Hanif Kureishi has stepped in to the furore over Lionel Shriver’s comments on diversity condemning the “knuckle-dragging” and “pathetic whining” of an elite who don’t want change.

In an article for the Guardian Kureishi argues that it should be seen as good news that “the master race” is becoming anxious about who they have to hear from.

“At this terrible Brexit moment with its retreat into panic and nationalism, and with the same thing happening across Europe, it is time for all artists to speak up, and particularly those whose voices have been neglected.”

The drive for diversity has hit headlines this week after Shriver’s attack on the publisher Penguin Random House, taking issue with an email in which the publishing house laid out its goal that by 2025, its authors and staff will reflect the diversity of UK society.

Writing in the Spectator she accused the publisher of being “drunk on virtue” and said it could be safely inferred “that if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling”.

Days later, Shriver was dropped as a judge on a short story competition run by the magazine Mslexia.

Kureishi said Penguin’s diversity policy was “wise and brave” and “seems to have awoken the usual knuckle-dragging, semi-blind suspects with their endlessly repeated terrors and fears.

“They appear to believe that what is called ‘diversity’ or ‘positive discrimination’ will lead to a dilution of their culture. Their stupidity and the sound of their pathetic whining would be funny if it weren’t so tragic for Britain. You might even want to call it a form of self-loathing; it is certainly unpatriotic and lacking in generosity.”

Kureishi, the author of novels including The Buddha of Suburbia and screenplays such as My Beautiful Laundrette, said white Oxbridge men “and their lackeys” had been the beneficiaries of positive discrimination for centuries.

“The truth is, the conservative fear of other voices is not due to the anxiety that artists from outside the mainstream will be untalented, filling up galleries and bookshops with sludge, but that they will be outstanding and brilliant.

”The conservatives will have to swallow the fact that despite the success of British artists, real talent has been neglected and discouraged by those who dominate the culture, deliberately keeping schools, the media, universities and the cultural world closed to interesting people.”

The entrenched lack of diversity is one of the most pressing issues in the arts and creative industries. Publicly funded arts organisations face losing funding unless they make progress but the most recent Arts Council England report on the subject warned that “there remains a large gap between organisational aspiration and action”.

Penguin Random House said its goal was that the books it publishes should reflect the diverse society in which people live. “We firmly believe that giving a platform to more diverse voices will lead to a greater richness of creativity and stories, rather than stifling them,” it said.

Shriver, a UK-based American writer whose best known work is We Need to Talk About Kevin, has been widely condemned although she received support from Toby Young.

She has said she is not anti-diversity but is against “box ticking” diversity goals. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph on Friday Shriver said her comments had been taken out of context and said the row was symptomatic of a toxic online environment.

“It’s a column, not written to be read in snippets. You have to read the whole thing. I have no doubt that half the people on Twitter who are up in arms haven’t read it.”

Kureishi said he had been fortunate to make a living as a writer. “It was a difficult and often humiliating trip, I can tell you. There was much patronisation and many insults on the way, and they are still going on.”

He writes that he is still expected to feel grateful when those in charge have never fought for anything. He had come up against visible and invisible “racism, prejudice and assumption” throughout his career and recalled the first TV producer he met asking why the characters in his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, had to be Asian. “If they were white we’d make this,” he said to me.