Robert Jenrick is right – Britain feels more and more Balkanised

Robert Jenrick has only gone and forgotten the golden rule of the woke era. Namely, that you are permitted to bemoan a surplus of white people, but you must never clock an absence of white people. Wailing about the pale, stale males who clog up our institutions is fine. Wondering where the white people are at when you visit certain parts of the Midlands is evil. How did these rules of the new racialism slip his mind?

Jenrick – the newly svelte YouTubin’ Tory – is in hot water for comments he made during a dinner at the Aldridge-Brownhills Conservative Association on 14 March. Yes, seven months ago. He mentioned visiting Handsworth in Birmingham. He said that in the hour-and-a-half he was filming – man’s always filming – he ‘didn’t see another white face’. It was ‘one of the worst-integrated places I’ve ever been to’, he said.

Someone recorded his comments and they were leaked by the Guardian on Monday, to coincide with the start of the Tories’ conference. One envisions Guardianistas dashing for the fainting couch upon hearing Jenrick’s scandalous comments. The paper is full of pained commentary on his ‘far right’ blather. It quotes Hope Not Hate railing against his ‘inflammatory remarks’. And a Brummie MP who says Jenrick peddles a ‘culture-warrior narrative’ with ‘far-right clichés’.

Hold on. This is the same Guardian, right, that called the European Union ‘too white’? And which said videogames are ‘too white and too male’? And which has published headlines saying ‘We hear too many white, male voices’? And which published a feature titled ‘Glossies So White’, lamenting that the people photographed for the covers of Britain’s magazines are ‘overwhelmingly white’? And which splashed with a column titled ‘Dear white people, your discomfort is progress’?

So that’s it: bitching about too many honkies is okay, but commenting on a lack of white people is borderline Nazi. The chattering-class rage over Jenrick’s comments is an orgy of cant. The Independent gleefully reports that he’s been ‘slammed’ for his comments. Which left me wondering when the Independent will be ‘slammed’ for publishing poisonous drivel saying ‘it is up to white people to rescue white people from our own worst selves, from the distorted monsters we have… become’.

If Jenrick had written off the non-white inhabitants of Handsworth as ‘monsters’, I’d have enthusiastically joined in the condemnation of him. But he didn’t. Pretty much the only people these days who denounce an entire racial group – us crackers – as monstrous and possibly deserving of eradication (whiteness ‘must be abolished’, says a Guardian hack) are Jenrick’s critics. Oli Dugmore, formerly of PoliticsJOE, is calling Jenrick ‘divisive’. The same Oli Dugmore who once thought it would be a hoot to hit the streets and ‘Ask white people where they’re from’. Remember, folks, noticing low numbers of whites is bad; taunting white oiks for the titillation of mullet-sporting ironic leftists who get a boner listening to Kneecap is good.

Even worse than these people’s hypocrisy is their cowardice. Jenrick is right – it’s worrying that parts of the country have become ethnic enclaves. Even the Guardian’s shrill assault had to admit that 91.3 per cent of Handsworth’s inhabitants are non-white. In some neighbourhoods, it’s 99 per cent. That’s not diversity, is it? It speaks not to the vibrant, multicultural patchwork of the rich, right-on Londoner’s dreams, but to the slow formation of communities Balkanised along ethnic lines. As Jenrick said: ‘I want people to be living alongside each other, not parallel lives.’

That’s the irony of this storm – it’s Jenrick who is standing up for diversity while his critics seem content for often very poor, migrant-descended people to live in monocultural communities where they rarely encounter people of an alternative extraction. I guess moneyed liberals quaffing merlot in the Westminster bubble don’t have to give a damn about the poverty-line Bangladeshi woman in Handsworth who can’t speak English, and doesn’t have to, because she’ll never cross paths with a non-Bengali speaker. Screw her, she can stay put, and live her life as a fleshy symbol of ‘diversity’ whose sole role is to give cushy liberals in Fulham a warm, fuzzy feeling about ‘Open Britain’.

‘A bit of racial diversity won’t kill you’, say Jenrick’s critics, with superb paternalism. Jenrick knows that. We all know it. I grew up in an ethnically diverse community. Next door to us Micks were a family from Guyana and an old Jewish couple originally from Eastern Europe. If you had told my mum when she got off the boat from Ireland that soon her best friend would be a black lady from Latin America, she’d have thought you mad. Yet there we were. But we didn’t live in cultural prisons falsely advertised as ‘diversity’. We lived mingled lives, not parallel ones.

The Jenrick scandal exposes the hogwash of the religion of diversity. That the elite footsoldiers of the ideology of multiculturalism are cool with parts of the country being 99 per cent ethnic minority confirms they couldn’t give a toss about diversity. No, to them ‘diversity’ is little more than a weaponised buzzword to be wielded against anyone who speaks of British values, British culture and the importance of integrating immigrants into these things.

As for diversity of thought – their urge to silence Jenrick is proof of their burning hostility to that. They yap about multiculturalism while pushing a monoculture of groupthink where no one is permitted to wonder if Britain is becoming more divided, more atomised, more tense. Under the ideological cover of multiculturalism they enforce their singular vision of a Balkanised Britain ruled by them and them alone. There used to be a phrase for this: divide and rule.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy