On 12 March 1983 A Sivanandan, one of the sharpest minds on the British left, gave a talk at the Greater London Council Ethnic Minorities Unit Consultation on Challenging Racism. "I come as a heretic, as a disbeliever in the efficacy of ethnic policies and programmes to alter, by one iota, the monumental and endemic racism of this society. There is nothing wrong with multiracial or multicultural education as such … But [it] has become the vogue … Government monies for pluralist ploys – the development of a parallel power structure for black people, separate development, Bantustans – a strategy to keep race issues from contaminating class issues."
The left has long had a critique of multiculturalism. While Tories were still arguing for Nelson Mandela's imprisonment, there were progressive voices debating its inadequacies, limitations and potential. The notion that those who attack it today, in Britain or elsewhere, are slaughtering a holy cow is laughable.
But Sivanandan was contesting something definite, whereas the target of the more recent onslaught is vague. Over the last decade multiculturalism, like political correctness, has come to mean whatever its opponents want it to, so long as they don't like it. Usually, the policies and dilemmas referred to are difficult to fathom or entirely invented. Ill-defined, the term is much-maligned – a lightning rod for the majoritarian impulses, cultural anxieties, economic insecurities and nationalist mythologies of the 21st century. Its contemporary critics keep telling multiculturalism's supporters to admit it has failed, without identifying what "it" is and who ever supported the lampooned version they present.
In this debate there are two types of multiculturalism: one rooted in fact, the other in fiction. The multiculturalism of fact is the lived experience of most people in Europe and the world. Cultures are dynamic, and emerge organically from communities. None exist in isolation or remain static. So the presence of a range of cultures in Britain or anywhere else is not novel, but the norm.
This is not the product of our genius for tolerance as a nation but of constant negotiation. Take the Notting Hill carnival. It emerged as a response to racist attacks after teddy boys went on a "nigger hunting" spree in 1958. Today it is a mainstay of British culture, but it was once viewed as inimical to British culture. "Many observers warned from the outset that mass immigration from poor countries of substantially different culture would generate anomie, alienation, delinquency and worse," argued the Daily Telegraph in 1977.
Its survival has little to do with government policy. Governments can barely clear snow or make the trains run on time. They cannot single-handedly create or thwart culture, let alone multicultures. The French have staked their founding revolutionary creed against the notion of multiculturalism. They are losing. Like it or not – and the state doesn't – it's a multicultural country.
Germany insisted for two generations that it was not an "immigrant country": that didn't mean there were no immigrants there. Not recognising something does not mean that thing does not exist. It merely means you don't see it.
Moreover, these multicultural facts have nothing to do with race, religion or immigration. The Bretons in France, Basques in Spain, Bavarians in Germany and Sicilians in Italy are a few examples of cultural affiliations that thrive independently of the nations they inhabit.
This is the multiculturalism many of us on the left, including Sivanandan, are defending. The right to assert autonomy and cultural difference underpinned by an understanding that national identity is just one among many identities and may well not be the primary one: an affirmation of plurality against calls for assimilation that attempt to first invent and then enforce "British values" and other national orthodoxies.
Then there is the multiculturalism of fiction. This evokes a liberal, state-led policy of encouraging and supporting cultural difference at the expense of national cohesion. It champions practices, we are told, that have caused segregation, alienation and ghettoisation of racial and religious minorities. This, the argument continues, has laid the basis for an acceptance of abhorrent and barbaric practices, such as honour killings, forced marriages and female genital mutilation, that sacrifice the basic tenets of western, liberal civilisation and universalism at the altar cultural tolerance.
There are several problems with this framing but for now let us just deal with three. First, in most of Europe no such co-ordinated policies ever existed. In many places where "multiculturalism" is currently being read its last rites, it never actually lived in its professed form. "We never had a policy of multiculturalism," explains Mekonnen Mesghena, head of migration and intercultural management at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, responding to Angela Merkel's claim that the "multikulti" experiment had failed. "We had a policy of denial: denial of immigration and of diversity. Now it's like we are waking up from a long trance."
In Britain, it is similarly difficult to discern precisely what critics are referring to beyond the activities of some local councils. In his most recent speech on the subject, David Cameron did not offer one concrete example.
Second, the trend towards segregation is a myth. Asian Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus all marry outside of their own groups at the same rates as whites. For most ethnic minorities in Britain, roughly half or more of their friends are white while only 20% of those born in Britain have friends only from their own group. So even if the state were promoting separation, it clearly isn't working.
Finally, who, with any credibility, on the left has ever supported the crimes described? Like "on-street grooming", "black-on-black violence" or the "down-low", such practices are specifically ethnic, racial or religious terms employed to pathologise a specific community in which every transgression is refracted through an ethnic or religious lens. Imagine we invented a term "toff bonking" to describe the infidelities of the upper classes, and then decried the epidemic every time Boris Johnson was caught in an indiscretion.
That doesn't seek to understate these problems but to recast them. Forced marriages are kidnapping; honour killings are murder. We have laws for these that should be applied without fear or favour. I've yet to hear anyone on the left argue otherwise.
These ostensible liberal dilemmas seek to pit opposition to Islamophobia against support for liberalism as though they are mutually exclusive. But in reality they pose no challenge at all. You don't give antisemitism a pass if it comes from a Muslim any more than one would give Islamophobia a pass if it came from a Jew. If a state forces women to wear a burqa, we should oppose that. And if the state bans women from wearing a burqa, we should oppose that too. Because as feminists and progressives we believe the state has no right to tell women what to wear.
That does not mean there are no problems. But it distorts the reality and misstates the true nature of the threat to national cohesion, which comes not from a fictitious multiculturalism but from the very real economic vandalism wrought by this coalition government. The decimation of public services will reduce the common space – be it schools or community centres – that we all might share, while growing inequalities will provide greater opportunity for scapegoating minorities.
The multiculturalism of fact is rooted in considerable achievements of who we have become. The multiculturalism of fiction is rooted in the fear of what has never been.
