The failure of multiculturalism is now impossible to ignore

It is shameful that people are taking to British streets to celebrate terrorist murders in Israel

Two weeks ago, Suella Braverman said multiculturalism had failed in Britain. She was, predictably, slated by the Left. People described her words as a sign the Conservative party was falling into the clutches of the extreme right. This week, politicians are warning that Palestinian terrorism in Israel could lead to violence in London, and urging the police to crack down on those celebrating the slaughter of civilians.

We are, implicitly, asked not to draw links between the two.

As the full horror of the attack on Israel unfolded, most of Britain stood in solidarity and sympathy with the Jewish state. Most, but not all. Twitter was filled with British accounts celebrating the murder of Israeli civilians, pouring abuse on anyone who condemned the slaughter. People waving Palestinian flags chanted in the street.

When multiculturalism fails, it fails spectacularly.

One of the less-discussed costs of Britain’s approach to immigration is that tensions around the world can become matters of domestic — rather than foreign — policy. We had a brief taste of this last year in the Leicester riots, where Hindu and Muslim groups fought after India and Pakistan played a cricket match in Dubai. Today, the Metropolitan Police is arranging additional patrols to avoid attacks on London’s Jewish community.

Yet if you turn back to our political discourse, it is very, very rare to find explicit acknowledgement of why this is necessary. The discourse lenses around it, as though there has always been a large pro-Hamas contingent in London, as if it’s just one of those immutable things.

The alternative — accepting not only that multiculturalism has failed, but that its failure cannot be ignored — is not something that we can bring ourselves to say. Our political system rejects this conclusion because it has no way of dealing with it. We can’t hit a button and “undo” 50 years of policy. We need to find a way of making it work.

I wrote after the murder of David Amess that the silence that followed — the distraction with talk of Twitter abuse and Facebook comments — resulted from the exhaustion of liberal policy options for dealing with extremism, or failures of integration.

The dream, held by both parties for decades, was that given time every new arrival would become British, simply by virtue of being in Britain. There was no real role for the state to play in integration — indeed, the very suggestion was offensive — beyond provision of schools, there was no need to consider the mixture of people coming in.

What can we do when this is proved to be false? We can adopt soft blasphemy laws. We can hope that trying the same thing over and over will finally have a different outcome. But eventually we will either have to confront the fundamental failure, or choose to live with it. Both, to Britain’s liberal political system, are intolerable. It cannot process this contradiction.

Instead, it hides from it. It hold up symbols of integration working well and ignores the broader evidence that it is not, until it is no longer possible to ignore it. We shrug terror attacks off as “part and parcel of living in a big city”. We don't prosecute people who chant anti-semitic abuse seemingly because we don't want to have to confront just how widespread those views are. And we try our hardest to avoid making obvous links.

This facade is starting to crack. The drumbeat of stories is becoming hard to ignore, in part due to Elon Musk’s Twitter, which is providing an almost completely uncensored view into what’s happening in Israel, and what lies behind the sanitised copy of news reporting. People trying to predict what could happen in the coming days and weeks are still underweighting just how far public opinion can shift when the full horrors of terrorism are played across screens across the country.

Our politicians will, sooner or later, have to deal with the consequences of their failures, and see what has been allowed to fester. And then they will have to find ways to make this work. It will not be easy.

I wish them every luck in this effort.