by Atul Hatwal

The English Defence League marches through Luton and David Cameron pops up attacking multiculturalism. Coincidence? Yeah, right.

Tackling radicalisation and its root causes is enormously important, but blaming the right’s favourite bête noire, multiculturalism, is lazy and wrong. Wrong about the reality of multiculturalism in this country and wrong about what will make us all safer.

In Britain there are nearly 11 million people from minority ethnic communities. The minority population in towns across the Northwest, Yorkshire, the Midlands and Bedfordshire where there have been problems constitute a small fraction of the total in Britain.

In these areas, the muslim population tends to be from the British Pakistani community and numbers about 500,000, of whom the vast majority will be utterly opposed to extremism. The problems that Cameron was referring to are real but are manifest in less than 5% of Britain’s minority communities.

The reality is that in most of the country, people from different communities get along fine. No conflict, no protests, they just go about their business, day in, day out. Because it’s so prosaic, it doesn’t make the news. But it’s what happens. (more…)