Until a few years ago the Dutch prided themselves on being the most tolerant, most progressive people on earth. If multiculturalism was going to work anywhere, it would be in Holland. That was the view, at any rate, of the intellectual elite which was by and large of a leftist disposition.

Multiculturalism always was most popular with people who felt enlightened enough to take in their stride the presence of immigrants whom they rarely encountered in their own daily lives. They were also historically aware enough to realise the perils of racial or religious discrimination. As some people loved to point out, “Auschwitz” was the inevitable destination of bigotry. In Holland, a country that had lost 70% of its Jewish population in the Holocaust, this warning had a particularly grim potency.

After the murder of Theo van Gogh, the film maker, two years ago by a home-grown Muslim jihadi in Amsterdam (Van Gogh had made a film, Submisssion, about the oppression of Muslim women), a consensus rose among a section of the Dutch commentariat: multiculturalism had been a disaster; appeasement in the name of tolerance had led straight to the slaughter of a man who had simply exercised his right to free speech.

Van Gogh, a born provocateur who liked to test the limits of freedom by being as offensive as possible — to Jews, Christians, Muslims, or indeed anyone he disapproved of — has now been reborn as a kind of patron saint of Dutch liberty, the rightful heir of Erasmus and Spinoza. Van Gogh was no Spinoza, let alone an Erasmus, but there clearly is a problem (not only in Holland, of course) when people resort to extreme violence, or the threat to use extreme violence, against fellow citizens whose views they find offensive.

There can be no tolerance of Islamist revolutionaries who believe that people who attack their faith should die, just as there can be no tolerance for any other type of political or religious violence. But do the murders committed in the name of Islam in Amsterdam, Madrid or London really mean that the multicultural idea is dead?

The problem with much multicultural propaganda (as well as arguments against it) is the assumption that monoculturalism ever existed. When I grew up in the upper- middle-class part of the Hague during the 1960s, Dutch society was still pretty much lily-white. There were no Muslims or black people in my school.

However, society was hardly mono-cultural. Catholics had their own schools, football clubs, newspapers, broadcasting stations, political parties, student fraternities, retirement homes and probably stamp collecting associations too, and the same was true for Orthodox Calvinists, Dutch Reformed, Liberal Protestants and so on. Marriages between Protestants and Catholics were probably rarer than mixed marriages with Muslims are today.

If religious differences still mattered, class did as well. Accents were a giveaway, as they were in Britain, but you could also tell a man’s social background in the Hague just from the style of his shoes. The society I grew up in was riddled with social and religious barriers. People managed to rub along by sharing perhaps a keenness for over-boiled potatoes and the Dutch football team, but otherwise they stuck pretty much to their own kind.

All this began to change in the 1960s when the so-called “pillars” that held religious and class affiliations together crumbled under the assault of a generation that rebelled against traditional constraints on their sexual, cultural, social and political lives.

This was the time of sex festivals (organised by Suck magazine, for whom Germaine Greer once posed naked), smoke bombs tossed at the Queen’s golden coach and “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” on the cobbled streets of Amsterdam. None of this was unique to Holland but because of the country’s puritanical background the change was particularly dramatic.

At about the same time that the young let their hair down, Muslims from Turkey and Morocco arrived to perform jobs that the prosperous Dutch no longer felt like doing. In the beginning people barely noticed these shadowy figures cleaning trains and the like. It was only once their families arrived a decade or so later and children were born that old working-class neighbourhoods began to fill up with halal butchers, mosques and satellite dishes tuned to Arab and north African television stations. This happened after the economic boom was pretty much over.

The views of most Moroccan villagers and Turkish men who settled with their families in the shabbier parts of Amsterdam or central Rotterdam had little in common with those of the newly secularised and sexually liberated Dutch. But the progressive multicultural view was that this did not matter. Each to his own. We may not like the way Muslim men treat their wives and daughters, but who are we to say that our ways are better? High crime rates and unemployment in immigrant areas were rarely discussed and those who tried to were frequently dismissed as racists.

To point out that the welfare state often had the effect of trapping young immigrants in a state of dependency on government handouts, increasing anti-immigrant resentment, also flew in the face of progressive orthodoxy. A flexible and accommodating labour market is often the quickest way for immigrants to find their place in a new society, however humble the work. In Holland, as in France, too many rules and regulations, as well as a deep strain of racial discrimination, make it difficult for newcomers to find work. In such a situation young people are bound to find their way to petty crime and violent causes, no matter how much we preach the virtues of multiculturalism.