The Death of Diversity Kitsch

Is Britain leaving smeds and smoos world behind?

I still remember the way a twenty-year-old shouted, ‘I don’t want to hear about any political mistakes! I just don’t want to! Give me my two legs back if it was all a mistake.’

-From Svetlana Alexievich, Boys in Zinc

This post is headed by a mugshot of Axel Rudakubana, the young man who stabbed three little girls to death, and injured many more, in Southport last year at a summer holiday Taylor Swift-themed dance club.

It is an extraordinary portrait. Rudakubana’s eyes somehow manage to convey sorrow, hatred, wickedness and fear all at the same time - with a viscerality that is almost physical. There are some people (there are two or three I can think of who I have encountered in my own lifetime) whose malice seems to emanate from them in a cold miasma - whose very presence in a room refrigerates it. That is the sensation that one gets when looking at this photograph. But at the same time one can see suffering and pain in the face it depicts, too; it does not excuse Rudakubana’s actions for one second to observe that his own evil has traumatised him. He is said to have told police in the aftermath of his stabbing spree that he was happy he had done it and that the girls were dead, but he doesn’t look at all happy; in fact he looks as though he is already in a personal hell.

The Rudakubana case, as always with such events, has become an empty vessel into which all kinds of meanings can be poured. Was it just a genuine, freak act of savagery perpetrated by a lone lunatic, and therefore having nothing to do with wider trends? Was it the fault of social media? Does it say something about the problem of young male outcasts withdrawing from society? Is it indicative of a growing misogyny in the culture?

But the fact that Rudakubana was the son of Rwandan immigrants and that his malevolence appears to have been directed at the country in which he was raised has caused the case to resonate against the backdrop of the Pakistani rape gangs scandal, which erupted into public consciousness a few weeks ago and has refused to go away. The confluence of these two stories - not on the face of it related, but seeming to come together in a dismal rhyme - has resulted in a bleak calculus being performed in the minds of much of the population: whatever the rights and wrongs of Britain’s very liberal immigration policy, if it had been stricter Rudakubana would almost certainly not have been born here and the girls he killed would still be alive, and a very large number of other girls - 100,000 is a conservative estimate - would have escaped degrading sexual exploitation and abuse at the hands of men who despised them for the sin of being white.

All of the usual caveats naturally apply to this - not all immigrants, etc. (I should know; I’m married to one) - but it does at least disrupt, and I think disrupts in a foundational way, a specific political kitsch that has been dominant in the culture for many years and which has been hitherto invincible in the grip it exerts on the chattering classes in particular.

You all know what I am describing, because you are familiar with its contours. It is not rational or thoughtful, because a political kitsch by definition never is. It is, rather, like all kitsches, a jumbled collection of mutually reinforcing emotional resonances that derives its power from the fact that it unites people in self-consciously shared emotion: it makes people feel a certain way, and also simultaneously makes them aware that others feel the same way too. This produces a powerful sense of unified feeling that propels a given social movement forward. That social movement is what might be called progressive multiculturalism, and the driving force I am describing is what I will label ‘diversity kitsch’.

Diversity kitsch is all around us - in the books we read, the films we watch, the music we listen to - but it is at its most obvious and simplistic in children’s literature and TV programmes. And the paradigm example, against which all others stand to be compared, is called The Smeds and the Smoos.

Have you by any chance heard of this? Unless you have small children and you live in the UK there’s no particular reason why you should. It is a book by Julia Donaldson, a doggerel poet who churns out volumes for children recited in rhyming couplets, and who has earned umpteen millions of pounds by doing so (she is, astonishingly, the biggest selling British author ever, in any genre, in terms of units sold). Donaldson has, in fairness, written some charming books - The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom, Monkey Puzzle, The Smartest Giant in Town, Stickman and Superworm being firm favourites in our house. But she has a tendency to stray away from her basic role of writing entertaining bedtime stories in order to make unutterably banal political points - and The Smeds and the Smoos is the perfect illustration of this.

The basic idea of the story is not complicated. On an alien planet there are two species, red and blue (the smeds and smoos), and they do not intermingle. Indeed, the children are told by their parents and grandparents that they must under no circumstances play with anybody from the opposing species:

There are no surprises in Julia Donaldson world: you can probably guess the plot from here already. And, sure enough, in the fullness of time, the smeds and smoos learn to get along, that everyone is the same deep down inside, etc., etc., and that one should play with whomever one wants to play with. The twist, such as it is, is a Romeo and Juliet-style plot in which a young smed falls in love with a young smoo; they duly get married and have a purple baby at the end:

Leaving aside the blatant disinformation being purveyed here about the colour of the baby’s toes, the political anthropology of The Smeds and the Smoos is written on its sleeve. Donaldson’s dedication of the book is ‘to the children of Europe’. And those with an aptitude for rat-smelling will note the publication date: 2019. Yes, it is a book explicitly inspired by Brexit. Because, you see, people who voted to leave the EU were racists. And if only they had realised that everybody is the same, and that everybody will get along if only they give each other a chance, they would have known that their silly notions about leaving the EU were rooted in archaic prejudices that any right-thinking person would abandon. There is in the end only a brother/sisterhood of man. And commitment to the nation state, since it works against the existence of that brotherhood, is therefore mankind’s great sin.

It didn’t matter to Donaldson that every British child has heard the basic, unobjectionable message of her book approximately a billion times by their sixth birthday, and that the number of parents in the country who would actually tell their kids not to play with those from other races is infinitesimally small. What mattered was the perpetuation of what I have described here as a kitsch. Donaldson got warm fuzzies from imagining the beauty of the global integration of humanity which the EU (forged in the aftermath of the Second World War to bring the continent together and put an end to the scourge of war, and so on) seemed to symbolise. This was reinforced by what makes a kitsch kitsch: the sensation that right-thinking people everywhere felt the same way as her. And she got not-warm fuzzies (cold spikeys?) from Brexit, which seemed to be about placing a barrier in the way of the march toward worldwide unity.

And that really explains not just The Smeds and the Smoos, of course, but the entire extremely-online #FBPE phenomenon - a group of people who simply found Brexit very disagreeable because it spoiled a nice idea they had about the future and which they shared with other people who they thought were on the side of the angels.

But it also exemplifies the vision of immigration and multiculturalism that exists in the heads of our national adults-in-the-room: one in which the only thing getting in the way of the wonderful dream of universal peace and harmony among people of all creeds and backgrounds is the lamentable, petty, grubby, neanderthal clinging-on to the vestiges of the nation state that persists among the deplorables. In this vision, everybody around the world is presumptively nice and lovely at heart, and all that is needed is for their inherent niceness and loveliness to be allowed to emerge in the optimal circumstances of tolerance and celebration. If people would only all try very hard to be tolerant and celebratory, the resultant niceness and loveliness explosion would positively rocket us into a better future.

When it comes to matters of immigration and diversity, in other words, the chattering classes, broadly conceived, in the West, are in the grip not of reason but of certain ideas which are rooted in repositories of shared emotion, and which take hold in their minds and direct them to the bizarre conclusions which they typically reach. They live, essentially, in a Smeds and Smoos universe, wherein there are no downsides or complexities to mass immigration whatsoever, and everybody on the planet is revealed to be a nice, polite, bourgeois Western liberal deep down inside if you just spend long enough getting to know them. This gives these people warm fuzzies which they like to share with the fellow like-minded. And the thought that anybody might ask any awkward questions about any of this - that anybody might interfere with the beauty of this shared vision - is the source of nasty cold spikeys that must be vigorously suppressed.

Because the chattering classes are so influential, it is this vision which has hitherto permeated polite society, and diversity kitsch which has held the so-called ‘new elite’ in its vice-like grip. But there are signs that this might actually be shifting. Last Sunday Kemi Badenoch, the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, went on the usual merry-go-round of morning talk shows to make the case that Britain is not a hotel, as she put it, and even to assert that - shock!, horror! - Axel Rudakubana should have loved the country that had given his family asylum rather than hated it. And she was not, as would have been the case even two or three years ago, reviled or aggressively challenged on this. She was given a fair hearing. Anecdotally, this change in mood is evident to me in my interactions with friends and family, who are increasingly willing to venture the opinion that immigration is too high and that the people who are coming seem to have no interest in integrating. Even some academics of my acquaintance - academia being the very engine room of diversity kitsch as I have here described it - have in private conversation expressed similar sentiments.

It is to early to say if this incipient ‘vibe shift’, as I feel compelled to call it, will continue to grow, but if so we may look back at the Rudakubana case as a genuine inflection point. The thing about political kitsches is that, because they are not reasoned in the first place - they inhabit a realm of pure emotion - they cannot be dispelled through reason, either. They can only be replaced by being gradually subverted - or shattered - by a stronger set of emotional resonances. The brutality of what happened in Southport last summer, and the fact that we have all been reminded about it at the very peak of concern about the rape gangs scandal, may have the emotional power to achieve such a subversion or even a shattering. This is because it has displayed, in all of its awful glory, the grim truth about human beings: that they are not all nice and lovely, and they are not all polite bourgeois liberals, and that when literally a million of them are entering the country each year, there will inevitably be a very large number indeed of decidedly nasty and unlovely persons among that million.

The realisation of this may have the effect of sweeping away the smeds and smoos miasma that lies across the country like a pall, because it will force people to confront the fact that diversity kitsch, which postulates a future in which everybody gets along through tolerance and celebration, is rooted in fantasy. The reality is that human beings are complicated. People can indeed live peaceably beside each other most of the time, but they also possess the capacity to be malevolent, cruel and pitiless, and those traits are often most manifest when it comes to people who are identifiably of a different group. Human beings, that is, manifestly do not always just all rub along wonderfully together irrespective of their backgrounds if they just learn to get along. Sometimes they do that. But sometimes they rape, murder and enslave people on the basis of possessing the wrong racial, religious or linguistic characteristics. And sometimes they are imbued with racial malice that has no end except in bloodshed and mayhem.

This realisation, it is to be hoped, will be a cause for serious thought about immigration in the round. Immigration is - I speak with some experience of the subject, having been an immigrant myself in a foreign country at one time, and now being married to an immigrant in turn - complicated. It is complicated personally, and it is complicated socially and economically. And mass immigration makes those complications yet more vexed. I would be a hypocrite to put myself into the camp of people who are opposed to it, since I personally have benefited so much from having had the freedom to go and settle overseas (a freedom which I may again exercise if life here in Britain becomes intolerable). And I am personally acquainted, as we all are, with immigrants who have made very positive contributions to the life of the country. But I have seen first hand the complexities to which immigration gives rise, from both sides, and they are far from trivial.

Careful consideration of this point is long overdue. In a post I wrote some time ago, I made the observation that Britain’s big problem is that its elite no longer think of it as a home. If you think of your country as a home, then it matters a great deal to you who you allow into it, and you will vigorously eject those who have through their conduct made themselves unwelcome. If you don’t think of it as a home, however, then it’s all the same to you whoever chooses to come or go. This of course is at the root of diversity kitsch: the idea that borders, and by extension that home itself, are barriers to true progress. But it follows that, with the dispersal of that notion, will come the realisation that a concept of home actually matters. The product of that realisation will I think be political dynamite in the right (or wrong) hands, because it will both be extremely popular and will upend every cherished notion that our current regime holds faith in. The result will be chaotic. But from that chaos a more realistic and humane political settlement - one which does not eschew immigration per se but emphasises that immigrants are migrating not just to any old place but somebody’s home - may ultimately be forged.