Author: Rod Liddle
Publication: The Sunday Times
Date: August 27, 2006
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2330258,00.html
Quick, somebody buy a wreath. Last week marked
the passing of multiculturalism as official government doctrine. No longer
will opponents of this corrosive and divisive creed be silenced simply by
the massed Pavlovian ovine accusation: "Racist!" Better still, the
very people who foisted multiculturalism upon the country are the ones who
have decided that it has now outlived its usefulness - that is, the political
left.
It is amazing how a few by-election shocks
and some madmen with explosive backpacks can concentrate the mind. At any
rate, British citizens, black and white, can move onwards together - towards
a sunlit upland of monoculturalism, or maybe zeroculturalism, whatever takes
your fancy.
That multiculturalism really is officially
dead and buried can be inferred both from Ruth Kelly's comments last week
and, indeed, from the title of the commission that the government had convened
in the wake of the July 7 terrorist attacks last year and to which her observations
were made.
In fairness, Kelly, the communities and local
government secretary, merely posed the question as to whether the creed had
resulted in division and alienation. "Have we ended up with some communities
living in isolation from each other?" she asked. That she was speaking
wholly rhetorically is evident from the title of the commission: the Commission
for Integration and Cohesion. You don't get either of those things with multiculturalism:
they are mutually exclusive.
It has all been a long time coming. Some 22
years ago Ray Honeyford, the previously obscure headmaster of Drummond middle
school in Bradford, suggested, in the low-circulation right-wing periodical
The Salisbury Review, that his Asian pupils should really be better integrated
into British society.
They should learn English, for a start, and
a bit of British history and a sense of what the country is about; further,
Asian (Muslim) girls should be allowed to learn to swim despite the objections
of their parents (who did not like them stripping down even in front of each
other). Muslim kids should be treated like every other pupil, in other words.
For these mild contentions, Honeyford was
investigated by the government, vilified as a racist by the press, ridiculed
every day by leftie demonstrators outside his office and was eventually hounded
from his job. He has not worked since.
Perhaps it will be a consolation to him, as
he sits idly in his neat, small, semi-detached house in Bury, Lancashire,
that he has now been comprehensively outflanked on the far right by a whole
bunch of Labour politicians, including at least one minister, and indeed the
chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. Then again, perhaps it won't.
It is impossible to overstate the magnitude
of this shift. To give you an example of the lunacy that prevailed back in
Honeyford's time: then, the Commission for Racial Equality was happy to instruct
Britain's journalists that Chinese people were henceforth to be described
as "black" because that, objectively, was their subjective political
experience at the hands of the oppressive white hegemony.
I don't suppose they asked the Chinese if
they minded this appellation or derogation - the question would not even have
occurred.
By definition, people who were "not-white"
- from Beijing to Barbados - were banded together in their oppression and
implacable opposition to the prevailing white culture and thus united in their
political aspirations. People from Baluchistan, Tobago and Bangladesh were
defined solely by their lack of whiteness.
This was, when you think about it, a quintessentially
racist assumption, as well as being authoritarian and - as the writer Kenan
Malik puts it - "anti-human".
We are not born with a gene that insists we
become Muslim or Christian or Rastafarian. We are born, all of us, with a
tabula rasa; we are not defined by the nationality or religion or cultural
assumptions of our parents. But that was the mindset which, at that time,
prevailed.
This is how far we have come in the past year
or so. When an ICM poll of Britain's Muslims in February this year revealed
that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced
in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded
by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor
Phillips's exact words were these: "If you want to have laws decided
in another way, you have to live somewhere else."
My guess is this: if such a statement had
been made by a member of the Tory party's Monday Club in 1984 - or, for that
matter, 1994 - he would have been excoriated and quite probably would have
been kicked out of the party. "If you don't like it here then go somewhere
else" was once considered the apogee of "racism". People who
did not like it here were exhorted to exert their political muscle and change
the status quo.
Similarly, Kelly, in her address to the commission
that I mentioned earlier, said the following: "There are white Britons
who do not feel comfortable with change. They see shops and restaurants in
their town centres changing. They see their neighbourhoods becoming more diverse."
Quite remarkable stuff, really. And motivated,
I suppose, by the Labour party's unhappy experiences in Barking and Dagenham,
where the indigenous white working class voted en masse for the British National
party at the last council elections. Margaret Hodge, Frank Field and Anne
Cryer had earlier warned that resentment was growing swiftly within Labour's
traditional, but neglected, inner-city and white-flight blue-collar vote.
But can you imagine it being uttered by anyone to the left of Ron Atkinson,
the former television football pundit, 10 or even five years ago? It has the
faint whiff of Enoch Powell about it.
Multiculturalism insisted that communities
always changed, were in a permanent state of flux and that if you were white
and lived in Oldham or Burnley or Tower Hamlets then you had better get used
to the idea quickly.
This was a doublethink because the same latitude
was not extended to the host population; while it was accepted that immigrants
would naturally wish to band together and preserve their cultural identity,
when the white working-class communities made similar protestations, this
was regarded, once again, as evidence of an antediluvian racism. Your fish
and chip shop is now a halal butcher? Your daughter's school now has a majority
of Urdu-speaking children? Good! Celebrate the change! Get over it.
One assumes that Kelly would still be telling
the white working class to get over it were it not for the BNP's inroads into
the Labour vote (where they have candidates who can read without moving their
lips over every word) and, of course, the presence within our midst of people
who are possessed of such a loathing of our culture, of our very existence,
that they wish to kill us all.
It has transpired that this was the final
triumph of multiculturalism - to create within British society a sizeable
body of people who have been assured that it is absolutely fine not to integrate
because, if we're honest, the prevailing culture is worthless: oppressive
and decadent. People who are, as a result, perhaps terminally estranged and
who have been relentlessly encouraged in their sense of alienation.
The news that the bombers of July 7 last year
and those who allegedly plotted to blow up a whole bunch of aeroplanes were
British born apparently came as a shock to the government. Well, it did not
come as a shock to those of us who viewed multiculturalism as both dangerous
and inherently racist.
It seemed, to people like Honeyford, a simple
case of cause and effect. In the end, it is not the mad mullahs at whom we
should direct our wrath, but the white liberals who enabled them to prosper.
That the creed has now been binned should be a cause for celebration; but
don't for a moment expect an admission that they got it wrong in the first
place.
