The real British disease.(London bombings)

There is nothing in the law of unintended consequences that dictates such consequences must be unpleasant ones (though that's the way to bet, as Damon Runyon remarked of Ecclesiastes 9:11). An unintended and beneficial consequence of the London bombings is the transformation of the debate in Britain over multiculturalism and "Britishness." The discovery that the original four bombers were cricket-playing native sons of Yorkshire has alarmed people who had reasonably assumed that the children of Muslim immigrants would assimilate to "Britishness" as a natural result of growing up in the country.

The bombings on the London underground shocked everyone out of this complacency, at least temporarily. None of the usual explanations seemed to apply. The bombers were not poor; they were not "marginalized"; they were not from disturbed or broken homes; they were not living in a culturally separate world. Some fit the profile of a potential terrorist, others did not. One was the son of a successful small businessman; another had fallen into petty crime and gone briefly to prison. Outwardly, they were young Brits of "minority" appearance out on a jaunt; inwardly, they were jihadis avenging the West's supposed crimes against Islam.

These unsettling facts inevitably raised questions of political identity and allegiance. What had transformed ordinary young Brits into jihadists and mass murderers? What were we to make of the polls that showed substantial minorities of British Muslims sympathizing with them? And did these polls suggest that Muslims had been diverted from developing towards "Britishness" by a multiculturalism that encouraged them to cling to a separatist religious identity? Yet though these questions were put more sharply, they were not new. The British have been conducting a debate on "Britishness" and multiculturalism for most of a decade--indeed, they have been conducting two debates.

The first debate took place between academics, civil servants, think tanks, minority pressure groups, center-left politicians, and what the British call "the Great and the Good." Like its doppelganger on the Right, this debate took place in response to a series of major reports on Britishness and multiculturalism--notably, the two Crick reports on education for citizenship and naturalization, the MacPherson report on "institutional racism" in the police, the Parekh report on Britain's national identity and multi-ethnicity, and the Cantle report on the background to racial riots in northern cities. This center-left debate shaped policy, especially at the outset, but it neither reflected nor significantly influenced public opinion.

That was not wholly surprising because most of those participating in it did not accept the idea of a single British public. They saw a multicultural society as either inevitable in Britain or as having existed for many years. They therefore rejected any assumption that "native" British culture or cultures should be privileged over those of recently arrived minorities. Indeed, the Parekh report's sixth principle held inter alia that "insisting on the superiority of a particular culture" was simply disguised racism. And they argued that schools, the police, local government, and other social institutions should be reorganized to accommodate and reflect the culture of the different "communities" inhabiting Britain.

There was, however, a central theoretical difficulty running through this debate. Some cultural ideas and practices--the legitimacy of killing apostates, female genital mutilation, polygamy--were radically inconsistent with the broadly liberal and progressive outlook of the various debaters. So they had to go in for quite exquisite distinctions in establishing why multiculturalism, properly understood, did not protect such outrages, and in effect conformed to a liberal version of a common culture.

This hypocrisy was seized upon by the second set of debaters: tabloid newspapers, a handful of columnists (notably Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail and Minette Marin in the Sunday Times), some renegade academics, and a few bold Tories such as Norman Tebbit. This debate reflected public opinion, but it acted mainly to restrain or obstruct policy rather than to inspire it. Its bedrock argument was that Britain was not a multicultural society but a multi-ethnic society united by a common culture. Even then, ethnic minorities were only 8 percent of the British population and almost everyone spoke English. Multiculturalism was not only false as a description of Britain, therefore, but it also implied ideas and practices that were incompatible with the nation's liberal common culture. Its theory of the equality of cultures both implied human inequality, since some cultures denied the equality of women, ...