UNLIKE MOST of Britain, the culture vultures organising this year’s British Book Awards are enthusiastic supporters of racial segregation — with the best and most politically correct intentions, of course. On April 20 they’ll be presenting the inaugural Decibel Prize, an award reserved exclusively for black and Asian writers. The Arts Council, which sponsors it, is doing so because it is “committed to supporting the increased engagement of black and Asian people as writers, readers and publishers”. To achieve this it is saving a special pat on the head for Britain’s ethnic minorities. Am I alone in finding this wholly patronising?

Boundaries in pop culture are blurring — the Punjabi Jay Sean performs R&B ballads, while the dreadlocked Kele Okereke sings white-boy indie vocals for Bloc Party — but the liberal middle classes still feel the need to colour-code and pigeonhole.

Britain is now awash with racially minded gongs that aren’t worth the plastic they are moulded with. The Emmas (Ethnic Multicultural Media Achievement awards) is an annual event that “honours media multicultural personalities”. At last year’s swanky Grosvenor House ceremony, hosted by Rageh Omar, its winners included Art Malik for his role in Holby City, and David Beckham for Sporting Personality of the Year. A show such as Holby City doesn’t merit any recognition, and in 2004 David Beckham won nothing for club or country; but Malik is brown and Becks wears a lot of bling, so in the eyes of the liberal elite they both deserve a medal.

I have to join ranks with the most Nimby of Middle Englanders: this is truly “political correctness gone mad”. The liberal middle classes dominate the media and literary world and are desperate to be seen to “celebrate diversity”. I wonder if this is because they are not likely to have had any real meaningful contact with black and Asian people.

Although council estates are full of mixed-race babies, and its inner cities teem with interracial couples busily getting jiggy with it, the liberal elite has arrived late at Britain’s multicultural street party and is keen to get in on the action. But by declaiming its PC trendiness so loudly it is elbowing aside those at the bedrock of a multicultural society who couldn’t care less about other people ’s race and don’t make a fuss of it.

The real multicultural personalities worth honouring are people such as Mrs Diamond, the old Jewish lady who babysat my cousins and me, so our mums could go to work; or Mr Garrett, my disciplinarian secondary-school form tutor, who put the fear of God into a class of rowdy working-class black and Asian boys, so that we all got an education. But decent ordinary people never get a mention; instead, with great fanfare, we have the Decibel Prize and the Emmas, and others that often depend on a corporate sponsor wanting to buy itself a little street-cred (last year’s Emmas came courtesy of NatWest).

There is a basic misconception behind these awards. The Arts Council says it wants to increase reading and writing among ethnic minorities; this implies that we don’t read and write enough. Toni Morrison and V.S. Naipaul are Nobel laureates; Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie are Booker Prize winners; India has the largest English-language reading public in the world. These are facts the Decibel Prize people have missed. Andrea Levy’s Whitbread Prize-winning Small Island is one of the books nominated for it, but she hasn’t got a problem with being placed in a niche. “I don’t call it segregation,” Levy said. “You’re trying to raise the profile of something . . . Sometimes it needs a helping hand.”

But genuine talent doesn’t need the condescending hand of bourgeois liberalism; it will rise on its own merits.

The truly talented members of Britain’s ethnic minorities don’t want meaningless baubles for work that doesn’t deserve attention; they want to make it in the big league, competing with everyone else. By allocating prizes according to race there’s a danger that not only will true talent be marginalised but also that mediocrity will be rewarded. The woolly sentimentalism of London’s literati made them laud a writer as unremarkable as Zadie Smith to the skies; the same thinking must be why the BBC repeatedly commissions The Kumars at No 42. I cringe whenever I watch that junk, hoping the public doesn’t think that all Asians are as naff and unfunny as they are.

I’ve written a novel myself; when it is published next year, I want it to cut the real mustard, not the sentimental treacle of the establishment. I don’t want the marginal recognition that might come with winning the Decibel; I want to go toe-to-toe with Whitey. I want to compete with Amis, McEwan and all the other big shots. And I don’t want a helping hand from anyone.

Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s first novel, Tourism, will be published by Vintage next spring.

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