“Batley and Spen is a gathering of typically independent, no-nonsense and proud Yorkshire towns and villages… What surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.”

Jo Cox, House of Commons, 3 June 2015

I wish I had known the late MP, Jo Cox, murdered by an extremist just a year into what promised to be a long and distinguished political career. She seemed like my kind of person: leftish without being tribal, ready to change her mind (she regretted having nominated Jeremy Corbyn), and devoted to helping the poor internationally. She campaigned against anti-Muslim sentiment without being duped into backing Islamist extremists.

But her death is, increasingly being used as a way of demanding compliance to a politically ‘woke’ orthodoxy that will cause the very misery and division she entered politics to combat. At the risk of seeming insensitive, I think we need to call a halt to what the French might call the banalisation of her most well-known message: “We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.” It’s just not true.

Further reading

In theory, you’re a racist

By Peter Franklin

For example, the fact that many Muslims and fundamentalist Christians say they feel British is often cited as evidence that we are all on the same side in today’s culture wars. But it doesn’t explain the inconvenient fact that a majority of these groups sincerely don’t want a gay teacher to stand in front of their children. The strident chants of the Muslim parents at the school gates won’t be drowned out by another rendering of “Kumbaya” even if backed by other groups who might share their concerns, such as Orthodox Jews or evangelical Christians.

I think Jo Cox recognised that social cohesion does not come naturally. It has to be fought for; far from suggesting that her constituency was a mawkish pastiche of northern life familiar from Hovis ads, she referred to the independent-minded, even truculent, character of the many towns and villages within the constituency.

Even more tellingly, she called out the persistence of minority ethnic and religious traditions in what was once a stronghold of Methodism. Irish Catholics, as well as Indian and Pakistani Muslims have settled in the area, and have become part of the local landscape, partly by adapting their accents and behaviours; but centuries on they maintain a definable cultural presence.

Further reading

How should we respond to the rise of mixed-race Britain?

By Sunder Katwala

Cox herself said in the same speech that she hoped to embody that the spirit of “independent, non-Conformist service” that she had seen in her predecessors. At the heart of her message was a recognition that some sincerely held differences will never be wished away by metropolitan intellectuals. If you truly respect diversity, you cannot just brush those differences aside.

Yet, in all too many cases, authorities, public and private are being bullied into pretending that these significant cultural differences do not really exist. Even now, for example, authorities in towns such as Rotherham and Rochdale remain reluctant to associate the child grooming scandals with social norms within the largely Pakistani Muslim neighbourhoods in which they took place. The website of Rotherham Council proudly highlights its response to Louise Casey’s damning report on child sexual exploitation in the borough, which dwelt at length on the cultural background of the perpetrators. But in pages of text and a glossy video presentation you will find absolutely nothing on this question – other than to present, deep into the site, and without context or comment, a list of 19 Asian men and two non-Asian women, sentenced to a total of 289 years between them.

This is odd; because these are often the very same authorities who defend ‘multiculturalism’, by which they mean accepting that some ethnic communities’ divergent historic traditions may take precedence over prevailing mainstream norms. Some try to square the circle by airily asserting that time will bring us together. If so, I’d say that the change must be so slow as to be imperceptible.

Further reading

How multiculturalism divides us

By Paul Embery

To take a simple but disturbing example: in many parts of the world the practice of “cousin-marriage” is legally prohibited – China, Korea, half of the United States. Yet in some British communities the practice of cousin-marriage is regarded as unexceptional, and indeed desirable. There are fears that ‘consanguinity‘ may be contributing to a rumoured increase in debilitating conditions among babies in these groups. But any widespread discussion of the cost, human and economic, of this phenomenon, has yet to take place for fear of ‘stigmatising’ such groups. In other words we prefer to maintain the fiction, even if it means unnecessary suffering of children and parents.

I could have chosen any of half a dozen examples of the pernicious real-world impact of the “more in common” delusion. It has led to silence on the racial factors in street grooming of white children, in knife crime, and in chronic educational failure – all of which are social issues that impose costs on everyone.

In each of these areas, even as the chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, I found it almost impossible to commission research on – for example – the reasons behind the educational out-performance of Asian children compared with other minority groups – a fact attested to by the government’s own data. Nervousness about acknowledging racial difference that cannot simply be attributed to white prejudice prevents companies from collecting data that might help them to improve service to customers. It blocks systematic inquiry into the growing certainty that computer algorithms are daily making biased decisions.

Further reading

How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

The fiction is clung to most fiercely by liberal opinion – particularly white liberal opinion. Such behaviour on the part of whites can – it is said – be put down to their innate racism. We minority Britons, according to the liberal mind, should show no such prejudice. But surveys of friendship circles consistently make the same finding – that left to our devices, and absent economic pressures or obvious discrimination, minority Britons typically choose to spend our time with others like ourselves. Asian Britains are five times as likely as they should be to socialise with other Asians, Black Britons eight times as likely to socialise with other blacks.

And there is little sign that such preferences are fading among the young; if you don’t believe me, stand outside any multiracial secondary school at the end of the day and count the number of single race groups walking home compared with the number of mixed groups. That’s why, as one (white) American diversity trainer points out, the worst thing you can say to a person of colour is  “I don’t see you as black (or Asian)” or the just slightly less patronising “Young people are so much more open, they don’t see race”. If you really believe that nonsense you should have gone to Specsavers.

Yes, we may all aspire to peace and prosperity, love our families and, want to build comfortable homes and neighbourhoods. But however much we wish it were not so, we really aren’t the same. And where ethnic and cultural groups sincerely hold different views – on, for example, attitudes to women or homosexuality – we need to accept that the gulf may never be bridged; either you believe that LGBT people are equal or you don’t.

The things that unite us may be many and various – but some matters that divide us are decisive, literally black and white, and the sooner we admit it the better. I am sure there is work to do to understand and to navigate the divides; and to decide what to do when compromise proves impossible. But that work can’t even be started until everybody stops pretending that we are all the same under the skin.

Is ethnic diversity a threat to the West? The original title of an UnHerd debate in which I recently took part was obviously contestable, but in itself the statement seemed innocuous to me. How naïve. Ferocious objections were raised the moment it was announced, on the grounds that the question suggests people of colour represent a danger to Britain and other developed nations in Europe and the Americas. It would not be the first time such anxieties have flared.

But the (mainly white) academics who thought that they were doing victims of racism a favour by shutting down the debate, might have paused to consider how this question can be read from the other side of the colour line. I know that they tell themselves that they are saving people of colour from the depredations of the likes of Tommy Robinson. It’s convenient for liberals to invest all racial evil in such bogey men; it avoids them having to interrogate their own contribution to racial injustice.

Tragically, it won’t be the people who play these political games who pay the price of their self-indulgence. Many of us not protected by the carapace of white identity see this question from a very different standpoint.

For a start I, for one, don’t feel that I need salvation by white Messiahs; and I don’t need them to tell my neighbours that I really am rather nice in spite of my being black. The truth is, I’d rather like people of colour to be seen as a threat to the established order. I know that on the Left it’s regarded as really quite wicked and divisive to assert that race may be a more significant social cleavage than wealth or income; to suggest, in short, that culture and ethnicity may trump class. But people of colour have been here before many times.

Suggested reading

Where is Tommy Robinson taking Ukip?

By Tanya Gold

Forty years ago, a man called Roy Sawh was convicted under the first Race Relations Act for incitement to racial hatred. Sawh, a Guyanese born anti-colonial activist, joked in his weekly address at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner that he had heard that the mother country was going down the pan – and he had “come to pull the chain”. Conventional politicians – on the Left and Right – were not amused.

Like Sawh, I grew up in Guyana. I believe that one of the great benefits of diversity to any society is that it can add resilience, but often, it is the newcomers who trigger radical change for the better. And many of us would welcome change in societies which, for the most part, have brought us four centuries of  slavery, colonialism and chronic racial injustice. So, had I had the chance to respond to the original question on the night, my answer would have been “Yes. And a good thing too.”

In fact, the title of the debate was changed. The initial, hysterical, reaction to news of the event threatened to make rational conversation impossible. A letter from dozens of university lecturers and students accused all the participants of accepting a “white supremacist” framing.

Ridiculous as this suggestion was, the debate’s organisers, the academics Matthew Goodwin and Eric Kaufmann, along with its sponsors, UnHerd and The Academy of Ideas, demonstrated a maturity conspicuously missing from their ivory tower critics, and adjusted the language, though not the central point of discussion. The question became: Immigration and Diversity Politics: A Challenge to Liberal Democracy? Naturally, the armchair radicals found that they had too much else to do to turn up to the evening; that claret at high table doesn’t sip itself.

Suggested reading

Can anything arrest the polarisation of the West?

By Eric Kaufmann

So, for the benefit of those who didn’t show up, I backed the amended proposition. I am pro-immigration, as you might expect; my Guyanese family has – mostly – prospered in the UK and the USA. The experience of those who have lived in diverse societies such as America or Canada is that a mix of cultures and traditions can give an enormous boost to creativity and innovation in a society – if managed effectively. But if poorly managed, that mix offers friction and lethal civil strife. Guyana’s experience is of the latter, and of  attendant decades of poverty. My fear is that our complacency will produce more of both in the UK.

Developed societies already face huge disruption, driven by demographic change, technological change and epochal transformation in the global order, given the rise of China and India as economic powers. We can now add to that mix unprecedented levels of migration across the globe. More of us are meeting more different kinds of people than at any time in human history. And alongside the promise of diversity comes the threat of social dis-integration.

Research on both sides of the Atlantic shows that the great splits in Western societies are becoming less and less to do with economics and more and more arising from cultural difference. Brexit was driven more by deep divisions over multiculturalism and feminism than by class conflict. Trump owes his election to the emergence of a self-consciously white nationalist movement that has roots far deeper and wider than the alt-Right.

Suggested reading

The growing power of the YouTube Right

By Gavin Haynes

The complacent liberal viewpoint is that such divisions are essentially transient; embodied in the banality of the slogan that “there is more that unites us than divides us”. No doubt most people in the ethnic and cultural majority, used to imposing their norms on others, genuinely believe this to be true. The politeness of immigrants can lead others to believe that their adoption of majority behaviours in public means that the newcomers have abandoned belief in their own traditions; some people mistakenly think this is what integration means.

But the truth is that there are sincerely held differences in multicultural societies that we need to acknowledge. Not all traditions share the same view about the place of women in society; there is a reason why Muslim women are significantly less economically active than any other demographic. White people in London, New York, Oxford, Cambridge and Los Angeles have a progressive and tolerant attitude towards homosexuality – but a visit to any of the burgeoning immigrant-supported megachurches in the UK will make it evident that these attitudes aren’t shared by their black or Asian neighbours, who are turbo-charging the revival of fundamentalist Christian faith in our cities.

Our Conway Hall audience laughed heartily at an African woman who stood up to argue that liberal democracy – less than two centuries old, as Matthew Goodwin reminded us – might turn out not to be that great an experiment after all. Her experience was that it hasn’t stopped war, protected the environment or even solved the global refugee crisis.

Maybe those amused by her naivete ought to take a another look at Russia, Turkey, Brazil, and post-Arab Spring Egypt, where it appears that much of the population agrees with her. Their electorates have chosen – by apparently democratic means – autocratic, socially conservative strongmen for their leaders. Might not many of those who come from these parts of the world want to show us that their way is better than our way?

Suggested reading

The fascist tendency sweeping the world

By Bidisha

But the growing chasms in our societies do not just lie between the settled and the newly arrived. There are also ever-widening ones between those who have been here long beyond living memory. The elite view is that our citizens enjoy lives that are more secure, more affluent, healthier and happier than most other nations, and far better than those of our parents and grandparents. They would be correct – on average. But for all too many Britons, the average isn’t what life feels like right now.

Many in the left-behind regions of the Midlands, and the North know that the promise of globalisation that puts a spring in the step of highly-educated city dwellers sounds more like a death rattle in their towns and villages. To the latter, a more diverse ethnic and cultural mix doesn’t mean a vibrant future; it means competition from the cleverest, most determined and most ambitious souls from other societies. It’s a match-up they are going to lose and they know it.

Even those in the prosperous urban regions aren’t protected. Many scoff at the idea of white decline as mapped in Eric Kaufmann’s magisterial study Whiteshift. They do so at our peril, if not their own; they forget what Britain was like half a century ago. When I was born in postwar London, a white boy born next door on the same day could be certain of one thing: my colour would mean that I would never be a serious competitor for him – not for a university place, not for a job, not for a home. Head to head, the statistics dictated that he would always win – and the law would permit his victory.

However, during my lifetime, the law and public sentiment have both changed radically to reduce that advantage; there’s no certainty that belonging to the ethnic majority will offer an automatic edge. From my neighbour’s point of view, that’s bad news. It’s not surprising then, that we are experiencing a profound change in the political landscape; for many people of all backgrounds, the predictor of their life chances that is rising most rapidly in salience is not geography or socio-economic status – but race and cultural background. High-minded lectures about the benefits of immigration ring pretty hollow if the job that you thought you were born to inherit from your uncle is now being filled by a cheerful, trilingual, overqualified eastern European or a tech savvy South Asian woman.

Suggested reading

What's driving this French revolution?

By John Lichfield

As a result, our class-based political architecture looks more and more outdated. It is not an accident that Brexit has revealed fundamental divisions within the UK’s major political parties. Nor should it be a surprise that the political centre all over Europe is imploding. The Macronistes, for example, are bewildered by their inability to meet the demands of an angry populace, which is no longer willing to be bought off by tinkering with tax. Even Britain’s Corbynistas are struggling to work out why their opportunistic pledges of nationalisation strike only a tinny resonance with an electorate manifestly disillusioned by conventional politics.

They still don’t get it.

Alarmingly, there are some who do. The most successful contemporary politician in Western democracies – Donald Trump – has sniffed the wind and moved before his opponents. Behind the snarling bombast and the blizzard of tweets that preoccupy his opponents and the media, the President has quietly refashioned one of America’s two great political forces, the Republican Party. It is now, whatever it claims to be, a culturally specific, white nationalist party. We are seeing a similar change across Europe, with the emergence of nativism in Austria, Italy, France, Germany, and astonishingly even the last redoubt of social democracy – Sweden.

Until recently, I had thought that Britain was near immune to such realignment. The British nativists have yet to find a persuasive figurehead. But history has a habit of creating its own icons. The lamentable performance of conventional politics in our own protracted exit from the European Union has, above anything else demonstrated the feeble condition of our political and media classes. We too look ripe for takeover by dark forces.

Unless our elites are ready to confront the genuine challenges being posed by ethnic diversity, no matter how desperately we strum the chords to Kumbaya, nothing will protect us from the wave of political change that is sweeping the West. No one is picking up our tune any longer. And the people who can afford to treat this threat as an entertaining academic spat should remember that for people like me, this is a matter of life and death.