Yes. Multiculturalism is Failing.

What the pro-Hamas protests reveal about modern Britain

Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 56,500 subscribers from 167 countries around the world and thousands of paying supporters who support our work. Like our stuff? Then help us expand by becoming a paid supporter and access everything —the full archive, exclusive posts, polling, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are not afraid to push back against the grain. You can also join us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook.

A week is a long time in politics. Last week, liberal commentators rounded on Home Secretary Suella Braverman for suggesting multiculturalism has failed.

This week, the streets of London were filled with British nationals, many from minority backgrounds, celebrating the terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas.

In the most diverse parts of London, car horns blared. People waved flags. And they drove through neighbourhoods as if their team had just won the World Cup.

Some described the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust as “beautiful and inspiring”. On Edgeware Road, there was dancing and fireworks.

As journalist Madeline Grant wrote: “That there are people at the heart of our polity who feel empowered to revel in such desecration, in public, with no consequences, suggests a catastrophic erosion of social norms”.

This is certainly true. But the protests and celebrations on Britain’s streets also suggest something else. Our model of multiculturalism is very clearly failing.

When you watch British nationals on Britain’s streets —many from minority backgrounds— celebrating the rape and mass murder of Jews by a terrorist group which is proscribed by the British state then you know multiculturalism is failing.

When you watch people have so little respect for British values and British laws they gleefully saunter around Britain’s streets saluting atrocities committed by ISIS-style terrorists then you know multiculturalism is failing.

When symbols of the national community like Wembley Stadium —which displayed the national colours of Belgium, France, Turkey, and Ukraine after terrorist attacks and the rainbow flag to support LGBTQ+ rights in Qatar —now refuses to show the colours of Israel because of fears about how the local residents of diverse Wembley will respond then you know multiculturalism is failing.

And when British Jews say they no longer feel safe in modern Britain, when they say they’re scared for their children, and when their schools need a permanent police presence, then you similarly know our model of multiculturalism is failing.

This is what happens when a national community has been steadily stripped of the things which used to hold it much closer together —a shared sense of values, a shared sense of national identity, a shared sense of history, and a shared way of life.

Liberal commentators, including those who berated Suella Braverman for stating what would have seemed obvious to many of the millions of people who live beyond the M25, will push back against all of this.

They’ll tell you once again, they’ll repeat the mantra in robotic fashion, that our experiment with multiculturalism has been an unalloyed success. And they’ll tell you once again, they’ll try and have you believe, that the celebrations and protests on Britain’s streets only represent the views of a tiny, insignificant minority.

But this is simply not true.

And deep down we all know it’s not true.

Because of mass immigration into Britain, because of the total failure of our politicians to integrate old and new immigrants into British society, and because of their determination to continue to import more culturally and religiously distinctive migrants and tribal grievances from abroad, many of the antisemitic views we’ve seen on display this week are now circulating widely in modern Britain.

This is especially true among Britain’s rapidly growing Muslim population, which in the last twenty years alone has expanded by nearly 140%, from 1.6 million in 2001 to 3.8 million today —and which is forecast to reach 5.6 million by 2030, meaning Britain will see one of the largest increases in all of Europe.

We already know, for example, that levels of antisemitism and anti-Israelism are two to four times higher among Britain’s Muslim population than among the British population in general, and that the only people who come close to displaying the same levels of antisemitism are people who identify with the extreme right.

We know too that British Muslims are, consistently, more likely than other groups in British society to endorse a range of antisemitic tropes —like rejecting the idea Jews are ‘just as British as other British people’, and Jews ‘make a positive contribution’. And nor are these views restricted to a tiny insignificant minority, as liberal columnists would have you believe. No ….