A speech by Peter Whittle, Chairman of the New Culture Forum, given at the Oxford Union on 12 March 2025. The topic for the debate was that This House believes that Multiculturalism has no future in the United Kingdom.
We should not seek to keep alive a doctrine which has done nothing but harm to this country – an ideology which has been imposed largely from above, which relies on lies, distortions and coverups to keep it in place.
It’s a doctrine which has compromised our free speech, and left our society increasingly fragmented, indeed segregated along parallel lines, and troubled now to the point of collapse.
Multiculturalists have always talked about building a community of communities. What this is not, is one nation, and certainly not a united nation. They’ve also always preached that cultures are of equal value and that they should be celebrated and respected as such. The political, media and cultural elites have enforced a narrative based on this which has sprung, I believe, from their basic cultural self-loathing and their distaste for the very concept of the nation, or nationhood, and the British nation in particular. Celebrating British culture was never part of the plan. Indeed it was antipathetic to the multiculturalists’ agenda.
“Diversity is our greatest strength” is multiculturalism’s mantra. You deny that at your peril. But I’m sure you must be familiar with the work of Robert Putnam, hardly some rightwing headbanger. This left-leaning sociologist in America wrote a brilliant thesis in which he found that the greater the diversity in a society, then the lessening of social capital and the decline in trust, not only between groups but within groups too. That is the situation which we are facing now.
We have gone from what was an extraordinarily high-trust society to a low-trust society. And that’s happened within one generation.
We need look no further than the appalling news we have been discussing over the past few weeks. Nationwide, systematic rape, torture and abuse of thousands upon thousands of white working class girls by mainly Pakistani Muslim gangs has blown apart the pieties and the dogmas of multiculturalism in Britain. Some of the Rotherham rape gang are shown below.
Now thanks to the interventions of Elon Musk the world now knows what must be this country’s biggest racially aggravated sexual crime. These girls were chosen because they were white, by men who considered them to be subhuman. Now from the police to the social services, from Parliament to the media, these shocking crimes were covered up largely to keep the multicultural narrative in place. As one former Labour MP put it, two years ago, there was the feeling that we shouldn’t rock the multicultural boat. Another Labour MP agreed more crudely with the statement a few years back that the victims should “shut up for the sake of diversity.”
Now the enormity of the rape gangs issue is such that it will force the complete reassessment of recent British history. The need to enforce this official narrative, that multiculturalism and unfettered mass immigration are wholly beneficial to the society, has shaped public policy and our politics for the whole of this century so far. And in doing so it has transformed our physical, cultural and political landscape.
What we are left with now is a situation which calls into question the very legitimacy of our democracy and indeed the British state. In reality, cultural practices and some beliefs totally at odds with our society have been tolerated for too long or indeed been ignored.
Female Genital Mutilation
Just to take one example, my organization, the New Culture Forum, about ten years ago did a report into FGM – Female Genital Mutilation. This is a barbaric practice. We established that tens of thousands of young girls in the UK were at risk or indeed have suffered this disgusting form of child abuse. I’m sure that number is even greater now.
Now FGM was specifically made a crime back in the 1980s. So how many convictions have there been? Two. Just two, in forty years. As with the coverup of the rape gangs, the only conclusion to be drawn is that this disgusting practice went unpunished so as not to upset the narrative that was in place, and also of course out of a fear of a career-ending “racism.”
Attack on Free Speech
That fear of being called racist has been a powerful tool with which to halt any criticism. It is all-pervading, and has struck at the heart of our cherished freedom of speech. Those who championed multiculturalism in the early days would openly and quite happily say that in order for it to work, some restrictions on what could and couldn’t be said would have to be operated. But what this has meant in practice since then is a massive and ongoing expansion in hate speech laws and the introduction recently of those Orwellian-sounding so-called non-crime hate incidents. And this restriction is about to get worse.
The All-Party Parliamentary Group’s new definition of Islamophobia – a made-up nonsensical term – has been adopted by the Labour Party and will in all likelihood come into law. This will effectively outlaw all criticisms of Islam and introduce what is in essence a blasphemy law.
Now to me that is the perfect example of how the requirements of multiculturalism undermine the established traditions and values of this nation.
So, what of the future? It’s very bleak.
Compromised judiciary
This is an addition to the article, not part of Peter Whittle’s speech . It shows how a key institution of Britain – the judiciary – is hopelessly compromised by multiculturalist ideology. It is completely incompatible with the fundamental principle of the Rule of Law – ONE law for everyone, with the law being no respecter of persons.
Sectarian Disorder
We have in recent years seen increasing sectarian disorder. I’ve seen it in both Leicester and London. Foreign disputes have been imported and now played out in this land. And last year’s general election was a landmark in that it saw the first election to Parliament of four sectarian Muslim MPs.
NOTE: The same is proposed to happen in Australia, where the Muslim Voice is to run candidates in our federal election.
Is “Integration” possible?
We should throw the disaster of multiculturalism into the garbage can of history. What should be in its place? The answer we mostly hear is that we need integration. As things stand, this is entirely implausible. It’s a good thing, integration, but implausible now. It is impossible to integrate up to a million new people a year from very different cultures into this country. And with established large communities already existing here there is virtually no need or indeed incentive to integrate. And as we now know, since the mass pro-Palestinian marches after October 7th, there are many people who have no intention of integrating and indeed despise what we are.
So I would say two things. One: If we are to have any hope of changing the situation, we have to have a halt to any further mass migration.
And Two: We need an entirely new and fresh establishment, one that believes in Britain, is not ashamed of Britain, has not got a distaste for its nationhood, and believes in the glories of Western civilization . When I look at what has just been happening in America, I have some hope.
