A whopping 95 percent of respondents to a BBC straw poll have said that they think multiculturalism in Britain is a failure. The poll was taken yesterday morning during the BBC’s Saturday Morning Live show, and asked “Is multiculturalism working?” Just 5 percent said “Yes”; 95 percent said “No”.
Breitbart London’s James Delingpole was a guest on the show. During the discussion of the results, he said: "I think the thwacking great majority in that poll says it all. The multicultural experiment in Britain has failed totally and people have finally realised how much it has failed. Rotherham was just one example; we’re seeing cases all around the country. It has been a disaster. I think that this is going to be the turning point.”
Also on the show was the left-wing journalist Owen Jones, who extolled the virtues of interracial sex and claimed: “fortunately the actually scientific polling suggests that’s quite a pessimistic answer. Yes there are always tensions which we need to work on. We need to bring our communities together. But Britain has one of the highest levels of interracial relationships in the whole world.
We need to break down segregation like faith schools. We concentrate poor people in particular areas because of the lack of social housing, and that disproportionately affects people from black and minority ethnic communities.
“Let’s promote communities which are mixed and live together, and let’s take on the obstacles and concerns that people have.”
However, growing evidence suggests that multiculturalism itself is responsible for increasing segregation in Britain. Last year the Daily Mail reported on the phenomenon of ‘White flight’ – that is, white British people moving out of London in vast numbers. Between 2001 and 2011 some 620,000 white British people left London, tipping the ethnic makeup of London into majority non-British heritage.
Analysis of the 2011 census figures showed that 45 percent of ethnic minority Britons live in areas where white Britons make up less than half of the population. This has led to some areas where there are large populations of Muslim immigrants being self-declared “Muslim zones”. In 2008, two Christian preachers were prevented from handing out extracts from the bible in Birmingham when a Muslim Community policeman told them “You can’t preach the Bible here, this is a Muslim area”. Last year a number of videos emerged on YouTube showing Sharia patrols in East London, as non-Muslims were told that they couldn’t drink in the streets as it was a Muslim area.
A poll last year conducted by Lord Ashcroft showed overwhelming support for multiculturalism, with 70 percent of the public supporting it, and 30 percent opposed. Only amongst Ukip voters were the majority opposed to multiculturalism, with 57 percent of Ukip aligned respondents saying that they opposed multiculturalism.
Those who voted for the other three main parties were overwhelmingly in favour, with 71 percent of Conservative voters, 76 percent of Labour voters, and 89 percent of Liberal Democrat voters all being in favour of multiculturalism.
Amongst ethnic minority respondents (Black Caribbean, Black African, and Asian Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs), nine out of ten thought that multiculturalism was a good thing.
However, the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq has this summer highlighted the problem of British jihadists travelling back and forth between Britain and the Middle East, plotting and carrying out brutal attacks on civilians. Today the UK has been put on a high terror alert as warnings of a “Mumbai-style terror attack” reverberated around Westminster. The 2008 Mumbai attacks were a series of co-ordinated shootings and bombings that took place over four consecutive days, killing 164 people and wounding a further 308.
And on home turf, it has emerged that more than 1,400 girls were brutally attacked and raped by mostly Muslim men in Rotherham, whilst council staff and police officers turned a blind eye for fear of being labelled ‘racist’.
These events are likely to have shifted public opinion against multiculturalism, although further polling evidence is required to ascertain how widespread the shift has been.