When both the most stuffy, traditionalist voice in British society and a supposedly radical voice – ‘a real voice from within the Muslim community’, as Channel 4 gushed – espouse the virtues of the T-word in messages to the nation, you know that tolerance has become the defining value in modern Britain. It was striking that even as the sovereign head of the British state was singing the praises of tolerance, over video grabs showing her visiting multiethnic schools and a mosque, on another channel a mysterious Muslim woman was demanding more tolerance. It neatly captured the reinforcing relationship between the official politics of multiculturalism and the culture of complaint. Khadijah was singing from the same hymn sheet as various self-selected and self-serving Muslim community groups, who claim there isn’t enough respect for their religious beliefs. Today’s official fawning over diversity – as captured in the Queen’s message – only encourages people to demand more respect, more evidence that you value their cultural practices, more public recognition for their ‘personal choices’, more official indulgence of their lifestyle choices, rather than giving rise to anything like a happy-clappy climate between communities.

The Queen and Khadijah’s messages also showed how the meaning of tolerance has mutated in recent years. Both today’s official and faux-radical celebrations of Tolerance with a capital T have little to do with genuine tolerance. Real tolerance, according to OED definitions and the words of Enlightened thinkers such as Voltaire, means ‘permitting free expression of views one does not share’; it is about ‘broad-mindedness’; it is about having a ‘fair, objective and permissive attitude towards opinions and practices that differ from one’s own’; tolerance is about being rigorous and robust, allowing all views to be freely expressed so that the ‘value of each…can be tested’ (1). In contemporary Britain, tolerance has been bastardised to mean almost precisely the opposite. Official Tolerance – or ‘intolerant tolerance’, as we have called it on spiked – is narrow-minded rather than broadminded, and more concerned with shutting down debate than freeing it up. And we shouldn’t tolerate that...

...We really could do with a more tolerant society in 2007 – a more genuinely tolerant society, that is. That means allowing people to believe and say what they like, just so long as the rest of us are free to challenge them. It means enlightening and enlivening public debate, rather than dampening it with demands that we all hold our tongues in case we offend sensitive religious souls, the Windsors, or anybody else. And it means doing away with the criminalisation of the ‘intolerant’ as the sinners of our new age in favour of cultivating a robust and open culture where everything is up for discussion. In a secular, democratic society seven years into the twenty-first century, we should tolerate nothing less.

Published in Spiked Magazine Online 28/12/06

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