How multiculturalism fuels hate

This elite ideology has cultivated and inflamed ethnic tensions

Speaking in Washington, DC, in September, British home secretary Suella Braverman declared that multiculturalism has ‘failed in Europe’. To illustrate her point, she highlighted the numerous violent clashes, involving distinct ethnic groups, that have erupted ‘on the streets’ of Malmo, Paris, Brussels and Leicester. Had Braverman delivered the speech a few weeks later, she would no doubt have also drawn attention to the Islamist-dominated anti-Israel protests that have taken over European capitals on a weekly basis, following Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel on 7 October.

She argued that multicultural policies have fuelled this fracturing of society into sometimes antagonistic identity groups. ‘Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate’, she said. ‘It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.’ She added that, in some extreme cases, certain groups of people can ‘pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society’.

To our cultural and political elites, criticising multiculturalism is now tantamount to heresy. Predictably, Braverman was swiftly denounced as a racist and her speech presented as a threat to migrant communities. One commentator went so far as to claim that ‘Braverman’s dangerous rhetoric puts pupils [from migrant backgrounds] at risk’ in British schools.

Even senior members of her own party have distanced themselves from her speech. Braverman’s boss, prime minister Rishi Sunak, responded to a journalist’s question about Braverman’s views by praising Britain’s ‘fantastic multicultural democracy’. Sunak then, in a retort to Braverman, claimed that ‘we have done an incredible job of integrating people into society’.

Of course, as we have seen again this week, following Braverman’s call for the police to ban the pro-Palestine march scheduled for Armistice Day, she frequently courts controversy. Her every statement, almost regardless of its content, seems to provide an occasion for liberal hand-wringing. Yet the response to her criticism of multiculturalism was particularly over the top. It seems that anyone who draws attention to its failures is likely to provoke the hostility of the great and the good – and to be accused of xenophobia and racism.

It hasn’t always been this way. In the recent past, the failure of multiculturalism was highlighted on numerous occasions by mainstream political leaders. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel – an enthusiastic advocate of mass migration – declared in October 2010 that Germany’s multiculturalism had ‘utterly failed’. Her criticism was echoed in February 2011 by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British prime minister David Cameron. The latter identified ‘state multiculturalism’ as one of the causes of terrorism.

Cameron’s statement was certainly milder in tone to Braverman’s speech. But the content was strikingly similar. He said that the ‘doctrine of state multiculturalism’ had encouraged people of different cultures to live separate lives, and had ‘failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong’. As a result, Cameron argued, ‘we have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values’. In response to the failure of state multiculturalism, Cameron called for the cultivation of a stronger national identity that could ‘prevent people turning to all kinds of extremism’.

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