A different agenda for race and faith relations
NGN is a collective of individuals calling for a new approach to tackle racism, discrimination and prejudice, and building a modern multi-faith and multi-ethnic Britain.
On Monday 20th November our launch ‘manifesto’ was published by Comment is Free.
The print version published an article by founder Sunny Hundal introducing NGN on the same day. You can read it here.
Comment is Free is also hosting a week-long session of debates on the future of race and faith relations in the UK from 20th - 25th November.
Let me be the first to congratulate you on an outstanding idea, and wish you all the luck in the future. One of the most disappointing aspects of modern british culture is the vacuum of british role models resulting from a disproportionate but vocal minority who seize the spotlight. This minority fills the pages claiming to be a representation of the society to which we subscribe, but all too often are just self-promoting opportunists and I do believe it’s about time the unbalance was addressed. I’m proud of my race and I’m proud of my country and though one is african and the other is british, they define me and I’m equally both.
We will never get rid of racism but we have to continue to reduce it and also fight the recent touting of ‘multi-racial community’ as a dirty word.
Keep up the good work.
This is a great initiative! Good luck.
I would like to sign your manifesto, but I am concerned about the section on free speech.
You seem to be suggesting that free speech includes the right to incite violence. Free speech is limited in a democratic society to exclude calls for violence, personal libel, and certain other areas which proscribe illegal acts.
I would like to see your position on exceptions to free speech clarified.
I could have been the first to post here you know! Hovering over the keyboard. Glad I didn’t. Open Position says it better than I could have.
Good to see non-PC debate on this subject. My experience leads me to believe that grant allocations over the past decade have exacerbated these divisions. “Community gatekeepers” have been encouraged to divide and apply, faith based groups have been given preferential treatment and funding has been somewhat race biased.
The roots of these difficulties lie in poverty,that of choice, education, aspiration, opportunity as well as economic, and this affects all colours , creeds and races.
There are certain limitations on free speech in a democracy. In the past 48 hrs: 1) OJ Simpson book release and TV special are cancelled due to backlash, 2) TV actor goes on an anti-black tirade in an LA comedy club, 3) Court-TV anchor aggressively interrogates unsuspecting Asian mother of missing child, resulting in the woman’s suicide.
I wonder if Iain Murdoch is misinterpreting the sentence:
“We call on the government to support freedom of speech in situations where extremists threaten artists and writers with violence.”
It’s the artists’ and writers’ freedom of speech that the proposer is seeking to support, not that of the extremists!
If this really is a fresh start I hope we can all stop pretending that everyone is equal. For example the Japanese, on average, are more intelligent than Europeans and less intelligent than Ashkenazi Jews. As an extreme example of this, in the hard sciences Ashkenazi Jews hold roughly ten times more Nobel prizes than their relative proportion in the UK/USA population. For a delicate introduction to some of this work, see the book by New York Times journalist Nicholas Wade:
http://www.amazon.com/Before-Dawn-Recovering-History-Ancestors/dp/1594200793/sr=1-2/qid=1163882279/ref=sr_1_2/102-1072917-6628126?ie=UTF8&s=books
Or check the research of:
Bruce Lahn http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/lahn.html
Gregory Cochran http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/clickit/search?r_aid=0F546499BED740509B5A0B530A9115A0&r_eop=1&r_sacop=4&r_spf=0&r_cop=main-title&r_snpp=4&r_spp=0&qqn=99Fuo%3Axl&r_coid=239138&rawto=http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
Linda Gottfredson http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/pubtopics.htm
The latter in particular is an easy read.
There is also the issue of the apparently disproportionate ethnic representation of suspects and victims of crime. For example, see:
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/s95race04.pdf
To zoom in on Lambeth in London see:
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hors254.pdf
On page 25 they state “Ethnicity and street crime could easily become a highly
emotive issue and for this reason data needs to be handled with special care.” For Lambeth In particular see the table 3.5 on page 26. There we have black suspects 86%, white suspects 10%, Asian suspects 0%; black victims 12%, white victims 79%, Asian victims 7%.
Table 3.6 on page 27 states for Lambeth that the population is black 31%, white 57%. This suggests that there are roughly three times more black suspects and three times less black victims than their proportion in the population. Not a valid statistical analysis but a good enough reason to investigate fully, if we indeed are looking at things afresh.