Eric Pickles, the Conservative UK secretary of state, has plans to build a “curry college” to train unemployed British youth to cook pakora, the samosa and the chicken biriyani to replace cooks formerly hired from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.
While this is a good initiative for the British workforce, let’s hope it doesn’t turn into this:
The new “curry college” initiative is bound to generate hilarity. No scheme which Pickles leads will fail to engender a good deal of good humoured ribaldry, but there is a serious side to these plans.
In addition to the jobs angle, this initiative also has some worthwhile and far reaching motives for the increasing integration. So instead of the New Labour language of “promoting local community cohesion” will be simpler and tighter ideas like “promoting integration” and increasing “tolerance” as the new watchwords.
