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Background issues
Intro | MI5 Recruitment | Islam and Spies | Racism | IdentityRacism and Political Correctness
The relationship between the British state and the country's Muslim communities will not have helped recruitment to MI5. Historically, it has fluctuated between racist discrimination, assimilation, and politically correct accommodation under multiculturalism. For example for Muslim girls, multiculturalism has often meant that police and teachers sometimes fail to provide them adequate support against forced marriage – out of 'respect for community values'.
For Muslim communities as a whole, multiculturalism has created a mythically homogenous group. A natural outcome is to see all Muslims as the same and therefore as 'terrorists'. Yet research in 2007 by the London School of Economics (LSE) concluded that 'There is no evidence that Muslims are less likely to think of themselves as British than other groups.'
According to the 2001 Census, 2.8% of the British population identified themselves as Muslim with just under half born in the UK and a further 30% born in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. But the government, the media and many within the Muslim community forget that more than one in ten Muslims in England and Wales describe themselves as white.
In addition, diversity among Britain's Muslims goes beyond ethnicity. Britz’s depiction of a family divided in its response to British policy illustrates the important distinctions between social position, identity, and political values. Someone born into a Muslim family may not choose to be a practising Muslim, and nor does a Muslim identity necessarily mean following an extremist political ideology. Governments – and communities themselves – tend to mix these up, which means success is difficult for social policy initiatives like Tony Blair’s 'Tackling Extremism Together'.
