How the Gaza war came to an east London school
The protests outside Barclay primary compel us to confront some tough questions
A primary school in east London is considering temporarily closing its doors and reverting to online learning because of security issues linked to the war in Gaza.
You read that right. A school in a British city may have to shut down for an indefinite period owing to hostilities occurring between two peoples over 2,000 miles away.
Barclay primary in Leyton has, over recent weeks, found itself at the centre of a political storm after asking parents to ensure that their children were not displaying any signs of political allegiance when attending school. The request came in response to a boy turning up wearing a Palestinian flag patch.
The school’s stance sparked a furious reaction among some parents. Protestors gathered outside the gates and, as word of the dispute spread, assorted external agitators became involved. In one incident, masked men hung Palestinian flags on the school fence. The protests prompted the school to close two days early at Christmas.
Staff have been threatened and subjected to what the school describes as ‘aggressive and confrontational interactions’. Police have stepped up patrols in the vicinity, and the school has hired private on-site security. School leaders have said they ‘will have no option but to close the school’ if the situation doesn’t improve.
The mother of the boy at the centre of the row is apparently Gazan, and the child himself is, according to his father, ‘traumatised’ by the actions of the school.
Some may seek to dismiss the events at Barclay primary as an isolated episode. I think that would be naïve in the extreme. The affair actually poses all sorts of wider questions for us as a nation and, in particular, compels us to ask ourselves how it is that an ordinary primary school in our capital city can find itself caught up in a stormy dispute with parents and protestors about the latest bout of violence in a historical conflict in the Middle East.
And if we are honest when answering that question, we would have to conclude that it is, in no small part, attributable to our abject failure to integrate large swathes of newcomers fully into our society and to years of giving the impression to these groups that Britishness was a sort of ‘add-on’, such that any sense of separateness and difference they felt from the rest of the country was entirely legitimate (and not only legitimate, but also to be ‘celebrated’).
Quite simply, the acrimony that has occurred outside the gates of Barclay primary is driven not only by the grievances and prejudices felt over the Gaza war itself, but is, in large measure, a manifestation of the failure of state-sponsored multiculturalism and the degree to which years of misguided policy decisions by successive governments have served to divide people from each other – to the extent that different groups often live parallel existences and know nothing of the lives of their neighbours – rather than bring them together.
Instead of choosing the melting pot, we opted for the salad bowl. In a society that found itself increasingly buffeted by the winds of global change and whose citizens were experiencing the deracinating effects of that phenomenon, the political class did nothing to assert the primacy of our own already-fraying cultural heritage, traditions and mores. Worse, it showed signs again and again of being ashamed of these things. In adopting this approach, it fatally neglected that which matters to most ordinary people; it undermined social solidarity within communities; and it ended up violating that sense of place and belonging which is so fundamental to what it is to be human.
Add to that mistaken political ideology the matter of the sheer scale of the numbers that have been arriving over the past quarter of a century or so, and the manner in which these new arrivals have (perhaps not surprisingly) often grouped together along ethnic or religious lines, and it is little wonder that many among them feel little incentive or need to fully integrate into their new environments.
Thus we can hardly claim to be shocked when some Muslims project grievances rooted in the Israel-Hamas conflict on to a primary school because it won’t allow their children to display open partisanship on the issue, or when we hear news, as we did last week, that a Muslim student is suing her school – with the assistance of the taxpayer, incidentally – over its ban on prayer rituals.
The real wonder is that anyone should be surprised at where we have ended up. A country may get away with a laissez-faire approach to questions of cohesion and identity in circumstances where no significant religious or cultural differences exist between the native and immigrant populations; but where such differences do exist, an approach of that kind is a recipe for fragmentation and discord.
If we are to make any progress on these issues, we must first bust the myth that a nation cannot be considered civilised if it follows any other path but the one taken by the British political establishment. For a refutal of that myth, we need only look to somewhere like Japan. The Japanese do not obsess about multiculturalism or celebrate diversity for its own sake or promote separateness and difference at every opportunity. Instead, they are entirely confident about asserting the primacy of their own culture, heritage and customs. Newcomers are expected to adapt to Japan – not the other way round – and are quite properly welcomed if they do. Japan is no less civilised for its cultural homogeneity. On the contrary, it is a highly-civilised, law-governed, largely peaceful and tolerant nation which prides itself on its cohesion and unity.
In Britain, by contrast, we are experiencing increasing levels of communalism, sectarianism and estrangement. That leaves us with some pretty serious questions to ask ourselves and some tough decisions to make. If we are ever to return to being a society built around common cultural bonds, a shared identity and a sense of being ‘one nation’, we had better start confronting them.
I appeared as a panellist on GB News’s Dewbs & Co last week. The episode can be viewed here.
A reminder that you can follow me on X/Twitter: @PaulEmbery
You are so right Paul. Diversity is not a strength, integration is.
In “Immigrant Nations” (2011) the Dutch professor Paul Scheffer points out that immigrants often feel alienated in new surroundings and hang onto old customs as an aid to survival.
Clashes are inevitable if large numbers of asylum seekers arrive in European towns unless there are shared common values and allegiances to bring people together as a nation. I’m defining the nation as an “imagined community”(Anderson 1983).
I often wonder how someone like Owen Jones would fare if he moved to a tiny village in Somalia with no internet, no English, no familiar rituals, value system? He and others on the left gloss over the contradictions of integrating people who come from this type of place into the U.K. which has always prided itself on a history of tolerance and freedom but which is now being sorely tried by the open door policies of the government.