How Islam has Killed Multiculturalism

How Islam has killed multiculturalism -- Rod Liddle says that Blair’s great U-turn on immigration has placed the Labour party to the right of Ray Honeyford — the man once vilified as a racist May 1, 04

Do you have a core of Britishness within you? Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, is anxious for us all to have one, even if we are not quite sure what it is. Trevor reckons he has one, at any rate. Perhaps it was implanted along with his OBE back in 1999.

His attachment to this notional thing, a core of Britishness, is nonetheless excellent news — and also a little surprising. Because Trevor’s enormous quango, the Commission for Racial Equality, has spent the last 30 years arguing that there is no such thing at all. The CRE was never hugely keen on the idea that we might all of us, white and black and brown, share a common set of values and beliefs; it smacked of — what was the phrase? — cultural imperialism. The ruthless imposition by the colonial white hegemony of alien norms and values upon a subject people powerless to resist. Core of Britishness? Sounds a bit racist to me, a bit Lord Tebbit.

So it’s a U-turn which beats, hands down, any so far executed even by Trevor’s friend and mentor Tony Blair. It is a quite astonishing volte-face, when you think about it. Trevor, chairman of the CRE, is effectively telling us that multiculturalism is finished, dead and buried. A discredited idea from two discredited decades. The rest of us might have suspected that multiculturalism was officially dead on 12 September 2001; but to hear multiculturalism disavowed, in public, by an organisation hitherto dedicated to its propagation is something else entirely.

Perhaps, before the CRE cheerfully moves on, a few apologies are in order to those people who, ahead of their time, stuck their heads above the parapet to complain about the iniquities of multiculturalism and, frankly, copped it as a result. There has been no greater insult these last 20 or so years than the barked deprecation ‘racist’, even though, when thus barked, it rarely meant ‘racist’, as one would correctly define the term, at all.