The only way this paragraph makes sense is if the issues we have today existed when we did have a monoculture.
When you state....
"These types of issues arise when inequality, poor policy, weak institutions, and lack of meaningful engagement allow toxic ideas to take hold in any community, not just minority ones."
That is simply not true, the worst racism I've come across is in leafy suburbia. I grew up in a terrace slum in predominantly white Salford in the 60s', it was grindingly poor, toilet out the back, no bathroom, but apart from petty theft there was no random violence or vandalism to speak of. Misogyny and wife beating existed that's for sure, but extremist groups? Toxic politics? there were none, zero, ziltch.
And you wouldn't have found the things you described in the poor communities of the Welsh valleys either.
The left view is that the "problems" are solely down to immigrant groups finding themselves in these deprived areas scrabbling for the same scarce resources as the majority poor white population, and the whites getting played to vent their resentment away from the real oppressor class, the rich, and instead onto these newcomers, but that's not how it was, and that's not how it is. If you're white working class and you haven't got a pot to piss in, only a tiny fraction of your fellow whites are going to blame the black family down the road who've just moved into the same kind of shit hole you live in.
Your post is the same patronising progressive nonsense that all nice liberal folk roll out every time, and while I consider myself a nice liberal bloke, I've realised over time that it's simply bollocks.
There are some problems that exist solely because people come from different cultural backgrounds and it has nothing to do with inequality, it has to do with multiculturalism itself, diversity is not our strength, admitting that is the case is not racism, but it is the first step in finding ways to build a more cohesive national identity that we can all buy into in order to build a happier more harmonious society
The left has a habit of wanting something to be true and then constructing a bogus oppressor/oppressed rationale to back it up, which is what you've just done. All that does is leave a gaping hole that the far right fills with hate.
The idea that the UK was peaceful and unified during its so-called monocultural past is a myth. Sectarianism, class conflict, and political extremism were widespread. Irish communities in the 60s, faced discrimination and marginalisation, causing some to sympathise with the IRA. I respect that you're speaking from personal experience, but anecdote isn’t the same as evidence. Just because some communities felt stable at the time doesn’t mean deeper tensions weren’t there. The 60s and 70s saw the rise of the National Front in white working-class areas.
Times have changed and access to extremist material is now instant and global, which makes the spread of toxic ideas far easier than it was in the 60s. The dynamics today aren’t just about who lives where they’re shaped by online radicalisation, polarised media, and digital echo chambers that didn’t exist back then.
What you’ve described as the liberal left view is actually a broader understanding of how inequality and policy failure can channel frustration away from the systems causing the harm and onto immigrant communities instead. That’s not calling people racist, it’s recognising how division is often manufactured. We've seen that dynamic repeated across media, politics, and history.
Most tensions don’t stem from diversity itself, but from how poorly it’s managed: underfunded services, lack of integration support, and political narratives that thrive on fear. Of course, there will always be exceptions, people don’t all respond the same way, and human behaviour is never uniform, but that’s exactly why we need to look at the broader patterns, not just individual experiences.
And this is exactly the kind of narrative that Trumpism thrives on, taking real frustrations and layering them with oversimplified cultural blame. It’s the same formula: suggest that diversity itself is the problem, dismiss structural issues like inequality or policy failure, and frame any attempt to explain complexity as “liberal/woke nonsense.” Trump didn’t invent this strategy but he perfected it. He turned cultural anxiety into political capital by pushing the idea that America was once strong and unified, and that everything changed when others started arriving. It’s not a solution, it’s a story. And it’s powerful because it offers easy answers to hard problems.
But if we really want a cohesive society, it won’t come from scapegoating multiculturalism. It will come from leadership that takes the hard route: acknowledging complexity, building shared values, and refusing to feed division for the sake of political gain.
