Jack Straw speech at Three Faiths Forum

Jack Straw speech at Three Faiths Forum; - 'What you wrote in your column is OK up to a point' said one close friend (who disagreed with me) 'but integration is a two way process / Where the Asian community is making an effort to integrate, by trying to live as neighbours or by encouraging mixing of children at a young age in schools, the efforts are not always reciprocated by the white community' / I understand the points being made / He cited a recent research project by Lancaster University's Religious Studies Department which found that Muslim students of Asian heritage are, compared to their white Christian and non-Christian counterparts, much more receptive to diversity and much more willing to embrace difference without feeling that their identities are being threatened or undermined - This leads on to the last section of this address / What we do next / How do we better ensure that what we have achieved over the last 50 years can be sustained? / In those areas where there are problems, what I suggest we need is to build open respectful but frank debate about the factors involved, and we have to identify those means and mechanisms by which we can encourage greater shared experiences and also express the frustration about why people appear to be living in parallel communities from school and college and workplace, even also to how we build into the following of our national sports greater shared experiences for all people - We also have to recognise, since this affects the prescription, that along with many other changes, in the last half century, people's sense of class has or is dissolving / Good in many ways, but with this has been an erosion of collective sense of community - When I first became actively involved in politics it was widely recognised that, notwithstanding the existence of party competition arising out of class, and perhaps regional differences, there existed an underlying social unity, a civic political culture based on shared, genera...