Multikulturalisme i Storbritannien: politik og udfordringer

as ideology endorsing the value and expression of cultural pluralism and as embodied by culturally complex or blended social identities

Multiculturalism is a policy aimed at preserving and developing cultural differences in a particular country and in the world as a whole, and theory or ideology justifying such a policy. Multiculturalism is opposed to the concept of a "melting pot", where it is supposed to merge all cultures into one.

In 1997, only the Labor government of Tony Blair proclaimed multiculturalism at the national level. However, racial and religious clashes after the attacks of September 2001 in New York and July 2005 in London, the cause of which was seen by the authorities in the isolation and insufficient assimilation of Muslim minorities, forced the government to abandon this policy, and in 2011 the then Prime Minister David Cameron stated that "state multiculturalism has crashed."

However, all this concerns not so much culture as such, but primarily ethnic, religious, social and political processes.

Culture, although it cannot be aloof from these processes, still lives for the most part its own, for better or worse, life that is independent of them.

There is, for example, almost complete cultural assimilation. Popular African-British actor Adrian Lester was born in 1968 in a family of immigrants from Jamaica. Starting his acting career at the Birmingham Youth Theater, he was educated at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and his track record has a rich classical repertoire from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams.