Multiculturalism unravels in Leicester

After all, if young people in Leicester feel a greater affinity with Pakistan or India than they do with the country they grew up in, then clearly ‘multicultural Britain’ is failing to cohere its diverse communities around any sense of Britishness or belonging. That a mini-Kashmir erupted in Leicester at the same time as others were taking part in the shared national experience of the queen’s funeral speaks to the Balkanising impact of the homegrown ideology of multiculturalism. The problem here is not immigration or the everyday experience of diversity. It certainly isn’t the recent arrival of Modi fanatics. No, it’s the way multiculturalism, as an ideology, grates against the idea of a common culture, of national identity, and instead implicitly invites communities to live in their own cultures, their own worlds. If youths in Leicester feel more passion for Kashmir than the queen, we have a problem.

And it’s a problem that’s been a long time coming. Those startled that Leicester has been rocked by communal tensions are naive. But it’s a model multicultural city, they say. Yes, that’s the problem. Multiculturalism sowed the seeds of today’s violent grief. …

This reflects another poisonous element of multiculturalism: the creation of an identitarian hierarchy. Such is the fragmenting dynamic of the identitarian worldview that it now even divides communities by moral worth. You’re either ‘privileged’, and thus suspect, or ‘oppressed’, and thus good.