One Nation, One Culture

For decades, official policy encouraged communities to preserve separate identities and live side by side. The vision was a harmonious mosaic. The result, too often, has been something closer to a set of strangers sharing a postcode.

This is not merely the view of the right. The 2001 Cantle report, written after riots in northern towns, described communities living 'parallel lives'. Dame Louise Casey's 2016 review found growing segregation and warned that integration had been neglected. Both reports were widely praised and then largely shelved.

Even senior figures on the centre-left have admitted the experiment struggled. In 2011, David Cameron said state multiculturalism had failed. Angela Merkel said the same of Germany a year earlier. It is now a mainstream observation; only the policy has failed to notice.

We want one common national