The Left’s Lying Eyes

The Left has a long, storied tradition of staring reality squarely in the face and refusing to believe their lying eyes. From the Soviet Union’s five-year plans to the West’s open border fantasies, nothing it seems is capable of shaking their ideological reverie. No matter how many tens of millions of deaths socialism is responsible for, we are routinely told that ‘real socialism’ has never been tried. It’s not just stubbornness – it’s a bloody art form. And nowhere is this wedlock to dogma more evident than the Left’s defence of multiculturalism – a project so disastrous that even its architects have admitted it to be dead. Yet here we are, in 2025, watching senior Labour politicians prancing around the corpse of cultural diversity, insisting it’s still got a pulse.

While the fabled benefits of multiculturalism are yet to materialise, it’s ill effects are now undeniable. In Britain, despite an impressive majority of 174 seats in last year’s general election, the Labour Party’s diversity chickens have finally come home to roost. First we were treated to the shameful spectacle of Angela Rayner, begging male Muslim voters (naturally, there were no women in sight) not to oust her from her Ashton-under-Lyne seat; promising that if Labour got into power it would ‘recognise Palestine’. The clip is a painful, but necessary watch – more reminiscent of a hostage video than a party political broadcast:

Next up was the soi-disant feminist firebird of Birmingham Yardley, Jess Phillips. Last July, Phillips clung to her seat by a wafer-thin 693 votes – hardly a mandate to write home about. During her victory speech she was heckled by a mob of pro-Palestine activists, notably predominantly Muslim men, who chanted “Free Palestine” and “Shame on you.” A lesser soul might have paused to reflect: perhaps the aggressive, sectarian undertones of the campaign – the slashed tyres, the intimidation of female canvassers, the masked activists screaming invective at Sadiq Khan about his mum – hinted at a deeper malaise. Even Phillips herself admitted the election was the worst she had ever stood in.

When asked about the abuse however, Phillips seemed strangely reluctant to put the boot in to the ‘Muslim’ aspect of the men responsible for the mêlée. She also pooh-poohed the suggestion that the abuse was sectarian, as “too simple” an explanation:

People want desperately for me to announce that the people shouting at me and barracking me were Muslim men.

The fact that they were men is quite significant to me – the fact that they were Muslim is not significant because there are Muslim people in my constituency who didn’t behave like this.

These people were idiots. They didn’t do it because they were Muslim – they did it because they were idiots, and they wanted something for themselves, and they used a terrible tragedy to get that.

There you have it – no reason not to berate ‘the patriarchy’, but the Muslim element had absolutely nothing to do with it. The fact that her constituency is almost 43% Muslim clearly doesn’t faze Jess, especially when being ‘pro-Gaza’ apparently gets you better treatment on the NHS.

Last week it was the turn of former Leicester South MP, Johnathan Ashworth, who was tipped for a cushy cabinet post under Keir Starmer before shockingly losing his seat to relative unknown Shockat Adam; a pro-Gaza independent who rode a wave of Muslim votes to victory. Interviewed in The Telegraph, Mr Ashworth claimed that multiculturalism hasn’t failed, and rejected the notion that the loss of his seat ought to give him pause for thought:

In my case, in my seat, there was a huge, huge, huge strength of feeling about the issue of Gaza, which I understand. People felt that somehow, if I had voted for an SNP rebel amendment, that would have delivered a ceasefire.

Of course it wouldn’t, and the campaigners who said so were obviously being dishonest. But that’s the rough and tumble of politics. I don’t think it’s a failure of multiculturalism, not at all.

‘The rough and tumble of politics’ John-boy?! You were chased out of your own patch by a baying mob screaming “Genocide John”, and were forced to take refuge in the local vicarage!

Here’s what Ashworth said at the time, although of course (like Phillips) he failed to make the multicultural connection to the extremism:

I have never known a campaign of such vitriol, such bullying, such intimidation built on the foul and obnoxious lie that I was responsible for genocide. That I had the blood of Gazan children on my hands.

This is the campaign that was run by a minority of bullies, and loud mouths. This is not representative of the many, many Muslim constituents I was proud to represent. This is not Muslim values.

Here’s the rub: every measurable index screams that he’s wrong. We’ve known for decades that migrants disproportionately commit crimes on the continent – even President Macron has admitted at least half of Paris crimes are committed by foreigners. In Britain however, the authorities have been reticent to collect let alone publish the equivalent data, for fear that a similar pattern would be revealed. Despite the continued government cover-up, The Telegraph cross-referenced Ministry of Justice data showing the number of foreign nationals in jails in England and Wales with ONS census data of foreign nationals from each country without a UK passport. The resulting crime statistics according to population, do not look good for the multiculturalists. Top of the table is Albania, 1 in 50 of whom are enjoying prime real estate in His Majesty’s prisons. Then there’s rape, and if you somehow missed the half-century grooming gang epidemic, you’ll be surprised to learn that migrants are three and a half times more likely to be arrested for sex offences than native Brits.

It’s hardly a shock that White Brits are now minorities in the nation’s largest cities, but if the multicultural hymn sheet had any validity this wouldn’t matter, thanks to the high levels of integration observed by Britain’s latest influx. The promised integration is a myth however: almost a million migrants can barely speak English. Even the former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, admitted a decade ago that Muslim integration is not going to happen: “Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect.”

‘Diversity is our strength’ is now a busted flush, and even its most die-hard advocates look a little embarrassed when parroting the line.

Which begs the question, what precisely are Ashworth and his ilk playing at? Are the Left genuinely so deluded they cannot see the reality in front of them, or is this myopia a mere cynical ploy to cling to office if not to power? Special cases aside, I generally credit the opposition with more intelligence than they choose to advertise – and we’d better hope that’s the case – because if Starmer et al are truly as blind as they seem to be, then Britain on its current trajectory is finished.

The likely (and egregious) explanation is that Ashworth and co. know the score full well, and are simply too wedded to the votes mass immigration generates to come clean. In his interview with The Telegraph, Ashworth simultaneously claimed multiculturalism in Britain is not failing, and at the same time (no longer an MP) clearly felt confident enough to reveal that he has urged the Prime Minister to consider immigration caps for certain sectors of the economy, in order to curb numbers.

Unimpressed by the likes of Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy, all of whom admitted 15 years ago that multiculturalism was an abject failure, Starmer’s government may dodge the post-mortem for now. Rayner can beg for votes all she likes, Phillips can blame ‘idiots’ rather than Muslims, and Ashworth may feel secure heading up the Labour Together think tank, but the reality of multiculturalism will catch up with them one way or another. Most likely they will only lose their seats, unlike the rest of us who are losing our country.

Frank Haviland is the Editor of The New Conservative, and the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West.

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This piece was first published in The European Conservative, and is reproduced by kind permission.

(Photograph: Richard Townshend, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)