I keep coming across the argument from those who want to leave the EU that if everyone embraced multiculturalism, everyone would become the same. If every city became a multicultural city, they would all lose their distinctiveness as they would all have the same mixture of peoples. Everywhere would be bland and grey, and there would be no point in travelling as everywhere would be alike. Of course, nobody wants this to happen; I love travelling (who doesn’t?) and the point of travelling is to go and experience different cultures. Hence this argument gets to me.

Yet it seems to me that those who make it are disingenuous. No city could ever lose it’s distinctiveness: could London ever become like Paris, Rome, New York or Tokyo? Clearly not. Every city will remain distinct. Of course, if people from other cultures move in, the make up of a city will change. But that would only affect the suburbs: the core of a city will remain unique. Moreover, as a Londoner I relish the variety of languages I hear spoken on the street and the number of cuisines I can sample. It’s part of what makes the city great. I know, too, that this precise mixture is unique to London – you won’t get this mix of ‘native londoners’, polish and AfroCaribbean people anywhere else. Thus for outists to make such an argument is wholly false: they are pretending to care about something they do not, appealing to a liberals’ desire to protect cultural variety in order to get votes, when in fact the only culture they care about is their own. Yes, cultural diversity is to be relished, but you don’t need to force people to live apart to protect it. Immigration might influence a culture, but that has always been the case. Culture has always changed. At the same time, no matter who lives there cities like London will always retain their distinctiveness: there have been centuries of immigration to both London and paris, but they remain resolutely unalike. Thus the argument is a false one: outists do not make it because they value diversity, but because they want to reject those they see as foreign.