A few months ago, the former home secretary, of Kenyan Indian and Mauritian Indian parentage, caused a storm of controversy with her claims that multiculturalism had “failed”. She said there was an “existential challenge for the political and cultural institutions of the West,” and that the “misguided dogma of multiculturalism” has allowed people to come to Britain with the aim of “undermining the stability and threatening the security of society.”
To determine whether she is right or not, we need to understand what multiculturalism actually is. If you were to ask a hundred people, there’s a good chance you’d end up with (at least) a hundred different answers. How do you define a term that is so utterly dependent on perspective? My own concept of multiculturalism would certainly be very different from that of Suella Braverman, or a Ukrainian refugee, or a Huguenot fleeing religious persecution in seventeenth century France. Where does multiculturalism start, and interculturalism or cosmopolitanism begin or end? When somebody uses the word, how do we know what they're talking about? A lack of shared experience means a gap in shared understanding.
Is multiculturalism all about black and brown and white faces? Does prime minister Rishi Sunak, the former Winchester head boy, Oxford graduate and Stanford MBA, have more in common, culturally, with a nurse whose grandparents came from the same village in the Punjab as Mr Sunak’s, or with the clutch of male Old Etonians and Oxbridge alumni with whom he has shared membership of various cabinets?
