Progressive opinion in the UK has long assumed that to be pro-EU is to be pro-multiculturalism and vice versa. The truth is more complex.
Take the arch-Europhile Roy Jenkins, who as a senior minister in British Labour Party governments in the 1960s and 1970s introduced explicit racial equality legislation – a first for Europe – and then became president of the European Commission.
In fact there is no special connection between these two causes. Indeed, Jenkins seemed to come back from his European post cooler on multiculturalism: he rarely spoke of it afterwards, and, after the Ayatollah Khomeini called for the assassination of British writer Salman Rushdie for his portrayal of the Prophet Muhammed and his wives in the novel ‘The Satanic Verses’, Jenkins wrote in The Observer that the UK should have been more careful in allowing so many Muslims in.
