Multi-Culturalism Re-visited

By Andrew Brons MEP. Culture is so often used as a euphemism for race for those who would prefer to believe race to be a social-construct rather than a reality.  So, multi-cultural as in multi-cultural society is seen as a euphemism for multi-racial society – one that contains more than its fair share of different races.

However, it is used in a quite different sense by those who accept the multi-racial society as an undisputed norm. Such people distinguish between multi-racial societies that are mono-cultural and those that are multi-cultural.

The former are those in which Brown Britons* and Black Britons* have donned, indeed are expected to have donned, the British cultural overcoat and therefore have become as British as the rest of us. The latter are those in which Black British Citizens and Brown British Citizens are allowed, even persuaded, to keep their ancestral overcoats on, despite the heat wave of reactions that they have to endure as a consequence.

It goes without saying that both the mono-culturalists and the multi-culturalists accept the cultural overcoat hypothesis: that cultures are, at one and the same time, superficial but identity determining. Whilst they can be put on and taken off, they determine who and what we are – a bit off a contradiction, don’t you think!

The reality is, of course, that distinctive cultures are indelible parts of each holder’s make-up. Distinctive cultures are the products of distinctive peoples; distinctive peoples are not the product of distinctive cultures. However, we must not, as the saying goes, let that reality spoil a good story.

For the first few decades of the multi-racial experiment, mono-culturalism was not so much proclaimed as presumed – in the word integration. It did not need to be articulated. I cannot quite remember quite when multi-culturalism came into the ascendant. Perhaps, it was simply an excuse for the manifest failure of integration. Nobody likes a failure, so when failure becomes too obvious, you claim that that is what you were trying to achieve all along.

Now the enthusiasm for multi-culturalism has waned, perhaps because the idea of third generation immigrants setting off bombs in central London in the name of militant Islam was too much for the multi-racialists of both persuasions to stomach.

This has led to the rise of civic nationalists like UKIP appealing to British citizens of all origins to flock to the flag, as though this act were enough to divest them of any remnants of their former cultural garments.

There are some who thrive on their supposed transmogrification into Britons with interesting features and a permo-tan. The predominant presence of the transmogrified among newsreaders and presenters of children’s television programmes makes one wonder how we managed before they came along.

However, there are others who feel deracinated – cut off from their roots. Their quest for a reconciliation with their roots, sometimes takes bizarre and even violent forms.

The London bombers were simply an extreme manifestation of this phenomenon. It need not have been like that.

The word radicalisation has been used – always pejoratively – in connection with the embrace of  fundamental and sometimes violent Islamism by second, third or even later generations of Muslim immigrants.

Whilst violence and unthinking dogmatism must always be resisted, a return to one’s ancestral and philosophical roots – the literal meaning of radicalisation – should not.

The encouragement of unassimilable immigrants to travel to our shores to settle is often portrayed as a generous, kind-hearted act. It was not. Capitalism and International Socialism had a coincidence of objectives derived from very different but equally disreputable motives.

Capitalism saw cheap labour from the Third World as a means of damping down wage demands and of competing with cheap imports made by cheap labour.

They saw immigrants as cheaper factors of production. International Socialism saw the creation of rootless second and third generation immigrants as cannon fodder in their class war.

Both saw it as a means of destroying national identities, which impede the activities of both forms of Cosmopolitanism.

It must be our task to radicalise our ethnic minority populations in the very best sense of that word and in so doing prevent them from being radicalised in the worst sense of that word.

We must encourage them to reconnect with their roots and re-identify with their peoples. All will have had an education that would be the envy of their families in their homelands. They must be enthused to serve in their ancestral homelands and help them to develop for the common good.

A return of our immigrant populations to their ancestral roots will be the first step towards our regaining our national integrity.

* The first second and last time that you will hear me use these terms!