Here's an excerpt from a May 2009 interview with Benjamin Zephaniah in which he speaks of multiculturalism:

...[Benjamin Zephaniah] "has travelled Britain speaking to audiences of all ages and all classes; he has lived around the world — he now spends part of every year in China. He believes that anything is possible as long as people are willing to talk to each other.

When I ask him why he wanted to live in China his reasoning is clear. "It was wanting to go somewhere that I'd heard so much propaganda about and find out what it was really like. I remember when I was younger being told that Russia was our enemy, and I just got on a plane one day and went to Moscow. I wanted to see for myself. I wanted to talk to housewives and pickpockets and just everybody — and see why they hated us. And I found out that they didn't hate us, they just wanted to get on with their lives. I'll never forget talking to one woman, and saying, 'Come on, what about your bread queues' — this was in the 1980s — and she got up and brought back a picture from a newspaper and I thought it was a bread queue. I said, 'Yeah, there it is!' And she said, 'No, that's your dole queue.'

"When I got to China I found I was being challenged in really interesting ways. For instance, I always believed that everybody in China had only one child. But I kept meeting people with six children. And it's challenging being a vegan in China, like I am — but the best vegan restaurant I've come across in the world is in Beijing."

Zephaniah is no old-fashioned Marxist. He's resistant to any ideology, even multiculturalism. The problem with multiculturalism, he says, is that "it's got so tangled up with race, now, and the war on terrorism and Muslim culture, that we've forgotten that multiculturalism was in Britain a long time before black people got here. The culture in Lincolnshire was very different from the culture in Devonshire or Cheshire — and then there were the Huguenots, the Angles and the Saxons and the Celts . . . "
Lincolnshire is where he lives when he's not touring or in China. Now it's a magnet for people from Eastern Europe. "It's interesting that people talk to me about these people like I'm not a foreigner," he says. "Like, 'What do you think about all these foreigners coming and working in our fields?' You know, they're like the people of my mother's generation. My mother and her sister saw a poster advertising jobs in England — and my mother said, 'I'm going,' and her sister said, 'I won't, that country's too cold!' And that's why I'm here and my cousins are in Jamaica.

"That's happening now with people in the countryside. The Government is telling us to eat locally grown fruit and vegetables. But if it's locally grown someone has to pick it. Young kids in this country are watching television, they're watching people in bands, they are watching people working in IT, and they want some of that. When you say, 'Do you want to go and pick potatoes?' They go, 'Do I f***! No way.'

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/poetry/article6204548.ece