Katie Lam and the Mirage of Coherence

Katie Lam – Cambridge-educated, Goldman-honed, and now the latest bright hope of the post-truth Tory Party – has entered the political theatre dressed as a grown-up, while hawking ideas that belong in the dustbin of history. Her charm lies in the polish. Her danger lies in what she’s polishing.

She wants to make Britain “culturally coherent.” A fine slogan until you ask what it means. Because the last time this island was “culturally coherent,” half its inhabitants were painting themselves blue and the other half were sharpening swords to make them stop. The Scots, Irish, Welsh, and English have been at ideological arm’s length since before Parliament existed. The only thing binding us together has ever been law, not likeness.

So what is Lam actually proposing? A Britain where difference is a design flaw? Where “cultural coherence” becomes a euphemism for whitening the census and rewriting who belongs? That’s not a vision – it’s regression in a tailored jacket.

Her rhetoric about “outdated asylum” and “people who came legally but shouldn’t have” reeks of moral amnesia. Her grandparents fled Nazi Germany, yet she now dismisses the post-war rules-based order that gave their generation sanctuary. If that isn’t irony, it’s hypocrisy on stilts. The very conventions she sneers at were written in the ashes of the camps. They exist because nations once decided that turning people away was a crime against civilisation.

Then there’s her arithmetic – the fantasy of deporting “a million” people. She talks as if logistics were an afterthought and law a nuisance. The Home Office can’t even issue passports on time, yet she imagines fleets of aircraft shuttling the unwanted into oblivion. It’s not a policy; it’s an authoritarian daydream.

The real absurdity, though, lies in her premise. Britain has never been culturally coherent and never should be. Its genius has always been its incoherence – the messy, contradictory, argumentative jumble that somehow produces Shakespeare, steel ships, punk rock, and the NHS. The minute you start policing “coherence,” you begin deciding who counts as British, and that’s a road paved with ruin.

Katie Lam dresses her intolerance as intellect. She speaks in the calm tones of technocracy while tugging at the threads that hold a plural society together. That makes her more dangerous than the foam-flecked ranters. She’s the acceptable face of an unacceptable idea – that diversity is disorder and conformity is salvation.

The truth is simpler. A coherent Britain would be a dull, fearful Britain. Give me the noise, the argument, the contradictions. Give me a country too untidy to fit inside a slogan. And if Katie Lam wants coherence, she should start by explaining how a nation of Celts, Angles, Muslims, atheists, gays, Tories, and anarchists is meant to sing from the same hymn sheet.

Until she can do that, her coherence is a mirage – and her politics, for all their polish, belong to a darker age.