JPR News archive
Who speaks for us? Representing the diversity of opinion in Britain’s multicultural society

 

 

In his introduction, Jonathan Freedland described the recent establishment of two new organizations, the New Generation Network (NGN, a group ‘calling for a new debate on faith and race, as well as a fresh approach to tackling discrimination and building a modern Britain’ – www.new-gen.org) and Independent Jewish Voices (IJV – www.ijv.org.uk), as a major development in community representation. Both bodies were launched in order to challenge and respond to what their founders saw as a monolithic representation of religious and ethnic minorities to government, in the media and the public sphere in general.

 

As Sunny Hundal explained, NGN was launched in an effort to allow a more diverse group of people to have a say in community matters, since the present leadership represented only one of many voices and not the voice of the community. He explained that most community leaders came from a strongly conservative religious background, whereas the spectrum of existing voices spans from the far left to the far right. He also stressed that NGN was worried by alliances some bodies make with the far right and by the ideologies of such groups as the Muslim Council of Britain and the 1990 Trust.

 

Talking about the response to the establishment of NGN, Tufyal Choudhury pointed out that it had raised broader questions such as how the government engages with other organisations, and how government policies are influenced and shaped. He described the general reaction of the Asian community to NGN as surprise and the debate it generated as ‘not too fierce.’

 

Defining Independent Jewish Voices as a network of often differing opinions rather than as an actual organization, Susie Orbach explained that it was established to provide a platform for the multiplicity of voices existing within the Jewish community. She claimed that for many Jews, who believed that Jewishness equalled social justice, it was difficult to identify with the Jewish voice normally heard in the media. She emphasised that support for the state of Israel did not mean that one had to agree with all its policies and actions. While a vibrant debate was taking place in Israel about controversial policy issues, a similar debate was unfortunately absent in the UK. IJV hoped to raise issues concerning Israel and the Palestinians and to make its voice heard at the government level too.

 

Rokhsana Fiaz stressed the importance of debate and claimed that the leadership of existing Muslim organizations needed to be strengthened. In her opinion, the main issue was how members could become actively engaged within their communities. There were no adequate structures at present in local government to allow the representation of younger voices and diverse opinions.

 

Considering whether NGN and IJV were primarily addressing the outside world or insiders in an effort to ‘win them over,’ Sunny Hundal thought it was necessary to draw the government’s attention to the fact that there was disagreement over certain issues within the community. At the same time NGN was also speaking out to the broader British public in an attempt to call for action against racism.

 

Susie Orbach explained that IJV had three main target audiences: the media, which ‘annoyingly only represented one view’; Israel, whose right to represent all Jews ought to be questioned; and those people who were wary of criticising Israeli policies for fear of being labelled anti-Zionist or antisemitic. Describing the various reactions to IJV, she said it had aroused excitement as well as criticism and in general, had encouraged a lively debate.

 

In response to a remark about the young age of most NGN members, Rokhsana Fiaz noted that there was a potential danger of antagonising those younger Muslims who wanted to remain committed to their religious tradition. Sunny Hundal, on the other hand, argued that the problem was not entirely generational – any organization affiliated to religious institutions would by its very nature be conservative and allow no room for dissent, a variety of religious identities or the discussion of sensitive issues. He recommended that the disagreements that existed within a community should not be hidden from the public.

 

The debate then shifted to the question of how the representation of a multiplicity of voices was feasible in practice in view of time and space constraints in the media. It was felt that it was impossible to explore the entire range of responses to any given issue while at the same time trying to do justice to the views of the mainstream majority.

 

In answer to the question why these initiatives were such a recent development, some argued that it was a stage in ‘growing up,’ or in the integration process of minority communities, while others saw it as a generational phenomenon, resulting from a dramatic change in Muslim identity. It had recently become ‘cool’ among the youth to be a Muslim, but this new identity no longer automatically contained a religious element. Again others emphasised the significance of the impact of 7/7, which had forced Muslim groups to take a public stand and communicate their agenda to the broader society.