Last week UK Member of Parliament and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman used a speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC to promote ‘replacement theory.’ She suggested it was worth asking the question if, in the next 20 years, the UK might fall “into the hands of Muslim fundamentalism, our legal system gets substituted for Sharia Law and our nuclear capabilities vest in a regime not too dissimilar to that of Iran today.”
To their credit, the News Agents podcast decided to tackle these (deliberately) outrageous claims head-on. Sadly, I feel they contributed to the problem rather than solving it.
How? By framing multiculturalism as a problem to be solved rather than an achievement to be celebrated.
Both Lewis Goodall and Jon Sopel caveated their rejections of Braverman’s speech with ‘of course there are problems with immigration,’ and that there were indeed immigrants who did not ‘integrate,’ ‘adopt our values,’ ‘learn the language.’
These are the wrong terms of debate. I know many Brits who do not share the ‘Judaeo-Christian values’ Braverman sees as fundamental to our society. Do we ask them to assimilate? We should not ask more of immigrants than we ask of people born here. The condition for British citizenship is to respect the law – not to assimilate in one single homogenous culture.
Integration is important. But it is as much a right as a duty; most importantly the right to work. Many people who come here would like to work – but are not allowed to. That creates exclusion, not the refusal to assimilate.
In my quest to better understand the situation in the middle East, I recently read a graphic novel biography of Theodor Herzl – ‘father’ of Zionism. A key experience shaping his views was the Dreyfus affair in France, which convinced him that assimilation does not work. You can be Frencher than the French – more patriotic than the President, but your alterity may still come back and bite you. The only solution for Herzl was hence a homogenous national home – a “Jewish state” – somewhere else.
My daily commute takes me through Stamford Hill – the largest Hasidic community in Europe. The people who live there have not assimilated. They live their lives following their culture and traditions – including headgear, cloths, language and all – while being part of British society just like I am. The largely peaceful co-existence of such a cohesive community in the midst of many others contrasts starkly with historic descriptions of the exclusion and poverty in ghettos in European cities and the “settlement zone” in Zarist Russia where Jews used to live before WW2.
I remember reading the backflap of a book about East London when browsing a bookshop a few years ago, where a bloke from East London described what his area looked like when he grew up (in the 1930s I think): Primarily white and very English. “It was so boring – everyone looked the same!” – he said. Now London is diverse and exciting, far from perfect, but also from the hell hole of no-go areas that the far-right would have us believe.
The benchmark for judging multiculturalism should not be a utopian ideal of an ethnically and culturally homogenous Britain. The benchmark should be the ghettos and slums of the past where religious minorities would be forced to live in many European cities – exposed – as they were – to pogroms and violence at any time. Judged by that historical standard, liberal democracy and multiculturalism have worked remarkably well! Where societies have been welcoming (rather than excluding), large numbers of immigrants have not undermined societies but rather made them more diverse, interesting, and richer.
The reason why white working-class people are suffering is not immigration and multiculturalism; it is a broken economic model. What threatens societies is not people with different values or languages living next to each other, but people like Braverman who stoke hatred and violence.
At a time where ethnic cleansing seems to become part of official US foreign policy, we would do well remembering that and start celebrating multiculturalism.