Ozymandian multiculturalism?
by Paul Goodman, Conservative Home:
Enoch Powell was wrong. There have been no rivers of blood. (Yes, he didn’t use the phrase but, no, he should have known, even in 1968, that the one he used would have been so popularised.) Instead, Britain has absorbed mass immigration on a scale unprecedented in its history.
Census data are among our most-long running. Its record of the percentage of the population born abroad is, in the absence of migration data that goes back as far, perhaps the most reliable evidence of social change. In 1900, it was under two per cent. In 2019, it was 14 per cent.
But the dry statistics don’t tell the human story – of how a country which until recently was, despite successive waves of migration, overwhelmingly white, Christian (at least culturally) and imperial (in terms of recent memory). Now, 18 per cent of the population, almost one in five, are members of ethnic minorities. Less than half the population now describes itself as Christian.
Furthermore, the ethnic and religious minority population is concentrated in particular places. So it is that a majority of people in both Birmingham and Leicester are now members of ethnic minorities. This is a challenge to integration and cohesion.
That this transformation has taken place without mass violence is a tribute, first, to the minorities themselves but, second and on a larger scale, to the tolerance, good humour and sense of the white majority. It is fair to say both that this astonishing transformation was never endorsed by voters in a general election, and also that they have never voted for any party that would seriously attempt to reverse it.
Enter multiculturalism. To some, the word means simply a multi-racial society. To others, a country in which people have different value systems. More people seem to hold the first view than the second.
As the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities put it: “there is now near universal acceptance that the UK is a multi-ethnic society and people of immigrant backgrounds can be British”. So Conservative politicians should be careful to distinguish between the two meanings – or risk having to explain that their words have been “mischaracterised”, as Suella Braverman did recently.
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