multiculturalism, or even interculturalism (the Government's current fashionable sop to these extremists: all cultures are equal and traditional British values are of no greater worth than anything new being introduced by, for example, "moderate" Muslims). These people are intent on bringing about a worldwide Caliphate, and every single concession given to them is for them a small stepping-stone to achieve this, never mind some woolly liberal concept of everyone living harmoniously in separate communes, each equal to the other, and none threatening or being threatened by the other. In short, the Government has not only misidentified the problem - a general unwillingness of people to live amongst cultures other than their own because they do not know enough about the other's cultures/religions sufficiently - but consequently misidentified the solution. A sledgehammer approach has been adopted, which includes such madness as altering to a parody of truth the history syllabi of all schools, or advising schools not to use story books for children that make reference to dogs or pigs, to the lunatic proposal that all faith schools should reserve 25% of their spaces for those of other or no faiths, when in fact the problem is very small (but potent and potentially society-destroying), but that small problem needs to be tackled head-on. The tail cannot be allowed to wag the dog any longer. Those individuals and schools that teach and preach hatred should be excised without regret or apology. Let there be no mistake, as the 7th July bombs in London showed, there are home-grown Muslim fundamentalists whose aim is the overthrow of the liberal democracy that has been the very progenitor of their very existence in Britain. To use a cliché, this small (but increasingly powerful) minority is not only intent on biting the hand that has fed it so generously, they wish to execuute the very body. Until the Government gets a grip on this, we will continue down the dangerous disintegrationist path on which we have been set. Not an easy book to read, but well worth the effort!

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-05 00:00:00 Nancy Sneider I thought this was a really useful read as we prepare to adopt a child that will make our family multiracial. I plan to use the pictures to demonstrate to our child that there are other families that look different from each other. I also enjoyed the personal accounts of how being multiracial affected each member of the family. Their honest sharing of their experience was helpful to me and I hope will help our child as well when they are struggling to find their identity.