UK Politics
How Tony Blair rewrote our past
Published 18 December 2006
Tony Blair is guilty of 'muddled thinking' on race
Failing some major social crisis, Tony Blair has made his final statement on the issue of race before departing the national and international stage. Blair opened his statement with what appears to be a huge observation: "The ethos of this country [on the race issue] is completely different from 30 years ago."
True. But he avoids saying how this was achieved, when and by whom. He praises, instead, those saviours who applied the healing remedies to which we, black immigrant workers, were and continue to be prey. Thus it was Roy Jenkins, rather than the grass-roots Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (Card), that was, according to Blair, the main impetus in the passing of the Race Relations Act in 1976.
Card's founding conference was held in July 1965 with black, Asian and white delegates from all over the UK. It was the first mass organisation of blacks and Asians to raise issues of racial discrimination and demand that the British authorities do something to counter it.
The conference was informed by small Caribbean and Asian groups scattered over the UK. I remember a distinctly working-class audience, which had landed in this country only three or four years earlier, but was growing in confidence. Ten years later, I recorded the ideas of various people. Their thoughts may make this clearer.
Here is Mustaq Hussein, an Asian textile worker from Nottingham. He arrived here, aged 13, from Azad Kashmir, in Pakistan. "It wasn't until I was 18 that I realised we are discriminated against and not treated the same as white people. All the workers were Pakistani and at first we thought of the foreman not as an employee, but as someone big who could do a lot of things to people. He said he was doing us a favour letting us work there, but later on we realised he wasn't doing us any favour. He should have been paying us the same as white workers."
Another Pakistani, Akbar Khan, said: "Before 1969, there wasn't any trade-union organisation at Perivale Gütermann and people say life wasn't any good there. We used to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for £30. In time, we were able to establish a branch of the TGWU."
The interviews recorded the most vulgar racial discrimination, and the accompanying revolt was intense. Card became the mouthpiece for their dissatisfactions. Racial attacks were the order of the day and policing was at best repressive and, at worst, brutal. But, to Blair, this fight against discrimination is not the reason for the changing ethos over the past 30 years. Instead, Jenkins is put forward as the great liberator - a descendant of William Wilberforce, I suppose.
People with no past have little present and absolutely no future. This lack of past perspective weaves through Blair's speech from beginning to end. It is all self-glorification. He quotes Trevor Phillips, Labour's own appointment to the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, as follows: "Phillips said recently that Britain is by far the best place in Europe to live if you are not white." He has obviously not been paying attention to Phillips's hostility to the black and Asian communities: "We are heading towards a New Orleans-style Britain," was one of Phillips's statements in 2005. This year, the CRE held a conference where "Rivers of blood: did Enoch Powell get it right?" was the title of one workshop.
Blair's speech was the more confusing because he ignored the only salient fact: that it is the immigrant communities which have been and continue to be at the heart of their own liberation.
The Prime Minister champions both Ken Livingstone's multiculturalism and the integrationist line of Phillips. I have in the past called on integrationists to tell us the steps we need to take to achieve their goal. For the first time, Blair tells us: an adherence to democracy, the rule of law, tolerance and equal treatment for all.
I am dumbfounded. Let's take democracy. There is not a single struggle during the past 30 years that was not aimed directly at involving ourselves in the democratic workings of this society. We challenged the rule of law when the police behaved outside the law. We insisted on a tolerant society with equal treatment for all, and not just for white folk. We formed the Black Sections in the Labour Party and in 1987 got four black and Asian MPs into parliament. And mark my words, Muslim women have started a long trek to demand equality from their men.
We can only hope that Gordon Brown, perhaps the next prime minister, is not burdened by Blair's confused and muddled thinking.
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