If it is not exactly a truth, it is at least a hope universally acknowledged that all cultures are fundamentally compatible in their values, and that cultural cross-fertilisation necessarily results in a flowering of the arts and sciences. In short, the more cultures, the merrier.

There can be little doubt, of course, that the transformation of Britain into a cosmopolis has improved the quality of its food out of all recognition. Anyone who remembers the dire nature of British cuisine in its virtually unchallenged heyday could not possibly wish to return to the days of culinary innocence. But it required no official policy, bureaucracies or governmental guidance for foreign food to conquer: it did so because it was, almost without exception, better than the native variety.

Multiculturalism, however, is not just a question of eating Mexican on Monday and Thai on Tuesday. It is, among other things, the denial that assimilation into our historical, cultural and political traditions should be the goal of immigrants. It is permission for Albanians and Kurds to take their driving test in Albanian and Kurdish (though perhaps not in all the latter’s several mutually incomprehensible dialects) instead of expecting them to have mastered a certain amount of English before doing so. It is to adopt a cringeing and uncritical attitude to every manifestation of every culture except one’s own. It is to disarm oneself in advance against the argument that an unpleasant practice is part of someone’s culture, and therefore inviolable.

When a Muslim in Birmingham observes that one of the largest mosques in the city is called the President Saddam Hussein mosque, is he more likely to feel gratitude for the tolerance that allows his co-religionists to worship unmolested in such an establishment, or contempt for the spinelessness and decadence of a country whose tolerance can so easily be turned against it, and whose liberties might without difficulty be used to propagate and eventually impose tyranny?

His contempt will not be lessened when he discovers that the society to which he has come does not have the will to impose upon him some of its own laws, notably those with regard to the education of his children. I have heard in my medical practice from innumerable young Muslim women that they were removed from school by their parents at an early age, several years before the law allowed, but I have yet to hear of even a single case in which a school or the school inspectors took effective action to return such a child to the school.

I concede that the white girls who remain in the schools from which the Muslim parents illegally withdraw their daughters learn little after a certain age except how to be a lumpen slut, of the kind with which this country is so exceedingly well endowed: but the law is the law, and the subsequent fate of so many Muslim daughters is far from enviable.

At a certain age — 17, but sometimes younger — they [Muslim girls] are taken on a ‘holiday’ to Pakistan. (Their British passport is confiscated from them at all times by their parents, and they themselves handle it only for the brief moments when they must show it at airports. Virtually no Muslim girl keeps her own passport.) On arrival in their ancestral village, they are told that they are to marry a first cousin, a young man whom they have never seen before and who may well be deeply repugnant to them.

[. . . .]

One might have thought that the girls who have been subjected to this culture that is now so much at variance with our own would have received loud, consistent and vociferous support from feminists. On the contrary, the feminists are the dog that did not bark, because, I think, feminism has appealed to the same kind of mind as multiculturalism has appealed to. And the only way the two isms can be held in the mind simultaneously is to ignore actual real-life evidence of their incompatibility.

It might be objected that, by the very nature of my work, I have contact only with young women whose experiences have been unfavourable; that, in fact, many British Muslim girls find the arrangements I have described perfectly satisfactory. But the number of cases known to me is by no means small, and each of them knows of many others whose cases have been just as bad or worse.

In any event, the fact that no one has consistently raised a voice in defence of these girls has played its part in persuading certain Muslims that they are virtually extra-territorial. They know that when a government such as the present one talks of women’s rights, they — the Muslims — are excluded from its rhetoric, precisely because it would take both real conviction and considerable guts, the very qualities so completely lacking in Anthony Blair, to include them. They draw the natural conclusion that our society is running scared of them and — to change the metaphor slightly — that it is nothing but a rotting fruit waiting to fall from the tree. Loosing off a few missiles at Afghanistan from submarines thousands of miles away will not have changed their impression; rather, it will have confirmed it, and their opinion of the cowardice of the British government.

Every multiculturalist believes — whether he knows it or not — that it is right to force young girls into marriages they don’t want, to deprive them of the schooling and careers that they do want, to regard them as prostitutes if they leave their abusive husbands, and to punish, even to kill, those who cross cultural and religious boundaries. As an Italian commentator once put it, multiculturalism is not couscous; it is the stoning of adulterers.