You can keep identity politics

Multiculturalism is in crisis. By that I don’t just mean that political correctness has ‘gone mad’, as the Daily Mail likes to put it: the British public worked that out long ago, and merely shrugs when it learns (for example) that the Lake District National Park is to abolish its guided walks because they attract insufficient numbers of black people. ‘Political correctness’ is shorthand for the etiquette and working practices of the most influential ideology of our age: multiculturalism, or ‘identity politics’. And that ideology is falling apart.

This collapse is not evidence of multiculturalism’s weakening hold on public life. On the contrary, it has been produced by the willingness of one institution after another — universities, schools, hospitals, the police, the Civil Service, multinational corporations, the Church, the BBC — to surrender to the demands of identity politics in a painfully self-abasing manner. Multiculturalism has captured the engine room of British society.