How multiculturalism fuels hate
by Frank Furedi, spiked:
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’.
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