Do progressive pundits genuinely misunderstand the meaning of the word “multiculturalism” or are they just pretending to be stupid?
After the former home secretary, Suella Braverman, criticised the “misguided dogma of multiculturalism,” the great and the good piled on in outrage. “Remarkable to hear Braverman say multiculturalism has failed,” tweeted The Times’ Hugo Rifkind. “She’s…descended from Goan Indians from Mauritius and Kenya, married to a Jewish husband, in a government headed by Britain’s first Hindu PM. What would successful multiculturalism look like?” The BBC’s John Sopel reiterated the same point, suggesting that if Braverman isn’t an example of multiculturalism, nothing is.
Curiously, the fact that Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Nikolas Sarkozy, John Howard and Jose Maria Aznar said the same thing as Braverman after the Munich Security Conference of 2011, or that New Labour emphasised integration over multiculturalism after 2001, seems to have been memory-holed. As far back as 2004, the black British New Labour appointee Trevor Phillips said the term “multiculturalism” should be scrapped.
Having taught about multiculturalism and its definition at the Masters level, I would fail any student that used it to simply refer to a society comprised of multiple ethnic groups or the view that multiple cultures can successfully coexist. This describes some 90 per cent of the world’s countries – even though 7 in 10 of them also, like Britain, contain an ethnic majority.
