The cult of multiculturalism has failed Britain

Telegraph

24-04-2025

British multiculturalism did not start when HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in 1948. Nor did it begin in the 50 years after the end of the Second World War. When Enoch Powell rallied against immigration in his 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968, 98 per cent of the UK population was white British.
Before the latter half of the 1990s, immigration played a marginal role in the mainstream life of our islands. The 'year zero' of multiculturalism was 1997. Tony Blair's election in May that year marked the start of a new Britain; the nation has changed profoundly since.
This might sound odd. We are used to hearing about the Huguenots of the early modern period and the Jews of the late 19th century. But migration to Britain was relatively insubstantial until the late 20th-century.
In the 50 years between 1945 and 1995, net migration to this country was less than one million. And much of that number was from the 1990s; before then, more people left the UK than came in. In the 30 years since 1995, net migration has risen to around eight million.
But 1997 was significant for another reason. The Runnymede Trust, an anti-racist think tank, established a commission to explore the diversity of the British people. Its remit was 'countering racial discrimination and disadvantage' and 'making Britain a confident and vibrant society at ease with its rich diversity'.
The commission's findings – known as the Parekh Report – were published three years later, to controversy and acclaim. Home Secretary Jack Straw described it as 'the most important contribution to the national debate on racial discrimination for many years'.
We are still living in its shadow, 25 years on: the debate around two-tier policing; the use of positive discrimination by West Yorkshire Police to hire ethnic minority officers; the grooming gangs scandal; the Gaza activists reportedly instructing Muslim people to vote on the basis of a foreign conflict thousands of miles away rather than on domestic issues. All of this needs to be seen in light of the statements and contradictions at the heart of the Parekh Report.
On the one hand, it rejected positive discrimination as a solution to racial inequality. The chairman of the commission, Bhikhu Parekh, stated: 'The report rejects quotas, positive discrimination and all attempts to give any group a privileged treatment.' What it strove for, it insisted, was, 'fairness, equality and common belonging as the necessary basis of a just, plural, rich and self-confident Britain'. It didn't argue that British identity was in itself racist. It was more nuanced. It argued instead that 'Britishness has largely unspoken, racial connotations', and that we should be more inclusive of how we define British identity: black British and Asian British people belong just as much as anyone else.
All of this sounds admirable. But it is not the whole story. The commission also argued that we should think of Britain not as a unitary nation, but 'as a looser federation of cultures', or a 'community of communities'. And that we should formally declare ourselves to be 'a multicultural society'.
The report was correct to note that diversity, widely defined, is a fact of life. But the report presented diversity not simply as a reality, but an ideology to which we must adhere.
Multiculturalism stopped being the same as people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds living together, but about emphasising the differences between them.
This gave credence to a kind of cultural relativism: if an ethnic minority practice is morally offensive to most of the population, on what basis can that practice be questioned? Shouldn't we practice 'tolerance'?
The multiculturalism the report celebrated sealed communities off from each other, rather than bringing them together. It is impossible to generate belonging out of thin air, and it must be grounded in something deeper than 'values' when values are always evolving: a white British person of 1945 would find the 'values' of a white British person in 1995 alien.
The world the report aimed to describe has come to pass. Ethnic minority people now play a major part in British life, from politics to popular culture. Their successes at school and at work are a remarkable achievement of which Britain should be proud.
But are we a nation at ease with diversity? Compared to our peers in Europe, the answer is yes. We should not, however, be complacent. The riots last summer suggest things are far from rosy. We have acquired a multicultural nation in a fit of absent-mindedness.
Britain is more than a collection of communities or a set of abstract values. It is a place with a history and traditions. Unless this is accounted for, the dream envisioned by the Parekh Report will turn into a nightmare.