But perhaps we need to get our own house in order before we can claim to have the answers. Recent UK surveys fail to show improvement in race relations. There remains clear discrimination in employment, in the use of the criminal justice system and in the provision of education. These are not getting better, and the figures for race hate crime are alarming and getting worse.

In 1999/ 2000 recorded incidents of racially aggravated serious crime in England and Wales totalled 20,994; by last year it had risen by 71 per cent to 35,974. Over the same period, racial harassment had risen by 100 per cent to 22,669 recorded incidents a year.

Apart from the fact that the statistics were collected and buried deep inside various Home Office reports, Paul Goggins, Under-Secretary of State, was unable to announce any concerted strategic action on race-hate crime in his answer to written questions to the Secretary of State for the Home Department.

Whether you are successful in race relations depends on what you are trying to achieve and over what timescale. Neither is obvious in our case.

We are not trying to mix racially. Though more than 50 per cent of the ethnic minority population was born here, there is not much intermarriage. It peaks at 25 per cent in those of Caribbean origin but is less than 5 per cent in those of Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani origin.

We talk about multiculturalism, but I am not sure we are really trying to do achieve this. Developing a cohesive community based on linked but distinct cultural groups who all get on is a tough task. It takes generations, and the Americans have been failing at it for hundreds of years. Anyone who thinks that we have achieved it is not living in the UK I live in. I see different ethnic groups living side by side here, sometimes mixing but usually not. Ethnic minority groups are confined to small areas of large cities. And the July bombers felt alienated enough from London commuters to kill them mercilessly.

My impression is that our strategy is keeping the peace, muddling along and hoping that everything will be all right with occasional ad hoc initiatives. We are doing just enough to stop society cracking along multicultural fault lines, and this is facilitated as much by the fact that the black and minority ethnic population in the UK want things to be peaceful as by any particular skill on the Government's part.

The French are different. They have an articulated goal that they seem to be pursuing - assimilation. The riots have stemmed from this, the fact that they decreased spending on the social infrastructure of areas with high concentrations of ethnic minorities and that they decided to fan the flames with a particular brand of inflammatory political rhetoric.

It does not matter whether assimilation or multiculturalism is the goal. If you are unreasonable and careless in the way you treat groups of people you can spark a riot. Ethnic monitoring will not make a blind piece of difference; talking to faith groups will not stop it and outsiders without on-the-ground cultural knowledge are unlikely to help.

Whether or not we have got one over the old foe depends on where we both end up in the long term. Perhaps if our indices of race relations were improving, and if we could preserve race relations under the same economic challenges the French face, we could claim to have the formula for a modern ethnically diverse society based on liberté, egalité and fraternité.

But these are big ifs.

Dr McKenzie is a societal psychiatrist, specialist in causes of mental illness, racism and social capital