The End of Multiculturalism: The West Is Finding That There Are Limits to Its Tolerance of Minorities Where Their Beliefs Clash Violently with the Laws and Customs of the Majority. (Features)

Llyod, John, New Statesman (1996)

Britain has been an actively anti-racist country for almost four decades now. British administrations, which had been fearful of "coloured" immigration because they feared that immigrants would not fit in and that the indigenous population would not allow them to, liberalised fairly rapidly. Since Edward Heath fired Enoch Powell from the shadow cabinet for his "rivers of blood" speech, even Conservative leaders have not tolerated overt expressions of racism in their cabinets or shadow cabinets. That Tory associations (like Labour clubs) will enjoy racist jokes in guilty or defiant privacy must be infuriating to black and brown Britons who wish to vote Conservative. But that is another matter, amenable only to time (if time is liberalising) or the speech police.

The liberal view, which underpinned public policy for many years, was expressed in the late 1960s by Roy Jenkins, then home secretary: "equal opportunities accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance". It depended on a system of core values and on an implicit acceptance of an indigenous British cultural hegemony. Over the past decade or so, however, it has come under sustained attack from multiculturalists or pluralists, who believe that this form of liberalism is at best constricting, at worst racist. A high-water mark in this thinking came in 2000, with the report of the Runnymede Trust's Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, chaired by Bhikhu Parekh.

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Publication information: Article title: The End of Multiculturalism: The West Is Finding That There Are Limits to Its Tolerance of Minorities Where Their Beliefs Clash Violently with the Laws and Customs of the Majority. (Features). Contributors: Llyod, John - Author. Magazine title: New Statesman (1996). Volume: 131. Issue: 4589 Publication date: May 27, 2002. Page number: 21+. © Not available. COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group.

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