Human rights campaigners are outraged by the Dutch government decision to expel thousands of failed asylum-seekers, including families who have been settled in the Netherlands for years. This is indeed a shocking and draconian move. But it is one to which we should pay the closest possible attention. For it shows that if legitimate concerns about national identity are suppressed and ignored, the eventual result is distasteful policies, political extremism or worse.

The Dutch are a paradigm of tolerance and liberalism. Yet as was shown by the rise to power of the anti-immigrant politician Pim Fortuyn before his murder, it was precisely because the Dutch valued their culture that they revolted against immigration numbers that would destroy the cohesion and identity of their society. They key realisation by the Dutch is that multiculturalism is anathema:

'New asylum applications have already fallen steeply from 43,560 in 2000 to an estimated 10,000 last year, but the scale of past immigration - mostly through family reunion - has stirred fears that Dutch society is spiralling out of control. A parliamentary report last month concluded that the country's 30-year experiment in tolerant multiculturalism had been a failure, ending in sink schools, violence, and ethnic ghettoes that shun inter-marriage with the Dutch. It found that 70-80 per cent of third-generation Dutch-born immigrants brought in their spouse from their "home" countries, mostly Turkey and Morocco. The consequences of this were brought home after September 11, 2001 when the intelligence service discovered that al-Qa'eda was "stealthily taking root in Dutch society".'

This is now a vital issue as our own debates about asylum, immigration, culture and national identity are threatened by knee-jerk vilification from illiberals designed to shut down debate. The chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, recently used the Guardian to accuse David Goodhart, the liberal editor of the liberal magazine Prospect, of racism -- simply because Goodhart had raised these concerns in an excellent and thoughtful article in the current issue. Now the Guardian has published an article by Julian Baggini taking Phillips to task. His point is that issues like this are far too complex to pin simplistic labels upon points of view:

'By eliding "race and culture" and presenting them as though they were two sides of the same coin, Phillips tarred Goodhart with the Powellite brush. But this is nonsense. Race and culture are not inseparable. Culture concerns beliefs and practices and we are responsible for what we believe and do. We have no such responsibility for the colour of our skin or ethnicity. To be against the culture of white slave-owners was not to be racist against whites. To deny passports to anyone who refuses to accept some basic principles about their prospective new country's culture is not prejudiced; to deny it on the basis of skin pigmentation is.

'This is not to say that Phillips was wrong in everything he said, or that Goodhart was entirely right. My whole point is that this is a genuinely tangled issue which can't be sorted out if we seek to pigeonhole every opinion into simplistic, assumption-laden categories. Most people are "not extreme enough" for that to work. We need to rise above the school debating society mentality that dominates our culture, from the Today programme to parliament. And that is impossible if we force people into pre-set moulds labelled "for" and "against". '

The issues of immigration, culture and national identity are perhaps the most fundamental, difficult and emotionally charged of any that we face. The myth of a 'multicultural society', that oxymoron which drives government policy and faux-liberal thinking, has been used to intimidate and vilify anyone who wants to defend national identity and culture by labelling such views as beyond the pale. The Dutch have shown us that even the most decent people are driven in desperation to do distasteful things when the harm caused by the faux-liberal consensus leaves them no alternative if they are not to commit social suicide.

Posted by melanie at February 18, 2004