THIS IS NOT a moment to despair about the state of Britain?s race relations. They have been under strain, certainly, since it emerged that the four suicide bombings in London on 7 July were committed by young men from the British Muslim community. The number of racist incidents known to the police directed at people of Asian appearance has risen substantially, and Britain?s most senior Asian police officer, Tarique Ghaffur, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, reports that religious hatred incidents, mainly targeted at Muslims, have increased by 600 per cent since 7 July. One Muslim organisation has now told women to remove their hijab headscarves to avoid drawing attention to themselves. At least one murder, of a Pakistani man in Nottingham, appears to have been revenge for the London massacres. Meanwhile a racially motivated gang murder in Huyton, Liverpool, has aroused memories of the attack on Stephen Lawrence in Eltham, south-east London, a decade ago. Both victims were teenagers, killed for being black.

These are dreadful events. It is not difficult to imagine, on the other hand, how much worse things could have been nor to recall how bad they once were. The Muslim community has been quick to accept that the alienation of a minority of Muslim young people not just from the British way of life but from the moderation taught by Islam is partly its responsibility. In identifying extremists in its midst it has offered the police an unprecedented level of co-operation. Similarly, fears that the ?racial profiling? of people the police were stopping and searching may anger those stopped and searched seem to have been exaggerated. However the sensitivity of the authorities is a sign of progress. British Asians are at last being respected as fellow citizens with feelings as well as rights. Even the murder of 18-year-old Anthony Walker in Huyton has brought forth strong displays of inter-racial solidarity. That is not what happened after the death of Stephen Lawrence. And this time the police response appears to have been exemplary.

Muslim communities are not the only ones to have problems with alienated youth. White working class communities do too. In each case extremist and simplistic philosophies, peddled by groups such as the British National Party in the one case, anti-Western Islamic preachers in the other, offer incitements to violence. In each case, the wider community has had poor success in sharing its values with a minority of the younger generation, perhaps because of a certain reticence, in the name of tolerance and inclusiveness, about imposing ?Britishness?. Apart from tolerance and inclusiveness, furthermore, there is difficulty reaching a consensus about what makes up Britishness. But the kind of multiculturalism that insists that all values and behaviour are of equal value has reached an impasse, as the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, recently recognised. Britain?s Churches should not stand aside from the debate about national identity on which the future of race relations in Britain may ultimately depend. Any sense of Britishness that ignored their contribution to it would be hollow.

Back to homepage