Hear me out: Suella Braverman isn’t entirely wrong about multiculturalism...

Her right-wing posturing and leadership posing do her no favours, but some of the home secretary’s views on immigration and integration shouldn’t be dismissed without some consideration, writes Mary Dejevsky

Suella Braverman posed legitimate questions about definitions of migrants and refugees (PA)

The home secretary landed herself in not just hot, but fiercely boiling water this week with a speech she delivered thousands of miles away, at a right-wing think tank in Washington.

The choice of host – the American Enterprise Institute – guaranteed Suella Braverman a friendlier reception for her speech on migration than she might have received even at some of the most steadfastly Conservative venues in London. There could also have been some benefit to the AEI.

Her speech, coming from an ally, set out some of the arguments for a wholesale updating of the international asylum system, which could be useful in the run-up to a US presidential election where migration is shaping up as a major issue. Never underestimate how authoritative a British-English accent can (still) sound in Washington’s corridors of power.

What made the headlines at home, however, was Braverman’s rejection of “multiculturalism”. And while what she said on this score was initially condemned in some quarters as the personal ravings of a xenophobic home secretary in pursuit of her supposed ambition to be the next Tory leader, this particular attack became harder to sustain after the confirmation, somewhat late in the day perhaps, that her script had been signed off by her department and by No 10.

At least some of the venom hurled in her direction seemed to reflect a misunderstanding, or at least a degree of confusion, about what “multiculturalism” means. And it seems to me it has two meanings. There is the general sense of a multicultural society – of which the UK may be seen as a reasonably successful example – a country where different ethnic and religious groups coexist in reasonable concord and enjoy similar prospects. Of course, the UK is a long way from being perfect, but it has been more successful than many in integrating and promoting people from a wide variety of backgrounds, as a glance at our parliament and the current cabinet would attest.

Those who took Braverman to task for rejecting society were quite simply wrong. She was talking about something quite different, and this was clear from her words. What she was condemning was not the multicultural society of which she is incontrovertibly a stellar example, but what she called “a misguided dogma of multiculturalism”, which is something quite different. It is the atomisation of society along ethnic and religious lines; it is a society where different groups are, if not actually encouraged to preserve and cultivate their difference, then given no real incentive to integrate and left to live in their own separate, or parallel, world.

This is what Angela Merkel was talking about when she said, back in 2010 – in reference largely to Germany’s Turkish minority, who had originally arrived as temporary “guest workers” – that multiculturalism (“multikulti”, as the policy of fostering pride in different identities, rather than an over-arching national identity, was known in Germany) had “failed”. The goal from then on was to be integration, to develop a unified sense of belonging and statehood. This does not mean enforced assimilation, or asking new arrivals to reject their heritage, but it does mean requiring an effort to fit in, by learning the language, for a start, abiding by the law of the land and accepting common values – such as gender equality – in the country where they have settled.

Braverman not only made that clear in her form of words, but she referred back specifically to Merkel, and to Nicolas Sarkozy and to David Cameron, in support of that same view, and even went so far as to set out what she meant. “Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate”, she said. “It has failed, because it allowed people to come to our society, and live parallel lives in it.” The term “parallel lives” in this sense, in fact went back further, to the report written by Ted Cantle after race riots in Bradford and several other cities, published in 2001.

Personally, I do not see what is so mistaken about this as a verdict, either then or now. Or about the idea that integration is preferable to separation, and indeed necessary, for a cohesive state. It also seems to me that most of those laying in to the home secretary this week for supposed hypocrisy – in wanting to prevent others from doing what she and her family had done – had simply got the wrong end of the stick. They weren’t, by and large, opposed to integration; they were using the term multiculturalism in a different way.

In fact, her political foes in the UK might have done better to engage her on the real meat of her speech, which was the need, as she and many others have seen it, to update the international protections for, and definitions of, refugees. However difficult, such a process must surely come – or else the whole system risks falling apart.

The majority of provisions are rooted in the aftermath of the Second World War and the imperative to resettle millions of people displaced by six years of fighting, destruction and changed borders across Europe. My late in-laws were part of this vast human tide. They had been taken from Ukraine to occupied Sudetenland as forced labour; they had walked across Europe after their factory was bombed out by the British, and spent two years in a refugee camp in the US zone of occupation near Frankfurt, before being sponsored to the US by relatives who had fled the Bolshevik revolution.

These Second World War refugees had no homes, and often no countries, to go back to – which did not prevent the British among others from trying to send Soviet citizens back to the USSR, where many faced prison camp, and worse, for what the Soviets deemed treachery.

With the war in Ukraine, some of the post-Second World War refugee provisions may seem applicable once again – and the reception accorded to Ukrainian refugees in much of Europe, including the UK, could been seen as a vindication of the protections first enshrined in the UN’s Refugee Convention of 1951. But this is an exception – or perhaps a justification for restricting refugee status to those fleeing war, with the added proviso that the primary reception countries should be those nearby.

The vast majority of those arriving in Europe now, however, come from much further away and from countries where living standards are generally lower. They have made journeys that would not have been possible in the past, applying knowledge that past generations of those moving country for whatever reason would not have. Braverman posed legitimate questions about definitions of migrants and refugees.

No Western country, and it is almost exclusively Western countries that are favoured destinations, can take in potentially all minority groups from countries where they face discrimination. All Afghan women? All LGBT+ people from Uganda and other African countries? All Rohingya from Burma? Under some current interpretations, they would all have a claim.

How much, if any, of what Braverman said to the AEI, I wonder, will find its way into her speech to the Conservative Party conference this week? The home secretary’s address on such occasions is commonly a tub-thumper, quite far removed from policy as it would be implemented even by a home secretary as far to the right as Braverman is presumed to be.

Doubtless, Braverman will follow this course – which would be a pity. In the unlikely event that she used her platform to present the same arguments for reform that she made in Washington, I rather think she might get quite a favourable reception – if not from certain sections of her party, then from the country at large.