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We bend over backwards to avoid giving offence, but we go too far
It’s like something from a dark, dystopian drama. A five-year-old white Christian child is removed from her family and given to a burka-wearing foster carer.
The girl is bewildered to find herself encouraged to speak Arabic in an environment where the cross around her neck is removed and scathing things are said about her culture.
The authorities note that the child sobs and begs not to be sent back to the foster home “because they don’t speak English” (the council says the family is English-speaking and of mixed race). Her alarmed mother reports that her daughter says “Christmas and Easter are stupid” and that European women are “alcoholic”.
Incredibly, this is happening right now, in Tower Hamlets, a scandalridden London borough, where the five-year-old has spent the past six months in the care of two different Muslim households. In her current foster placement, the mother wears a burka, that ghastly shroud that covers the whole body from head to toe, with only a cloth grille to view the world.
Photographs showing the little girl in a white top and black trousers, standing next to her, fills you with unease. You want to reach into the picture and grab her.
To deliberately place a Christian child in the care of such a person is socially and emotionally tone-deaf.
Sadly, cultural sensitivity seems to be a one-way street. Back in 2012, a couple had three ethnic-minority foster children removed from their care by Rotherham Borough Council because they were members of Ukip. The director of children’s services explained her decision was influenced by the party’s immigration policy, which “calls for the end of the active promotion of multiculturalism”.
Let’s pause here to remind ourselves that it was those same Rotherham authorities who failed to protect hundreds of white girls from mainly Pakistani grooming gangs. The men may have been predators and rapists but, hey, at least they didn’t vote Ukip!
In the warped world of political correctness, it’s fine to deduce that a foster family is racist because they support Ukip; God forbid you imply that a woman wearing a black sack, who refuses to be seen or touched by non-muslims, is a bigot.
Just imagine the eye-popping outrage of Diane Abbott if social services had entrusted a Muslim child to an evangelical family who forced her to eat pork. So far, not one word from Labour about the fate of the five-year-old girl. Not one. See, if you’re white British, you don’t count as “vulnerable”.
You can expect to get your nose rubbed in diversity by Tower Hamlets social workers, even though there must have been more suitable foster carers available and members of the child’s wider family volunteered to take her.
Do social workers think it’s culturally enriching to plunge a disorientated, English-speaking tot into a household that might as well be in Bangladesh? A family friend claims the fostered girl is “trapped in a world where everything feels foreign and unfamiliar”. And this is the mess multiculturalism has got us into.
We have ended up with de facto ghettoes like Tower Hamlets, where only 31 per cent of the residents are white British and a reactionary, misogynist version of Islam is allowed to flourish unchecked.
Instead of insisting on integration, shared values and a common language, we have capitulated to the point where a senior officer in the Metropolitan Police suggests that victims of crime who do not speak English should be given priority.
What about the German doctor who worked in Tower Hamlets and said to me: “I couldn’t believe there were women who had lived there for 30, 40 years, and still couldn’t speak English. How can that be allowed to happen?”
Oh, for the same reason that Aldi lets Muslim workers put up a notice saying: “No alcohol is able to be served at this till”.
The same reason Sarah Champion was forced out of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet for daring to tell the truth about the rape and exploitation of white girls.
The same reason Transport for London used a cartoon image of four-year-old “Razmi” wearing a headscarf in a road-safety campaign.
We bend over backwards to avoid appearing biased or giving offence, but we go too far and end up discriminating against our own way of life. Or looking ridiculous and weak in the process.
It took advocates of Muslim women’s equality to attack the Transport for London cartoon of Razmi, pointing out that the headscarf is only worn from puberty onwards for reasons of modesty. “How can you integrate in society if you have a four-year-old girl wearing a hijab?” demanded one.
And how can you place a five-yearold Christian child with a burkawearing foster carer who thinks English women are alcoholics?
Tory MPS and the Children’s Commissioner for England have demanded an urgent review. It is not enough.
Foster carers, of any faith or of no faith, who offer sanctuary to a troubled child are among the very best people we have. In this case, they have turned out to be a hell. Tower Hamlets must admit its mistake. Return the little girl to where she belongs.