Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
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Multiculturalism is robbing Britain of its communities, wrote Shaun Bailey The Conservative Party found itself mired in a controversy after it emerged that its candidate for London Mayor Shaun Bailey had written a pamphlet warning that multiculturalism was robbing Britain of its communities, pointing to the celebration of Hindu and Muslim festivals as examples of what was going wrong, and warning that Britain was descending into a “crime-riddled cess pool”. “You bring your children to school and they learn far more about Diwali than Christmas. I speak to people from Brent and they’ve been having Muslim and Hindi days off,” he wrote in the 2005 pamphlet, “No Man’s Land. How Britain’s Inner City Young are being failed” for the Centre for Young Policy Studies. The latter reference to “Hindi” appears to be an incorrect reference to Hinduism, as many on social media pointed out. Last week, Mr. Bailey, a former youth worker, was chosen as the Conservative Party’s candidate for the 2020 Mayor election, in which he will attempt to unseat Labour’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan. The choice was seen as an attempt by the party to distance itself from the previous campaign in which the Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith had been accused of attempting to stoke Islamophobic sentiment against Mr. Khan. In the May 2016 election, Mr. Khan ended eight years of Conservative Party rule over London, and won 56.8% of the vote, against Mr. Goldsmith’s 43.2%. In a statement when he was chosen as the party’s candidate, Mr. Bailey called for Londoners to “come together” and pledged to run a “positive campaign that puts Londoners first and delivers them a true stake in society”. His recent Twitter feed pictures him attending a Conservative Friends of India dinner and an event held by Tell MAMA, a group which monitors hate speech and activity directed against Muslims both during the Conservative Party conference. “We do not tolerate such views about Muslim and Hindu communities,” tweeted Tell MAMA immediately after news of the pamphlet emerged. “Nor do we tolerate any hatred or racism directed towards any other community. We will raise this further.”
