Letter: PM on right track

Prime Minister David Cameron has opened the long awaited debate on the UK's experiment with "state multiculturalism" and signalled a crackdown on extremist groups of every hue (your report, 5 February).

It is difficult to argue that most multiculturalists are not at heart ethnocentric separatists who see little in British heritage other than the "crimes" of the Christian West.

Certainly, under New Labour, the doctrine encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream, weakening our collective identity.

And our individual rights such as liberty, democracy and equality before the law must not be replaced by the rights of groups, defined by race, ethnicity, sex and sexual preferences.

The Archbishop of Canterbury claimed many British Muslims didn't like our legal system and that Sharia law should be sanctioned. That is inane, and David Cameron is right to say so.

JOHN CAMERON

Howard Place

St Andrews, Fife

David Cameron, in company with such socialist stalwarts as David Blunkett, is leaving us in no doubt that multiculturalism has "failed".

To replace this vertical structuring of society, as he recommends, with horizontal integration of all the ethnic minorities now present in Britain will surely bring more horrifying problems than face us at present.

In the first place, the rapidly increasing Muslim minority will resist any dilution of their ingrained religious/political faith for the sake of integration in a society whose social and political mores conflict head-on with their own.

On the other hand, if for the sake of that social and political assimilation that Cameron and company see as the latest Big Idea indigenous Britons are further massaged or dragooned into an untraditional melting pot of race and culture, there is little doubt the recent English Defence League marches will only be the beginning of infinitely more violent political expressions.

ALASTAIR HARPER

House of Gask

Lathalmond, by Dunfermline