Minette Marrin writes about Britain's disastrous multi-culti policy fashion, and its resulting tragic failure to assimilate its immigrants:

Today, in the borough of Southwark as a whole, about a third of the entire population comes from a black or ethnic minority “community”, as official figures so tendentiously put it, when the problem is precisely the lack of community. “More than 100 languages are spoken in our schools and 43% of our pupils speak English as an additional language,” says the council.

This shows, as the council says, a rich diversity and for many years in this country we have been required by the progressive establishment to celebrate this diversity. Yet such extreme diversity is quite obviously at odds with community. It is at odds with the development of shared culture and shared purpose, of shared language in shared school rooms and the creation of the ties that bind a community together.

To throw together such a hugely various collection of people from all over the world, in such numbers, from all kinds of different cultures speaking different languages, is to create a miserable, murderous Tower of Babel. So it has proved in Southwark and in other places like it. The result is racial tension of all kinds, bullying, crime and fear.

If you wanted to invent a way of demoralising people and setting them against each other in their deprivation, you could hardly have come up with anything better, short of bombing them. The ties of community are fragile; they are hard to weave but easy to break; they can’t be drawn together by wishful thinking.

Community needs a critical mass of familiarity, shared language, shared tradition and shared moral attitudes. A strong community can accept outsiders and is often enriched by them, as ours has been, but it also needs a high degree of common purpose and common culture. That might seem blindingly obvious, yet immigration policy has been based on a determined refusal to admit the obvious.

"Yet such extreme diversity is quite obviously at odds with community. "

Well doh. Anyone notice that Britain's gun crime statistics are rapidly increasing?

I guess Rodney King was off base. We CAN'T all just get along.

Why is anyone surprised at this situation. Many of these groups are already not friendly to each other in their home countries. Sunnis & Shi'ites, Pakistanis & Indians, Turks & Iraqis, Iranians & Iraqis, Turks & Kurds. Add that anger to being in a foreign country and it's a recipe for disaster.

You can't possibly meet the needs or, more importantly, the wants of citizens who are religiously and culturally different. So the Brits have angered them ALL. So the probable dissenters band together, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The U.S. has a more homogenous background. We don't have a millenium of history behind us to keep in tact. We take other cultures "in" and add them to our culture. Sister Germaine, 6th Grade, St Ignatius School, "..we are a Melting Pot, we incorporate the cultures of immigrants to keep building and bettering ourselves."

I think instead of trying to add these foreign cultures to their own culture, the Brits are trying to make them seperate but part of the whole. "...blimey mate, we likes ya' awright but, could ya' please live across town? You know, with the rest if the Asians?"

I'm not saying we don't have bigots, but it seems that al this multi-culti stuff in the U.K. does more to divide, than to enfold, or include.

Diversity is the most overused word in the English language. I am sick unto death of it!

Steve quotes: ...we are a Melting Pot

But we're not. We're more of a tossed salad. All these people and cultures in the US that maintain their diversity and only accept traditions from other cultures that they so wish.

A melting pot makes me think that all the diversity is mixed together and everybody uses it. I don't see that, so I believe tossed salad is a better analogy. I'm an onion.

Of course, the thing about Britian is that it has also failed to integrate its residents. Try to pronounce a Welsh street sign, or wearing the wrong colours at a Celtics-Rangers football game, let alone that whole IRA thing.

Multiculturalism is hardly a recent invention sprung by leftists. It was the very foundation both the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Conquest on the cheap, as it were.