The Harehills riot reveals cultural divisions, but how significant are these divides for a nation?
In South Korea — arguably the most culturally homogeneous and ethnocentric nation in the OECD — grievance and suspicion between Gyeongseong-do in the east and Jeolla-do in the west are sufficiently deep and enduring to make you wonder whether the nation might have split on both latitude and longitude.
Humans swarm, they don’t ‘integrate’. It’s too soon to say whether Celtic Britons will make their peace with Anglo-Saxon arrivals. That’s been one and a half millennia now. As interest in league tables for ethnicity and religion has declined, new leagues have taken their place, for ideology and social codes. The demand for team membership often seems to outpace supply.
A nation can survive all this. It’s our division of rights and responsibilities between culture and state that has lost coherence. In Britain, culture and state ask the wrong things of each other. We need education, health, and law from the state, but morality, welfare, and order from culture.
I suspect more of a consensus on this among Britain’s cultural islands than pessimists have accounted for. Middle-aged Reform voters would find the cultural values of many recent arrivals to be more familiar than those on their own children’s university campus — a fact both parent and child might take a moment to digest.
We can live with vast differences, and little integration. What we must agree on is the terms of the social contract.
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