Do we really have that much in common?
by Trevor Phillips, Unherd:
[…] At the risk of seeming insensitive, I think we need to call a halt to what the French might call the banalisation of her (Jo Cox’s) most well-known message: “We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.” It’s just not true.
For example, the fact that many Muslims and fundamentalist Christians say they feel British is often cited as evidence that we are all on the same side in today’s culture wars. But it doesn’t explain the inconvenient fact that a majority of these groups sincerely don’t want a gay teacher to stand in front of their children. The strident chants of the Muslim parents at the school gates won’t be drowned out by another rendering of “Kumbaya” even if backed by other groups who might share their concerns, such as Orthodox Jews or evangelical Christians.
I think Jo Cox recognised that social cohesion does not come naturally. It has to be fought for; far from suggesting that her constituency was a mawkish pastiche of northern life familiar from Hovis ads, she referred to the independent-minded, even truculent, character of the many towns and villages within the constituency.
Even more tellingly, she called out the persistence of minority ethnic and religious traditions in what was once a stronghold of Methodism. Irish Catholics, as well as Indian and Pakistani Muslims have settled in the area, and have become part of the local landscape, partly by adapting their accents and behaviours; but centuries on they maintain a definable cultural presence.
Cox herself said in the same speech that she hoped to embody that the spirit of “independent, non-Conformist service” that she had seen in her predecessors. At the heart of her message was a recognition that some sincerely held differences will never be wished away by metropolitan intellectuals. If you truly respect diversity, you cannot just brush those differences aside.
Yet, in all too many cases, authorities, public and private are being bullied into pretending that these significant cultural differences do not really exist.
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