The day integration died

In May 1966, the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins attended a dinner at King’s College, Cambridge. Other attendees included Ann Fleming (Ian Fleming’s widow), Lord and Lady Rothschild, and the art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt. If you think this sounds like an unforgettable occasion, you would be wrong. Jenkins could not remember a thing about it — and so had no recollection of meeting Blunt — because he was “almost totally absorbed” in the process of writing a speech which would “strike a more upbeat note on race relations”.

Today, this speech is mostly remembered for the definition of integration that Jenkins gave.

 I do not regard [integration] as meaning the loss, by immigrants, of their own national characteristics and culture. I do not think that we need in this country a “melting-pot”, which will turn everybody out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone’s misplaced vision of the stereotyped Englishman … I define integration, therefore, not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.

This stands in stark contrast to the assimilationist definition, which was succinctly summarised two years later by Enoch Powell: “To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.”

By Powell’s definition, integration concerns a duty on the incoming people to become like the natives. By Jenkins’s definition, the responsibility is on both the incoming people and the natives to adapt to the new order, by taking its values to heart. The culture of the natives — since it is not exhausted by these vague values — is no longer the set culture of the nation; rather, it is simply one in a range of legitimate alternatives.

In retrospect, it seems fitting that Jenkins prioritised his speech over the dinner, since the ideas it outlined have been far more consequential than the evening’s events. Indeed, the contents of his speech provided the social foundation of the modern British political settlement.

The deception of political language
George Orwell wrote that “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Effectively deployed political language hides the true nature of a thing; Jenkins’s definition of integration provides an exemplary case.

In quotidian English, to integrate is to unify, by fitting a part into a whole. In Jenkins’s English, to integrate is to keep those disparate parts separate. The 1969 Rose report on race relations referred to Jenkins’s definition as “cultural pluralism”. The chairman of The Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain labelled it “bifurcationist” — referring to the process of dividing a whole into two distinct branches. Thus, even the supporters of his vision noted that Jenkins’s definition was an attempt to pass off division as unity. This sleight of hand is bad enough; however, his vision went far beyond this.

A radical campaign of transformation
When Jenkins became Home Secretary, in December 1965, one of his first decisions was to appoint his “close friend” Mark Bonham Carter as the chairman of the new Race Relations Board. According to Runnymede Trust co-founder, Anthony Lester, “Jenkins and Bonham-Carter conducted a shrewd campaign to reform the law”, using “carefully timed speeches” to commit the government to change. However, they “lacked the advantages enjoyed by their US counterparts from whom they drew their inspiration”.

There was … no ideal of equality, embodied in a written constitution or elsewhere, to which the campaigners could turn in support of their case for using law to combat racial discrimination. The common law had at best been neutral, at worst giving preference to property and contract rights over the right to equality of treatment, and failing to treat racial discrimination as contrary to public policy.

Thus, their “objective was radical and without precedent in this country”. 

This campaign laid the groundwork for the Race Relations Act 1968, which extended the 1965 Act to target discrimination in housing and employment. However, campaigners were not happy with its scope and weak enforcement powers.

When Jenkins returned to the Home Office in March 1974, he and Lester (his new Special Adviser) set about extending the 1968 Act. The Race Relations Act 1976 extended the 1968 Act’s scope (even targeting indirect discrimination), and provided enforcement through the creation of the Commission on Racial Equality. They were also led by how racial politics had evolved in America — there, colour blindness had been jettisoned to make way for discrimination in favour of minorities. Therefore, the 1976 Act allowed that special encouragement and training could be provided solely for underrepresented minorities.

For a group of immigrants to be integrated into Britain, they must be assimilated to the natives and their culture

Engineering social attitudes
Jenkins’s radical campaign ensured that the liberties of the natives were restricted to bring them into line with his vision of a Britain based on mutual tolerance. If the British people were not naturally tolerant, they would be socially engineered to become tolerant. Philosopher and racial activist Michael Dummett summarised the belief behind such legislation:

Racial attitudes … are very often shallow components of the human psyche: they can then be easily scraped off by the abrasion of a social milieu unfavourable to them. To create a social climate in which it is disreputable to evince racial hostility is the only way in which to eliminate, not merely the expression of the feeling, but the feeling itself.

Yet, the racist attitudes of minorities were not “scraped off” by multiculturalism — which encourages them to circle the wagons around their attitudes and culture, via distinct languages and institutions. Thus, equality legislation sowed the seeds of ethnic conflict. For example, it failed to scrape off the violent, racist attitudes of child-rape gangs while binding the hands of the natives. As an editorial in the Independent noted in 1989, following the Rushdie Affair:

Roy Jenkins’ philosophy was predicated on the expectation that the minorities would also demonstrate tolerance, and the implicit belief that all manifestations of cultural diversity would be benign. It is becoming disturbingly apparent that this is not the case.

Jenkins’s infatuation with America led him beyond his original views — turning his back on equal opportunity in favour of pro-minority discrimination. His fully realised vision concerned the use of social engineering to bring Britain closer towards a progressive ideal.

The entrenchment of Jenkins’s vision
Following Jenkins’s tenures as Home Secretary, his multiculturalist vision became entrenched in policymaking. Despite a series of crises which inspired critiques of multiculturalism, no government properly tackled the growing integration crisis.

Margaret Thatcher took a relatively strong rhetorical stance on immigration and integration:

 … people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture … So, if you want good race relations, you have got to allay peoples’ fears on numbers … we must hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration … except, of course, for compassionate cases … We are a British nation with British characteristics.

Upon becoming Prime Minister, Thatcher inherited Labour’s committee on ethnic minority education — replacing the chairman with Lord Swann in 1981, based on the reception of the interim report. The subsequent Swann Report provided a clear articulation of Jenkins’s vision. It argued against assimilation and for “pluralism … within a framework of commonly accepted values … whilst also allowing and … assisting the ethnic minority communities in maintaining their distinct ethnic identities within this common framework.” 

The Thatcher government’s post-Swann rhetoric was strongly against multicultural education. Furthermore, the 1988 Education Reform Act has been described as “profoundly assimilationist”. Yet, the government report quoted to evidence the assimilationist agenda behind the Act’s notion of British identity reveals no such thing.

[Ethnic minorities] should be helped to enter fully into a British society which recognises, respects and draws upon their own culture and traditions within a context which emphasises that which is common to and shared by all. 

The Rushdie Affair, in 1989, was followed by a brief window of rhetorical scepticism regarding multiculturalism. Even Roy Jenkins suffered a brief moment of clarity when he said:

In retrospect, we might have been more cautious about allowing the creation in the 1950s of substantial Muslim communities here.

Yet, policymaking did not really change. Home Secretary John Patten even wrote an open letter to British Muslims, which affirmed his support for Jenkins’s vision. 

No one would expect or indeed want British Muslims, or any other group, to lay aside their faith, traditions or heritage. 

In 1995, Prime Minister John Major committed the UK to Jenkins’s project in a submission to the UN. The UK’s ethnic minorities were to be enabled to “maintain their own cultures, traditions, language and value”.

Jenkins’s moment of clarity subsided, and he became “a mentor” to the new Prime Minister, Tony Blair. The 2001 race riots in Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham brought the next crisis in multiculturalism. In the aftermath, a series of reports were commissioned. The Cantle Report’s team were “struck by the depth of polarisation” they found: 

Separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives. These lives often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchanges.

To target this problem, they argued for “community cohesion, based upon a greater knowledge of, contact between, and respect for, the various cultures that now make Great Britain such a rich and diverse nation”. They also produced a long list of recommendations, none of which concerned restricting the liberties of new arrivals to bring them into line with Jenkins’s new Britain — as had happened to the natives. Instead, they argued for “cultural pluralism”; an acceptance that monoculturalism is gone for good; “extensive diversity education and training in all key agencies”, political parties, and schools; sex and ethnicity-based strategies in hiring; and further study into the role of racism and Islamophobia. Ted Cantle even cites Roy Jenkins’s definition of integration as a notable example of a “positive vision for multiculturalism before 2001”.

Another major crisis came in 2013 with murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby and the Trojan Horse Affair. The Prevent strategy was established to target extremism, which was defined as “opposition to” Jenkins-inspired “British values”: “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. However, it did not take long for Prevent to be wielded against native British culture. In 2023, William Shawcross’s Independent Review of Prevent concluded that:

 … the present boundaries around what is termed by Prevent as extremist Islamist ideology are drawn too narrowly while the boundaries around the ideology of the extreme right-wing are too broad.

Prevent’s Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) was even found to have flagged books by Burke, Hobbes, Locke, Orwell, and Tolkien as potentially indicative of right-wing extremism. At the same time, RICU was carefully managing native reactions to terrorism through a strategy of “controlled spontaneity”.

Tackling the integration crisis
Since Jenkins’s campaign, each successive government’s revealed preference for multiculturalism has been evident in their refusal to do anything to meaningfully tackle the integration crisis. More recently, Kemi Badenoch has signalled her intention to solve it. But any successful policy platform on this issue will depend on having an honest understanding of what integration is.

Integration is not, as Jenkins would have us believe, enforced multiculturalism. It is also not community cohesion. The notion of community cohesion is blind concerning which communities are focused on — integration is not. Albanians getting on with Bangladeshis and Pakistanis getting on with Nigerians are examples of community cohesion, but they are nothing to do with British integration. For a group of immigrants to be integrated into Britain, they must be assimilated to the natives and their culture, not just happily intermixed with the people and cultures of other immigrant groups. Large-scale integration can never occur in areas where those with (at least some) native ancestry are no longer the majority. Why? Because, in practice, integration requires a large cultural majority for newer arrivals to assimilate into — only this provides the day-to-day enforcement needed. Thus, any party intent on achieving integration must be clear regarding what they are committing to. Only a reversal of the demographic changes in our major towns and cities will tackle the integration crisis which Jenkins initiated.