‘How right wing the left sounds’ – Rod Liddle on multiculturalism

Rod Liddle“Quick, somebody buy a wreath. Last week marked the passing of multiculturalism as official government doctrine. No longer will opponents of this corrosive and divisive creed be silenced simply by the massed Pavlovian ovine accusation: ‘Racist!’ Better still, the very people who foisted multiculturalism upon the country are the ones who have decided that it has now outlived its usefulness — that is, the political left….

“When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: ‘If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.’ …

“Multiculturalism insisted that communities always changed, were in a permanent state of flux and that if you were white and lived in Oldham or Burnley or Tower Hamlets then you had better get used to the idea quickly. This was a doublethink because the same latitude was not extended to the host population; while it was accepted that immigrants would naturally wish to band together and preserve their cultural identity, when the white working-class communities made similar protestations, this was regarded, once again, as evidence of an antediluvian racism. Your fish and chip shop is now a halal butcher? Your daughter’s school now has a majority of Urdu-speaking children? Good! Celebrate the change! Get over it….

“The news that the bombers of July 7 last year and those who allegedly plotted to blow up a whole bunch of aeroplanes were British born apparently came as a shock to the government. Well, it did not come as a shock to those of us who viewed multiculturalism as both dangerous and inherently racist…. In the end, it is not the mad mullahs at whom we should direct our wrath, but the white liberals who enabled them to prosper.”

Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times, 27 August 2006