Migrants tsar says new arrivals in UK should be taught how to queue and when to put out the bins to aid integration
NEW MIGRANTS should be taught how to queue and when to put the bins out – the Government’s Integration Tsar declared yesterday.
Dame Louise Casey said foreigners coming to the UK should be taught the basics of British life – to help them fit in.
And speaking to MPs, she said migrants had to give more to British society, insisting integration was not a “two way street”.
It came as the senior civil servant warned that religious extremism still posed a serious risk to schools in parts of the country.
She hinted that at least one headteacher at a secular school had come under pressure to close at 1pm on a Friday for “religious reasons”.
And she insisted the Government should do far more to tackle chronic segregation in pockets of the country.
Speaking to MPs on the Communities Committee she revealed her team had been the first in authority to even address a group of eastern European migrants in Sheffield.
She said: “We were the first to explain the rules of the game to people who had never been engaged with before.
“I thought it was interesting that nobody had talked to them about the way of life here, about when to put the rubbish out.
“There are basics no one had run through, no one had told them to queue, to be nice, as a package that would be no bad thing to do.”
The comments came a month after Dame Casey said migrants should swear an oath to Britain in an official report on segregation in modern day Britain.
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She warned the “unprecedented scale” of immigration had transformed many communities and some women in ethnic communities were being held back by “regressive cultural practices”.
Despite fierce criticism she yesterday reiterated that migrants should make more effort to fit in.
She said: “I don’t think it is a two way street.
“I would say, if we stick with the road analogy, that I think integration is more like you have got a bloody big motorway and you have a slip road of people coming in from the outside.
“People in the middle of the motorway need to accommodate and be gentle and kind to people coming in from the outside lane.
“But we are all in the same direction and we are all heading in the same direction.” She added: “There is more give on one side and more take on the other.
“That’s where we have successively made a mistake.”
Dame Louise also called for more checks on the rapid growth in home schooling, warning that it could allow children exposed to extremism or abuse to drop through cracks in the system.
And she said religious extremists were still infiltrating British schools in the way it happened in the ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal in Birmingham.
She stormed: “Should a secular school close at 1pm on a Friday for religious reasons?
“I know what my view is on that but I know that headteacher has to have a very difficult set of conversations with ‘the community’ which often turns out not to be the parents.”