By Brian Nicholls

Last updated 11:39, Tuesday, 22 April 2008

Communities. Damn communities! The word has become so overused and so misused in modern Britain as to be meaningless in the context of what we used to understand it to represent.

Police in south Cumbria have launched a poster campaign in Polish to strengthen their relationship with the Polish community. NO! This is not intelligent community relations. It’s madness, just as is the multilingual website for Cumbria County Council and the many interpreters they and others make available.

We can see all around the country how damagingly unsuccessful have been the policies and strategies designed to create a ‘culturally diverse society’ in the UK. It has had the exact opposite effect to the one intended. There is almost no integration in some areas, only friction where various groups, often against their will, come into contact.

Many of the most influential immigrant voices believe that providing interpreters at medical centres and government offices and agencies as well as multilingual literature has encouraged people to remain firmly rooted in their own cultures. The result, strangely, is not so much tension between immigrant groups and the indigenous white population but between immigrant ‘communities’ as Rageh Omar pointed out in a recent TV documentary on this subject.

What the misguided cultural diversity workers at various councils and constabularies are achieving, apart from giving themselves grandiose sounding job specifications, good salaries and something to do, is to push immigrant groups closer together but further away from the rest of us. We are not creating ‘communities’ we are creating ghettos.

There are tens of thousands of people who have lived in Britain for most or, in some cases, all of their lives who cannot speak a word of English. We have made it so they don’t have to. They are mainly women. We do them a terrible disservice. We imprison them within the walls of their ‘communities’ for ever.