We still have not put the racist devil behind us
Published 01 November 1999
Media
For me the most memorable moment of the inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence came at the very beginning, when we heard from the witness who had watched from across the street as Stephen, supported by his friend, reeled from the knife attack. The witness admitted that he had hesitated before going to help, fearing that he was being lured into danger by a black gang.
When the Macpherson report grappled with a definition of "institutional racism" inside the Metropolitan Police, it was the honesty of this account that made the charge so incontrovertibly plausible. We know that we live in a society still deeply deformed by racial prejudice, yet we tell ourselves that our intentions are good and that our multicultural society is, by international standards, pretty healthy.
Playing the Race Card, a three-part series currently running on BBC2, delivers a compelling account of the way this duality of thought has permeated British politics in the past 35 years. Made by the accomplished contemporary historians of Juniper, the coolness of the narrative treatment of such incendiary events is deeply revealing.
Here we see two of the outstanding Labour figures of the period, James Callaghan and Roy Hattersley, admitting that they failed to act correctly: Callaghan, as home secretary, in giving way to pressure from the police to be excluded from the provisions of race relations law (a defect the Blair government is at last committed to remedy); and Hattersley for failing to resign in protest at his government's betrayal of the Kenyan Asians in 1968. Even Roy Jenkins, chancellor at the time, admits that he failed to mount effective protest, just as he failed to see the importance of including the police in his own Race Relations Act in 1976.
On the other side, Conservative politicians were guilty of encouraging a vile, racist populism, at the Smethwick general election campaign in 1964 ("If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour") and so opening the sluices for Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood". Yet senior Conservatives also did the right thing. As home secretary, Robert Carr stood up to an ugly party conference. As prime minister, Ted Heath dismissed Powell without hesitation.
The pattern of the story is unmistakable. Tories of conscience worried about their actions on immigration; and, whatever Labour politicians said in opposition, once in power they were every bit as tough as their Conservative counterparts. They shared the view that good race relations demanded a sense of control against "the flood".
In one of these programmes Clare Short, a passionate foe of draconian immigration controls, is asked about Margaret Thatcher's infamous deployment of the race card in the 1979 election, when the would-be prime minister warned that "this country might be swamped by people with a different culture". Short replies that "historically, it was probably helpful" in that it helped to undermine the National Front and to keep extremists within the Conservative Party in check. So far, it is true that parties of the far right have made no breakthrough in Britain, a situation that, judging by recent events in Austria and Switzerland, we should not take for granted.
It is difficult, however, to evade the irony, not made explicit in these television programmes, that once again we have a Labour government forcing through an asylum bill in response to populist arguments about Britain being overrun by defective foreigners. Once again, Labour feels the need for a carapace of a "tough" immigration policy to give it room for manoeuvre on reforming the police.
The danger of this approach, apart from its lack of moral courage, is that we never actually put the devil behind us, that we continue to encourage the kind of racist language used by the Dover newspapers when faced with refugees on their own patch. At the national level, the Sun and the Daily Mail set the standard in this type of journalism, for which there was another opportunity this week with the release of figures showing a sharp increase in asylum applications.
The Mail greeted the news with a familiar vocabulary of "flood", "tide" and "system in a state of collapse". Yet the Mail is also the paper that went furthest in raising the stakes on Stephen Lawrence and, just two days before the asylum figures, the Mail on Sunday did a better job than most in reporting the story of racial persecution inside the Ford factory at Dagenham. All the papers carried either straight or approving accounts of the American company's belated intervention at the east London car plant, which represents progress of a sort.
The Times, however, also put the asylum figures on the front page, reporting as if it were a fact that "the asylum system is collapsing", whereas the Sun thought the figures merited only a single paragraph. It would be pleasant to think that this reflects an outbreak of logic at the Sun, which strongly supported the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia, from where the bulk of the additional asylum-seekers have come in recent months. A more credible explanation, however, is that the Sun's supply of xeno-ink is currently fully committed to the denunciation of the excrement-eating French.
As Jack Straw's policy to disperse asylum seekers around Britain takes effect, we shall see whether our local newspapers follow the pattern set in Dover or whether their reaction will be more complex. Our recent history suggests the latter.
"Playing the Race Card", parts two and three, are on BBC2 on Sunday 31 October and Sunday 7 November at 7.10pm. The writer is professor of journalism at Cardiff University
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