BRITISH DOUBTS ABOUT MULTICULTURALISM

By Ferdinand Mount -- writing in the March 6th edition of "The Spectator". Some excerpts:

As of last Thursday, multiculturalism was officially declared dead in this country. The funeral took place in Brent Town Hall in the presence of the Prince of Wales and the Home Secretary and was accompanied by the National Anthem... we shall still hear people mouthing the old platitudes about Britain being a multicultural country, but that dogma will no longer be driving the debate.

Instead of ‘celebrating diversity’, the ceremony to welcome new British citizens celebrates in the most flagrant way imaginable the common culture of these islands. The new Briton takes an oath: ‘I swear by Almighty God (or do solemnly and truly declare and affirm) that, on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her Heirs and Successors according to law.’ The oath in itself is not new but was previously sworn privately in front of a solicitor. Now it is to be taken at a public ceremony as in the US, Canada and Australia. To it is now added the pledge: ‘I will give my loyalty to the UK and respect its rights and freedoms. I will uphold its democratic values. I will observe its laws faithfully and fulfil my duties and obligations as a British citizen.’....

To see how startling this is, you have to look back to the furore which greeted Keith Joseph back in the 1980s when he suggested that the school curriculum should include lessons about our national heritage. The intelligentsia jumped to denounce any such initiative as a quasi-fascist conspiracy to impose outmoded jingoistic values and repress the cultures of ethnic minorities. It was, per contra, the duty of all public institutions in this country not only to respect but also to foster those minority cultures and to be extremely wary of indulging in anything which sounded too overtly British. Local authorities, state schools, libraries, the Arts Council, parts of the BBC felt themselves under unremitting pressure....

But there was more behind the multicultural movement than a desire not to give offence. If it had been only an admirable impulse to show courtesy to new arrivals, there would never have been such a fierce urgency about it.

Multiculturalism had and has other motives of a more negative kind. It is the loathing that dare not speak its name. For it is not the desire to respect minority cultures that has fuelled such a crusade to reform our traditional practices. It is the unuttered desire to blot out and where possible erase all visible traces of the majority culture. The multiculturalist’s interest in Chanukkah or Diwali seldom goes beyond the mild and patronising curiosity of the tourist; it is the hatred of Christmas that stirs his juices.

As the spirit went out of socialism in the ordinary sense, radical discontent groped for another means of expressing itself. If it was no longer possible to purify the nation by abolishing capitalism and seizing the commanding heights of the economy, then at least one could purify the atmosphere. The national culture could be bleached and leached, leaving a more or less blank space in which every citizen was able to express his or her own preferences.....

At the same time, even left-wing intellectuals have become dimly conscious that immigration in all its forms — economic, illegal, asylum-seeking — has had unnerving reverberations. To put it bluntly, working-class whites in run-down towns like Burnley have come to feel that everything is done for incomers who constitute, at most, 9 per cent of the population. The reappearance of the BNP is on a tiny scale compared with the massive inroads made by Le Pen or the heirs of Pim Fortuyn. Much more widespread is a sour disenchantment or alienation which so far expresses itself in political terms only by a refusal to vote at all. And we have seen too the long-term effects of a failure to entrench a single overarching national culture, in Palestine and Northern Ireland to name but two of the worst: intercommunal conflict, rule by ruthless vigilantes, peace walls.

David Goodhart in his essay in last month’s Prospect recognises that, contrary to the long-standing wishful thinking of the liberal Left, there may be limits to diversity. The squawks of protest he has provoked suggest that he has hit a nerve.....

Note: If the above excerpt does not suffice, links to "The Spectator" are rather pesky to pursue these days. You can only see the Table of Contents without logging in and your "Back" button will not work to get you out of there. To log in you need to register, which is also difficult. Registering defeated me so I log in as info@rationalreview.com with the password "rationalreview". They obviously do not really want online readers.