This is a great and illuminating piece Ed, thanks for posting up.
I don't mean this as a criticism of this piece at all, but I'm getting to the point where if I never hear the terms "multiculturalism" or (even worse) "diversity" ever again, I'll die a happy man lol. At 44 I'm old enough to remember when you never heard those terms, and then starting about 1991, you suddenly heard them a lot, with escalating frequency until the present, where you hear them every five minutes.
It's all just such a wearying pantomime now. A politician will pop up and make a brave/reckless/racist speech about how multiculturalism really hasn't worked out. Commentators are outraged, reactionaries briefly enthused. And nothing happens. Immigration just keeps on rising, the bureaucracy required to manage it just keeps on expanding, things just keep on getting worse. I imagine there'll be Bravermans making these speeches every few years from now on, though with ever-dwindling audiences, just to maintain the impression that there's some kind of genuine policy disagreement going on somewhere.
Progressivism (communism but in slow motion) tells us: (A) that it is leading us to utopia; and (B) this utopia will simply, spontaneously arise once when we destroy of every last trace of the previous, oppressive order. The previous order in Britain was ancient, distinct and organic. As such a serious obstacle to utopia. Obstacles to utopia are initially inconvenient and then, eventually, evil. Various progressive solvents have been applied to Britain over recent decades (including devolution) but I suspect none has been as effective as immigration and the multiculturalism it inevitably ushered in.
And we have not finished yet, because implicit in the progressive world view is that Britain must become ever more multi cultural in order for utopia to be achieved, with open borders being the final destination. That is what DEI is about. That is why everything is institutionally racist. That is why the pages of the fashion retailer H&M features "diverse" models at the expensive of indigenous models. It doesn't matter that H&M share price is down 60% since 2015. It doesn't matter that the majority want models that mostly resemble them when deciding on what clothes might suit them. And if it does matter it just proves why more diversity is necessary.
Excellent piece, as always. Only thing I think you've missed is that the "Critics of Braverman who point to her own immigrant background" have wilfully ignored that she's talking about _mass_ and _illegal_ immigration, and that saying "but you're an immigrant (although she's not)" is really a bit like saying "but science says a little alcohol is good for you" if someone mentions that Dylan Thomas died after drinking 18 whiskies*. Quantity shades into quality, and while immigration may have been a good thing when Ms Braverman's parents arrived, it may also not be now, with no contradiction.
Also, someone said to me on Twitter than Braverman being Home Secretary proves that multiculturalism works. (I think to know if it works, we have to know what it's supposed to do. And one instance in a country of millions is a data point, not a conclusive proof, because with very large numbers, statistically unlikely events occur.) Anyway, France has a policy (laïcité) which is pretty much the opposite of multiculturalism, as you've said, and their Culture Minister is an *immigrant* from Lebanon. So I'm even sure we can say "Suella Braverman would not be in the government if we didn't have multiculturalism."
* I just tried to fact check this, and I have to mention that the Guardian has another theory, but then the Guardian would.
And it is impossible to get it right in a multi ethnic society, because groups call for differential treatment and see themselves as victimised- to some extent because their identity group is not in the majority. This has impacts that cannot be solved. Grievances mount. A police marksman is charged with murder in relation to the death of Chris Kaba. Not involuntary manslaughter but murder. Murder for reacting under pressure in discharge of his duties. No mention of the incredibly difficult and dangerous job the police have in London. We don't say that any more. Or that law and order matters. Accusations of racial profiling but no mention that homicide in London is by an order of magnitude committed by the demographic who claim to be profiled. A 15 year old girl is murdered with a knife resembling a sword in Croydon at or around 9 am yesterday morning. But by next week the BBC will be wanging on yet again about disproportionate stop and search as they wage their war against what is often plain reality. And perhaps more than anything else, more than the direct downsides, it is the constant control of narrative that it the worst thing. The need to manage. censor and corral reactions in relation to everything to ensure that only progressive and regime approved conclusions are reached. The accretion of power which the various groups afford the regime, precisely because the groups are disparate.
Multiculturalism is NOT the idea that multiple cultures should EXIST. It is the idea that they must COEXIST, in the same spaces, no matter how incompatible they are.
Intelligent people understand that the way to preserve different cultures is to insulate them from each other, not forcibly commingle them.
To make multiculturalism work, we need someone who understands how different cultures can work together successfully to lead the government. Maybe someone who was born abroad, had been a mayor of a major metropolitan city, and had knowledge of the Ottoman Empire through their ancestry.
If someone like that was in charge, this country would be more successful, richer, and more united...
One can argue whether an individual should or shouldn't be permitted to migrate and take up residence in this Kingdom but once they are here the argument that their behaviour needs to accord to an abstract set of 'British Values' or modes of behaviour is simply foolish.
This is the nation that contains multitudes, that has born Byron and Wesley, Wilde and Cobbett, George Eliot and Katie Price, Lord Kitchener and Bertrand Russell to name but a few. The idea there there is a core set of transcendent 'British Values' around which we can ask or compel 'newcomers' to form themselves simply doesn't stand up.
I don't say that with any relish but as a man who feels that the Forever-Pride, individual-expressionist liberal-authoritarian state I see around me is frankly less congenial than Brixton Hill on a Sunday morning when the churches are open for worship.
As Mr West points out here and elsewhere, the British Values inculcated at my children's school would have been quite foreign to many in my grandparents generation even when compared with the values taught in the Mosque up the road.
Furthermore, what are we actually talking about here? Once an individual is admitted to the civic rights of this nation he can do and be what he likes within the law. The 'native' population of this land labours under a genuine and persistent illusion that the proverbial 'birth-right' is a special legal or moral category. Disabusing oneself of this notion is the first step to that blessed state where one can 'stop worrying-and-love-the-population-bomb'.
No history is illegitimate. Nothing ever goes back. Let's see what the future holds.
"All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity".
'Once an individual is admitted to the civic rights of this nation he can do and be what he likes within the law.' It's the essence of John Locke's notion of toleration, which is not the same as tolerance in the way we use that term today.
"Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God." Romans 13:1
PS: I wonder why you find it necessary to place the term native in scare quotes?
John Locke quite happily argued for the exclusion of Roman Catholics from participation in national life. As you know the Test Act was only finally repealed in full at the end of the 19th Century.
So, yes, Locke's much misunderstood notion of toleration is not the same as the idea we conjure with today. It is infected with all the unresolved contradicitions and wire drawn special pleading which has made him the tutelary deity of the unhappy American experiment.
He might do for 'American Values' or some such moveable feast, but as a basis for British Values he is rather a feeble prop, in my opinion.
I merely put the term native in quotation marks to emphasise that it is a category not distinguished in our law from non-native citizen, despite what us Natives may think or hope.
"John Locke quite happily argued for the exclusion of Roman Catholics from participation in national life." Not in the Letter on Toleration he didn't:
"Further, the magistrate ought not to forbid the preaching or professing of any speculative opinions in any Church because they have no manner of relation to the civil rights of the subjects. If a Roman Catholic believe that to be really the body of Christ which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbour. If a Jew do not believe the New Testament to be the Word of God, he does not thereby alter anything in men’s civil rights. If a heathen doubt of both Testaments, he is not therefore to be punished as a pernicious citizen."
Since the the Test Act (1673) required holders of public office to renounce the notion of transubstantiation and to take the sacrament in accordance with the Anglican rite, it was clearly in violation of Lockean Toleration.
His concern was with institutions and allegiance, not beliefs:
"That Church can have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate which is constituted upon such a bottom that all those who enter into it do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince."
This is not an unreasonable position given the times, and finds application, mutatis mutandis, in our own day. The National Security Act makes 'assisting a foreign intelligence service' a crime punishable by imprisonment for up to 14 years. Russia Today has had its licence to broadcast in the UK revoked, and the Confucius Institutes are, to say the least, in official disfavour. All on the same grounds as those upheld by Locke.
PS: As to what you disdain as American Values (I refrain from scare quotes), having Locke in mind, which part of the following do you consider to be a feeble prop?:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . "
Locke's philosophy, in my reading of it, requires of it's adherents the acceptance of rather too many nice distinctions, exemptions and deductions from the ordinary order of consistency. Catholics are to be tolerated insofar as they do not manifest their belief in certain ways. And atheists were not to be tolerated in any event whatsoever. This is a strange idea of tolerance and a strange idea of belief.
The forsworn rebel and good Lockean scholar who inserted those fine words on liberty and equality into The Declaration of Independence also kept 600 of his fellow men enslaved as his personal property at Monticello. A nice exemption indeed, we may say, but one taken directly from John Locke's varied oracles.
In a lesser thinker we might even say it approaches hypocrisy.
Like a blinding revelation from on high, the scales have fallen from my eyes!
I see now that it's ok to betray your country and people, so long as you do it in the name of some esoteric ideology, such as believing that bread really is the flesh of God; or in thrall to a ruthless but strangely attractive man-of-power. Oh brave new world!
In our new utopia we should discard the fundamental human rights of life and liberty on the grounds that a hundred years after Locke proposed them, the American who copied them into his country's founding document did not wholly live up to the principles he espoused. Imagine a world run on such bold Critical principles. What could possibly go wrong?
PS: In the end, you see, Critical Theory (or anti-Enlightenment Romanticism, which ever takes your fancy) is no more than self-destructive, anti-human nihilism.
I'm sorry to say I think you are getting a little overwraught.
Locke had many patriotic critics in his own time and on his own terms. As he does now. Pointing out the possible weakness and inconsistencies in his arguments need not imply utopian, nor antinomian inclinations.
Indeed it has been Locke's own theory of the mind as a 'Tabula Rasa' which, percolated through Marx, has led to so much muddled and utopian thinking in our own time. It is the intellectual foundation of all susequent 'social engineering'.
Bravermann is clearly a product of assmilation. Rifkind is being disingenous because he knows class protects him from living next to someone who is possessed by a Jinn
Surely the point of the Christian Vizers, is that they could not inherit. They could not challenge their masters. I am staggered why the Ottomans always get good press. They seem to have great PR in the American public school system btw
I am sorry that Prinz Eugene did not take Constantinople in 1700 and turn the Balkans into a big Slovenia
Isn't the key point with Bradford was that people were able to bring in brides from their homeland.
Let's just be honest and not hide reality, this ends badly for anyone involved.
You either support your own or not at all and if you support the other they gain power and kill you.
Political masking or masking meaning is the bloody problem, say what you mean straight out or don't bother. If your scared of consequences you don't have a pair, and your own will suffer for it.
But "inadequate integration" and "multiculturalism" v "assimilation" are policy choices or at least the results of policy choices. And why would a politician use "uncontrolled" in good faith to mean not properly controlled according to their preferences?
All that said, I recognize that the situation of Europe is different from the US that has had more historical experience absorbing immigrants and less experience with immigrants from more culturally distant backgrounds, so I certainly agree that your challenge is greater than ours.
Call me cynical but my intuition is that most white liberals like multiculturalism because it introduces more diverse consumer choice.
As for whether we want groups from outside to integrate in a seamless way I'm not sure that liberal values are our friend, given the focus on individualism.
A very fine article, Ed. I learned so much from it and will have to read it a couple of times more.
On a lighter note (perhaps) I wonder if, in time, King Charles III will become our very own ‘BörklüceMustafa, preaching a union of Christianity and Islam’?
This is a great and illuminating piece Ed, thanks for posting up.
I don't mean this as a criticism of this piece at all, but I'm getting to the point where if I never hear the terms "multiculturalism" or (even worse) "diversity" ever again, I'll die a happy man lol. At 44 I'm old enough to remember when you never heard those terms, and then starting about 1991, you suddenly heard them a lot, with escalating frequency until the present, where you hear them every five minutes.
It's all just such a wearying pantomime now. A politician will pop up and make a brave/reckless/racist speech about how multiculturalism really hasn't worked out. Commentators are outraged, reactionaries briefly enthused. And nothing happens. Immigration just keeps on rising, the bureaucracy required to manage it just keeps on expanding, things just keep on getting worse. I imagine there'll be Bravermans making these speeches every few years from now on, though with ever-dwindling audiences, just to maintain the impression that there's some kind of genuine policy disagreement going on somewhere.
Progressivism (communism but in slow motion) tells us: (A) that it is leading us to utopia; and (B) this utopia will simply, spontaneously arise once when we destroy of every last trace of the previous, oppressive order. The previous order in Britain was ancient, distinct and organic. As such a serious obstacle to utopia. Obstacles to utopia are initially inconvenient and then, eventually, evil. Various progressive solvents have been applied to Britain over recent decades (including devolution) but I suspect none has been as effective as immigration and the multiculturalism it inevitably ushered in.
And we have not finished yet, because implicit in the progressive world view is that Britain must become ever more multi cultural in order for utopia to be achieved, with open borders being the final destination. That is what DEI is about. That is why everything is institutionally racist. That is why the pages of the fashion retailer H&M features "diverse" models at the expensive of indigenous models. It doesn't matter that H&M share price is down 60% since 2015. It doesn't matter that the majority want models that mostly resemble them when deciding on what clothes might suit them. And if it does matter it just proves why more diversity is necessary.
Excellent piece, as always. Only thing I think you've missed is that the "Critics of Braverman who point to her own immigrant background" have wilfully ignored that she's talking about _mass_ and _illegal_ immigration, and that saying "but you're an immigrant (although she's not)" is really a bit like saying "but science says a little alcohol is good for you" if someone mentions that Dylan Thomas died after drinking 18 whiskies*. Quantity shades into quality, and while immigration may have been a good thing when Ms Braverman's parents arrived, it may also not be now, with no contradiction.
Also, someone said to me on Twitter than Braverman being Home Secretary proves that multiculturalism works. (I think to know if it works, we have to know what it's supposed to do. And one instance in a country of millions is a data point, not a conclusive proof, because with very large numbers, statistically unlikely events occur.) Anyway, France has a policy (laïcité) which is pretty much the opposite of multiculturalism, as you've said, and their Culture Minister is an *immigrant* from Lebanon. So I'm even sure we can say "Suella Braverman would not be in the government if we didn't have multiculturalism."
* I just tried to fact check this, and I have to mention that the Guardian has another theory, but then the Guardian would.
And it is impossible to get it right in a multi ethnic society, because groups call for differential treatment and see themselves as victimised- to some extent because their identity group is not in the majority. This has impacts that cannot be solved. Grievances mount. A police marksman is charged with murder in relation to the death of Chris Kaba. Not involuntary manslaughter but murder. Murder for reacting under pressure in discharge of his duties. No mention of the incredibly difficult and dangerous job the police have in London. We don't say that any more. Or that law and order matters. Accusations of racial profiling but no mention that homicide in London is by an order of magnitude committed by the demographic who claim to be profiled. A 15 year old girl is murdered with a knife resembling a sword in Croydon at or around 9 am yesterday morning. But by next week the BBC will be wanging on yet again about disproportionate stop and search as they wage their war against what is often plain reality. And perhaps more than anything else, more than the direct downsides, it is the constant control of narrative that it the worst thing. The need to manage. censor and corral reactions in relation to everything to ensure that only progressive and regime approved conclusions are reached. The accretion of power which the various groups afford the regime, precisely because the groups are disparate.
Multiculturalism is NOT the idea that multiple cultures should EXIST. It is the idea that they must COEXIST, in the same spaces, no matter how incompatible they are.
Intelligent people understand that the way to preserve different cultures is to insulate them from each other, not forcibly commingle them.
And is "multiculturalism" also at the heart of this going ignored for so many years by police...
"Why Did British Police Ignore Pakistani Gangs Abusing 1,400 Rotherham Children? Political Correctness"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerscruton/2014/08/30/why-did-british-police-ignore-pakistani-gangs-raping-rotherham-children-political-correctness/
To make multiculturalism work, we need someone who understands how different cultures can work together successfully to lead the government. Maybe someone who was born abroad, had been a mayor of a major metropolitan city, and had knowledge of the Ottoman Empire through their ancestry.
If someone like that was in charge, this country would be more successful, richer, and more united...
Yes, a bit more managerialism should do it.
The best form of irony is that which the moderately attentive reader is not quite sure is intended as such. We done, old chap - er, I think.
One can argue whether an individual should or shouldn't be permitted to migrate and take up residence in this Kingdom but once they are here the argument that their behaviour needs to accord to an abstract set of 'British Values' or modes of behaviour is simply foolish.
This is the nation that contains multitudes, that has born Byron and Wesley, Wilde and Cobbett, George Eliot and Katie Price, Lord Kitchener and Bertrand Russell to name but a few. The idea there there is a core set of transcendent 'British Values' around which we can ask or compel 'newcomers' to form themselves simply doesn't stand up.
I don't say that with any relish but as a man who feels that the Forever-Pride, individual-expressionist liberal-authoritarian state I see around me is frankly less congenial than Brixton Hill on a Sunday morning when the churches are open for worship.
As Mr West points out here and elsewhere, the British Values inculcated at my children's school would have been quite foreign to many in my grandparents generation even when compared with the values taught in the Mosque up the road.
Furthermore, what are we actually talking about here? Once an individual is admitted to the civic rights of this nation he can do and be what he likes within the law. The 'native' population of this land labours under a genuine and persistent illusion that the proverbial 'birth-right' is a special legal or moral category. Disabusing oneself of this notion is the first step to that blessed state where one can 'stop worrying-and-love-the-population-bomb'.
No history is illegitimate. Nothing ever goes back. Let's see what the future holds.
"All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity".
Isaiah 40:17
Here' an abstract British value for you:
'Once an individual is admitted to the civic rights of this nation he can do and be what he likes within the law.' It's the essence of John Locke's notion of toleration, which is not the same as tolerance in the way we use that term today.
"Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God." Romans 13:1
PS: I wonder why you find it necessary to place the term native in scare quotes?
John Locke quite happily argued for the exclusion of Roman Catholics from participation in national life. As you know the Test Act was only finally repealed in full at the end of the 19th Century.
So, yes, Locke's much misunderstood notion of toleration is not the same as the idea we conjure with today. It is infected with all the unresolved contradicitions and wire drawn special pleading which has made him the tutelary deity of the unhappy American experiment.
He might do for 'American Values' or some such moveable feast, but as a basis for British Values he is rather a feeble prop, in my opinion.
I merely put the term native in quotation marks to emphasise that it is a category not distinguished in our law from non-native citizen, despite what us Natives may think or hope.
"John Locke quite happily argued for the exclusion of Roman Catholics from participation in national life." Not in the Letter on Toleration he didn't:
"Further, the magistrate ought not to forbid the preaching or professing of any speculative opinions in any Church because they have no manner of relation to the civil rights of the subjects. If a Roman Catholic believe that to be really the body of Christ which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbour. If a Jew do not believe the New Testament to be the Word of God, he does not thereby alter anything in men’s civil rights. If a heathen doubt of both Testaments, he is not therefore to be punished as a pernicious citizen."
Since the the Test Act (1673) required holders of public office to renounce the notion of transubstantiation and to take the sacrament in accordance with the Anglican rite, it was clearly in violation of Lockean Toleration.
His concern was with institutions and allegiance, not beliefs:
"That Church can have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate which is constituted upon such a bottom that all those who enter into it do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince."
This is not an unreasonable position given the times, and finds application, mutatis mutandis, in our own day. The National Security Act makes 'assisting a foreign intelligence service' a crime punishable by imprisonment for up to 14 years. Russia Today has had its licence to broadcast in the UK revoked, and the Confucius Institutes are, to say the least, in official disfavour. All on the same grounds as those upheld by Locke.
PS: As to what you disdain as American Values (I refrain from scare quotes), having Locke in mind, which part of the following do you consider to be a feeble prop?:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . "
Locke's philosophy, in my reading of it, requires of it's adherents the acceptance of rather too many nice distinctions, exemptions and deductions from the ordinary order of consistency. Catholics are to be tolerated insofar as they do not manifest their belief in certain ways. And atheists were not to be tolerated in any event whatsoever. This is a strange idea of tolerance and a strange idea of belief.
The forsworn rebel and good Lockean scholar who inserted those fine words on liberty and equality into The Declaration of Independence also kept 600 of his fellow men enslaved as his personal property at Monticello. A nice exemption indeed, we may say, but one taken directly from John Locke's varied oracles.
In a lesser thinker we might even say it approaches hypocrisy.
Like a blinding revelation from on high, the scales have fallen from my eyes!
I see now that it's ok to betray your country and people, so long as you do it in the name of some esoteric ideology, such as believing that bread really is the flesh of God; or in thrall to a ruthless but strangely attractive man-of-power. Oh brave new world!
In our new utopia we should discard the fundamental human rights of life and liberty on the grounds that a hundred years after Locke proposed them, the American who copied them into his country's founding document did not wholly live up to the principles he espoused. Imagine a world run on such bold Critical principles. What could possibly go wrong?
PS: In the end, you see, Critical Theory (or anti-Enlightenment Romanticism, which ever takes your fancy) is no more than self-destructive, anti-human nihilism.
I'm sorry to say I think you are getting a little overwraught.
Locke had many patriotic critics in his own time and on his own terms. As he does now. Pointing out the possible weakness and inconsistencies in his arguments need not imply utopian, nor antinomian inclinations.
Indeed it has been Locke's own theory of the mind as a 'Tabula Rasa' which, percolated through Marx, has led to so much muddled and utopian thinking in our own time. It is the intellectual foundation of all susequent 'social engineering'.
I hope we have not misunderstood one another.
Best Wishes.
WHA
Bravermann is clearly a product of assmilation. Rifkind is being disingenous because he knows class protects him from living next to someone who is possessed by a Jinn
Surely the point of the Christian Vizers, is that they could not inherit. They could not challenge their masters. I am staggered why the Ottomans always get good press. They seem to have great PR in the American public school system btw
I am sorry that Prinz Eugene did not take Constantinople in 1700 and turn the Balkans into a big Slovenia
Isn't the key point with Bradford was that people were able to bring in brides from their homeland.
So the national governments facilitated this.
Let's just be honest and not hide reality, this ends badly for anyone involved.
You either support your own or not at all and if you support the other they gain power and kill you.
Political masking or masking meaning is the bloody problem, say what you mean straight out or don't bother. If your scared of consequences you don't have a pair, and your own will suffer for it.
'Because it has allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.’
'hasn't it', Suella, not 'in it'.
But "inadequate integration" and "multiculturalism" v "assimilation" are policy choices or at least the results of policy choices. And why would a politician use "uncontrolled" in good faith to mean not properly controlled according to their preferences?
All that said, I recognize that the situation of Europe is different from the US that has had more historical experience absorbing immigrants and less experience with immigrants from more culturally distant backgrounds, so I certainly agree that your challenge is greater than ours.
Call me cynical but my intuition is that most white liberals like multiculturalism because it introduces more diverse consumer choice.
As for whether we want groups from outside to integrate in a seamless way I'm not sure that liberal values are our friend, given the focus on individualism.
A very fine article, Ed. I learned so much from it and will have to read it a couple of times more.
On a lighter note (perhaps) I wonder if, in time, King Charles III will become our very own ‘BörklüceMustafa, preaching a union of Christianity and Islam’?
Blimey.