The Left’s outrage over Suella Braverman’s speech is pure hypocrisy
Her comments on multiculturalism were met with fury, but I don’t recall such outrage when Angela Merkel said the same thing in 2010
Multiculturalism has failed. After Suella Braverman said these words during her speech in the US this week, British liberals erupted in scandalised outrage. Personally, though, I find their fury puzzling. This is because, as the Home Secretary had made perfectly clear, she’s not the first major politician to make this comment. In fact, she was expressly quoting one politician in particular: Angela Merkel.
That’s right. The former chancellor of Germany – and longstanding darling of British liberals. The woman they revered as a voice of decency and reason. The woman who, in their eyes, made our own leaders look like cheap, nasty populists.
Anyway, back in 2010, this paragon of centrist virtue gave a speech declaring that multiculturalism had failed. Those very words. Well, their German equivalents, at least. The speech was widely reported over here. So how did British liberals react?
Oddly enough, they didn’t seem all that bothered. A columnist in The Guardian politely disputed Merkel’s conclusion. An editorial in The Independent said she was being “too hard on her country”. But that was pretty much it. There was no raging horror. Liberal pundits did not unite to denounce Merkel as a dangerous fascist.
Of course, a mere five years later, Merkel threw open Germany’s borders to a million asylum seekers, so perhaps British liberals feel she’s atoned for her previous sin. But that still doesn’t explain why they seem so much angrier with Braverman in 2023 than they were with Merkel in 2010. So what can the reason be?
Do they perhaps consider it worse when a non-white person criticises multiculturalism? Do they believe that non-white people should automatically support open borders? Do they think that, as Braverman is the daughter of immigrants, it’s rude of her to complain, and she should just shut up and be grateful?
No, they can’t possibly think that. After all, that would be racist.
In which case, could their anger be due to a simple misunderstanding? The trouble with the word “multiculturalism” is that it gets used to mean two very different things. When liberals use it, they mean communities all mixing happily together. When conservatives like Braverman use it, however, they tend to mean the opposite: communities living separately, and failing (or even refusing) to integrate.
Then again, Braverman’s critics must know that’s what she meant – because she spelt it out in the plainest English. “Multiculturalism,” she said, “makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.”
As it happens, I don’t agree with Braverman’s speech. I think that, for the most part, Britain is remarkably well integrated. And I think she was wrong to suggest that “simply being gay and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin” is not reason enough to qualify for asylum.
Even so, I don’t think this entirely accounts for the sheer blistering fury with which her speech has been received. At heart, I suspect, the real reason for all this liberal outrage is as follows.
Braverman used her speech to pose some simple but awkward questions. If, as predicted, mass migration to the West continues to accelerate, how will we build sufficient housing? Or sufficient schools and hospitals? And if we can’t build them fast enough – what will happen?
Such questions are extremely difficult to answer. Much easier to dismiss them out of hand as merely hateful and racist – so that you don’t have to think about them.
