There is no such thing as a multicultural society
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The findings of the 2021 census for England and Wales reveal a country that is becoming unrecognisable before our very eyes.
Britain’s two largest cities, London and Birmingham, are now minority white British. Since the last census ten years ago, the white British population of Birmingham has fallen from 52 per cent to 43 per cent. In London, the number has fallen from 45 per cent to 37 per cent.
While more than 80 per cent in England and Wales still identify their ethnic group as white, the numbers have fallen from 86 per cent to 81.7 per cent. And while this trajectory shows a downward trend, minorities are rising. The second most common ethnic group after “white” was “Asian, Asian British or Asian Welsh” at 9.3 per cent, up from 7.5 per cent in 2011. The number of people identifying their ethnic group as “Other” rose to 1.6 per cent from 0.6 per cent. And those identifying as “Black, Black British, Black Welsh, Caribbean or African” also increased to 2.5 per cent from 1.8 per cent.
No less momentous is the related watershed that has now been reached in the continuing decline of Christianity within the United Kingdom. For the first time, fewer than half the population of England and Wales identifies as Christian, with the number describing themselves as “non-religious” almost trebling since the millennium. While self-described Christians have declined by 17 per cent, there has been a 43 per cent rise in the number of people who say they follow Islam.
The significance of these changes does not lie in skin colour but in the fact that minority cultures are increasing while the majority culture is waning. Statisticians have welcomed this as the development of a “multicultural society”. But this is an oxymoron. While a multi-ethnic society is possible, there is no such thing as a “multicultural society”.
A society only exists where its inhabitants regard themselves as bound together by a culture composed of language, religion, law, literature, traditions, customs and so on expressed through civic and political ideals embedded in the historic development of that culture. Different ethnicities can sign up to the norms established by that culture, even if they are newcomers who didn’t share in its development. But there has to be an identifiable overarching culture to which they can sign up.
Multiculturalism, by contrast, means that no one culture defines a nation which is composed instead of a babel of cultures. Moreover, multiculturalism holds that the indigenous culture cannot declare its values superior to any other. So it cannot lay down cultural norms which everyone is expected to share. Multiculturalism therefore destroys society as a body of people with a shared collective national vision.
It’s more accurate to say that Britain is changing into a multicultural state. The bonds of society that keep everyone together are fraying fast.
This is why unlimited immigration is so disastrous. Certainly, managed immigration benefits a country in many ways; a limited number of immigrants enhances the culture.
But if their numbers are too great, there comes a point where there’s no culture for them to enhance. On a practical level the country cannot cope, with housing, health, education and other services becoming overwhelmed. And on a cultural level, the nation becomes Balkanised. The sheer number of newcomers from different cultures makes it impossible to hold the culture together.
If the vast majority of pupils in a British school come from backgrounds with religious, moral and cultural values that are foreign or even hostile to western society — not to mention with poor or non-existent English — it becomes extremely difficult for such a school to transmit British culture to them.
Yet through a combination of ideological will, inertia and sheer incompetence in either encouraging or permitting mass immigration, successive governments have all been complicit in the increasing Balkanisation of Britain. Last week, the Office for National Statistics revealed that UK net migration had hit 504,000, the highest figure ever recorded and the equivalent of adding the population of the city of Liverpool to the country every year.
And the key thing is that no-one in Britain ever voted for the transformation of their nation like this. No political party ever asked the public. No political party ever said this was what was happening. On the contrary, anyone who ever questioned any of it was promptly tarred and feathered as a racist.
No less important than this demographic and cultural change is the fact that the majority in England and Wales no longer identify as Christian. This is a baleful milestone for two reasons.
First, Christianity is the bedrock of Britain cultural identity. Biblical values infuse its institutions, moral norms and traditions across the board. As I explained in detail in my 2010 book The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, the values that secularists claim are universal are not universal at all but derive from the Hebrew Bible, the root of Christianity which was the basic building block of western civilisation. Even though so many people in Britain no longer consider themselves Christians, the values that the vast majority (including atheists) hold so dear — individual freedom, conscience and compassion, tolerance and even the rationality that fuelled western science and modernity — were created uniquely by the Bible.
Secularists may deny this, but Christianity has been the glue that held Britain together. The decline of Christianity means Britain is becoming increasingly unglued.
And the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity doesn’t mean people are losing the impulse to religious faith. The vacuum is being filled by religious faith turned upside down — the growth of paganism, witchcraft and shamanism (which the census says has increased more than tenfold since 2011), cults, irrational conspiracy theories, and the elevation of man-made ideologies such as apocalyptic climate change or sex-based “rights” into creeds with all the characteristics of the witch-hunting dogma of medieval Christians but without their Christian belief.
The second baleful outcome is that, as Christianity declines, Islam is rising.
Certainly, many British Muslims have totally embraced British and western cultural norms. But given the worrying proportion of Islam-supremacist attitudes that have been revealed in repeated opinion polling over the years in Britain’s Muslim community, these rising population numbers suggest a significant increase in political and cultural muscle among those whose aim is not to adapt to British and western culture but to make British and western culture adapt to Islam.
In his fascinating inaugural lecture (below) as Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London earlier this month, Richard Buggs observed that religion and ethnicity were closely intertwined.
He referred to a survey that had asked Christians around the world how important their religion was to their lives. In the UK, a mere 11 per cent of Christians said it was important; in sub-Saharan Africa (other than in South Africa), it was above 80 per cent.
The fact that so few Christians in Britain think their faith is important to them suggests that the Anglican church in particular utterly fails to project Christianity as a vital asset to individual lives. But there may also be an issue of “shy” Christians who in effect practise their faith under cover.
In America, said Buggs, researcher Elizabeth Barnes had observed that Christianity could be called a “concealable stigmatised identity” among biology graduate students who tended to hide their Christian beliefs because of the widespread (if highly contestable) assumption that religion and science were irreconcilable. Some undergraduates had been put off studying biology at a higher level because of remarks made by their lecturers who were very critical of religious views.
Yet in Buggs’s own lecture there may be hopeful signs of a more open-minded attitude developing. For Buggs, a practising Christian, was specifically invited to speak about his faith as well as about biology — and in his lecture he talked about the unprovable aspects of both Christianity and Darwinism. Darwin himself, he pointed out, had benefited greatly from the ferment of critical engagement with his ideas, and Buggs ended his lecture by expressing the hope that today’s scientists would follow that example.
A decade ago, Buggs could not have delivered such a lecture without being torn limb from limb. Maybe the fact that he was invited to give it on this occasion merely signifies a particularly tolerant attitude at Queen Mary. But it may also be that, among younger biologists, geneticists and other scientists, developments in science as well as the intolerant and error-strewn bombast of certain celebrity atheists have engendered a more open-minded approach.
A culture is like a deep ocean. While prevailing winds may be whipping up the waves, the currents deep below may be going in a very different direction.
