No, Your Majesty, diversity is not our strength

This unproven and controversial mantra should not be asserted as fact by public leaders

Facts don’t care about your feelings. Wishing that something were true doesn’t make it so. Whatever our subjective desires, they must never be allowed to obscure objective reality – and this is especially so when it comes to questions of public policy and discourse. It is, in fact, deeply unwise – Orwellian, even – for public leaders and institutions to affirm as fact theories and opinions which are unproven and conflict with the everyday experiences of a large part of the population. Of such actions may revolutions be born.

That’s why it was highly injudicious for King Charles to have recited in his Christmas message that mantra so beloved of the metropolitan liberal class that ‘Diversity is our strength’. Or, to quote him precisely: ‘[D]iversity of culture, ethnicity and faith provides strength, not weakness.’

The problem here is that the king, like so many others who trot out this cliché (for that is what it has now become), are substituting what they desire to be true for what actually is true. The desire itself is not ignoble. After all, there is nothing wrong with wanting to live in a highly-integrated society in which everyone gets along famously and cultural differences are immaterial. But the truth is that life is just not like that. Humans - most of us, at any rate - are social and parochial beings who value cultural attachment and belonging. Excessive levels of diversity can undermine those things.

Thus, the king had no business asserting a personal desire as a truth. In fact, any member of a nation’s governing class has a duty, when making public pronouncements, to concern himself with what is factual, not with what happens to sound right or ranks as fashionable opinion among certain other members of the elite class.

For it cannot seriously be denied that, far from being a strength, diversity is, in many respects, our country’s greatest challenge. We need only look around us to see the evidence for this. Years of mass and uncontrolled immigration coupled with the adoption of ‘hard multiculturalism’ – meaning the active promotion of cultural separateness and difference as a matter of public policy – have resulted in a country that is arguably more fragmented than it has ever been. Even the king himself refers to the United Kingdom as a ‘community of communities’ – a phrase that provides an implicit recognition that our once universal and unifying culture is no more and has been replaced by, well, everything and nothing.

Communities divided along ethnoreligious lines; communal sectarianism on our streets (often linked to conflicts in faraway lands); grooming gangs; armed police officers patrolling Christmas markets; schoolteachers being forced into hiding; everyday trust, civility and social solidarity slowly eroding; the ‘ghettoisation’ of certain districts within our towns and cities; the rise of right-wing ‘populism’, the intensifying racialisation of our workplaces and the public square: all these things are evidence of the downsides of saturation-level diversity. And we should be instinctively distrustful of anyone who pretends they don’t exist or that some other phenomenon is exclusively responsible for them.

Of course, some will prefer to live in a highly-diverse society, where a multitude of different languages are spoken and cultures practised. Such people will often argue that all cultures are equally valid and that a society in which a single culture dominates is somehow philistinic or intolerant. But theirs is ultimately a personal – and, I would argue, a minority – choice. Too often these people confuse their individual preference with what may be desirable or beneficial for the nation at large.

There are many within our country who, while entirely decent and tolerant in their personal dealings with others, regardless of their backgrounds, do not necessarily wish to live in a society marked by rapid social churn or cultural ‘vibrancy’. Instead, they prefer the stability and cohesion that come with cultural familiarity and unity – and that does not make them somehow morally inferior. Is Japan – a deeply homogeneous nation – less civilised or enlightened for its lack of diversity or its refusal to promote hard multiculturalism?

That isn’t to say that things must never alter. On the contrary, it would be absurd to suggest that any neighbourhood or country might be frozen in time or shield itself from the winds of change. But it is how that change is managed that is the crucial thing. Citizens are entitled to expect their long-established way of life – their culture, customs, social mores, and so on – to be respected, and for any change to take place at a pace and scale which can be comfortably absorbed. Too often in our recent history, it has been inflicted on them in a way that has caused deracination and disorientation. It was too quick and too far-reaching. And when these people complained, they were branded as narrow-minded bigots.

Strangely (or perhaps not) the demands made of white working-class communities in Britain – that they open themselves up to diversity and cosmopolitanism, the better to promote tolerance and understanding – are never made of other communities. Can you imagine a politician telling a Muslim community, for example, that it isn’t diverse enough and that it should be more willing to embrace cultural change?

Doubtless King Charles, like all monarchs, is driven by a desire to remain ‘relevant’ and to show that he has his finger on the pulse of the nation. But no amount of ribbon-cutting or handshaking will provide him with a true picture of the lives and priorities of millions of his subjects, particularly those living in the working-class and provincial parts of his kingdom. When it comes to duties such as the Christmas message, then, he will invariably be at the mercy of advisors. But these advisors, usually drawn from a narrow background, will themselves often have little grasp on life beyond their own tight circles. So when judging the public mood on a given question, it is probable that they do little more than consider what other members of the elite class and the DEI-obsessed institutions they run are saying. Hence, to them, diversity-mania reflects the zeitgeist.

Only, for most of us, it does no such thing. For no matter how much we may wish it were otherwise, our society is deeply divided. And those divisions are in no small measure attributable to the obsession of the elites with promoting diversity at every turn. It will take a considerable effort to remedy the situation. Most people beyond the elite class understand that. That’s why it rankles when they hear public leaders claim ‘Diversity is our strength’. It tells them that those leaders are either knowingly reciting a false slogan for political purposes, or they simple don’t appreciate the scale of the challenge facing us.

If he really wishes to be seen as relevant and in touch with the nation, the king would do well in future to avoid regurgitating unsubstantiated and controversial mantras.

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