Just when it feels as though the last nail had been hammered into multiculturalism’s coffin, another public figure appears with an anvil. The latest celebrity critic of everyone’s pet ideological hate is Anglican Bishop Michael Nasir-Ali. Nasir-Ali not only complains about the imposition of an "Islamic character" to some parts of Britain, which verge on being no-go areas for those of other faiths, but that our multifaith "mishmash" has jeopardised Christianity’s status as the "public faith" in Britain. It's a sentiment echoed by the shadow home secretary, Dominic Grieve, only last week.

The trouble is that while its cynics become more diverse, and their criticisms more daring, multiculturalism’s advocates have dwindled to a predictable few (Tariq Modood and Ken Livingstone among them). This is a worrying state of affairs, since such figures are unlikely to win the hearts and minds of those who cherish cultural diversity, want it valued publicly, but have misgivings about how it’s been managed in the past. It also leaves the second and third generation of immigrant descent—"multiculturalism’s children," one might say—unsure of their political footing. Should they embrace colour- and culture-blind platforms, or innovate new forms of political expression that resonate with their own particular experiences and concerns? Secondly, how do we ward off the creeping spectre of majoritarian anxieties, apparent throughout Western Europe, without a coherent ideology of minority protection? Should we allow Britishness to be distilled to Morris dancing and binge drinking, or should we rail against such simplifying rituals in the name of our multicultural traditions?

What, indeed, are these aforementioned majoritarian anxieties? By majoritarianism I mean a popular backlash against the indulgence of national minorities and doctrines of minority rights, as per multiculturalism. But unlike multiculturalism, majoritarianism is incoherent and inchoate. In Britain it’s more apparent as a trend than a movement (unlike the BJP’s ideology of Hindutva in India). It’s a trend that connects populist tirades against Eastern European immigrants in the tabloid press, essays that indict immigration for withering social bonds, and government green papers that propose making citizenship earned and exclusive. Majoritarianism makes neo-Powellite anxieties about the dilution of national character respectable again, and it acts as a licence for organisations such as Migration Watch and the Centre for Social Cohesion. It manifests itself, overall, as a weakened commitment to the principles of multiculturalism and the practice of minority rights.

Essayist and journalist David Goodhart’s conservative liberalism coherently maps shifting social attitudes to diversity, mirrored in government policy: his proposals for "second-tier" or "earned" citizenship concretise ideas that have been floating around Whitehall in recent years. Goodhart’s position is encapsulated by his belief that there is "nothing politically dishonourable" about policy designs that respond to "popular anxieties" and his insistence that security and immigration have to be framed as "issues of community."

He is the poster-boy for what has to come to be known as conservative or new liberalism – the prevailing strain of liberal thought which has taken on explicitly communitarian features since the watershed of 2001 (after the riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham). New liberalism is also distinguished from previous liberal discourses by its casual attitude to liberal rights, and its conservative leanings on issues of immigration and ethnic relations.

Goodhart’s conservative liberal answer to the crisis of multiculturalism is to reinvigorate British identity through a highly conditional communitariansm – newcomers have to do more to get into the club. Such a conditional and conformist regime of British community is likely to worsen the forms of exclusion that inspire popular majoritarianism in the first place. The conditions of progressive nationalism’s two-tier citizenship would do little to promote any reciprocal sense of belonging among groups most vulnerable to discrimination. Put simply, by privileging the sensibilities of national majorities, Goodhart’s new liberal imagination of national community therefore articulates a profoundly inequitable concept of citizenship. It only entrenches—and worse, legitimates—the deprivation of some of Britain’s most vulnerable groups by insisting that government should reserve its focus on the "anxious and the liberal." It relegates rampant Islamaphobia, the institutional failing of Afro-Caribbean schoolboys, and chronic discrimination in mental health services to the wastebin of government priorities. Its strongly conformist bent would equally make the civil-political exclusion of national Others, such as Muslims, refugees and Eastern European immigrants, that much starker.

Goodhart’s progressive nationalism alerts us to the dangers of an unmeasured response to popular anxieties, particularly when it sets a new baseline for political discourse. The conservative liberal disavowal of multiculturalism has effectively opened a vitalising intellectual—and ultimately political—space where majoritarianism can expand with licence. Goodhart’s major achievement, despite the overblown condemnation of some commentators, was to make it credible to dispute the intrinsic merits of cultural diversity. That he did so through by invoking economic reason and identity loss made it both controversial and appealing. But it is not only the conditionality and the conformism of Goodhart’s Britain that panders to majoritarian thinking. It is also deeply conservative, and this is most evident in its defence and naturalisation of xenophobia. As Goodhart has vehemently protested, ‘preferring our own kind’ doesn’t make us racist.

Casting multiculturalism as a diabolic villain is clearly a popular intellectual fetish. It’s a lame duck, after all. Besides, it now has so few champions that such critiques largely go unopposed. Single-handedly it has supposedly balkanised Britain, brought about an epidemic of domestic violence, killed the welfare state and made every Muslim man a potential terrorist. These complaints are clearly overblown. But, by the same token, that doesn’t mean that we have to exonerate multiculturalism’s contribution to social problems where there’s reasonable evidence against it. It also means that we shouldn’t excuse it from the political disenfranchisement wrought under successive policy regimes in its name.

A report conducted for a 2006 report by the conservative leaning think-tank Policy Exchange was accompanied by a poll whose headline figures garnered far more column inches. The poll revealed, among other things, that 37 per cent of 16-24 year-old Muslims would prefer to live under sharia law, compared to 17 per cent of those surveyed over 55. Another often repeated figure was the third of 16 to 24 year-olds who believed that those converting to another religion deserved execution (under a fifth of those under 55 shared that view). Unsurprisingly, 86 per cent of young Muslims said that religion was the most important thing in their lives. These figures were seized upon as evidence that British-born Muslims are more sympathetic to political Islam than their parents and grandparents, and reinforced the perception that British Muslims are Muslims first and British second.

Taken in isolation from the report such polls vindicate the government’s persistence with multiculturalist policies that respond to the existential dependency of second and third generations on race and faith. Headline figures such as these make it easier for the government to engage with young Muslims through their religious identity, rather than as ordinary, diverse citizens. But it is not only Muslims that are being marginalised by multiculturalism. Many will recall when Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Bezhti was cancelled amid protests by some Sikhs, who claimed offence by the theme and setting of the play, and one scene in particular, which takes place in the recreation of a Sikh temple. On the opening night the theatre was encircled by hundreds of protesters, three of whom were arrested for criminal damage. The decision to cancel was taken with the blessing of the Commission for Racial Equality.

Following the play’s closure Fiona Mactaggart, a minister in the Home Office, blithely implied that death threats against the playwright would probably increase sales – although Bhatti's retreat into hiding and the withdrawal of the play in Britain altogether doesn’t exactly bear that out. She also happily endorsed the protests since if "people feel this passionately about theatres [it] is a good sign for our cultural life." Her shamelessly opportunistic remarks spoke eloquently about the fickle nature of British multiculturalism, veering between sensitivity towards offence and dismissiveness towards shared values, dependent on the needs of the political moment. It panders to minorities and placates majorities equally well, free of a commitment to upholding the sanctity of civil rights.

It is extremists and conservatives who have become the unexpected poster-boys of multiculturalism, a legacy of government patronage and a callous, uninformed tabloid media who trade in the hard currency of shock and controversy. Multiculturalism has abetted this monopoly by systematically disenfranchising a silent majority in favour of token representation that is seldom representative.

We would also do well to remember that, as a grand framework for affirmative action, multiculturalism is also dependent on the goodwill of national majorities to be workable. Put differently, it is parasitic on white guilt. The trouble is that white guilt has largely exhausted itself in Britain – whether it should have or not is another question. The latent hostility of new liberalism to cultural diversity, in all its shades, has made that abundantly clear. They’re more concerned with the neglect of poor whites than the discrimination that keeps black and Muslim Britain poor. So multiculturalist policies are increasingly starved of mainstream intellectual sympathy, and, equally, of popular support.

This might well be a good thing. Despite the best intentions of its champions, multiculturalism has lost all its promise in translation. As a policy regime, multiculturalism has been a disaster, if not for the reasons that new liberals suggest.

It is no surprise that multiculturalism has skewed national debates on race and faith. The dogmatic and polarising voices of so-called community leaders suppress and conceal widespread desires for public democratisation and diversification among "multiculturalism’s children." For example, a MORI poll conducted in August 2005 told a rather different story about British Muslims than is usually presented, comparing their social attitudes against those of the public overall.

90 per cent of the Muslims polled believed that immigrants should be made to learn English – compared to 82 per cent of the general public. Similarly, 76 per cent said immigrants should be made to pledge their primary loyalty to Britain (slightly higher than the 73 per cent overall figure). Most revealingly, 65 per cent of Muslims thought that imams should be made to preach in English, almost double the proportion of the general public. Unfortunately these kinds of statistics rarely feature in the media’s depiction of minority attitudes toward Britain, which tends to favour alarmist revelations of pervasive radicalisation. It therefore makes it that much easier for the government—and increasingly David Cameron’s New Conservatism—to blame disaffection and alienation among minority youth on "cultural malaise" rather than exclusionary causes, such as low educational achievement and disproportionately high unemployment – a problem that extends even to highly educated Muslim women. Once again, multiculturalism serves as an excuse for state failure, while simultaneously obscuring persistent levels of discrimination.

Yet these find no place in the new liberal complaint against multiculturalism. As a position it is less interested in redressing the policy regime’s bona fide casualties and more concerned with exaggerating its culpability for any number of institutional shortcomings. Multiculturalism has become the fall guy so that conservatives, now joined by liberals, can absolve public institutions and practices of the imperative to address their failings. It serves to explain why, for example, there has been no government inquiry into the role of local housing authorities in separating communities into ethnic and racial blocks. It explains why, despite the unprecedented media coverage of Banaz Mahmoud’s death, not a single front-bench politician called for a public inquiry or even proposed a parliamentary debate.

It explains why, despite intermittent tabloid hysteria, there hasn’t been a concerted government attempt to itemise the gains and costs of immigration, particularly on public services. It explains why the official response to flagging patriotism, as set out in a recent white paper, nationalises a belief that it is exclusivity that makes citizenship valuable – rather than meaningful, substantive inclusion. It explains why the government is fixated on the symptoms of Islamic radicalism—like asking Muslim parents to rat out radicalised children—and negligent of its causes, such as educational underachievement, unemployment, and political disenfranchisement.

We know that multiculturalism no longer holds policy currency. We also know that it has fewer friends than at any time in its intellectual history. But while we can retire the concept, we still live in times characterised by unheralded cultural diversity; we still live in a society adjusting to the consequences of that diversity. We might not need multiculturalism any longer, but we do need some kind of ideological bulwark that can frame our inescapable differences in less neurotic ways than new liberalism does, and which doesn’t sap political energy from the reform, and renewal programmes necessary to begin addressing the underlying reasons for Britain’s current social diseases.

This demands that the British Left negotiate its discomfort with culture, and particularly the culture of settled and new immigrants. It has to confront the truth that principled aversion will not make the elephant in the room disappear: it only allows the Right to claim cultural identities as their domain, their property. Once that becomes too entrenched, the opportunity to steer them in progressive directions may be lost.