The UK is now a sectarian state

Diversity, for so long championed as the source of our strength, is rapidly proving the UK’s undoing. There can be little doubt now that Britain is becoming a sectarian state. The signs are everywhere. Flags on streets demarking ethnic enclaves, communities living parallel lives, ‘community leaders’ assuming the position of fiefdom chiefs, areas in our towns and cities becoming no-go areas for certain ethnic groups, police dictating where and when which groups may or may not assemble… these were the hallmarks of Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s.

The ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans attending a Europa League fixture with Aston Villa has felt like a tipping point. It has confirmed the fears of many that Britain is now a country in which the authorities feel powerless to prevent intra-communal violence, or that they have surrendered to the demands of one ethno-religious group at the expense of the safety of another.

Britain’s apparent fragmentation has numerous, oft-cited causes. Many point the finger to the increased and unsustainable levels of immigration since the 1990s. The craven capitulation by the authorities in Birmingham points to another: the ingrained cowardice of our liberal elites, who fear to speak about or act upon grave problems for fear of being called racist.

Yet a crucial factor, and one that often goes overlooked, is that those who for decades have promoted multiculturalism have never seemed to understand what ‘culture’ actually means. Those liberals who parroted the mantras of multiculturalism have been prone to think of culture as something superficial or fleeting. For them, multiculturalism refers merely to different food or exotic customs. Given time, these types assume, all immigrants and their children will turn out just like them: tolerant, enlightened, secular humanists.

The free-market fundamentalists who have consistently pushed for higher immigration likewise think of culture as cosmetic. But their philistinism differs slightly. Beneath it, they say, we are all global, footloose economic units who shouldn’t be constrained by such trivialities as borders or the nation state.

Over the decades, the powers that be have viewed the issues facing our multiethnic society foremost from sociological or economic perspectives, when our approach should also have been anthropological. Culture is not just about chicken tikka masala or celebrating Diwali. Culture is about values. And the values we inherit, hold and transmit shape our thinking and behaviour.

There are some values that have been intrinsic to these islands over the centuries: freedom of speech and action, equality before the law, and tolerance of others who think and believe differently. This is why the mass gang rape of children by disproportionately Pakistani men, or demanding special treatment on account of one’s race or religion, or hounding and killing others because of theirs, is so unacceptable to most Britons. These actions are not only illegal: they violate our values.

These values, which go back to Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, and find expression in the writings of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, have served us well. Some have been imperfectly implemented and many were secured only after much struggle. Nevertheless, our values of freedom, equality and mutual tolerance are intrinsic to what it means to be British. No one should fear saying so.

Stop blaming Brexit for Britain’s economic decline

Those in the Labour Party who would like to blame Brexit for Britain’s economic predicament are behaving in a predictably desperate and shameless manner. Arguably, there is an even graver intellectual deficiency on display here: these people don’t understand the concept of time.

People who blame Brexit for everything assume that everything in the world was going swimmingly until Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016 – or until we left officially in January 2020. Just as ignorantly, they think the rest of the world has blossomed since then, while the UK alone has been plunged into poverty and financial distress. But things were never fine here, and things everywhere else have continued to get worse.

It’s not just that our current problems have plenty to do with Labour’s decision to torpedo the economy with tax hikes – the fortunes of European countries have hardly ever been worse, either. France is in an even more precipitous state of political turmoil than we are, while Germany is experiencing its longest economic slump since 1871. Their respective crises are clearly nothing to do with Brexit, and instead owe far more to the effects of the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The bogus conjecture that Brexit is to blame for the UK’s weak economy has its origins in a prediction made in October 2021, when Richard Hughes, then chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, said that Brexit ‘would reduce our long-run GDP by around four per cent’. That qualified prognostication is still routinely regurgitated as a fact. Only this month, a letter in The Times repeated that ‘as a direct result of our leaving the European Union’ there had been a fall in the United Kingdom’s GDP by four per cent.

Not content to spread their own ‘misinformation’, EU diehards and a grasping Labour government are now reduced to quoting prophecies from yesterday’s soothsayers.

When philosophy was on prime time

As a longtime fan of the late broadcaster, Bryan Magee, I was glad to see BBC Four now repeating his 1987 series, The Great Philosophers. It seems fitting given the passing last month of one of his guests on the show, John Searle.

Searle, known for his philosophy of consciousness and language, was a redoubtable foe of postmodernists who maintain that we can have no unmediated access to objective truth, being thwarted by our cultural perspectives and physical senses. Instead, Searle stuck to the unfashionable view, one going back to Kant, that there is an objective world to apprehend – even if it is interpreted through mental categories we impose on reality. ‘How we perceive the world in our experiences is influenced by that system of representation’, he told Magee in a previous 1978 series, Men of Ideas.

Magee agreed on this point, but disagreed with Searle’s more ambitious assertion that ‘our concept of reality is a matter of our linguistic categories’. ‘What counts as a glass of water or a book or a table, what counts as the same glass or a different book or two tables… is a matter of the categories that we impose on the world; and those categories are for the most part linguistic’, he argued. This defies common sense, protested Magee. As he elaborated in his 1997 autobiography, Confessions of a Philosopher: ‘If I look up from the writing of this sentence, my view immediately takes in half a room containing scores if not hundreds of multicoloured items and shapes in higgledy-piggledy relationships with one another… There is no conceivable form of words into which this simple, unitary act of vision can be put.’

Magee’s words invite a thought experiment. Look up from your screen now. Do you see items, objects and people, all of which instantly evoke names? Or do you just get a general impression of things?

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.