Suella Was Right

There's nothing racist - or wrong - about saying multiculturalism has failed.

In late September Suella Braverman, the British Home Secretary, gave a speech at a conservative think tank in the USA. In the course of this speech she broke ranks on one of the sacred cows of all right-thinking 21st century people - multiculturalism. It’s a matter of faith that multicultural societies are better than the old-fashioned kind we used to have, but Braverman dared to blaspheme; she told her audience that multiculturalism has failed.

As you’d expect, that didn’t go down too well with those of more politically correct opinions. Braverman was quickly condemned as an idiot who didn’t even know what multiculturalism is, a provocateur trying to reignite the culture war (as if it had died down while nobody was looking) and of course as a racist. The BBC, the Guardian, the Huffington Post and a host of blogs, journalists and activists have united in self-righteous outrage at Braverman. But, in among all the fuss, one key question has been somewhat overlooked - was she right?

Braverman Says The Unsayable

Talking to the American Enterprise Institute on 26 September, Braverman said the problem with multiculturalism is that it “makes no demands of the incomer to integrate” and lets people “come to our society and live parallel lives in it.” She went on to criticise the scale and pace of immigration to the West, and suggested that international law on migration - particularly on the rights of refugees - that was written less than a decade after the Second World War might not be fit for purpose in the 21st century.

Nothing Braverman said in this speech was actually new. In particular, the idea that multiculturalism might not be the shining success it’s touted as has been said several times before, by higher-profile politicians. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s political legacy will forever be her 2015 decision to throw Germany’s borders open to a million refugees, but in 2010 she said the attempt to build a multicultural society where different cultures “live side-by-side and to enjoy each other... has failed, utterly failed.” A few months later Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative “wet” not generally known for right-wing policy positions, said pretty much the same thing - he criticised “segregated communities” and said the UK needs to build a stronger sense of shared national identity.

What Are We Arguing About?

At this point we need to be clear what multiculturalism actually is, because even many of its supporters don’t seem to know what they’re defending. Having some black and brown people around doesn’t make a society multicultural; that’s just a multiracial society, and they work fine - as long as everyone shares the same culture. And culture is exactly what the different “communities” - god, I’m coming to seriously hate that word - in a multicultural society don’t share. The idea behind multiculturalism is that one society, for example the UK, doesn’t need to have a common culture. Advocates believe that a society can survive - and even be better - when it contains different groups who follow different traditions, live by different value systems and behave according to different norms. Enthusiasts of multiculturalism like to present it as bringing us exciting new foods and music genres from around the world. If that was all it meant there wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, along with the curry and sitar rhythms we also get a collection of behaviours that, to put it mildly, often aren’t very compatible with our own.

The ugly truth is that multicultural societies don’t work. One reason for that is a concept called social capital. In the UK and other western countries we expect the state to provide a lot of services for us, and we pay for those services through taxation. In general, when we think the beneficiaries of those services will be people pretty much like ourselves, we’re happy to pay for them. Anyone who has a job can imagine, every time their pay hits their bank account at the end of the month, how bad it would be if that money didn’t turn up. We can relate to people who have lost their jobs. We can imagine ourselves in their position, and we don’t mind paying for a welfare system that gives us some insurance against a day when we might be in that position.

It’s a little harder to imagine ourselves in the position of a man with four “wives”, married in Islamic ceremonies that aren’t recognised in British law and, if they were, would attract three charges of bigamy. Are we still happy to pay into a welfare system so his wives, who will never be allowed out to work, can spend their lives claiming benefits? I suspect not; whether we’re willing to say so out loud or not, I think most of us would see this man and his harem as unfairly taking advantage of our generosity. As we don’t get the option of only paying tax to support deserving benefit claimants, the net result is most of us become a little less enthusiastic about funding the welfare state.

There’s another reason multicultural societies don’t work, and that’s been thrown into stark relief in the last few weeks. Immigrants from other cultures don’t just bring a recipe book; they also bring traditions, behaviours and social norms that in general we don’t want to share - and which may be fundamentally incompatible with our own culture, sometimes to the point of being a crime. Female genital mutilation is the classic example but there’s also forced marriage, polygamy, the hijab and, at the extreme, so-called “honour” killings. All these things are rife in some British “communities”, but our authorities are often reluctant to act because they’re scared of being called racist.

Does it matter if immigrants and their descendants treat those within their “community” in ways that might be repellent or even illegal to us, but seem normal, traditional and even right to them? You could argue that it can be overlooked, as long as it stays confined to the “community”. Unfortunately it doesn’t. Even if it did I still believe it would be wrong to tolerate this, but it just doesn’t; we’ve all seen that on our streets since Hamas slaughtered 1,400 Israelis on 7 October, and Israel predictably hit back. Since the Blair premiership we’ve welcomed something like ten million immigrants to the UK, and in return many of them have “enriched” our society with a generous helping of the conflicts and grievances that make their home countries the sort of place people want to flee from. It’s all very well to say people come here for a better life, but what if that comes at the price of making our lives worse? We don’t have anywhere else to go if we no longer like what Britain has become, not least because every other western country is grappling with exactly the same problems as we are.

Diversity Means Division

Let’s be blunt here: Diversity, whatever the Mayor of London likes to tell us, is not a strength. Strength comes from unity, not from diversity. Britain’s finest hour was, without question, when this country abandoned the easy path of an accommodation with the Nazis and, instead, threw itself into six years of self-sacrifice and total war. The UK that did that was not diverse at all. Almost everyone in this country in 1939 was what we’d now call “White British”, and most of those who weren’t were from Ireland and other Anglosphere nations - the USA, Australia, Canada and so on. Other immigrants mostly came from Europe, in small numbers, and were usually assimilated and absorbed in a couple of generations. Non-white immigrants from China, India and Africa made up a tiny part of the population - much less than 1% for all groups combined. There was no significant Muslim population; the UK’s first mosque was built in London in 1889 but closed again ten years later and didn’t reopen until 1913. A second one, again in London, opened in 1926 - and those two were it, for the whole country, until Pakistani immigrants started to arrive in the 1960s. Even when I was born in 1970 Muslims made up just 0.11% of the UK’s population, and the endless turmoil in the Islamic world was no threat to us or our way of life.

By 1984, with Muslims now about 1.2% of the population, that was already changing. That was the year I moved from Kilmarnock Academy, a school with around 1,400 pupils who were all White British except two children whose parents owned the Chinese takeaway, to Shawlands Academy in Glasgow. Shawlands was a much more diverse school. It was popular with Glasgow’s Jewish community - Hebrew was a language option - but more significantly, around 15% of its pupils were of Pakistani heritage.

Imagine my surprise when, aged 14, I discovered that my new school had segregated boys’ and girls’ playgrounds. That seemed odd even then, but it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I found out the reason behind it. It wouldn’t seem strange now, of course; it turns out that whenever a new headmaster tried to get rid of this sexist remnant, something called the Scottish Asian Action Committee would throw its teddy in the corner and organise petitions, protests and the mass withdrawal of children from school until the segregation was reinstated.

Ah, how innocent we all were then. Now, with a 6.7% Muslim population, they don’t write petitions about playgrounds anymore; they threaten to kill teachers who show perfectly legal cartoons in class, or pupils who drop their own copy of the Quran and get it slightly scuffed. We’re well into clash of cultures territory now. In the UK we don’t have blasphemy laws; in our culture it’s perfectly legal to mock a religion’s scriptures or drop your own book on the floor. The price we pay for multiculturalism is that, legal or not, someone from a different culture might try to kill us if we do it. How many of Aunt Shamima’s curry recipes does it take to balance the scales for a teacher who’s now spent three years in hiding because a “community” is willing to impose its own imported blasphemy laws?

Multiculturalism threatens many of the freedoms we’re used to. In 2016 Channel 4 carried out research into British Muslim attitudes, and the results were shocking. In the UK we’re proud of our record on LGB rights; gay, lesbian and bisexual people are free to work, marry, join the Armed Forces or whatever they want, just like straight people are. Fifty-two percent of British Muslims believe homosexuality should be recriminalised. Meanwhile, only 34% would report a fellow Muslim who joined Islamic State. The dismal catalogue goes on; 32% refuse to condemn violent attacks against blasphemers, 39% are appalling sexists who believe wives should obey their husband, 34% won’t condemn murderers who stone women to death and 31% think polygamy is acceptable. Even 6.7% of the population can have a big impact on everyone else’s quality of life when so many of them are prepared to kill to get their way. That’s why our welfare state quietly hands out benefits to multiple wives; nobody wants to put themselves in the limelight just in case they end up butchered in the street.

Imported Hatreds Are Killing Us

Lee Rigby got butchered in the street. He was 25 years old, a musician in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, and he was murdered simply because he’d chosen a perfectly respectable career in the British Army. In my own time in the Army, by the way, I deployed twice to protect Bosnian Muslims from ethnic cleansing, once to protect Kosovar Muslims from attack, and once to liberate Iraqi Muslims from a brutal secular dictator. The British Army has saved thousands of Muslim lives in the last three decades. Whatever they claimed, Rigby’s murderers didn’t kill him to avenge Muslims killed by British soldiers; they did it because our culture is secular and democratic, and the very different one that shaped them is violent and theocratic.

Wherever multiculturalism goes, it brings the same problems with it. In Germany the traditional New Year celebrations to welcome 2016 were blighted by widespread, seemingly organised sexual assaults committed by one “community” whose culture despises the freedoms enjoyed by German women. In the USA left-wingers celebrated the election of a “diverse” all-Muslim and (of course) all-male city council in Hamtramck, Michigan - then recoiled in horror when that council promptly outlawed LGB Pride flags in the city.

Across Europe cities have been ravaged by terrorist attacks inspired by an ideology imported from the Middle East and enthusiastically adopted by people from all over the Islamic world - and by home-grown extremists who might live in Europe but, thanks to multiculturalism, can live the parallel lives Braverman criticised. Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Glasgow, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Toulouse, London again, Brussels, Dijon, Paris again, Copenhagen. Berlin, Paris yet again… it’s a dismal litany of cities rocked, sometimes repeatedly, by violence that spills over from our self-segregated “communities” to wreak havoc on the host society. And yet some cities never appear on that endlessly growing list. Do you ever hear of terrorist attacks in Warsaw or Budapest? No, you don’t. Why? Because Poland and Hungary are determinedly monocultural. That isn’t to say they don’t take in immigrants; for example, Poland has given sanctuary to well over a million refugees from Ukraine. They just refuse immigrants who don’t already share a broadly similar culture, and so nobody is screaming “Allahu Akbar!” on the streets of Gdansk as they reach for the detonator. We - the British, Western Europeans, Westerners in general - face threats that Poles and Hungarians do not, and it’s the consequences of multiculturalism that threaten us.

Are The Wheels Falling Off?

Of course, all of this has been said before. As I already mentioned, Merkel and Cameron - both centre-right leaders of major countries - said it years ago, and many others have also warned of the trouble we’ve been storing up for ourselves. None of them got the same furiously over the top reaction Braverman provoked, though. Why did she attract so much hostility? Well, I think part of it is down to when she said it - and the rest is down to who she is.

As I write this, social media is full of increasingly desperate messages from the Metropolitan Police about how they’re working to protect “all communities” from the tidal wave of anti-Semitic hatred unleashed by Hamas’s attacks. Jews in the UK - and across the West - are facing a level of intimidation and hatred not surpassed since Nazi Germany, and most of that is coming from “communities” who are very much not integrated into the cultural mainstream. Despite all the shouts of “Diversity is our strength!” and “We stand together against hatred!” it must be clear to everyone by now that multiculturalism has left our society dangerously divided. Followers of an ideology always defend it most ferociously when its foundations start crumbling, and I think that explains much of the fury Braverman’s speech triggered.

Then there’s Braverman herself. She’s British-born but of Indian - specifically Goan and Tamil - descent, and many on the left have a very proprietary attitude to ethnic minorities. They naturally assume that anyone who isn’t white will be politically left-wing, and they can get quite irate when that turns out to be untrue. President Biden once told African-Americans who voted for Trump instead of him “you ain’t black”, and that’s the polite end of the spectrum; insults like “coconut”, “Oreo”, “Coon” and “house nigger” get thrown around pretty often, too. The fact Braverman, who’s automatically assumed to have benefitted from multiculturalism herself, has the temerity to criticise it will be particularly annoying.

But has Braverman benefitted from multiculturalism? No, not really. Her parents immigrated to the UK from Mauritius and Kenya, and met in London. Braverman herself is married to Rael Braverman, who’s white and Jewish - she married outside her “community”. She’s a Buddhist, but the only reason I know that is because the media reported she took her oath of office on a Buddhist text; she doesn’t go in for ostentatious religious displays. She speaks with an English accent, wears normal western clothes and named her son George. Suella Braverman is integrated. She’s British. She’s a product of assimilation, not of multiculturalism.

And she’s right. Multiculturalism has failed.