If this country depended on the Commission for Racial Equality and the official political parties for its racial stability, we would be in the midst of the most awful internecine war. We have come a very long way since supporters of the Conservative candidate for Smethwick, Peter Griffiths, declared in the election of 1964: "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour."

Race riots had taken place only a few years previously in Nottingham and Notting Hill (by this I mean riots in which whites went after blacks), and relations between the Caribbean and white working classes were slightly precarious. The first major step towards racial stability came not from the official parties, nor from parliamentary legislation, but from the rank and file: from the Caribbean community and its allies within the white liberal community. We formed the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), which had chapters throughout the land. It was a mass, vibrant campaigning organisation, but rather genteel in parts. It had a huge but rather simple demand: racial prejudice had to be outlawed. The opposition ranged from sections of Harold Wilson's Labour Party to almost the entire Conservative Party.

Then the winds brought another attitude from the other side of the Atlantic: the radicalism of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The behaviour of the police towards the black community went right up the agenda, as did the failure of trade unions to protect Caribbean workers and the exclusion of our community from promotion in ordinary jobs. (It was popularly held that the ex-slave was ill-suited to the job of foreman on the shop floor.)

Our very survival here was uncertain. Some people demanded that we "coons" (not Asians, they were not here in large numbers in the early days) be shipped out. In those days, a shift in a few seats could change a government. After all, Harold Wilson scraped in at the 1964 election, and the elections of 1970 and 1974 were all close-run. Race, at election time, packed a punch. The Labour Party was terribly afraid of being seen as the nigger-loving party.

Wilson drew the fangs from CARD. He picked off its leaders and co-opted them into a small department attached to the state: the Joint National Council for Immigrants, the forerunner to the Commission for Racial Equality. It was always intended as a tool of the Labour Party. The main Caribbean leadership argued that it could do better "working from within" in this way. CARD slowly collapsed.

The CRE has never represented the black and Asian communities. Nor have the local community relations councils been more than a means of sucking blacks into the Labour Party. But Labour has never made it a point to incorporate blacks into its highest ranks, whether at Millbank or at its old headquarters in south London.

Race has now become not an issue to be resolved, but the source of political grandstanding. "We love our blacks more than you do yours"; "I have got more pets than you have"; "I treat mine better than you treat yours".

You only had to listen to Robin Cook's political drivel to be convinced. His speech on 19 April, supposedly celebrating Britain's multiculturalism, was dealing with an extraordinary historical experience, which reshaped the old colonial world beginning with the East India Company, continuing through the Raj and culminating in the ferocious fight for independence. To reduce it to chicken tikka masala was an insult. Then he invited Britain to aim for the diversity that America has achieved. Yet the US is unquestionably the most racist society known to man. We are asked to emulate a society that had race riots in Cincinnati earlier this month and a huge disenfranchisement of blacks in last year's election.

The political parties and the CRE have all made asses of themselves. I repeat with even greater certainty a call I made to the CRE a while ago: "Bye, Bye Blackbird."

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