Politics

New Labour’s greatest U-turn of all is its sudden attack on multiculturalism

21 October 2006

As it happens, the Tory leader himself has tentatively broken with his own strategy — but almost no one noticed. In an address to Hindus on Tuesday night, he attacked multiculturalism as ‘state-sanctioned division’ and said it had to end. While intended to be a principled intervention in the debate, his remarks did not make the headlines. Making a tub-thumping speech is not Mr Cameron’s forte. It is, after all, hard to come across as an outraged English patriot in a speech that starts with ‘Namaste’ and ends ‘as we prepare for Diwali, let’s go forward as a happy and united people’.

What has surprised both parties is the speed with which the acceptable boundaries of debate are shifting. Just two years ago Mr Davis would have been pilloried for his remarks, and Mr Straw might have lost his seat had he made the veil observation before the 2005 election. Michael Howard’s campaign slogan last year — ‘It’s not racist to talk about immigration’ — led to accusations that the party was blowing the so-called ‘dog whistle’ and appealing to racist sentiment while claiming to do the opposite. Now, such a slogan would be seen as platitudinous. It is as if Westminster has suddenly realised the gap between the concerns of voters and the language of the political elite.

Normally Labour quickly closes such gaps. But Tony Blair has several problems. First is that his authority has now collapsed, as we saw when the head of the British army scorned the government’s Iraq strategy. Next, many in the Labour party fear that the Prime Minister has given up trying to drive a wedge between extremists and moderate Islam, and is instead extending the net of blame to peaceful Muslims.

But the biggest problem, which Gordon Brown would inherit, is that the multicultural scripture is not his to tear up. It is kept in the tabernacle of local government, and real power on this matter rests in places like Lancashire Council, which denounced Mr Straw’s comments on the veil as ‘unfortunate’, ‘unwise’ and ‘ill-advised’. The ‘pro-diversity’ agenda has been stitched into every level of government since Labour came to power nine years ago, and it cannot easily be unpicked now.

This may not matter. Culture war is all about backing a cause, not necessarily acting upon it. President George W. Bush had no hope of amending the American constitution to outlaw gay marriage, but championed what he saw as a popular position in the hope of winning political capital. So in Westminster an inane debate about veils may be the first stirrings of a political battle against fundamentalist Islam — which has, for years, been waging its own one-sided culture war against Britain. All politicians are in the very first stages of a debate which many of them have spent their careers avoiding. There is much time to catch up on, and much dust to brush off. A subject closed down by Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in 1968 has finally been reopened.