Politicians who once espoused this once-immutable orthodoxy now deride it as ‘a wrong-headed doctrine that has had disastrous results’; Church of England bishops blame it for failing the very immigrants it was supposed to assist; the Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission has said it is causing us to ‘sleepwalk towards segregation; and even senior employees of the BBC declare that it is responsible for causing the indigenous white population to feel ‘alienated, threatened and voiceless’.
Multiculturalism has spawned more Socialist twaddle, lefty hogwash and politically-correct claptrap than any other single policy of the past 40 years. You may be Asian, African or Afro-Caribbean: Turkish Cypriot, Congolese, Kurd, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Somali or Chinese. There’s a place for you in the UK, and you’re more than welcome.
And you can guarantee that Labour created some quango or founded some commission to look after your interests.
But God forbid that you might be white, Christian and British.
And the moment you say this, you’re a breath away from being racist and a closet member of the BNP.
His Grace was emailed a link yesterday by a politician, who has asked His Grace to comment.
His Grace responded that it would be difficult to respond with the usual baying hordes crying ‘bigot’, ‘racist’, etc., etc.
Well, what the hell.
The link he was sent was to an anonymous article in Standpoint magazine, entitled ‘A Stranger in My Own Land’.
Read it, and you may appreciate why it was written anonymously, though the author is content to disclose that she is a vicar's wife.
She tells of the overt racism to which she and her ‘husband-priest’ were subjected as they lived in inner-city Birmingham: ‘the daubing of "Dirty white dogs" in red paint on the church door, the barrage of stones thrown at him by children shouting "Satan". He was called a "f***ing white bastard" more than once, though, notably, never when in a cassock.’
They endured this for four years, in a part of the city which had ‘been a police no-go area for 20 years’. And even in this short period of time, they witnessed considerable change: ‘When we arrived, the population was predominantly Pakistani. Now Somalis are there in equal number. Most of the run-down Irish pubs were turned into mosques during our time.’
She tells of Muslim men who address her ‘as if inconsequential’, which rather accords with the sentiments expressed by Jack Straw just a few days ago: some Asian men do indeed view white women as trash, such that raping one is no greater crime than kicking the cat.
The writer’s husband asked one Muslim why he had come to Birmingham, and the response is revealing:
He was surprised at the question: "Everybody know. Birmingham — best place in Europe to be pure Muslim." Well, there must be many places in Europe where Muslims are entirely free to practise their faith, but I suspect there are few places in which they can have so little contact with the civic and legal structure of a Western state if they choose. It seems to be particularly easy to "disappear" if that is their intention. A parishioner once described a lorry pulling up outside his house, the side opening to reveal stacked mattresses full of sleepy, and presumably illegal, immigrants, who staggered out into broad Brummie daylight. We heard tales of how houses are exchanged for cash payments in our area.She refers to a sense of ‘separation from the Western world’, not only from its culture and traditions, but also from reason: the mindset is one of conspiracy. She tells us that the entire Muslim community there believes ‘the 9/11 planes were organised by Jews’. And that ‘the Mumbai terrorists had been kidnapped and brainwashed by Indian people’:
The tendency towards denial is strong. When my husband mentioned the "dirty white dogs" graffiti to a local Muslim, the response was, "One of your people did it." I have to say that the police's response was no better when the local Methodists complained about the same thing. They chose not to believe it had happened, since we had removed all sign of it with the buckets of anti-graffiti chemicals we had stocked since we arrived. They asked, somewhat pathetically: "Are you sure it was racist?"Such is the myopia of the police.
But the ‘sense of denial’ is pervades Parliament and politics as well.
This woman describes herself as being ‘born and bred with multiculturalism’, and is aware that her experiences ‘may come across as outlandish and exaggerated’, such that she ‘must surely be a BNP voter’.
The problem is that the greater the delay in addressing what every reasonable person now acknowledges to be a fundamental problem, the greater the likelihood of BNP gains in these areas.
They are, however loathsome you may find them, the only party which is seen to be doing anything about a manifestly untenable situation.
While the indigenous are ethnically cleansed, out go the ‘key-workers’; nurses, teachers, dentists, police, fire-fighters, ambulance crew, social workers, probation service staff, community support officers, local authority health officers…
It is not long before the entire social structure necessary for civilisation has abandoned an area to anarchy.
Along with those unable to move out – ‘the elderly, the infirm, the illiterate, the chronically poor’ – ‘only the priest remains, if you can get one — the thriving but clerically-vacant church down the road has had no applicant in two years’.
One has to thank God that there are men a women with a sense of vocation to minister in these crime-ridden ghettos, for that is what they are: that is what the eminent Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali termed them, and that is what no-one in government dare acknowledge.
In Germany, it appears, the issues are at least being discussed and debated:
…the whole country is debating Thilo Sarrazin's controversial book Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany abolishes itself"), in which the author — a former member of the board of the Bundesbank and the German Social Democrats — examines research about immigrant communities and then makes specific recommendations about the integration of the Muslim community. I have only seen scant reference to this in the British press, which usually dismisses it, wrongly and lazily in my view, as good old German racism. This has nothing whatsoever to do with race. The Muslim community in Birmingham, for instance, is made up of people from many continents and races, including Afghans, Yemenis, Pakistanis, Indians and Somalis.And here we get to the nexus of the issue: to discuss ‘the Muslim community’ is not racism, for, like Christianity, this religion transcends ethnicity. And yet to talk of ‘the Muslim community’ is at once to stereotype, for there is no such homogenous or cohesive entity any more than there is a ‘Christian community’ in the UK.
Until the narrative of ‘racism’ changes, there can be no addressing
what is happening to many cities in Britain. We know, and the author reiterates: ‘If current demographic trends continue over the next few decades, the West Midlands, as well as other parts of the country, will become a predominantly Muslim area.’
Well, the demographic trends are going to continue.
And so the focus has to be on integration and assimilation.
And this is not concerned with crass notions of uniformity in a monochromatic community: any thriving culture can contain only one, dominant culture, yet it can have a variety of sub-cultures. But the dominance must must include respect for British values, in particular of liberty, democracy and the rule of law.
And these must be inculcated from the earliest years, which is why His Grace disagrees so profoundly with those who seek to eradicate the ‘broadly Christian’ ethos of Religious Education and school assemblies within state education. 'Broadly Christian' is not to confess that 'Jesus is Lord': it is to love your neighbour. To object to what is ‘broadly Christian’ is to oppose those values, rights and liberties which people of all faiths and none believe to be foundational to Western civilisation.
When he was Leader of the Opposition, the Prime Minister said: ‘The big challenge facing the country is how we end state multiculturalism.’
Indeed it is. And the surest way is to repeal New Labour’s acts of bland uniformity and reinvigorate genuine diversity – not to perpetuate multiculturalism but an infinite variety within a single culture. The United Kingdom has a long and successful history of achieving this, and one must begin with the language. What unites the Anglosphere must be the fundamental building block of Mr Cameron’s vision, so let us cease translating every government document into Panjabi, Arabic, Turkish, Polish, Romanian and the rest, for this truly weakens the British collective identity ‘to the point of encouraging separate lives’.
If multiculturalism has had ‘disastrous results’ and ‘fostered difference between communities’ it is important for Parliament to be united in addressing the issues. The ‘broad church’ metaphor may be somewhat cliché, but it is nonetheless wholly applicable. Parliament could learn much from the via media of the Church of England, which, for all its faults, remains at the spiritual heart of the nation, virtually alone in ministering both to the criminals and the victims in these challenging areas.
There is no point bleating that multiculturalism is bad if no solution is expounded. The root of all these problems has been (and remains) mass immigration. The more of any outside group there are here, the more they will go their own way, and the more the floodwaters rise.
Mass immigration has not ‘enriched us’, as we are constantly told: it has been disastrous. Certainly, a nation may benefit from immigration. But not when it amounts to a city the size of Peterborough coming to live here every year.
And so the Government has a dilemma: such is the extent of Muslim colonisation in the UK that the democratic system we have can no longer ignore the 'ethnic vote' and must be careful not to offend it. Mr Cameron is to be applauded for starting from where we are, rather than where race-obsessives would like us to be, and for attempting to lead the nation back to cultural and societal unity.
But when will he begin?
The present consensus, left, right and centre, is that multiculturalism has damaged community cohesion. They are fully aware of the religio-political strategy of marking out territory and then proclaiming that it belongs to the Dar al-Islam, and that ‘people of a different race or faith face physical attack if they live or work in communities dominated by a strict Muslim ideology’.
With that realisation, into the vacuum we must inject our cultural values before Britain is abolished. Lord Tebbit is right that ‘we must find common ground with British Muslims who stand up to fanatics’.
Some of these Muslims are more British than the British. It is a theme His Grace has taken up on more than one occasion.
But this is not for some future government to sort out.
If we do not act, and act now, we will bequeath to our children the strife of apartheid and sectarianism, and to our grandchildren the curse of civil war.
