Culture Wars

by James Curran

  Press racism

  It is extremely important to stress this particular aspect of press history in order to emphasise the very considerable hurdle facing any political party which wishes to pursue policies which run counter to the racist ideology propagated daily by significant sections of the national press, an ideology which has in fact considerably intensified since Labour came to power in 1997. But this is a particular problem for Labour, which has routinely faced implacable hostility from the majority of the national press, which, as will become ever clearer as this chapter progresses, regards the party as fundamentally anti-British (and particularly anti-English) to the point of treachery, and thus as congenitally unfit to govern.

  In much of Britain’s national (and increasingly nationalist) press, people of colour are habitually represented as constituting a potential threat to British society, which is conceptualised as essentially white. Recent immigrants are viewed as particularly problematic, and in their case hostility frequently extends to white people as well (apart, that is, to those coming from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other parts of the erstwhile Empire, who are regarded, however erroneously, as ‘kith and kin’ as opposed to ‘economic migrants’ and ‘bogus asylum seekers’). Numbers are seen as a problem per se (‘swamping’, in Mrs. Thatcher’s phrase), and the attitudes and behaviour of immigrants, whether recent or not, are seen as posing a potential threat to law and order, cultural cohesion and indeed the ‘national stock’. There is now quite a substantial literature on press racism,8 and one of the best summaries of its components is provided by Teun van Dijk, who states that:

  The very topics of news on ethnic affairs convey an overall impression that associates minorities or immigrants with problems, conflicts, deviance, or even threats. Crime, violence, drugs, and riots are usually among the most frequently covered topics on ethnic minorities, especially but not exclusively in the right-wing and popular press. Immigration is also often covered, but news reports on that issue focus on problems, large numbers, immigration rackets or ‘economic’ refugees who are seen as coming to live off our pockets. Cultural differences are enhanced and are often negatively interpreted as the cause of numerous social problems associated with a multicultural society … All topics that imply a critique of the white dominant group in general, or of the authorities or other elites in particular, are seldom covered. Racism, failing legislation against discrimination, the refusal to enact Affirmative Action, the real causes of high unemployment among minority groups or the schools’ lack of success in providing minority children with motivation and a good education, are among the topics that tend to be avoided.9

  As far as the British press is concerned, this remains as accurate as when it was written, although it should be added that racism directed at people of colour has since been supplemented by a more general xenophobia and an intense hostility directed specifically at Muslims – often referred to as Islamophobia but in fact an expression of anti-Muslim racism. What also needs to be stressed is that a key component of this kind of racist discourse is the contention that British society is not itself racist – indeed compared to many other western countries it is represented as remarkably tolerant of racial differences within its midst – and that when racial tensions do arise, they are the result of agitation by sections of the non-white population and their white allies in what it is absolutely de rigueur in certain right-wing circles to label the ‘race relations industry’ and, more generally, the ‘liberal establishment’. Such agitation breeds resentment in the white population, it is argued, and this provides a fertile ground in which the seeds of racism grow and flourish. Thus, racism in the ‘host culture’ is exonerated and explained away.

  As Martin Barker noted at the time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the notion of racial prejudice was in the process of being radically redefined by the right: ‘Here it has nothing to do with disliking foreigners, or with discriminating against them. You are racially prejudiced if you refuse to adopt the characteristic life style of the country in which you have chosen to live’. Racism is thus reinterpreted as a threat by ‘immigrants’ to the ‘British way of life’. A key ingredient of this way of life, so the thinking goes, is tolerance, easy-goingness and an ability to muck in together. ‘Immigrants’, with their demands for ‘special rules’ (like Sikhs not wearing crash helmets) and their complaints about such taken-for-granted toys as golliwogs and Little Black Sambo are thus ‘abusing our hospitality’ and generally ‘rocking the boat’.10 As Michael Billig et al. have pointed out, such complaints are key components of a deeply, if largely unconscious, nationalist ideology: ‘The rules are “our” rules. This is “our” country and, if “they” want to come here, “they” must abide by “our” rules, which constrain “us”. If “they” obtain special privileges, then “they” will be receiving unequal treatment’.11 This whole ‘commonsensical’ edifice is, of course, founded on the notion that the ‘British way of life’ is self-evidently tolerant, unprejudiced and reasonable; thus, anybody who questions or criticises it is, by definition, intolerant, prejudiced and unreasonable.

  A lesson from history

  However, racist attitudes in the UK long predate immigration by people of colour, and have been routinely expressed by sections of the press long before the birth of the ‘race relations industry, the ‘loony left’ and New Labour. It is extremely important to understand this, as so much of the right-wing hostility to all three is predicated on the entirely erroneous assertion that Britain was largely free of racism until the actions of anti-racist ‘agitators’ in the second half of the twentieth century provoked resentment in the white population against people of colour.

  The early targets of racism in Britain were not people of colour, but Jews fleeing first from pogroms in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then the Third Reich.12 To take but two of many possible examples of articles critical of the first cohort of refugees, an editorial from the East London Advertiser (6 May 1899) argued, like so many articles about Muslims in today’s papers, that members of certain groups either cannot or will not assimilate to the ‘host nation’:

  People of any other nation, after being in England for a short time, assimilate themselves with the native race and by and by lose nearly all their foreign trace. But the Jews never do. A Jew is always a Jew. No doubt this is due to their desire for the formation of a new Hebrew nation, a fact which inclines them to look upon themselves as pilgrims in a strange land.

  Meanwhile the Mail (3 February 1900), in an article headed ‘So-called refugees’, deployed a veritable battery of anti-Semitic clichés, and prefigured much modern ‘reporting’ by casting doubt on the refugees’ status; it also draws an all-too-familiar distinction between deserving (English) and undeserving (Jewish) refugees:

  There landed yesterday at Southampton from the transport Cheshire over 600 so-called refugees, their passages having been paid out of the Lord Mayor’s Fund … There was scarce a hundred of them that had, by right, deserved such help, and these were the Englishmen of the party. The rest were Jews… They fought and jostled for the foremost places at the gangways … When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined, and, in broken English, asked for money for their train fare.

  Moving on to the influx of Jewish refugees in the 1930s, we find prefigured another present-day obsession, namely numbers. Here it’s extremely important to provide a degree of historical and political context.

  By the end of 1938, the year of both the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, the number of Jews fleeing Germany and Austria was growing rapidly, and although the British government liberalised its immigration policy to some extent after the latter, it actually tightened entry requirements for Austrian Jews in the wake of the former.13 The most famous example of mercy shown towards refugees – the Kindertransport – was not a government initiative at all, but one proposed by a loose grouping of Jewish and Quaker organisations, in particular the British Committee for t
he Jews of Germany and the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany. As a result of their pressure, the British government agreed to allow unaccompanied refugee children, up to the age of seventeen, to enter the country on temporary travel visas, on the understanding that, when conditions permitted, the children would return to their families. The bodies which had originated the scheme promised to fund the entire operation, find homes for all the children and ensure that none of them would become a financial ‘burden’ on the public purse. In 1940, the British government ordered the internment of all male sixteen- to seventy-year-old refugees from enemy countries, and those refugee children who had reached the age of sixteen were rounded up and placed camps, whilst around 400 were transported overseas to Canada and Australia.14 Many of those who sailed to the former died when the Arandora Star was torpedoed, and those headed to the latter on the Dunera were treated so abominably that they were later awarded compensation by the British government.15

  As the numbers of Jewish refugees began to grow in 1938, so did the increasingly shrill demands for tighter immigration controls in sections of the press (and indeed of the population), which goes a considerable way to explaining why the government was loathe to take a more humanitarian stance. So, for example, the Mail (23 March 1938) argued that ‘once it was known that Britain offered sanctuary to all who cared to come, the floodgates would be opened, and we should be inundated by thousands seeking a home’, whilst the Express (24 March 1938) ran the argument that immigration breeds racism (as opposed to racism breeding hostility to immigrants), which we will be discussed below:

  There is powerful agitation here to admit all Jewish refugees without question or discrimination. It would be unwise to overload the basket like that. It would stir up the elements here that fatten on anti-Semitic propaganda … Because we DON’T want anti-Jewish uproar we DO need to show common sense in not admitting all applicants.

  That there was indeed an anti-immigration campaign being waged by sections of the press is confirmed by an article in the Mail (20 August 1938), which stated:

  ‘The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage’. In these words, Mr Herbert Metcalfe, the Old Street magistrate, yesterday referred to the number of aliens entering the country through the ‘back door’ – a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.16

  The story of the 1930s Jewish refugees, and especially of the Kindertransport, is an extremely important one in the present context for two reasons. First, it shows that there is nothing new about the racism expressed by sections of the press nor about government sensitivity to it. That this undoubtedly reflected concerns in sections of the population as a whole brings us on to the second point – namely, the existence of racism in British society. This gives the lie to the endlessly repeated claims by politicians and most of the press that Britain is an open society which is tolerant of ethnic differences and has always welcomed those in need of refuge and succour – that is, as long as they’re prepared to abide by the ‘British way of life’ and adopt ‘British values’. In this narrative, the Kindertransport has come to play an ever more important role17 . But perhaps one of the most significant aspects of most present day press articles on the subject is that they remain entirely silent on the reasons why these poor wretched children arrived on their own, separated by government policy from their parents, the majority of whom would perish in the Holocaust. As Louise London has observed:

  We remember the touching photographs and newsreel footage of unaccompanied Jewish children arriving on the Kindertransports. There are no such photographs of the Jewish parents left behind in Nazi Europe, and their fate has made a minimal impact … The Jews excluded from entry to the United Kingdom are not part of the British experience because Britain never saw them.18

  London recalls watching the then Home Office immigration minister Barbara Roche on television in 2000 defending the UK’s latest round of harsh policies towards asylum seekers and hearing her intone the usual mantra that ‘this country has a proud tradition of taking in refugees over many centuries’, which caused her to wonder

  what adjective Roche would propose, then, to describe Britain’s history of not taking in refugees: would that be proud too? Or would it be the opposite? Shamefaced? Hidden? Denied? Suppressed? Because, even if it isn’t proud, even if it doesn’t fit the political message, this country also has a history of not taking in refugees. It is not true that whatever Britain may do to hamper asylum seekers, it will always take in the genuine refugee. This is a myth. And one of the cornerstones of the myth is the remarkably persistent claim that this country did all it could to aid Jews trying to escape Nazi persecution.19

  Hence the ever-lengthening list of legislation designed specifically to keep as many immigrants as possible, of all kinds, out of the country: for example, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, the Immigration Act 1971, the Immigration Act 1988, the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993, the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, and the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006. These were passed by Labour and Conservative governments alike and vociferously supported by significant sections of the press. Absolutely invariably their enactment was accompanied by politicians and journalists hymning the UK’s ‘proud tradition’ of taking in refugees and asylum seekers.

  In the rest of this chapter, I want to show in some detail how the ideological forces outlined above were brought into play against three initiatives concerning racism, the first by ‘loony left’ councils in the 1980s, the second by the newly elected Labour government in 1997 and the third by Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain at the turn of the millennium.

  Anti-anti-racism

  During the 1980s, Conservative politicians and newspapers routinely argued that black unrest was stirred up by ‘agitation’, rather than fuelled by justified grievances. Such a position was anchored in the premise that racism was not systemic in the UK, and came into being only when white people were antagonised by the behaviour of people of colour. Crucial here were organisations such as the Centre for Policy Studies, the Social Affairs Unit, the Hillgate Group, the Conservative Philosophy Group and the Salisbury Group, whose ideas were routinely pedalled in the press in more populist terms by pundits such as Ronald Butt, Peregrine Worsthorne, Paul Johnson, George Gale, John Vincent, Andrew Alexander, Ray Mills and Roger Scruton.20 Chief amongst the sources of this alleged ‘agitation’ was the ‘race relations industry’, and, in particular, the philosophy of anti-racism. What emerged from their writings, as Paul Gordon has argued, was ‘not just a campaign against anti-racism, but a campaign which used as its means a fertile mixture of intellectual dishonesty, fabrication, smear, innuendo, half-truth and selection’.21 Indeed, at its most extreme, anti-anti-racism did not simply imply that racism did not matter, but, rather, that it did not actually exist. And in more directly political terms, the attractions of anti-anti-racism for the political right are not exactly hard to fathom. As David Edgar has put it:

  Anti-anti-racism provides a means to transfer responsibility for the most visible and threatening sector of the young unemployed (and thereby responsibility for the problems, including civil unrest, connected in the public mind with that unemployment) away from the state and toward the black community itself, aided and abetted by the sinister forces manipulating it.22

  (1988: 133)

  By the early eighties, anti-racist initiatives had come to occupy a significant place on the left’s political agenda, particularly at the local level, not least as a result of urban unrest in black communities such as Tottenham, Brixton, Bristol and Handsworth, and such initiatives were regularly lambasted as ‘loony’ by right-wing papers and politicians, as noted in the chapter in this book on urban myths, and also the chapter on Brent in the previous edition. However, alarm bells had long been ringing on the right at any sign of a
nti-racist activity in black and Asian communities. Thus, in his famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 20 April 1968, Enoch Powell had specifically targeted those ‘immigrants’ and their sympathisers who, as he saw it, were determined to ‘agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, to overawe and dominate the rest with legal weapons which the ignorant and ill-informed have provided’.23 For the right, then, the urban unrest proved conclusively that Powell had been entirely correct; in their view, what was needed, above all, was law, order, discipline and, if necessary, force majeure. Anti-racist measures were, for the right, part of the problem, not part of the solution, as they were seen by social conservatives as a form of left-wing propaganda, both un- and anti-British, fostering divisions along racial lines. Meanwhile, for economic liberals they were a waste of public money and an interference with both individual and corporate freedoms.

  Thus, for example, after the Brixton events of 1981, the Express (20 April) argued that race relations law was giving black people ‘special status’ and so ‘dividing the two communities, instead of uniting them’, whilst in The Times (10 July 1981) Ronald Butt complained that young blacks ‘are instructed that they are discriminated against, oppressed and denied work by a racialist society, and are misused and persecuted by the police’. A Telegraph editorial (8 January 1982) attacked a Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) code of practice on equal opportunities as ‘bossy nonsense’ and the Mail (30 July 1982) denounced it as an ‘agent for discord’. Similarly, on 24 October 1983, Andrew Alexander in the Mail dubbed the CRE ‘the equivalent of the Holy Inquisition’, and the Express (16 May 1984) referred to the ‘thought police of the Commission for Racial Equality’. In the wake of the Broadwater Farm disturbances in 1985, Ronald Butt in The Times (17 October 1985) claimed that race had become a weapon in a ‘new class war’ in which ‘class warriors’ manipulated blacks, seeing in them a class politics which had otherwise disappeared from Britain. Meanwhile the Mail (8 October 1985) linked the unrest with a video on policing produced by the GLC and a cartoon book on racism produced by the CRE as ‘evidence of the torrent of lies and twisted truths that is indoctrinating our society today’.