In England's crappiest town, we can do culture too. Multi-culture even.

Luton, we were told this afternoon, has been voted the crappiest town in the UK. 

Despite that, it seems that people are happy to live here, the air quality is great and – the ultimate accolade – it apparently has the fastest broadband connections in the country.

What’s more, it does culcher. Multi-culcher, actually. We picked up this intriguing information at a multi-cultural tea party this afternoon (no, no, not the Tea Party: that’s the US organisation which is decidedly mono-cultural, if not culture-free, except in the sense of a culture as the place to grow toxic microbes).

It was multi-cultural in so many ways. The majority group there was Muslim, if appearances could be counted on, but it took place in a Methodist church hall, with members of the congregations of the local Baptist and Church of England congregations present too (plus a scattering of other faiths, and ourselves: we marked ‘none’ down in that column of the attendance list, atheism or even free-thinking not being exactly a faith, after all).

There were at least three main ethnic groups represented. ‘British Asian’ was the biggest, and there were a few ‘Afro-Caribbeans’, as well as a reasonable representation of what we’ve come to know affectionately as ‘White British’. The arrival of our party of four increased its numbers by about 25%, which was ironic, since two of our White British group were French, a third was half Dutch and the fourth – myself – held French nationality as well as British, and was a native of Rome.

White British was far from the biggest group, but that was appropriate: Luton, along with Leicester and London, is one of the British centres where that ethnic group, while being the biggest, is no longer in the majority.

There were getting on for 100 people present, which is a bit weak in a population of 200,000. But still, if you’re going to build bridges between cultures, you have to start somewhere, and a few dozen is a lot better than none.

And the bridges were there. On the tables, there were samosas and pakoras alongside the scones (with clotted cream and jam: all done right, in the good British way) and the Battenberg cake.

The Afro-Caribbean element was more than adequately represented by two young women, full of enthusiasm, who were there with Djembe drums from West Africa, as well as other instruments from India and the Middle East, and gave the children present a dynamic and lively lesson in using them.

Djembe players in multi-cultural Luton

So a good time was had by all. The event may prove the seed for something bigger, with various people volunteering to launch further activities. Danielle, for instance, is going to set up a knitting group to produce multi-cultural socks, a concept which boggles my mind. I can’t wait to see what one of those looks like. 

We all filled in the attendance register faithfully. It did occur to me as I did it, ‘wouldn’t it be nice for the xenophobes in UKIP to have a list like that? They’d know straight away where to send their new Thought Police, if they ever got to power?’ An index of all those pinkos from the Churches and their fellow-travellers. The weidos who think we should get on with people from other cultures rather than kick them out to some other, much poorer part of the world. A real gift to them.

That just made me have another pakora. I clearly need to build up my strength to help make sure that UKIP in power is one of those nightmares that never happens.

War-weariness? Nothing to do with multiculturalism

It’s funny what a bad press multiculturalism gets. All sorts of failings are attributed to it. The latest charge against it, today, was that it was producing a growing war-weariness in Britain.

Now that’s a really curious accusation. It seems nothing short of perverse to go looking for a cause of war weariness other than weariness with war. After all, a whole bunch of US allies sent soldiers into Iraq, and ten years later the deaths are up there in six figures while the country’s a chaotic mess as well as being a client of Iran’s, the West’s favourite bogey figure in the region.

The Afghan war’s lasted even longer, and Afghanistan’s a complete basket case. The one achievement of the invasion was to kick out Al Qaida’s friends, the Taliban; just last week, a Taliban spokesman was crowing that once Western troops are out next year, the movement will be right back in control again. It would take a pretty convinced optimist to think he might not have a point.

How we turned Afghanistan into a haven of peace and plenty

You don’t have to be multicultural to have got pretty weary of war after those two episodes of our recent history. 

In any case, it doesn’t seem to me that we need less multiculturalism just now. Rather more might be an improvement. I mean, the point of multiculturalism is to consider the possibility that other cultures may not be entirely worthless, and may actually have something legitimate to say for themselves. Or at least, that ours may not be so obviously superior to theirs that we’re entitled to kick them around over here and invade their homes over there. 

A good starting point would be Oliver Cromwell’s plea to the Scottish Presbyterians: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.’ That salutary capacity to doubt oneself didn’t actually stop Cromwell giving the Irish a pretty miserable time, at the very moment when he wrote those words. It would be fun, on the other hand, to think that getting on for four centuries later we might have learned to go a little further and do a little better.

Imagine how it might have been had Tony Blair, say, considered the possibility that he was wrong. He might not have been so keen to invade Iraq. At least 100,000 Iraqis might not have lost their lives.

Now, I say that about Blair because no one could suggest that Dubya might have entertained any doubts. That would have required that he hold one idea while comparing it with another. Two ideas? Getting his head round ‘we’re gonna get that Saddam guy’ pretty much exhausted his capacity in that direction.

Fortunately, few of us are quite as intellectually challenged as Dubya. It would be good if rather few of us were as closed to other points of view as Blair. Then we might open up a little to multiculturalism and perhaps avoid a few wars.

Of which more and more of us are well and truly weary.