“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.” – Bertrand Russell
One of the great stupidities of the British state today, though we see the same across much of the West, is that it has conflated race with culture. This would ordinarily be called a category error, although that makes it sound like a miscalculation rather than what it is: a useful dogma that the managerial class can hide its failures behind. We call it multiculturalism.
Many hear that word and conjure up a society where cultures intermingle happily and enrich the whole. “Look at the wonderful festivals and cuisines”, they say. “Chicken tikka masala is your national dish now. Isn’t it brilliant how multiculturalism has saved the native British from the distress of eating their own food?”
Sure, okay. I mean, I love Indian food. I would take it over fish and chips any day of the week except Sundays, when I opt for Chinese. I’m fine with festivals, too. I’ll pass on Notting Hill Carnival because it’s a little “vibrant” for my taste, but I’m happy for others to parade through London and celebrate their cultures.
None of those things is multiculturalism in the sense I’m talking about in this essay. The cuisine and mixed marriages, the freedom to practise your religion within the law, everybody rubbing along – that’s the soft version of multiculturalism, and almost nobody objects to that. I certainly don’t.
I’m talking about the hard version of multiculturalism, the one written into state policy. It’s the doctrine that says the state should treat some groups differently rather than expect them to assimilate into a shared civic culture. It says, in effect, that the liberal principles which are the bedrock of the free and open societies we enjoy in the West must adapt to imported customs, even when those customs conflict with those same principles. It’s the multiculturalism that defers to “community leaders” and treads on eggshells every time it asks a group to adapt a bit to British norms, maybe rein in the cousin marriage stuff, that sort of thing. It’s the sort of multiculturalism that has critics talking about “failures to assimilate” and “integration problems”. That’s the version I’m talking about in this essay.
And let’s be honest about what “integration problems” really mean. We’re not usually referring to Poles or Nigerian Christians. Nobody seriously worries that the Hong Kong diaspora will refuse to adapt to liberal norms or demand that the local supermarkets stock dim sum.
We’re talking about Islam, and specifically the cultures around some of its more conservative interpretations. Many Muslims integrate perfectly well, of course, and that matters. Where things go wrong is in the immovable religious injunctions that treat secular law, female equality and free expression as problems to be managed rather than rights to be upheld. Conservative Muslim men are not taking their cues from On Liberty but the Koran, and the two sets of ideas, liberalism and literalist Islam, are (shall we say) pulling in opposite directions – the latter producing men who regard women as property and, as we are all too aware today, view girls outside the group as fair game.
This week saw the release of the Rape Gang Inquiry report1. You already know about this unless you’ve landed on this post by accident and have paid no attention to one of the darkest episodes in modern British life.
The report describes how, for decades, organised networks of overwhelmingly Pakistani-heritage men abused and exploited working-class girls, many of them children, across towns and cities in the UK. We already know the rest: that the police, social workers and media looked away for years, and that even when Elon Musk dragged the scandal into the global spotlight, the government's first instinct was to resist – voting down a national inquiry before grudgingly conceding one much later. The sentient filing cabinet that is Keir Starmer previously accused critics of “jumping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying what the far-right is saying” – because that’s simply the script he pulled from the shelf, one written down long before he came into power.
We also know that the children who reported what had happened to them were treated as the problem; that those whose first duty should have been to listen to these children and care for them instead treated them with suspicion and even contempt. Why? Because they were terrified, above all, of looking racist.
Just think about what that means for a moment. The organised abuse of white English working-class girls mattered less in their moral calculations than the perception of racism. Not actual racism, which is stupid and wicked, but “racism” in the sense a bureaucrat uses it, which amounts to: please stop noticing patterns because your noticing is creating paperwork and I might lose my job if we make a fuss about it.
The governing class understands all this well enough, which is why it puts so much emphasis on crisis management and on holding a tight rein on the mainstream media – not that the latter need much restraining. This is just another institution staffed by the same university cohort that was taught Britishness is somehow morally defective, that it must pay for colonial sins and the rest. Even Britain's feminists, who can detect patriarchy in a manspread, fell silent.
All of them understand the difference between attacking people for their skin colour and criticising ideas, customs and practices. They simply discovered that conflating the two categories was useful, because it made awkward questions easier to dismiss and dissent easier to pathologise. It also preserved their self-image as moral sophisticates, which is why they return to the slogans again and again, like a dog proudly returning to its vomit. The rest of us, meanwhile, see a poisonous mess in urgent need of clearing up, although few have wanted to say so out loud.
Decades of nudge tactics and propaganda have trained the public to respond in very particular ways to questions of race. People learned to self-censor because the charge of racism became the second-worst thing you could be called after paedophile – unless, of course, the paedophiles belong to a protected group, in which case mentioning it is “divisive”. We learned that noticing patterns was the sort of thing the “far-right” do, so we pretended not to see them, or at least not to mention them in polite company.
Who can blame anyone for avoiding these discussions when speaking up costs them their reputation or even their job? And what if going along with it has the opposite effect: a promotion, a status bump, the applause of a handpicked BBC audience? This is the kind of social engineering that has been operating on the general public for two decades or more.
It was Times reporter Andrew Norfolk who, in 2011, broke the "conspiracy of silence" over the abuse of vulnerable girls by organised groups of men. The man who exposed it was promptly accused of racism and received death threats, which tells you everything about what he was up against2. His investigations eventually forced an inquiry, but only after the state had switched on the fog machine at full blast. It’s why we kept hearing about “Asian men”, a group so broad it could mean anyone from Istanbul to Tokyo. The people who could distinguish between 72 genders suddenly couldn't identify a relevant subculture, for the same reason others looked away from the girls who needed protecting: the fear of seeming racist.
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