Once again, Britain is experiencing the vibrant tapestry of diversity that is capital-M Multiculturalism.
This time, it’s not organised gangs of Pakistani Muslims perpetrating industrial-scale rape of white and Sikh girls — and getting away with it for years, thanks to the willful blindness of “racially sensitive” officials. It’s not rampant knife crime and acid attacks, either. Nor is it some of the 30,000 known jihadis running amok with knife and nail-bomb.
It’s not even “far right” extremists committing such wicked atrocities as hurting Muslims’ feelings.
No, this time it’s running battles in what is supposedly the jewel of British Multicultural diversity and harmony.
For the past few weeks Leicester has become a kind of mini-Kashmir in the middle of England, with clashes, protests and disorder breaking out in the city between young Muslim and Hindu men.
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Ain’t Multiculturalism grand? Hope it’s worth the trendy ethnic cafes.
For several weekends now, Leicester has been a city plagued by sectarian violence. Dozens of people have been arrested. Some have been sentenced for possession of weapons.
Just as in Rotherham and Telford, officialdom puts on a “Coexist” blindfold and refuses to see anything happening.
Not long after the riots broke out, Claudia Webbe, our local MP, described Leicester as a ‘shining example of how people from different cultures can live together side by side’. The reality could not be more different. Leicester may have 40 different nationalities and 70 languages, but it’s one of the most segregated cities in the UK. Different cultural, ethnic and religious groups live alongside, but not amongst, each other. Instead, they accumulate in their own pockets of the city. Many Muslim families live around the Evington Road and Green Lane Road areas, in the east of the city, whereas places like Belgrave Road, known as ‘Little India’, have a large Hindu presence.
In other words, ghetto-isation. This is the inevitable outcome of capital-M Multiculturalism.
It’s not that migrants banding together in suburbs is anything new, or unnatural. People prefer to be around people like them. But, under small-m multiculturalism, the second generations move out, blend in, inter-marry and assimilate. At least, that’s how it used to work.
But in the last few decades, capital-M Multiculturalism has been the ruling conceit of Western elites. Entrenched ethnic ghettos are just one result. No-Go Zones and unofficial Sharia police are another.
The last few weeks have shown the dangers of assuming that Leicester is a model of multiculturalism. The reality is that tensions between communities are nothing new […] Yet all too often, the authorities simply turned a blind eye to it, assuming that all was well.
Inevitably, “Coexist” pieties get mugged by Multicultural reality.
When violence broke out last weekend, eight police officers initially attempted to confront a mob of several hundred rioters. They didn’t stand a chance. These officers were failed by Leicester’s political leaders, who have not done enough to face up to the tensions on the streets of my city that have been present for years. Instead of preaching about how well people in Leicester get along, MPs and police chiefs should have spent longer speaking with religious leaders about the realities of sectarianism here.
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And political leaders should have been more forthright about assimilating, leaving old-world grudges behind and accepting the values of the country they’ve demanded to live in.
But that wouldn’t be Multicultural.