Mick Hartley

If you have any dealings with the NHS, you'll have had to fill in those forms about ethnic identity: are you white British, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Caucasoid, Uzbek-Turk, Caucasoid Mongolian, Mongoloid Asiatic, Asian Aboriginal, Aboriginal Asian, Swarthy, Part-Irish, Mostly Irish, Neanderthal, Other? That pretty much sums up official multicultural Britain: no doubt well-intentioned in theory, but offensive and divisive in practice. Here's Kenan Malik at CiF:

The irony of multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is valuable about diversity as lived experience. When we talk about diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of clashes and conflicts. That's all for the good, for such clashes and conflicts are the stuff of political and cultural engagement.

But the very thing that's valuable about diversity – the clashes and conflicts that it brings about – is the very thing that worries many multiculturalists. They seek to minimise such conflicts by parcelling people up into neat ethnic boxes, and policing the boundaries of those boxes in the name of tolerance and respect. Far from minimising conflict what this does is generate a new set of more destructive, less resolvable conflicts….

Multicultural policies have come to be seen as a means of empowering minority communities and giving them a voice. In reality such policies have empowered not individuals but "community leaders" who owe their position and influence largely to their relationship with the state. Multicultural policies tend to treat minority communities as homogenous wholes, ignoring class, religious, gender and other differences, and leaving many within those communities feeling misrepresented and, indeed, disenfranchised.

As well as ignoring conflicts within minority communities, multicultural policies have often created conflicts between them. In allocating political power and financial resources according to ethnicity, such policies have forced people to identify themselves in terms of those ethnicities, and those ethnicities alone, inevitably setting off one group against another.

The logical end point of such policies came with communities minister John Denham's announcement last year of £12m for white working-class communities. There are clearly many working class, predominantly white, communities crying out for resources, not because they are white, because they have been politically and financially abandoned over the past decade.

Denham's £12m will, however, do little to solve of the structural problems facing such communities, such as a lack of jobs and social housing. What it will do is reinforce the idea that whites have an identity, and a set of interests, that is distinct from the identity and interests of other groups.

The aim of Denham's policy is clearly to ward off the BNP in areas such Barking and Dagenham in East London. Its consequence, however, will be to feed the BNP's own pursuit of white identity and to legitimise the idea that such identity needs privileging. And that is, perhaps, the biggest indictment of multicultural policies: they have helped turn racism into another form of cultural identity.

To challenge all this, we need to separate the debate about immigration and diversity, on the one hand, from that about multiculturalism, on the other – and defend the one, but oppose the other. The lived experience of diversity has been good for Britain. Multiculturalism has been bad.