Bill Morris: Stop and listen, Mr Blunkett - don't make matters worse

'Now it is the turn of our ethnic minorities to feel the heat of the Home Secretary's impatience'

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Valued friends are those who support you when you are right and have the courage to tell you when you're wrong. David Blunkett is a Home Secretary in whom I placed my trust that he would deliver a fairer deal for asylum seekers. While I still have faith that he will do so, I have to say his latest intervention – telling ethnic minorities to adopt "British norms of acceptability"... or else – may be the right debate, but it is being handled badly.

In his five brief, bludgeoning months at the Home Office, Mr Blunkett has managed to offend the police, attack the judiciary in terms that would make Robert Mugabe blush, and stir the Lords to the point of revolution, condemning them as "naive liberals" when they refused to buckle to his will.

Now it is the turn of our ethnic minorities to feel the heat of his impatience and Mr Blunkett is fast creating the impression that it is safer to leave the cat in charge of the milk than the Home Secretary in charge of our liberties.

With his instructions to do more to fit into British culture, Mr Blunkett has handed the burden of integration over to those who are too often forced to the fringes of our society and, in the process, absolved our institutions from their responsibility to shape a cohesive Britain. Talk of learning English takes us no further forward now that we know English was often the first tongue of the summer rioters in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley. It entirely misses the point about why some of our cities have become so unsettled.

By acting ahead of the reports into the summer riots, Mr Blunkett has got his retaliation in first. But, as these reports show, community failure is propagated by complex factors – a mess of poverty and alienation complicated by misguided local policies and overloaded by Government initiatives. A reluctance to assimilate was not a chief factor. Yet, in a classic case of blaming the victim, Mr Blunkett opts to promote a simplistic "integrate or perish" message.

The experience of these northern communities is not unique – they are microcosms of what is happening in cities and towns across the land. Whatever social yardstick Mr Blunkett cares to use to examine it, poverty and exclusion are the experience of ethnic minorities Britain-wide, and they are most severe for the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities.

In August, the Cabinet Office's own study found that more than half of these people lived in the most deprived 10 per cent of wards in England, compared with only 14 per cent of white households. Around a third of Pakistani and Bangladeshi households lived in unfit properties. Second generation immigrants – growing up in poor neighbourhoods, locked in jobs in declining industries – are more than twice as likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts and are turning to sub-cultural groups for a sense of identity.

Perhaps most damningly, the Cabinet Office study found that, in contrast to the United States where inequalities had diminished over the past 30 years, the gap had widened here. A less tolerant culture, weaker anti-discrimination laws and a labour force with fewer non-whites are identified as causes – not a reluctance on the part of immigrants to integrate. Will such complexities really be addressed by forcing immigrants to adopt Mr Blunkett's "norms of acceptability"?

That Cabinet Office report found that an "education system that encourages competition and separation" ensures that Bangladeshi, black and Pakistani pupils fare less well than other pupils. They may enter school with equal or higher ability than their white friends but they will leave the system anything but equal in achievement.

So why is the Government persisting with its proposals to introduce more faith schools? Allowing even more schools to select on the basis of religion will entrench the "parallel lives" that our communities are leading. Established faith schools may be here to stay but, in the name of good race relations, let's not create any more of these nurseries for segregation.

Social cohesion has never been nurtured by social exclusion. If the Home Secretary needs further proof of this he only has to look at our cousins on the Continent to realise the sorry consequences of measuring immigrants' worth against a limited national identity. Germany, Austria and now Denmark have all seen social cohesion troubled by politicians who travel on the attack-the-immigrant ticket. In the past, I have warned about the damage that immoderate talk would do to communities here, and when the British National Party finds the Home Secretary to be a rich source of copy I can take no comfort from my interventions.

So, David, listen to a friend. Before handing down edicts on integration, it would be wise to stop and absorb the lessons from Bradford, Oldham and Burnley. They have much to tell us all.

The writer is leader of the Transport and General Workers' Union