The higher the failings of multiculturalism pile up, the greater the effort required to ignore the fetid mound of societal consequences. But most of the political and commentary class is prepared to put in the shift. So Kemi Badenoch’s latest speech was a crisp break from the omerta that binds together our gutless establishment.

Multiculturalism is the enemy of multiracialism

Multiculturalism is the enemy of multiracialism

Her words were not incendiary for the sake of it; this was a clinical, clear-sighted analysis of how a confluence of uncontrolled immigration, non-integration, state multiculturalism, and asymmetric tolerance turned Britain into a fractured, fearful, increasingly harder to govern nation.

Badenoch dismissed as ‘a fig leaf’ the idea that international law motivated Keir Starmer’s reluctance to give support to US-Israeli air strikes on Iran:

‘The real explanation is not legal. It is political. Across the UK, there are groups whose political loyalties, when it comes to conflicts in the Middle East, do not align with the British national interest.’

This sort of talk makes educated liberals queasy, so queasy that the mere attempt to start a conversation about ethnic and cultural separatism in the UK is deemed an act of bravery, even as it leads to no change in policy. A change is urgently needed – it was urgently needed several decades ago – and Badenoch rightly chided Labour for its long-running strategy of sectarian electioneering, though this is hardly a matter on which Tory hands are spotless.

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Importantly, she put the outcome of the Gorton and Denton by-election in the proper context: it was not the result of ‘family voting’, but of there being a large number of voters in that constituency only too eager to vote along ethnic or religious lines or for sinister ideologies like anti-Zionism and Islamism. I made this very point on Coffee House last week.

The electorate in Gorton responded to ‘campaigning designed to mobilise voters on ethnicity and religion, not domestic priorities’, and cast their ballot based on ‘who will protect the interests of their identity groups and punish........

© The Spectator