Leicester and the unravelling of multiculturalism

There are two disturbing things about the Muslim-Hindu clashes in Leicester. The first is the violence itself. Gangs of men have clashed across the city. Hundreds of Muslim and Hindu youths in balaclavas and Covid masks – those plague-era face-coverings still have their uses, it seems – have confronted each other on normally quiet suburban streets. Glass bottles have been thrown, a knife was allegedly wielded (one man was arrested on suspicion of possessing a ‘bladed article’). It really blew up on Saturday night into Sunday morning, as the rest of the country was preparing for the queen’s funeral. You couldn’t have asked for a better, more depressing snapshot of fragmented Britain: a display of solemn unity in Westminster, violent religious streetfighting in Leicester.

The second disturbing thing is the moral evasion of the elites. The political and media establishments seem utterly unwilling to grapple, honestly, with this explosion of identitarian tension on the streets of England. Even where they do talk about Leicester’s strife, evasion remains the name of the game. It’s all the fault of outsiders, many are saying. As the Leicester Mercury summed it up, it is being ‘widely claimed’ that ‘a number of more recent migrants to the city hold far-right Hindu nationalist views’. Those backward Indians coming over here and disrupting our multicultural paradise. This is issue-avoidance on an epic scale. Blaming foreign agents for clashes in the Midlands is a desperate attempt to distract attention from the domestic ideologies that have whipped up identitarian tension. Primarily the ideology of multiculturalism, that hyper-divisive worldview. It is that ideology’s unravelling we are now witnessing in Leicester.

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Read also: Disorder in Leicester is a reminder that we can’t take social cohesion for granted by Rakib Ehsan, CapX