In my view there are two types of multiculturalism. The first is the organic kind where different peoples with different beliefs and backgrounds who are forced together due to circumstances, such as were once found in port and dock areas of Britain and had to learn to get along with each other and with each side or each community engaging in give and take and in order to do so. In this situation as well as people having to by necessity learn to understand where people come from geographically and with regards to belief systems, they are guided by the overarching need to comply with the broader national culture. This is because such compliance with the broader national culture and community was the cost of getting on and escaping from the ghetto or their position at the bottom of the social pile.

The other second sort of multiculturalism is state imposed multiculturalism where there is very little pressure put on different groups by the state or the wider community to ‘get along’ and integrate or abandon those beliefs and cultural aspects that are incompatible with the wider society. With this sort of multiculturalism there is an encouragement for groups to ghettoise and to disengage with the broader national culture. This state sanctioned and encouraged segregation of different groups has not in my view been at all good for the country.

State imposed multiculturalism coupled with a generous welfare state has helped to create areas where not only have ghettos populated by people whose views are at odds with the rest of society started to grow at an alarming rate, but because there is no need to work and mix with others outside of the ghetto, contact with the wider society is reduced and an ‘us and them’ mentality can be created alarmingly quickly. Sometimes these ghettos only have negative effects on the inhabitants, as is the case of areas predominantly inhabited by Haredi Jews where religious education is extremely good but secular education much less so, causing problems for young people who wish to enter the jobs market.

However there are other areas, other different and in particular Islamic ghettos, where Muslims live a completely separate life from non-Muslims and where extremely concerning ideologies and a hatred of the wider society are promulgated. The problems caused in these ghettos do not only afflict the individuals living within them, they affect all of us as it is in these Islamic ghettos where there is little need for mixing with others, where Islamic extremism and Islamic supremacism are normalised and from whence the race driven rapes and jihadism emanate to afflict the rest of us.

Ghettos are places that in my view should be areas that people to escape from. To escape from the ghetto is to be exposed to new ideas, to seek a new life and a new way of engaging with the wider civilisation and to get away from the sometimes stultifying oppression of the dominant ghetto culture whether that culture be religious or of a more secular nature.

Unfortunately rather than break up ghettos and get people mixing and learning, state multiculturalism does the exact opposite. Instead of helping people learn and rise and become and integral, valid and valuable part of society, multiculturalism has created parallel societies where separatism and hatred of the outsider is all too common.

The academic and commentator Rakib Eshan has also, over at Spiked Magazine, recently criticised much of what passes for state sanctioned multiculturalism. He speaks in his article of how the first outbreaks of murderous hatred towards the author Sir Salman Rushdie came out of Bradford a city that were one of the first to have a policy of treating all cultures as if they had common and equal values. Mr Eshan said that much power ended up in the hands of the Bradford Council of Mosques because of Bradford’s multiculturalist policy and it was this same group of mosques that ended up being behind much of the furore in Bradford over Sir Salman’s book. Mr Eshan also pointed out that by granting the Bradford Council of Mosques the position of ‘voice of local Muslims’, the council also ended up ‘both funding and legitimising an intolerant expression of Islam that was explicitly hostile to free-speech values’.

Here’s Mr Eshan’s damning verdict on the policy of state sanctioned multiculturalism:

The problem with multiculturalism is that it treats all values, customs and practices as equal, even when they come into conflict with what are considered to be shared British values, such as free speech and democracy. And more often than not the ‘representatives’ of various religions and communities that are picked by the state tend to be the most hardline and uncompromising. Instead of challenging worldviews that are at odds with Western-style liberal democracy, the state legitimises them and funds their activities. This has essentially fostered the creation of ‘counter-societies’ across vast swathes of Britain.

I agree with Mr Eshan that we’ve arrived at a situation where, because of an adherence to a policy based on the doctrines of multiculturalism, we, or rather the government, end up funding individuals and groups from the Islamic community that hate the rest of us and who promote some of the worst types of Islam. Multiculturalism, in my opinion has gone a long way to ensure that Muslims, unlike the Jews who arrived in the UK during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, face no challenge to their ideologies whether they be religious or cultural, no expectation for them to fit in as best they can with the majority and respect the majority’s shared values.

I find it particularly telling that no matter how hard I’ve looked I’ve never found an Islamic equivalent of ‘Minhag Anglia’ or British Jewish customs, customs tailored on life in the United Kingdom and which include a public congregational declaration of fealty to the Crown. With Islam on the other hand multiculturalism has created a situation where there’s no need for an Islamic equivalent of Minhag Anglia because there’s no expectation on the part of the state that Muslims should do such a thing or feel pressure to properly integrate and respect the wider cultural norms. Instead multiculturalism has allowed many thousands upon thousands of Muslims to live in the ways they would in Pakistan or Bangladesh or wherever. This is not good for the wider society as it is from these walled off siloised cultures that Islamic extremism comes from but it is also not good for those in these societies who might want to broaden their cultural horizons but who are prevented from doing so by social pressures in these Islamic ghettos.

I’ve little doubt that those who originally promoted multiculturalism thought that they were doing good, maybe they thought that they were making life better for minorities by giving them more respect and autonomy. Unfortunately they failed to comprehend that although people might be equal, ideologies are not. Multiculturalism has gifted us not only the return of the siloised ghettos that members of other groups have laboured hard to escape from, but also worse than that we now have ghettos run by extremists who have turned their areas into hostile parallel societies. How we deal with this problem I do not know but we cannot start to deal with it until we acknowledge that multiculturalism as an ideology has failed.