A view from one of London’s wisest …
The other day, arriving early to do some filming in the London Library, I sat in the small park in St James’s Square by the statue of William III. A tall, lugubrious looking white man in his fifties walked past talking on his phone. He had, he said, been on the Palestine demonstration at the weekend. I didn’t hear the rest. ‘Ah”, I thought, “he must be one of those failures of multiculturalism I keep reading about on Twitter”.
In the aftermath of the October 7th massacres of Israelis by Hamas the vociferous New Right in Britain took to retweeting pictures of demonstrators with Palestinian flags and decrying this as a failure of multiculturalism and a vindication of their demands for reduced immigration. In the Green Room after my recent debate with Matthew Goodwin he characterised North London to me as a kind of sink of support for terrorism and told me – contemptuously – that because I didn’t see it that way I was not “living in reality”. When later it turned out that he had not been invited to dinner with the organisers I reflected on what we were all missing. We could have enjoyed another 90 minutes of that.
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