Story of London: How Boris should tell it

From my latest for Comment Is Free:

For Johnson, London's multi-cultured character is no contaminating force but a living, historic evidence of its talent for economic enterprise. His beef is about something else: the taxpayer funding of discrete ethnic or cultural interest groups, which he suspects of being socially divisive and a contributor to a harmful abandonment of what he sees as proper history and the higher arts. I think such arguments are overstated, often wildly and mischievously. But my point is that that is how Johnson defines multiculturalism: as an ideology, one he dislikes. He does not dislike London's multi-cultured society, and does not advocate Norman Tebbit-style cultural assimilation, which would offend his libertarianism much as it does mine.

Now read on.