I am not afraid to say the West’s values are better

Before sidling off into history last month, the Commission for Racial Equality published a final report. Decades of multiculturalism, it revealed, had left Britain a fractured and unequal nation at risk of splitting up. The Commission’s chairman Trevor Phillips stated several years ago that multiculturalism had failed. His commission waited till its final hours to admit as much. It was impossible not to feel saddened by this confession.

Even as left-wing experiments go, multiculturalism was an especially costly failure. Principally it blighted the lives of immigrants who escaped their own countries only to be told not to integrate into ours. But its victims also included those who refused to remain silent before their era’s craze. For some, like the Bradford headteacher Ray Honeyford, speaking the truth ended their careers. Others — like the philosopher Roger Scruton — had to endure years of libel and innuendo. How different it could have been had the recent worthies all spoken out a little earlier, or kept silent a little less.