THE recent gagging of John Townend and, even more worryingly, Laurence Robertson, will have given many on the Right pause to consider whether free speech on the issue of multiculturalism will be possible for much longer. Judging from Michael Portillo’s election campaign statement in Brick Lane, it is now compulsory for Conservative Party members to believe that ethnic diversity is a "great strength" to Britain. The tens of millions of Britons who doubt this proposition may wonder if their voices will ever be heard again. However, sweeping attacks on the doctrines of multiculturalism can still be found in the mainstream press, provided that they come from those who claim to support it. Indeed, far from where the masses can hear their equivocation, liberals can often be found airing the ideas that they seek to de-legitimise or even criminalise in others. What follows is merely a sample.

Rightists on the lookout for the rarer species of thoughtful Leftism should first consult Prospect magazine. Encouragingly, one of their best-known contributors, the Canadian academic Michael Ignatieff, seems to have spotted the cracks in the multicultural edifice. The death of Enoch Powell in February 1998 gave Ignatieff an excuse to discuss national identity, and he provided a refreshingly honest treatment of the subject.

The ideology of multi-culturalism holds that the native population should reconsider their own identity in order to be more accommodating to immigrants – that the English should see themselves as a "tikka massala" rather than a "fish and chips" or "roast beef" nation. Referring to his own Ukrainian and Canadian origins, Ignatieff claimed to be an adherent to this multiculturalist creed: "I believe in a multi-cultural society. What else can I do? I am a foreigner here". Nevertheless, he dismissed the type of posturing that the likes of Robin Cook indulge in: "What sense can be given to the idea that Britain is genuinely multi-ethnic, if the visible minorities remain at five per cent of the population? In inner city London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool, ‘multi-cultural discourse’ does describe the street life by day and sometimes the club life at night. Yet even here there is enduring residential segregation within the inner cities".

Referring to the majority of England, Ignatieff was even more direct: "Beyond the inner cities, what about the shire counties and the English hinterland of market towns and countryside where millions of people still live? Here, Englishness remains much as it was: cricket, back gardens, country churches, hedgerows, the "green and pleasant land"… Here the language of multiculturalism describes neither how people live nor how they wish to live. The idea that we are or should be a multi-ethnic community is regarded by millions of English people as either false to their own personal experiences or as an exercise in political correctness by a bien pensant elite which does not actually practice what it preaches. The virtues of… multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism… have been asserted, rather than argued, by the postwar liberal elite; for most of the British population – not just whites – their plausibility is not self-evident. In reality, like continues to live with like, and the practice of tolerance looks much more like polite – and not so polite – avoidance".1

A year later, Ignatieff had the chance to relate these observations to a topical issue. In the wake of the hysteria following the publication of the Macpherson Report, he told his fellow liberals that they should overcome their "convulsion of guilt-ridden confusion" and subject themselves to a "a dose of liberal realism". Ignatieff had noticed that, when used by the race relations industry, the word "tolerance" had radically altered its meaning, in a way which was hampering clear thought. Borrowing from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s definition of two types of liberty, Ignatieff suggested that henceforth it would be necessary to distinguish between "negative" and "positive" tolerance. He wrote: "Negative tolerance is the minimum we require in a liberal society. It means protecting minorities from abuse and attack, it means equal treatment by public agencies, level playing fields for employment and so on". This would appear to conform to the original meaning of ‘tolerance’, and should be subscribed to by any decent conservative as well. However, when Ignatieff proceeded to discuss ‘positive tolerance’, he again dismissed the values of multiculturalism: "But we do not need to love each other, reach out to each other, or even particularly value our different cultures. A minority will practice such positive tolerance and, as time passes, that minority might become a majority. But for now most of us do not live together. We live in the same neighbourhoods, watch the same television programmes and visit the same shops, but the various class and ethnic groups often inhabit unfathomably different universes. What is desperately needed, and still a generation away, is a happy indifference towards those collective identities".2

It is in this last sentence that the crucial assumption of Ignatieff’s liberalism can be found. In an earlier article for Prospect, he had argued that the breakdown of all collective identities was an inevitable part of modernity, but that the freedoms of pure individualism would more than compensate for the loss of a sense of belonging. In the meantime, Ignatieff expressed the hope that enlightened self-interest would prevent ethnic strife: "Competing groups who disrespect each other’s values may tolerate each other and co-exist simply because the advantages of common adherence to the rules outweigh the benefits of social warfare. If – and it is a big if – the liberal state guarantees procedural fairness to all groups, there is no reason in principle why they cannot compete and disagree peacefully".3 Thus, all Ignatieff can ultimately offer is the argument that there is "no reason in principle" why multiculturalism cannot work. He makes the mistake (which Enoch Powell avoided) of discussing how people could and should behave, but not how they probably will, given the evidence of history.

Others, further to the Left than Ignatieff, who still hope to recreate a sense of belonging in order to underpin their socialistic aims, also see a connection between multiculturalism and a lack of social cohesion. Alan Wolfe and Jytte Klausen, self-proclaimed "progressive" academics writing in response to Lord Parekh’s report on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, predictably sang the praises of ethnic diversity, but then confessed that: "Solidarity and diversity are both desirable objectives. Unfortunately, they can also conflict. A sense of solidarity creates a readiness to share with strangers, which in turn underpins a thriving welfare state. But it is easier to feel solidarity with those who broadly share your values and way of life. Modern progressives committed to diversity often fail to acknowledge this. They employ an over-abstract and unrealistic notion of affinity, implying that we ought to have the same feelings of generosity or solidarity towards a refugee from the other side of the world as we do towards our next door neighbour. In the 1940s and 1950s, the early days of the British welfare state, this was not such an issue. People believed that they were paying the social welfare part of their taxes to people who were like themselves and who faced the same risks and problems. For most people, paying tax was a kind of enlightened self-interest. Just 25 years later, Britain had become a much more diverse place… By the 1970s, that binding force began to weaken and it has been gradually unravelling ever since".4 Wolfe and Klausen noted that this was not just a matter of ethnicity, and that the inter-generational conflict present since the 1960s has played a part too. However, by admitting that altruism is dependent upon affinity and similarity, and that ethnic diversification had thus reduced the level of social cohesion, they had come quite close to saying that "Our homogenous Anglo-Saxon society has been seriously undermined by the massive immigration – particularly Commonwealth immigration – that has taken place since the War," the observation for which John Townend was excoriated as a "racist."

A more chilling insight into the multi-culturalist mentality came from Andrew Marr, writing in the Observer before his appointment as BBC TV’s chief political pundit. The publication of the Macpherson Report provided him with an opportunity to discuss the causes of racial tension in Britain, and suggest some remedies. Marr wrote: "The establishment would like to see racism as something perverse, a kind of unreasonable wickedness that appears in badly-educated people. But this painless, convenient explanation can only come from people who don’t really bother to look at, or listen to, their fellow citizens. In fact, racism is natural and at its worst wherever there is serious poverty". Rather than deduce from this observation that permitting mass immigration into Britain’s cities had been a regrettable mistake and should stop immediately, Marr discussed the means by which racial harmony could be fostered. His first suggestion was "widespread and vigorous miscegenation, which is the best answer, but perhaps tricky to arrange as public policy". By making this proposal, Marr effectively conceded that multi-ethnic societies can best be made to work through intermarriage and assimilation, thus flatly contradicting the ideal of multiculturalism that he sought to uphold. This was of course the solution found last time England truly was a melting-pot: during the Dark Ages, the Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings ceased half a millennium of slaughter only when they had intermarried enough to be indistinguishable.

Given that Marr desires neither assimilation nor racial strife, he was thus forced to argue that attitudes and behaviour he had earlier described as "natural" were somehow alterable: "Though human experience happens inside nature, human progress also depends on surmounting it. The tools by which we do so include politics and taxation, as well as science and art. But it needs a whole nation to move, not simply pious exasperation directed at the lower orders…the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain ‘natural’ beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off. The police are first in line to be burdened further, but a new Race Relations Act will impose the will of the state on millions of other lives too".5 The supposedly ‘Blairite’ and moderate Marr apparently believes that politicians should experiment on their electorates rather than serve them. He used much of the article to advocate American-style ‘affirmative action’ quotas in employment and education, arguing that only when the white middle classes also suffer disadvantages at the hands of ethnic minorities could they expect to provide moral leadership to the more prejudiced working classes. Nowhere did Marr explain what benefits an increasingly multi-ethnic society would bring which could possibly outweigh the cost of turning Britain into a repressive state.

Finally, it should be conceded that the occasional multiculturalist does try to defend the assertion that mass migration and ethnic diversity are beneficial with rational argument. The well-known historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto recently attempted to support, with historical examples, the proposition that usually "societies with high rates of immigration find that the newcomers do more good than harm". However, with the exceptions of the European colonisation of the New World, which overwhelmed native societies, and slavery (which I assume Sr Fernández-Armesto does not condone), he cited cases which involved trivial numbers of migrants: "During any process of economic change, niches open that the existing workforce cannot fill. In the 17th century, for instance, Morocco needed Spanish gunners and England required Dutch engineers, while China summoned Italian astronomers and Burma demanded Japanese mercenaries. In the 18th century America needed African slaves, Britain needed Irish navvies, China wanted Portuguese gardeners". Such examples bear no relation to the wave of migration that the West faces today, not least because the host societies did not suffer from the catastrophically low birth rates now being experienced by Western countries.

Indeed, Fernández-Armesto clearly appreciates this, and uses almost inflammatory language to discuss our future prospects: "Now history is taking a suitable revenge. Colonisation has been replaced by counter-colonisation… the victim-peoples of former empires are heading for the homelands of their sometime masters… This movement, which is one of the most startling of our times, is effectively unstoppable… The future some futurologists predict – in which the West is overwhelmed by great waves of migration similar to those that swamped the Roman empire – is by no means incredible". However, rather than urging Westerners to take urgent measures to avoid this fate, Fernández-Armesto referred back to his observations about the benefits of small migrations (of Portuguese gardeners!), and concluded that: "Cultures that reject migrants as a menace postpone, but rarely elude, convulsions and conquests. Other peoples welcome strangers, accepting their gifts, appropriating their wisdom, deploying their labour. The risk usually pays off".6

But even if Fernández-Armesto’s dubious historical analysis is accepted, his suggestion that the West should welcome mass migration because it does not "usually" result in disaster is disingenuous: when someone playing Russian roulette pulls the trigger, he does not "usually" blow his brains out, but it cannot be denied that only the suicidal or insane would play. Furthermore, he implies in his closing paragraph that if Western nations reject further mass immigration, they will suffer some sort of unspecified convulsion anyway, without providing any justification for this prediction.

It thus seems that by silencing their opponents, multiculturalists have insulated themselves from the rigours of political debate. Some, like Ignatieff, Wolfe and Klausen, are able to express enormous doubts about the central dogmas of multiculturalism, apparently without shaking their faith in the ideology. Meanwhile, others, such as Marr and Fernández-Armesto, appear – like Manchester United – to be suffering from a lack of competition, and have been reduced to sloppy, self-contradictory and sometimes downright frightening arguments.

David Worsley writes from Cheshire

Footnotes

1. Michael Ignatieff, "Identity Parades", Prospect, April 1998

2. Michael Ignatieff, "Less Race, Please", Prospect, April 1999

3. Michael Ignatieff, "Belonging in the Past", Prospect, November 1996

4. Alan Wolfe & Jytte Klausen, "Other People", Prospect, December 2000

5. Andrew Marr, "Poor? Stupid? Racist? Then Don’t Listen to a Pampered White Liberal Like Me", Observer, 28 February 1999

6. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, "Global Revenge of the Colonised Millions", Sunday Times, 11 February 2001

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