“There is [a] story about what happened in this country over the last few years that no one wants to tell,” says left-wing commentator Ian Dunt, “Which is that it’s just the most extraordinary experiment in multicultural living.”
This might sound absurd. Has he seen the opinion polls?
Well, yes, he has. But for Mr Dunt the backlash against multiculturalism is the result of one man. “We’ve decided that we’re … going to start closing it down,” he says, “Pulverising ourselves morally, socially and economically, for a very tawdry, ugly little dream that one fag-stained man happened to dream up in the back of a pub.”
I’m going to do something you might not expect. I’m going to say that there is an element of truth to Mr Dunt’s words. For almost the entirety of the existence of mankind, our species has been so tribal that if you lived on the other side of a forest, we would try to kill each other and our families. Even since the dawn of civilisation, man has been violent enough that the British and the French have fought in more than twenty separate wars. That people can move across the world — not just the English Channel — and find jobs, make friends and build relationships, then, can be pretty cool.
For most British people, some element of multiracialism, if not multiculturalism, is part of daily life. “One third of white Britons don’t have any friends from an ethnic minority background,” YouGov grouched in 2018. An alternative headline is that two thirds of white Britons do have friends from an ethnic minority background. Even the head of policy of the party of that “fag-stained man” that Dunt deplores has Asian heritage. The idea that Britons would embrace fascism is absurd. One might as well expect them to embrace Zoroastrianism.
But Dunt used an interesting word there: experiment. I’m no scientist but I believe that one important aspect of an “experiment” is risk assessment. Another more philosophical aspect of an experiment, as far as I’m aware, is not assuming that you know the outcome. In the case of the British experiment with multiculturalism, though, talking about the risks has been taboo because the experiment has been presumed to be successful.
So, Britain has had too little honest assessment of the extent to which some people are more likely to be economically inactive and economic net recipients. Britain has had too little honest assessment of the extent to which some people are overrepresented in crime statistics. Britain has had too little honest assessment of the extent to which its politics are being distorted by increasing sectarianism.
Atrocious crimes have been obscured in part because of the fear of “raising community tensions”. Yesterday, for example, we heard about a case in which two Afghan asylum seekers had raped a 15-year-old girl and lawyers had attempted to suppress the details because of the fears of “public disorder”.
Speaking of the public, it seems like if you are conducting an “experiment”, you should have some form of consent from its participants. In practice, as we have seen, Britons are self-evidently accepting of some amount of multiculturalism. But for decades voters have requested that the “experiment” be conducted on a smaller scale and for decades voters have been ignored. I don’t live in the UK, so Mr Dunt has more of a right to judge the outcome of the “experiment” than I do. But most Britons are a lot less positive than he is. This was the case long before Nigel Farage had smoked his first cigarette.
Mr Dunt has an intense emotional attachment to the aesthetic of maximal multiracialism. “Something rich had become monotonous,” he wrote in September, commenting on the Unite the Kingdom rally in London, “Skin colour had simply disappeared. Suddenly, everyone was white.” Is Seoul monotonous? Is Kigali?
If we accept that Britain has been undergoing a “multicultural experiment”, the problem is that people like Mr Dunt have behaved as if the results are in and that the establishment can keep applying its experimental intervention with greater and less discriminate force without stopping for any kind of serious assessment.
That doesn’t sound like much of an “experiment” to me
If I am conducting an experiment with a new line of pharmaceutical goods, for example, should I give a small amount to a test subject and study the results? Or should I keep dosing him and cross my fingers in the hope that he won’t keel over?
That doesn’t sound like much of an “experiment” to me.
