Old ideas that should have never been discarded are being revisited
Janet Albrechtsen
IT is, by any measure, a sunny day when moralising elites are forced to eat their words. Only a few short years ago many were busily deriding Australia as an “international pariah” on immigration. Indeed, only last year our new citizenship test was labelled as nasty stuff by people such as journalist David Marr and former Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser.
Enter the British Labour Government, which last month announced its intention to introduce tough new citizenship tests and, get this, bring in immigration controls “based on the Australian model”.
Far from pariah-dom, Australia is a role model on how to control immigration and integrate migrants.
More important, as Western nations learn from one another, each new step taken looks more confident and assertive than the previous one. Old ideas that should have never been discarded are being revisited. Although the Brown Government is pitching this as a “vision of British citizenship for the 21st century”, it is, in reality, an old one. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s vision of British citizenship as one “founded on a unifying idea of rights matched with responsibilities” marks a long overdue turning point in Western thinking, a return to more sensible times where basic Western values were asserted with confidence.
For the past few decades, the progressive fad of minority rights, fuelled by multiculturalism, has flourished. Once a hard form of multiculturalism took root, one that treated all cultures as equal, the values of the host country were effectively under attack. Cultural relativism morphed into a virulent strand of Western self-loathing where tolerance was reinterpreted to mean tolerating those intolerant of Western culture and values.
Brown’s reforms are aimed at overturning that rights fetish, a counterproductive and indeed dangerously one-sided notion where people could demand of the state but the state could not demand of them.
These days the multiculti crowd is dwindling to a few stragglers. But they include people who should know better. Last month, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the world’s 77 million Anglicans, called for the introduction of some aspects of sharia law into Britain and told the BBC that Muslims should not be required to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty and state loyalty”.
The cultural loyalty that Williams robustly defended explains why parts of British society are already unofficially dispensing their own form of sharia law.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23431666-7583,00.html