Inclusion Isn't Enough

When does a culture stop changing?

When does a culture become it’s most essential self?

These questions were prompted by Matt Goodwin’s typically noxious article ‘Breaking Point’ on the destruction of a shared national community - a unitary sense of ‘we’ - that he believes British culture is undergoing.

How, then, might you destroy a nation? …You would, either gradually or suddenly, strip away this belief among people that they share a distinctive identity, history, and culture. You would flood the national community with outsiders who do not contribute to the collective pot, who do not play by the rules, and who hold radically different if not incompatible identities, histories, religions, cultures and ways of life.

Matt Goodwin is becoming a prominent figure in my book Staging Free Speech. He’s a thought leader in the reactionary right who defended the fascist riots last summer, amplifies the moral panic that free speech is imperilled at universities, and unapologetically describes immigration as an ‘invasion.’

His political trajectory from centrist liberal to hardcore ethno-nationalist is a case study of far-right radicalisation. This episode of The Big Questions from 2012, where Goodwin appears opposite Tommy Robinsion and talks about the growing threat of the British far right, shows just how extreme his politics have become. (I’ll be discussing this episode in more depth in a future post about how The Big Questions acted as a space to codify Islamophobia in the language of liberalism).

The image of multiculturalism as parasitic entity infecting the dominant culture with doubt and even loathing over it’s true identity Goodwin and others on the reactionary right decry can be detected in an outwardly moderate speech that Cameron gave in 2011 on European security. The speech declared that state multiculturalism had failed and that integration between immigrant, ethnic minority and religious communities with native British citizens (the white majority, in other words). The form of inclusion favoured by the right was impossible without a shared set of values.

Cameron argued that the root causes of Islamist radicalisation was a crisis of faith in the key pillars of liberal democracy: equality before the law, equal rights, and freedom of speech, and that the New Labour government’s policies of multiculturalism had made people afraid to challenge prejudice in Muslim communities. The fear of causing offense had created a situation whereby people were unwilling to defend British identity for fear of being accused of racism:

In the UK, some young men find it hard to identify with the traditional Islam practiced at home by their parents, whose customs can seem staid when transplanted to modern Western countries. But these young men also find it hard to identify with Britain too, because we have allowed the weakening of our collective identity. Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values. So, when a white person holds objectionable views, racist views for instance, we rightly condemn them. But when equally unacceptable views or practices come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious frankly – frankly, even fearful – to stand up to them.¹

The argument that immigration and multiculturalism had eroded the spiritual integrity of British culture became calcified in rightwing ideology over the following decade. The UK Independence Party successfully weaponised the narrative that Britain’s membership of the European Union was a direct threat to British traditions and status as a sovereign nation. Anti-European xenophobia was undoubtedly normalised by UKIP’s ubiquitous media presence during the Coalition years. But despite Cameron’s successful rebranding of the Conservatives as a liberal party at ease with Britain’s cultural diversity, opposition to European political integration – represented most vociferously by the free movement of people across the continent – remained a fierce conviction in what was then considered to be the mainstream conservative movement.

The refrain of universalism running throughout Cameron’s speech has important differences from the nativist language of the reactionary right, at least in terms of its emphasis and tone. The ‘we’ he refers to throughout the speech invokes a pluralist political community that defines itself in legalistic and moral terms as opposed to nationalist or racial ones, a ‘shared national identity that is open to everyone.’²

Despite his implication that the optimal democratic community is one characterised by diversity, the kind of inclusion Cameron articulates is an attempt to depart the internationalist conception found in the popular discourses of multiculturalism. In the (neo)liberal model, cultural difference in the imaginary of a globalised society is negotiated at an individualist level and managed within an atmosphere of tolerance for the Other.

Rustom Bharuca identifies the limited forms of cross-cultural dialogue this model of multiculturalism makes possible when ‘multi’ is used to imply a cohesiveness beneath the surface of a diverse society.³ Both (neo)liberal and ethnonationalist narratives of a harmonious society ‘decry the “right to exit” a particular society’ and deny the means for marginalised and othered identities to ‘subvert the premises of “living together.”’⁴

(Neo)liberal and nationalist identity politics reduces multiculturalism to either an enabler or impediment to social conformity. Discursive spaces to invent alternative forms of cultural connectivity between ‘social actors’ that are not mediated through ‘the idea of the “nation”’⁵ are foreclosed to those emergent globalised identities ‘that are not always translatable within the norms of liberal individualism'⁶ or the essentialist character of national cultural identity. Cameron’s criticisms of (neo)liberal models of social integration omit the assimilationist principles within the cultural system that neoliberalism engenders.

The five years of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government are generally remembered for its destructive austerity policies, which many cite as a major contributor of the social alienation that fuelled Brexit. The decimation of local services in working class communities and the concerted effort to reshape the economy in the interests of business and private philanthropy lead to profound levels of poverty. The political discourse justifying massive government cuts normalised classist prejudice against low earning, unemployed and disabled people, with the Conservative Chancellor George Osborne infamously dividing the public into the ‘workers and the shirkers.’ These unprecedented cuts to public spending and the decimation of Britain’s social fabric were underpinned by an ideology grounded in the neoliberal doctrine of individualism and the small state.

Louise Owen contends that the ‘broad political project’ of neoliberalism ‘has been to quash the power of labour in the interests of (finance) capital.’⁷ In her reading of this political paradigm, neoliberalism acts as the ‘normative theory’ publics are compelled to negotiate to understand the how the interaction between the ‘governmental apparatus of the state’ and capitalism, the dominant western ‘mode of economic organization’ produces the hegemonic political settlement in western democracies.⁸ In the classic neoliberal formulation, to be categorised as a subject who is included within this settlement means to be an ‘economically productive’ member of society.⁹

The models of neoliberal capitalism have become naturalised to the extent that the concept of the ‘“global" is subsumed within an uncritical acceptance of the modes, mechanisms, and agencies that constitute First World affluence.’¹⁰ It is imperative to acknowledge the multiple historical and political contingencies which act on these models beyond pure monetarist economics. Further, such contingencies dynamically interact with other systems of meaning in western cultures, which produces contradictory narratives of a unitary culture.

Despite the ostensive absence of any overt cultural facets in neoliberal ideology, the discourse of inclusion and exclusion is ‘indissociable from globalization and its institutional and cultural developments’¹¹ meaning membership within the neoliberal democratic polity cannot be sufficiently performed purely through the economic metrics of production and consumption. Immigration is as fundamental to the supra-structures of globalization as the free movement of money and capital. Issues and questions relating to race, religion and culture have always played an equally important role in determining who is permitted to join the democratic community of the free and who is labelled as the Other in the political tradition of liberalism.

Likewise, neoliberalism exceeds purely economic concerns by acting as a discursive foundation to articulate a set of values citizens living in the west must adhere to if they are to be included in a democratic polity. British society’s willingness to accommodate or even acknowledge the legitimacy of the new subjectivities being produced under the economic and cultural conditions of globalization, which dislocate the discursive linearity of a shared and inherited identity¹² and so destabilise artificial notions of cultural fixity, became fiercely contested topics in British politics in the 2010s.

What I find most consequential about Cameron’s speech is not the emphasis on regulating cultural difference but on the framing of extremism as any act that challenges practices considered sacred to Britain’s native culture. The comparison Cameron makes between the specific social evil of racism and the opaque ‘unacceptable views or practices’ creates an expansive and nebulous category of deviant acts that those deemed to be living outside of, yet still adjacent to, the majoritarian community of the free are guilty of committing. The speech puts the failings of integration by Muslims into mainstream culture on a ‘spectrum’ of anti-British extremism, those ‘who accept various parts of the extremist worldview, including real hostility towards Western democracy and liberal values.’¹³

Such processes of exclusion exist within the social trajectory identified by Stanley Cohen in his seminal study of moral panics. Discursive constructions of the Other within the dominant culture are ‘erect[ed] to show its members which roles should be avoided and which should be emulated’¹⁴ Muslims have become modern ‘folkdevils: visible reminders of who we should not be’¹⁵ in the post-Brexit conjuncture, whose racial and religious identity embodies the enemy of western values. Sara Ahmed’s description of rhetorical commitments to tolerance, inclusivity, and anti-racism as ‘non-performatives’¹⁶ - speech acts that do not produce actions or material effects - helps to understand the insecure contingencies of (neo)liberal membership to Goodwin’s normative, majoritarian community. It is dependent upon the individual’s capacity to consume stuff and make money. The displacement of (neo)liberal inclusion with the ethno-nationalist variety was always inevitable after austerity ravaged the public realm of the means to perform productivity.

The excluded Other is now the cultural, racialised Other. Free speech has become markers of an authentic British identity encoded by the western values both he and Goodwin are not shy of asserting the superiority of when compared to cultures outside the Global North. Mobilising a limited repertoire of free speech acts to regulate performances of authentic Britishness has proven an effect strategy by the reactionary right to suppress ‘new signifying systems’¹⁷ of globalised cultures and identities. Any attempt to do so now carries a risk of being branded as an extremist.

Eliding Otherness with extremism has created an exclusionary regime for regulating difference in British culture, whose purpose is to violently deny marginalised identities the means to performatively express dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy. The choice to remove oneself from the mainstream culture is a freedom the reactionary right fierecely reserve for themselves. It is also the freedom that they claim only western culture affords its citizens. Yet the exercise of exclusion is, paradoxically, a condition of membership; moving against the tide of the status quo performs the western values Cameron and Goodwin claim to defend. But for immigrants, Muslims, and all Othered communities to practice it is a freedom too far in the politics of ethno-nationalism.

1. British Political Speech. 2024. Speech at Munich security conference, Munich 2011. David Cameron (Conservative). http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=329. Accessed 21 March 2024

2. Ibid

3. Bharuca, R. 2000. The politics of cultural practice: Thinking through theatre in an age of globalization. London: Athlone Press, 9

4. Ibid, 10

5. Ibid, 9

6. Ibid, 7

7. Owen, L. 2024. Restaging the future: Neoliberalization, theater, and performance in Britain. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 7

8. Ibid

9. Ibid, 12

10. Bharuca, R. 2000. The politics of cultural practice: Thinking through theatre in an age of globalization. London: Athlone Press, 5

11. Owen, L. 2024. Restaging the future: Neoliberalization, theater, and performance in Britain. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 16

12. Hall, S. 2017. The fateful triangle: Race, ethnicity, nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 124

13. British Political Speech, ibid

14. Cohen, S. 2011. Folk devils and moral panics. Abingdon: Routledge, 2

15. Ibid

16. Ahmed, S. 2012. On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham: Duke University Press, 117

17. Bharuca, R. 2000. The politics of cultural practice: Thinking through theatre in an age of globalization. London: Athlone Press, 12