Posted: February 16th 2011

See The Runnymede Trust director's blog contribution in defence of Multiculturalism at Left Foot Forward (including a response from me - see below).

"Rob Berkeley is right when he says “a key problem in debates around multiculturalism is that the term means different things to different people”.  But he doesn’t exactly help the muddle by inferring that opposition to his (and Runnymede’s) preferred definition comes from those who regard multiculturalism as ‘the root of all evil’.

All that does is set up the same old ‘you’re either for multiculturalism or a bit of a racist’ line, which serves mainly to shut down debate.  

Let’s start again.  Rob, you probably heard this week’s Radio 4 Moral Maze on this exact same subject.  Kenan Malik was attacked by the neo-conservative Douglas Murray for daring to question aspects of Murray’s anti-multiculturalism (Murray hit back by simply calling Malik an “extreme left” communist).    But Malik is also critical of multiculturalism.  In fact at the start of the Moral Maze he made a very useful distinction. “We confuse 2 things”, he said, “one is the lived experience of a diverse society, the other is a set of polices to manage that diversity”. 

It is precisely the lived experience of a society enriched by a fizzing cosmopolitan diversity that unites many of us in our approval of modern multicultural Britain.  But that doesn’t mean we must support the policies of state-multiculturalism.  This has been a creed which, over several decades, encouraged the politicisation of identity in ethnic and religious terms.   The principle of equality – that all people should be treated the same regardless of their skin colour, ethnicity or religion – became discretely swapped-out with the principle of diversity, whereby every ethnic and religious identity had to be given public recognition.  ‘Diversity’ may as well of read ‘division’.

Rob’s preferred definition of multiculturalism is, “the existence and recognition of different identities in a shared political space within a framework of human rights”.  This is the essence of good old state-multiculturalism, which regarded ‘different identities’ as meaning ‘minority ethnic communities’.  It was after the Handsworth riots that Birmingham City Council adopted multiculturalist policies, setting up community organisations based on ethnicity and faith.  Newly ‘recognised’ in the political sphere, these organisations began to compete with each other for resources from the city budget.  Pretty soon migrant communities that had not previously seen themselves as especially homogenised around race or religion started to do so.  Don’t forget that in the Handsworth riots hundreds of people – black, white, Asian – took to the streets and stood shoulder to shoulder in the demand to be treated the same – not differently.  Twenty years on, in neighbouring Lozells, it took a single, untrue rumour about the gang rape of an African Caribbean girl by a group of Asian men, to open up rifts fostered through policy and ignite a bloody clash between the two communities. At the sharp end, that’s the price of multiculturalism. 

In a more everyday sense, the relativism that insists we celebrate differences over commonality, that we respect all cultures, values and identities without question (or risk offence) – this has been the soft tyranny of multiculturalism.   And yet the way we arrive at the much coveted ‘shared sense of collective identity’ based on ‘common values’ is surely through that time-honoured process of rigorously interrogating and debating the myriad values on offer - If there are any genuine liberals out there, unequivocally FOR diverse society, FOR immigration and FOR free speech (no ‘ifs’, no ‘buts’) lets dump the M-word and get on with that."