I want to write an article about British multiculturalism. As we saw in the lecture, there’s a debate over whether or not it has failed. Since this is a blog article, not an academic essay, I’d like to share my personal perspective on the issue according to my own experiences in the UK.

Firstly, let me tell you about my experiences a bit here. I’ve lived in England twice actually.
The first time was a lovely homestay with a middle class British family for one month in Coventry city. (an industrial city in Midland, England). They were what we imagine as ‘typical conservative working-class English people.
The second time was a year study abroad as an exchange student in one of the most liberal Universities in the UK named SOAS. I was living in central London, with diverse range of people. So the things were completely different from the former experience. Also I travelled a lot around the UK and Europe.
In general, I absolutely loved my life there (except for the food No offence mate!) and I think I saw quite a lot about issues of race, ethnicity or multiculturalism.

I know it’s almost impossible to assert its failure or success, since things are not that simple. I mean, it’s so hard to define what’s ‘failure’ and ‘success’, some could even say Britain is not a multicultural society at all! There can’t be unified view on that.
So, I’m mentioning both (what I felt was) positive and negative aspects of ‘multicultural Britain’ below.

Positive points

• Tolerance towards foreigners.

I have never felt discriminated against in the UK, at all. Even in a small village in Scotland, people were really helpful! I didn’t have any difficulty living in the UK as a foreigner.
I also saw a lot of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds living and working, keeping their own lifestyles. For example, in many restaurants there’s always vegetarian food or special meat designed for Muslims. Also in my University, there was a praying room for Muslim students, people could go there and pray even during the class. Those kinds of things cannot be expected in my country, to my sadness.

• Diversity(limited area)

This diversity was beyond my expectation. People are really diverse and coming from all over the world. In my university, more than 40% of all the students were from outside the UK! Also, there are plenty of Asian British, African British, Caribbean British, Muslim British or anything. I thought being British no longer means being Christian ‘white’ British. This diversity makes the country more attractive and creative!

Negative point

• Segregated communities

I wrote that diversity is limited above because outside the ‘special places’ like university where everyone agrees with multiculturalism, the communities are very segregated. There’s a area for Chinese, Arabic, Indian, or Bangladesh. When you go outside of the university and look at the reality, there certainly are hates between the groups People seemed to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream, which creates hatred. (Politically radical right wing party is gaining power and at the same time, radical Muslim groups are getting more powerful).

In conclusion, I still don’t know if British multiculturalism is a failure or I don’t know the solution for that. However I wouldn’t call it a success. At least I cannot imagine the same situation happening in Japan. This is how I feel now.

What do you think?

by Yuki Sugiyama