British society is irreversibly heterogeneous despite superficial political change

Evidence

Multicultural drift is really an idea from the other side. Things are not going so well, really. There hasn’t been a profound change in British society. We haven’t got to the deep level of racism in the culture that I think throbs on. Well, has nothing changed? Yes, something has changed. What has changed is, you go into the street—and I came here in 1951—and it just looks different. Britain will never go back to being a culturally homogenous society ever again. It can’t. I mean, it can have purges, it can throw people out into the sea, it can enforce assimilation, but it can’t go back to being stable and steady on its own monocultural foundations. It can’t happen. So I want to say multicultural drift is sort of what we’ve had to be getting on with. At least this is the thing that’s not in their control. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1126

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the nation-as-imagined-community framework (Anderson) the reader is building in the Islamophobia scaffold; drift is what happens when demographic reality outpaces the national imaginary.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘multicultural drift’ as a specific concept: incremental, unintended social change as opposed to conscious political movement.