News

The government is right to want to deport Abu Qatada. He is a threat
to community relations in Britain. The Home Secretary is right to want
to use her powers to exclude him, say Shamit Saggar and Sunder Katwala.

Rather than being created by grand declarations of Britishness, British identity has grown organically through history, says James Forsyth, political editor of The Spectator.

British identity is about how we treat each other, and a civic sense of fairness is at the heart of Britishness, says Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

“When you go into school, or into college, you meet people from everywhere – from America, from Poland, everywhere – in one day”, says one Hackney Community College student at a British Future debate.

British Future went to Hackney to talk to students about whether they defined themselves as British, English or something else. The students’ debate, chaired by Anthony Painter, also focused on integration – in terms of the diversity they could see around them in London, and how they thought that was mirrored in the rest of the country.

By Sunder Katwala

What a disappointment Fabio Capello turned out to be.

The England football manager has resigned – protesting at his authority being undermined by being his overruled in his desire to allow an England captain to face court charges over alleged racial abuse without relinquishing the armband.

The problem was never that Fabio was foreign. Rather, he failed the integration test.

By Sunder Katwala

It is the constitutional duty of the head of a republican pressure group to provide a dissenting note during the high days and holidays of Monarchical ceremony.

But if Graham Smith of Republic may have half a point in his call on the mediato ensure the alternative anti-Monarchy view gets a voice he also massively overstates his two central claims, that the Monarchy “is able to co-opt almost the entire media output of this country to its own advantage and a media that is failing to report the true story of a changing public attitude toward royalty and monarchy”. Neither claim stands up to scrutiny of the evidence.

Ipsos Mori research for British Future has found that the Welsh are more enthusiastic about the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee than the English and the Scottish.

70% of Welshpeople expect the jubilee will lift the mood of the British public compared to 69% of English people asked, and only 55% of people from Scotland.

But, when asked about the Olympics, English respondents were the most positive with 66% believing it would be good for the mood of the British public, compared to 57% of Scots.

Ever since the Home Secretary announced her plan for the new integration strategy in June 2011, we have been waiting for it to materialise with a mixture of excitement and anxiety, says Zrinka Bralo.

Excitement because it might be different and better from those preceding it, and anxiety because of recent government announcements about further immigration restrictions. The rumour in the blogosphere is that a draft integration strategy called ‘Creating the Conditions for Integration’ has been circulating in Whitehall since November 2011. At The Forum, the organisation where I work, we are curious to see what’s in store for the future of integration as this is what we do and we need a constructive environment to be able to keep doing it.

By Sunder Katwala

The Six Nations is a great tournament, drawing in many of us who don’t pay a great deal of attention to rugby for the rest of the year. And Scotland versus England at Murrayfield on Saturday afternoon probably does not need any additional political spice as context. It is hard to imagine the fans will be discussing devo-max at half-time.