Suella Braverman said multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate.
Britain’s home secretary Suella Braverman has said that multiculturalism has “failed” in Europe and threatens social cohesion. She said this while giving a speech on migration in the United States, according to the BBC. Ms Braverman also questioned whether the United Nation’s 1951 Refugee Convention, which was drawn up after World War Two, was “fit for our modern age”. She has in the past talked about training people of the UK as lorry drivers, fruit pickers and butchers so that the country doesn’t have to rely on foreign workers.
This time, speaking at an event organised by American Enterprise Institute, a centre-right think tank in Washington, the UK home secretary said a “misguided dogma of multiculturalism” has allowed people to come to the UK with the aim of “undermining the stability and threatening the security of society”.
“Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it. They could be in the society but not of the society. If cultural change is too rapid and too big, then what was already there is diluted,” she said in her speech.
“And, in extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society,” Ms Braverman added.
The home secretary mentioned the clashes in Leicester last year to point out that “the consequence of that failure are evident on the streets of cities all over Europe”.
Her remarks were criticised by the UN’s refugee agency. UNHCR rejected Ms Braverman’s call to tighten the definition on who qualifies as a refugee, saying the convention had saved “millions of lives”.
At home, opposition Labour Party said that the home secretary is trying to “distract from her failures” as her government is not able to find a solution to the UK’s migrant crisis.
However, Tim Loughton, a Conservative member of the Home Affairs Committee, said Ms Braverman had a point and “the UK cannot be the refugee camp for the entire world”.
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