20110209_MM

Source: BBC Radio 4: Moral Maze

URL: N/A

Date: 09/02/2011

Event: Michael Buerk presents Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4.

People:

• Michael Buerk: BBC journalist and newsreader

Michael Buerk: Good evening. The timing was unfortunate but the meaning was clear. David Cameron's denunciation of multiculturalism at the weekend - a failure, he called it - marked an extraordinary shift amongst the chattering and political classes. Not long ago, to question multiculturalism, the precepts or the policies of successive governments, risked being branded racist and pushed into the loathsome corner with paedophiles and climate change deniers.

In fact, Cameron went some way to separate himself from the English Defence League, inconveniently rallying in Luton the same day. His was not an argument against the basic idea of tolerance towards those amongst us with different cultures, ideas or lifestyles. Rather, his target was government policy, which he said had actually encouraged different cultures to lead different lives and helped build metaphorical walls between communities, rather than remove them. He promised, but did not closely define, what he called "muscular liberalism" instead.

There are difficult moral questions here. How much diversity can a society handle? To what extent should we require incomers to sign up to our customs, our language, our ideals, before we accept them? Tolerance and mutual respect sound nice but are morally complicated too, particularly for a country whose ideas of what it stands for have become so hazy. Does it mean, for instance, that all values are of equal worth? Even when, on human rights, say, equality for women and homosexuals, the distinction between faith and the state, they run directly counter to our national traditions.

What's the future for a society that ends up with no shared ideals and no collective identity? So it's diversity versus integration, our moral maze tonight.