Austerity and the End of Multiculturalism in Britain

Toby Helm, Matthew Taylor and Rowena Davis report in the Guardian that

David Cameron was accused of playing into the hands of rightwing extremists today as he delivered a controversial speech on the failings of multiculturalism within hours of one of the biggest anti-Islam rallies ever staged in Britain.

A coordinated attack or just a slip up? Salma Yaqoob seems to think the latter. She writes also in the Guardian

I like to think Cameron was genuine in his words when he visited my ward. And that somehow his mind was hijacked by the right wing of his party. I hope for all our sakes he wins it back. Because while areas like Sparkbrook are not perfect, they are succeeding...

 Cameron once had a vision. It was a positive and genuinely uniting and inclusive one that gained him admirers across the political spectrum. He should return to it.

 The "Big Society" the name coined by PM Cameron to couch his vision for Britain to counter the idea of "Big Government" attached to Labor which has resulted in huge fiscal deficits was coincidentally his way of re-branding the Conservative Party in Britain and make them electable. Margaret Thatcher had previously declared, "there is no such thing as society." This was a complete reversal of that way of thinking. Just as Tony Blair had reinvented the Labor brand, so was Cameron.

It now appears that the "Big Society" that the PM had in mind is not so big after all having some strict preconditions for entry. As Yaqoob notes, this is a total reversal of the "face" he put on when he was aspiring to become Britain's next PM. Does the PM's statement unmask the fact that the new Tory brand is just a repackaging of the mean old Thatcherite ideology?

While all this was taking place, a fourth quarter contraction in GDP was hitting the headlines. Dean Baker commenting on the Great British Austerity Experiment notes that

(t)he fourth-quarter GDP report showing that the economy went into reverse and shrank at a 2.0% annual rate is exactly the sort of warning that many of us here were expecting. Weather-related factors may have slowed growth some, but you would have to do some serious violence to the data to paint a positive picture. Of course, the austerity in the UK is just beginning. There will likely be much worse pain to come, with a real possibility that the country will experience a double-dip recession, or at least a prolonged period of stagnation.

 With the pain of economic stagnation possibly setting in, is this the end of multiculturalism in Britain?