Society
Carnival means more than morris dancing
Published 11 September 2006
Trevor Phillips, who holds court as the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, is at it again, this time with his denigration of the Notting Hill Carnival. This year, 1.2 million people attended the festival, including visitors from many other parts of the globe. Most of the participants were of black or Asian Caribbean origin, or white. Anyone who attended the steel-band competition on the Saturday would have witnessed young whites, increasing in number every year, playing the steel pans, driving the band that placed second with a wicked percussion section.
Many, many more donned costumes and danced to the complex beat. Indeed, some of them are active in the administration of the autonomous groups that make up the festival. Somalis, Sri Lankans from north-west London, Bengalis from the East End, the Irish from Kilburn and other white folk from here, there and everywhere converged on Notting Hill. In short, all classes and all races mixed and mingled, hipped and hopped, chipped, danced and pranced in a festival inspired by Caribbean culture brought here through migration. I know of nowhere else in the United Kingdom where such an exciting example of multiculturalism exists, and has done so for 42 years.
So consumed is Phillips by his hatred of multiculturalism that he flatly denies the Carnival is a reflection of this reality. He poured scorn on a press report that this year's carnival was a multicultural triumph, declaring: "We wouldn't, frankly, think of participation in a day's morris dancing or caber tossing as a valuable exercise in building a modern multicultural society."
I am no tosser, nor can I perform morris dancing, but these I am certain do not compare to Carnival. Let me explain. Some 40 years ago, a handful of us paraded around the streets in the Colville ward of Notting Hill without costumes and to the tune of a rough and ready steel band. We were exclusively black and it appeared to us, then, a harmless and insignificant activity. Yet, over 40 years, the festival has leapt into the public imagination and fixed itself in the calendar each and every year.
Along the road we were vilified by the press, disrupted and interrupted by the police, abused by politicians. In the vanguard of this attack was the London Evening Standard. So much has changed with time. A couple of days before last month's festival the same paper sang its praises, advising Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, to "leave the Carnival alone".
Phillips's vain dismissal of an institution created by Caribbean folk from below, drawing sections of the whole society into our web, is proof positive of his intention to undermine, disrespect and cheapen the Herculean achievement of we migrants who arrived with nothing but ourselves and renewed areas of the inner cities with our class discipline, creative powers and stick-at-it-iveness.
In its place Phillips offers integration. He has not once outlined what he means by the term and how it is to be achieved. Vagueness in public life invariably conceals mischief.
Does the state of which he is a part intend to remove blacks and Asians from their homes, replacing them with white folk? Is he going to prevent white people from moving out of any area once we move in? Are we to be fined or imprisoned for not having white friends? He does not know; he cannot tell. Rather than get on with his job of fighting racism with the might of the law, he launches salvo after salvo at our communities, which have fought, at times heroically, to defend ourselves against discrimination, police malpractice and the rest. I can list scores of skirmishes, running battles fought and won.
Livingstone would hear no more. Following Phillips's abuse of the festival, Red Ken donned his hobnail boots and kicked him up the rear. He was defending his constituents against these gratuitous attacks.
The mayor says he expects that Phillips will be joining the fascist British National Party shortly. That, I know, is an exaggeration. The Phillips type was analysed to perfection by C R James in his tract on the Caribbean middle classes, written in 1962:
"For the most part they developed political skill only in crawling or worming their way into recognition by government or big business. When they did get into the charmed government circles, they did their best to show that they could be as good servants as any. They ac tually did little. They were not responsible for anything, so they achieved a cheap popularity without any danger to themselves."
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