The multicultural roots of today’s race hate

Two reports published earlier this month shed a grim light on race relations in Britain.

The first documents the enormous rise in anti-Semitic attacks on Britain’s Jewish community since 7 October. According to the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity that monitors racist attacks and abuse against British Jews, there has been a 41 per cent increase in assaults on Jews compared with the same period last year. Anti-Semitic damage to Jewish property is up 246 per cent.

There is little doubt that the huge increase in anti-Semitic attacks has gone hand in hand with the identitarian left’s obsessive agitation against Israel. In the self-pitying world of identity politics, Jews are imagined to be at the top of the privileged order – well-off, probably rich and over-represented in the middle-class professions. They are seen as legitimate targets for identitarian rage. And this has given succour to racists eager to give vent to the world’s oldest hatred.

The Labour government hasn’t helped matters. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer might have denounced his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, for allowing anti-Semitism to develop in Labour’s ranks during the 2010s. Yet for all his claims to have purged Labour of its Jew hatred, he too seems to have a blind spot on anti-Semitic attacks. He recently affirmed his commitment to get tough on anti-Muslim hatred and abuse. Yet he hasn’t made any public comment since January about the surge of anti-Semitism.

Of course, it’s not just Britain’s Jews in the firing line. Britain’s Muslim community is, too. According to an association representing Muslim health workers, Muslims in the NHS have faced an increase in verbal and online abuse since the riots erupted earlier this month. It seems those disturbances brought a simmering resentment against Britain’s Muslims to the surface.

We seem to be living amid an upsurge of nasty, ethnic conflict. Two minority groups are being turned into collective objects of hate. Just as Britain’s Jews are held collectively responsible for the actions of Israel by the woke left, it seems some on the right are only too keen to hold Muslims collectively responsible for Islamist terrorism or for assorted grooming-gangs scandals. In both cases, we’re seeing individual Jews and Muslims treated as no more than representatives of their minority communities, and blamed as the cause of hardships and problems elsewhere.

This is a product of multiculturalism. Far from allowing people from different ethnic backgrounds to live peacefully with each other, it has led to a corrosive dynamic that has risen violently to the surface over the past year.

Certainly, loudmouth Islamic and so-called community leaders, often supported and legitimised by the state, are hardly calming tensions. They issue intolerant demands in the name of all British Muslims. Yet in truth they speak for only a tiny minority. Too often, the diverse range of Muslim opinion within Britain is hidden from view.

The report on abuse of Muslims in the NHS does draw attention to something important. It highlights the central role that Muslims play in front-line public services. This gives the lie to the claim that British Muslims cannot or will not integrate into British society. Indeed, British Muslims make up 12 per cent of NHS staff, some eight per cent of teaching staff and play high-profile roles in politics and journalism. This shows that many British Muslims are playing a full and vital role in British society, serving in key areas of public life.

Indeed, the workplace is one of the few spaces left in which people can transcend their ethnic backgrounds, and get to know and befriend one another. This is clearly happening in the case of Muslims and non-Muslims. Despite the disgusting post-riots abuse some Muslims have suffered working on the NHS’s frontline, Muslims do not suffer from much in the way of workplace discrimination in the UK. Such are the economic opportunities open and available to individuals from different ethnic backgrounds in the UK, that Muslims from France and Germany often emigrate to London in particular because of the greater career prospects (and religious freedoms) on offer than in other European cities.

As Rakib Ehsan has written previously on spiked, Britain is still one of the best places to be for ambitious Muslims. We should not allow the riots to give credence to the corrosive woke narrative that Britain is a viscerally racist society.

There are of course significant differences between the attacks on British Jews and British Muslims. But they do both share common roots in state-sponsored multiculturalism. This ideology has turned British society into a series of monolithic cultural-identity groups and set them against one another. It has nurtured a sense of identity-based grievance, and encouraged people to blame whole identity groups for the wrongdoing of individuals and to seek their collective punishment.

The state’s response to the attacks on Jews and Muslims shows its unerring capacity to make this already bad situation worse. Jews continue to be under-protected by the authorities, giving credence to the idea that anti-Semitism is an acceptable form of racism. Meanwhile, the tough sentencing for those engaged in anti-Muslim hatred suggests that two-tier policing is a reality rather than a far-right myth.

The state needs to reestablish the rule of law, under which all citizens are treated equally. Over-policing some communities while under-policing others in the name of multiculturalism undermines social solidarity, fairness and social cohesion. Until the Labour government realises this, its actions will only heighten social tensions.

Neil Davenport is a writer based in London.