Against Birbalsingh-ism

Britain’s conservatives are obsessed with Katherine Birbalsingh being their saviour, from a multicultural mess that they caused.

A version of this essay was first published by The Critic.

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“It’s wonderful to see headscarved girls reciting Kipling, singing the national anthem…” Those were the words of historian Robert Tombs, when asked by Carl Benjamin, “If anyone can identify as English, then what does being ‘English’ mean?”

Questions about demographic change vexed the audience at the Now and England conference in London on Monday, hosted by the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation. Two concerned Zoomers had already asked, “What happens when multiculturalism makes our differences irreconcilable?”, and “What if sectarianism turns democracy into a zero-sum game?”.

Danny Kruger noted the rounds of applause given to each question, saying it is clear to Parliamentarians “where the conversation is headed” — before gingerly sidestepping giving an answer. Whereas Tombs lamented, “If only we could clone Katherine Birbalsingh…” before denying English identity has anything to do with ancestry, and telling a heckler “Of course you can” learn to be English.

Tombs was referring to the Michaela Community School in Wembley: where “Britain’s strictest headmistress,” Katherine Birbalsingh governs one of the least white-British student cohorts in the country. It is ironic that Tombs cited Michaela as a model for restoring England’s fractured culture, because a photograph of the late Sir Roger’s visit is often used in mean-spirited X posts, to show the stark and undeniable reality of rapid demographic change in Britain.

Well-educated Western-philes have become enamoured with Birbalsingh. Michaela is pedestalized as proof of the greatness of Michael Gove’s education reforms, and a fix-all for the failure of immigrants and their children to integrate organically into British culture.

The likes of Fraser Nelson, for whom Britishness is solely an identity conferred by the happenstance of birthplace or via legal document bestowed upon anyone by our oikophobic government, think the state ought to be run just like the Michaela School. (A tacit admission that integration, when left to its own devices, is not the “miracle” he infamously proclaimed.)

Sir Niall Ferguson has praised the Michaela School, and argued spokespeople of immigrant heritage, like Birbalsingh and Kemi Badenoch, will reinvigorate conservatism for a multi-racial nation better than “white men like us.”

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During her opening address at ARC in February, Badenoch cited Birbalsingh’s banning prayer at Michaela as an exemplary act of the muscular liberalism made necessary to quash sectarianism under multiculturalism. Badenoch is now considering copying Denmark's “anti-ghetto” laws, breaking up Britain's immigrant enclaves and dispersing the occupants around the country.

But what Badenoch, Birbalsingh, and the Michaela School model represent is a replacement of Britain’s traditional high-trust, homogenous, self-governing spontaneous order with an authoritarian headmistress state to make new tribal minorities and the besieged host majority play nice.