Britain should not become a national Michaela School to “make multiculturalism work”
“It’s wonderful to see headscarved girls reciting Kipling, singing the national anthem…” Those were the words of historian Robert Tombs, when asked by Carl Benjamin, “If anyone can identify as English, then what does being ‘English’ mean?”
Questions about demographic change vexed the audience at the Now and England conference in London on Monday, hosted by the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation. Two concerned Zoomers had already asked, “What happens when multiculturalism makes our differences irreconcilable?”, and “What if sectarianism turns democracy into a zero-sum game?”. Danny Kruger noted the rounds of applause given to each question, saying it is clear to Parliamentarians “where the conversation is headed” — before gingerly sidestepping giving an answer. Whereas Tombs lamented, “If only we could clone Katherine Birbalsingh…” before denying English identity has anything to do with ancestry, and telling a heckler “Of course you can” learn to be English.
Tombs was referring to the Michaela Community School in Wembley: where “Britain’s strictest headmistress,” Katherine Birbalsingh governs one of the least white-British student cohorts in the country. It is ironic that Tombs cited Michaela as a model for restoring England’s fractured culture, because a photograph of the late Sir Roger’s visit is often used in mean-spirited X posts, to show the stark and undeniable reality of rapid demographic change in Britain.
Well-educated Western-philes have become enamoured with Birbalsingh. Michaela is pedestalized as proof of the greatness of Michael Gove’s education reforms, and a fix-all for the failure of immigrants and their children to integrate organically into British culture. The likes of Fraser Nelson, for whom Britishness is solely an identity conferred by the happenstance of birthplace or via legal document bestowed upon anyone by our oikophobic government, think the state ought to be run just like the Michaela School. (A tacit admission that integration, when left to its own devices, is not the “miracle” he infamously proclaimed.) Sir Niall Ferguson has praised the Michaela School, and argued spokespeople of immigrant heritage, like Birbalsingh and Kemi Badenoch, will reinvigorate conservatism for a multi-racial nation better than “white men like us.”
During her opening address at ARC in February, Badenoch cited Birbalsingh’s banning prayer at Michaela as an exemplary act of the muscular liberalism made necessary to quash sectarianism under multiculturalism. Badenoch is now considering copying Denmark’s “anti-ghetto” laws, breaking up Britain’s immigrant enclaves and dispersing the occupants around the country. But what Badenoch, Birbalsingh, and the Michaela School model represent is a replacement of Britain’s traditional high-trust, homogenous, self-governing spontaneous order with an authoritarian headmistress state to make new tribal minorities and the besieged host majority play nice.
Michaela tries to bind its student body, of different ethnicities and faiths, by enforcing militant secularism, vegetarianism, and silence in corridors upon its students. In March 2023, Muslim students began spontaneously praying in the school playground, and pressuring others to wear Islamic garb and observe Ramadan. When Birbalsingh banned all prayer to put a stop to it, Muslim parents petitioned the High Court, complaining the ban perpetuated “the kind of discrimination that makes religious minorities feel alienated from society”.
Birbalsingh’s eventual triumph was touted in the New Statesman as “a victory for tolerance” and “a metaphor for the challenges of multi-faith Britain.” The author criticised the “naive assumption among a certain type of liberal that tolerance is the factory default setting of British life,” and praises Birbalsingh as “a radical optimist”, who reminds us of the “trade-offs and contradictions inherent to the soul of multicultural Britain.” Birbalsingh embodies the “keenly cultivated sense of self-sacrifice” required to “argue our way to a fairer world.”
Stripped of ideological gloss, what Birbalsingh’s admirers want is for the state to abstain from favouring any one version of what constitutes the good, except for liberalism. This is premised on a tabula rasa reading of human nature, which presumes that a universal culture can be rationally formulated for anyone to buy into. (Nevermind that John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, argued that atheism is intolerable because it does not value truth of its own accord, as a prerequisite to keep promises and preserve “the bonds of human society.”) This is the same mentality which led Northamptonshire Police to deliver a PowerPoint presentation on “UK culture” to illegal migrants living in taxpayer-funded hotels. The idea being that the disproportionate numbers of sex crimes committed by foreign men from various third world countries can be prevented by a few classes on consent and women’s rights, because we’re all the same deep down.
Before the lawsuit was brought against Michaela, Birbalsingh told the audience at ARC in 2023, “That’s what you do to make multiculturalism work: you sacrifice things that are important to you.” But why should we accept the banishment of Christianity from schools and institutions as the price to “make multiculturalism work”? Britain remains a Christian country, with an established church (a fact of which the Church should be reminded). We are not, nor have we ever been, secular. Tombs knows how inextricable this Christian substrate is from Britain, given Kruger cited Tombs’ book, The English and Their History, to explain how England was a Christendom long before it became a kingdom.
It represents the intrusion of a parallel moral system and family structure
English Christianity has shaped the people of this land: with the first Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Augustine instructed to discourage consanguinity by Pope Gregory I in 597 AD. British families nuclearised much earlier than the rest of the world, centuries before the Catholic church’s Fourth Lateran Council formalised the prohibition in 1215. It was the formation of these “little platoons” that primed the English to presume individualism qua liberalism is the default mode of human organisation. The fact that Parliament has to relitigate this issue today, because more than half of Pakistanis in cities like Bradford are married to a cousin, shows how many unintended consequences there are of mixing imported incommensurate cultures with our own.
This is why it is not “wonderful” to have classrooms full of girls in hijabs, whether they recite Kipling or not. It represents the intrusion of a parallel moral system and family structure, antithetical to the individualistic Christian givens upon which Parliamentary democracy, common law, and English customs rest. Like it or not, these children will be more the products of their parents’ faith and customs than whatever they are taught at the Michaela School — whether they were born abroad or in Britain. We wouldn’t have the legal and cultural incursions on our settlement between church and state, and public and private spheres, if foreign sectarianism was not brought here in the first place.
On 14 June, I followed Birbalsingh’s speech at the annual Family Education Trust conference. I used the analogy of the Longhouse to describe how modern schools are anathema to the rambunctious nature of young boys. The Longhouse is the communal living space of fictional prehistoric matriarchal tribes. It is without levels, walls, and therefore privacy; and is presided over by a Den Mother who redistributes resources equally and arbitrates all disputes. I can think of no better description for the Michaela School: with its insistence on egalitarianism, and feminine disapproval model of disciplinarianism. For an independent-minded, boundary-pushing boy like me, its silent corridors and meat-free lunches would have been will-breaking torture. As a friend described it at ARC: “I’ve never been to Belmarsh, but I suspect the inmates feel much the same… Michaela is a category-A experience.” If this is the downward pressure on diversity necessary to “make multiculturalism work,” then why would we want multiculturalism at all?
That influential, self-identifying conservatives think Michaela is a model for an authoritarian Headmistress State, to manage diversity and multiculturalism, should worry us. This is not a desirable environment for children, or a country writ large. This is an authoritarian adaptation to a culture that was broken against the expressed will of the British people, which now seeks to cement multiculturalism as the new settlement.
But Britain’s conservative intelligentsia have thought themselves into a bind. Having a priori ruled out the ability to exclude anyone from self-identifying as British or English, because it feels mean and unjust, they are forced to propose convoluted, contradictory criteria for how one can become as indistinguishably British or English as someone whose ancestry stretches back as far as the Battle of Hastings. The solution offered to the deleterious social consequences of increased ethno-cultural diversity is to liquidate the settled culture and identity of the people who already lived here.
There are many reasons to reject this. Any attempt to redefine British or English identity feels like telling those for whom that identity comes naturally that they need to rationally justify it, or else forfeit ownership. Any attempt to do so by an immigrant especially codes as condescension or contempt. And the stakes are far too high, and the hour much too late, for these renditions of national identity, riddled with obvious falsehoods, to be offered up as the sole solution to a febrile and fractured country. When David Betz and Dominic Cummings are providing sober warnings about the grave possibility of civil war along ethnic lines in the next five years, opining about how a girl in a hijab reciting “If—” brought you to tears just isn’t good enough.
Politicians and academics will be forced to reckon with this falsehood, and asked the Matt Walsh-esque question, “What is an Englishman?” until they provide a better answer. One cannot reduce centuries of tradition, custom, family formation, and organised religion to a scout’s pledge of British values or curriculum that anyone from anywhere can call their own. More and more people recognise this; but those tasked with solving the problem seem content to carry on pretending that they can. There is a divide not just between those living in leafy Richmond, Devizes, and Cambridgeshire, and those for whom the downsides of diversity are a daily eyesore, but also between Boomers and Zoomers, the latter of whom saw organic ethnic segregation at their school lunch-tables. Robert Jenrick has come closest to speaking in these terms; but even he credited Tombs with “teaching me everything I know” at the drinks after the conference.
Birbalsingh seems nice, and her methods get good exam results. But inculcating a feeling of belonging to a people and nation, and fashioning the future custodians of our culture, requires more than manufacturing well-performing cogs for the workforce, reading Shakespeare, or revering Churchill. As Ed West observed during a panel, the prefix “British” before “culture,” “values,” or “heroes” denotes that they belong as exclusive property to a distinct British people. Being a member of that people is often a prerequisite to buying into that culture or values. Such was the model of shared hero worship in the tribes and city states of antiquity. Any attempt to overcome these cultural differences will fall at the first hurdle if it fails to recognise how ethnic identity and rival religious beliefs present an impediment to buying into the British tribe.
We should not have to sacrifice the spontaneous order of our settled, high-trust, homogenous English culture to “make multiculturalism work.” If the unilateral liquidation of our identity is required to accommodate thousands of hostile strangers and their incompatible customs, because politicians ran an unwanted demographic experiment at our expense, then it is multiculturalism, not English identity, which will have to give way.
