The increasing racial diversity of Britain since the Second World War is often captured in the idea of ‘the multicultural’, a term that gestures towards difference without needing to define how it may be managed; ‘multiculturalism’, however, speaks immediately to the problem of management, asking exactly how the difference of peoples might be philosophically, ethically, and politically addressed. The multicultural can be conceived of as the totality of transactions and interchanges that take place within a society in which traces of more than one distinct cultural tradition can be discerned. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, refers to political and cultural philosophies and praxes that aim to explain, codify, and legislate over these relations. The seminal statement of multiculturalism in Britain may perhaps be Roy Jenkins's late 1960s pronouncement that immigrants to the UK should not be required to ‘assimilate’ to British norms, if this assimilation meant a ‘flattening out’; instead, he famously called for ‘equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance’. This commitment to cultural diversity became government policy though the 1976 Race Relations Act. However, a full, reasoned, and consistent account of the aims and ideals of multiculturalism as a political policy of respect for cultural diversity did not appear in Britain until 2000 with the publication of the report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (CFMB), chaired by Bhikhu Parekh. Many of the conclusions of the Parekh Report were questioned within days by Jack Straw, the very Home Secretary who had set up the Commission. In particular, the suggestion made in the Report that Britain should be seen as a ‘community of communities’: a national umbrella under which diverse cultural groupings existed according to their own lights, whose interaction required policies that respected their integrity and could work to facilitate just relationships between them, seemed to disconcert Straw, who became the first of several in his role to suggest the importance of ‘Britishness’ as a unifying concept.

The Report often seems determined to complicate the terms with which it works: