Tories attack race 'bureaucrats'

Tories attack race 'bureaucrats'

Government response to the race riots was inadequate, says Letwin

Shadow home secretary Oliver Letwin has warned that race relations "bureaucracy" is failing to tackle the far-right.

He said the UK had a "top down" approach to community relations which used a nanny state to implement ineffective and pointless initiatives.

As an example, he pointed to the Home Office recommendations in its report into the race riots of 2001.

In his speech on Tory philosophy on race and religion, the MP for West Dorset called for more engagement with people within their communities.

He said: "The same top-down, we-know-best approach is applied to the communal tensions that arise as a result of disempowerment.

Sikhs 'invisible'

"Those at the top of the bureaucratic food chain employ all their usual weapons - committees, quangos, targets, initiatives, paperwork, tick boxes, codes, compacts and the rest of it - to try and manage these tensions out of existence."

Although they may have good intentions, the bureaucrats would not achieve "real positive change", he added.

He said the race riots report recommended a range of initiatives, including "an inter-agency support group, community cohesion plans, various cross-community fora, challenging and measurable targets, individual capacity building programmes... and not forgetting 'a powerful task force to oversee development and implementation'."

Let us build a nation that upholds the freedom of each community, so that in return each community may uphold the nation

Oliver Letwin
Shadow home secretary

Mr Letwin added, sarcastically: "The BNP must be quaking in their jackboots."

The shadow home secretary criticised the Commission for Racial Equality for failing to recognise Sikhs as a separate ethnic group, which he claimed made 600,000 Britons "invisible".

"Surely there is something very wrong with a system where entire communities pop in and out of existence at the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen?"

He wants to see people engaged at a local level and the recognition by the government "that communities are networks of relationships that turn collections of people into responsible individuals".

He praised the Haile Selassie Peace Project in Handsworth, Birmingham, in which volunteers from the Rastafarian community go out on the beat with police officers.

Secular state

But "this remarkable scheme" was threatened with closure due to funding problems, he said, and he called for more support for voluntary organisations.

Mr Letwin condemned "an increasingly vociferous campaign to strip our constitution of its Christian heritage".

He added: "There are advocates of state secularism who propose a 'neutral' non-religious basis for the constitution and institutions of society."

I for one, do not want to live in a monochrome Britain, a Britain without differences

Oliver Letwin

But this would be detrimental to national unity and other faiths, he said.

"Ours is an inheritance that has stood the test of time.

"If it is to stand the test of the future, it needs to be celebrated and taught in the media, in academia and in our schools."

European law - especially human rights law - was a "threat to our liberties", along with Labour's plans to restrict right to trial by jury and end the double jeopardy rule, he said.

"Let us build a nation that upholds the freedom of each community, so that in return each community may uphold the nation."