Multicultural Continuity in the Absence of Deep Diversity in the United Kingdom

This chapter employs a threefold approach to trace multiculturalism’s movement and directionality in the United Kingdom (UK) from 2010 to 2024, a time period that covers uninterrupted Conservative governance albeit under five different Prime Ministers (i.e., David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak) and that also includes the Brexit referendum and the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union and Labour’s landslide victory in the 2024 general elections. This chapter explores what happens to multiculturalism following a shift to the right in government leading up to a shift to the left in government. This chapter shows that, contrary to what one might have expected, the UK has not retreated from multiculturalism during 14 years of consecutive conservative government; instead, multicultural continuity has occurred without a commitment to multinational ‘deep diversity’ and alongside a backlash against immigrants in the press and in public discourse. This chapter concludes that multicultural continuity in the UK may be evidence of a path-dependent process that, paradoxically, has occurred in the absence of a formal institutional commitment to multiculturalism.