Multiculturalism has failed but tolerance can save us
Michael Portillo

Multiculturalism is of another era and should be scrapped. That conclusion, expressed last year by Trevor Phillips, caused a sensation.

The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), which he chairs, was founded to promote multiculturalism and governments of both parties pursued that policy since the 1960s.

In the 1960s Enoch Powell foresaw immigration leading to rivers foaming with blood and was sacked from the Conservative party’s front bench for saying so. In 1990 Norman Tebbit talked of a cricket test, meaning that you doubted whether people were integrated into this country if they supported Pakistan or India when those teams played England. Those remarks embarrassed the Tories, too.

With those exceptions the respectable British right has left multiculturalism unchallenged out of fear that it would be accused of racism. Phillips’s remark indicates that multiculturalism has passed its high water mark. But that occurred because the left got cold feet, not because the right won the argument.

The American right has not been so passive. For example, the Ayn Rand Institute (which bears the name of the author of The Fountainhead, the bible of individualism) claims that: “Multiculturalism is the view that all cultures, from the spirits worshipping tribe to that of an advanced industrial civilisation, are equal in value.” It continues: “A culture that values freedom, progress, reason and science is good; one that values oppression, mysticism and ignorance is not.”

The institute has battled against such terms as “black American” on the grounds that they invite us to categorise a person according to his ancestry rather than his qualities as an individual. The voters of California rejected the use of teaching in Spanish, which had become standard practice in state schools. Victory went to those who argued that American children who could not speak English would founder in later life.

A number of things have unsettled the British left and led to the dramatic U-turn. The Labour party has had to respond to its white working-class voters in urban seats such as David Blunkett’s in Sheffield. The former home secretary introduced English language tests for those wishing to become British and town hall ceremonies at which successful applicants receive citizenship. More worrying was the issue of Muslim schools. The demand for them was difficult to resist given that Britain had Catholic, Church of England and Jewish schools. The authorities felt on the back foot when Muslim leaders argued that they would enforce higher moral standards than state schools. After September 11, 2001 the issue seemed less straightforward.

Another problem for the left was that its belief in multiculturalism collided with its espousal of women’s rights. Thinkers on the left struggled to accord equal respect to all cultures when they felt offended by the idea of some Muslim women living in Britain being shrouded in the burqa.

Maybe the greatest blow to those who believed that all cultures were to be esteemed equally was dealt not by Islam but by some Christian sects in Africa. The two guardians of Victoria Climbié, the little girl whom they murdered in 2000, claimed that she was possessed by witchcraft. At the time of her death she was due to undergo a church exorcism ceremony.

More recently three people were jailed for torturing another girl from Africa, claiming she was gripped by evil spirits. BBC reporters who tracked her family to Angola found a boy being beaten. He died before the authorities would intervene.

British police investigating the discovery of a boy’s torso declared that he had been the victim of a ritual killing and revealed that in a three-month period in 2001, 299 African boys living in Greater London had disappeared. Britain’s failure to collect data on people leaving the country makes it impossible to prove that they did not simply return to Africa, but experts fear that human trafficking and abuse of such children are widespread.

The Climbié case suggested that political correctness hampered local authorities in their duty to protect children, and social workers were afraid of appearing insensitive to legitimate cultural diversities.

Tolerance was clearly never meant to mean that Britain should allow those with roots outside the country to flout human rights and the laws of the land on the pretext that things were done differently where they came from. The Ayn Rand Institute is right to say that it is dangerous nonsense to pretend that all cultures are morally equivalent. Such sloppy thinking corrodes our ability to distinguish good from evil.

It is tempting in a tolerant society to want to see other people’s point of view. If Islam has thrown up its extremists, we can recall the excesses committed over centuries in the name of Christianity. We can understand that a devout Muslim might find western society licentious and irreligious. But the time for sophistry has passed. Our citizens and our society are under threat from those who believe that difference is a justification for terror and murder. Our country has the right to assert its values and require from everyone living here compliance with our laws and respect for our standards.

Britain’s woolly thinking about multiculturalism has helped to make us vulnerable. We were reluctant to heed warnings passed to us by the French about the dangers of Islamic extremists settling here. Last week the Conservatives were in no position to criticise the government because the last Conservative government was no more inclined to recognise the perils.

The discovery that the young men who planted the London bombs were British is deeply worrying. It defies comprehension that people who have grown up enjoying our liberties should hate our society enough to engage in mass murder and to kill themselves. We cannot know whether tens or thousands of our fellow citizens have been perverted in that way and now pose a danger to us.
The impact on community relations is another worry. For all the concern that I and many others feel about the growing intrusion of the state in our lives, our security services will have to penetrate more deeply the places where some of our young people are being taught to hate Britain.

We need to think more clearly than in the past. Politically correct commentators will want us to cast our security measures wide to avoid stigmatising the Muslim community. After the bombs Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, argued that the words “Islamic” and “terrorist” must not be linked.

If he means that most Muslims abhor murder he is right. But most Irish people did not support the IRA. Nonetheless the security forces infiltrated Britain’s Irish community to know what was going on and to disrupt the activities of individuals. Another lesson from the Irish Troubles is that the British showed themselves well able to distinguish between Irish terrorists and Irish people. British and Irish people feel an affection for each other that neither politics nor terror has diminished.

I do not think that the bombings will produce a backlash among the majority of our non-Muslim population. Even if multiculturalism in Britain went perilously too far it had important successes. Britain has undergone enormous changes in the make-up of its population with little social unrest. There is understanding and respect between our diverse ethnic communities. Our signature national quality of tolerance has been strengthened, not diminished, by successive rounds of immigration.

Multiculturalism may, as Phillips says, belong to a bygone era. But magnanimity and understanding must shape our future.