Culture Wars

by James Curran

  Hardly surprisingly, then, the anti-racist policies of the GLC, the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) and the Labour London boroughs reduced the anti-anti-racists of the right-wing press to a state of apoplexy. Thus, when in 1983 ILEA set out its anti-racist policy for London schools, which merely stressed its commitment to equality for all pupils and called for the removal of all forms of discrimination in schools, the Mail (30 September) called this ‘reverse discrimination’ and the Express (2 October) ‘school apartheid’ and ‘racist, patronising, divisive’. The offensive was significantly stepped up when the GLC named 1984–5 as Anti-Racist Year; this was also the moment when certain Labour boroughs decided to make anti-racism a political priority. At the Conservative Party conference in 1985, the Party chairman Norman Tebbit attacked ‘the divisive racism preached by the black power merchants of the extreme left’ which he described as ‘as objectionable and destructive as that preached by the white racists of the National Front’.24

  By the time of the events dealt with in the rest of this chapter, then, the notion that anti-racism is itself a form of racism had become firmly established on the right. A good example of this form of thinking is offered by the Mail (3 May 1984) in an editorial which declared that: ‘Nowadays racial strife is less likely to be caused by ordinary folk [sic] than by the professionals of the race relations industry who in effect go round looking for ways of stirring it up’. Roger Scruton helped to give such ideas an ‘intellectual’ gloss, arguing in The Times (30 October 1984) that it was the anti-racists who are ‘the real racists’. In similar vein, in the Sunday Telegraph (30 June 1985) Peregrine Worsthorne stated that: ‘Much more effective than the National Front in stirring up racial hatred today are those ostensibly dedicated to anti-racism’. Likewise Paul Johnson, in the Mail (17 June 1985) compared the ‘primary racism … preached by the brutish bigots of the National Front’ with the ‘secondary racism’ of the ‘race relations fanatics’. For Johnson, the latter were the ‘more insidious phenomenon’. He continued: ‘I can think of nothing more likely to stir up race trouble in Britain than the activities of these secondary racists …. The National Front and the race relations doctrinaires are in unconscious alliance’. Another doughty fighter in this particular cause was Roy Kerridge, who argued in the Mail (15 October 1984) that those who argued that black children should be fostered by black people were demanding a form of apartheid and claimed that:

  The new guerrilla fighters are … the black equivalent of those Trotskyites who falsely claim to represent the working man … Anti-Racist year, an encouragement to those whose interests lie in a racial power structure, seems to have set the seal of officialdom on a black movement that is essentially no different from the National Front.

  The publication of the Swann report, Education for All, in 1985, provided the anti-anti-racists with yet another field day. In March 1979 Labour education secretary Shirley Williams had established the Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Minority Groups. This was a result of the Commons Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration highlighting in 1977 widespread concerns about the poor performance of West Indian children in schools. Under the chairmanship of Anthony Rampton, the committee published its interim report West Indian Children in Our Schools in 1981. This concluded that the main problems were low teacher expectations and racial prejudice among white teachers and society as a whole. Inevitably, the press rubbished the report even before it was published, and Mark Carlisle, then education secretary under the Tories, sacked Rampton and appointed Lord Michael Swann in his place. His report,25 which argued, inter alia, that poor performance by minority ethnic children in schools was partly the result of racial prejudice and discrimination in the wider society, that multicultural understanding must permeate all aspects of a school’s work and that all schools should adopt clear policies to combat racism, was largely ignored by the government, but it did underpin many of the educational policies pursued by the councils stigmatised as ‘loony’ by the press, such as those contained in Brent’s Two Kingdoms initiative as outlined in the first edition of this book. Even before it was published, Swann’s report was met by sections of the press with as much hostility as the interim one, thanks to judicious leaks. The free market guru Alfred Sherman prophesised in the Telegraph (19 January 1985) that the report would recommend ‘a procrustean pidgin culture to be imposed on majority and minorities alike’, a recipe for ‘cultural genocide’ which ‘in effect outlawed the concept of the English nation’. Meanwhile, Mary Kenny in the Mail (13 September 1984), under the headline ‘Race madness’, warned that its proposals would turn ‘mild British people into resentful misanthropes … as they see everything native to their own tradition scuttled’, a sentiment which was echoed by the Telegraph (14 March 1985) which argued that the report would ‘lead only to great racial bitterness among the white population’. On 22 November 1984, the same paper had also run a piece by regular columnist Honor Tracy, who asserted that ‘our own new role will be that of native freedom fighters. We are not merely the people of the land, but trustees for those who come after us’.26

  The real hero, or rather, martyr, of the anti-anti-racists was, and indeed continues to be, Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headmaster who, amidst howls of outrage from the right-wing press, was forced to resign after publishing articles highly critical of multicultural education in the Times Educational Supplement and the ultra-right-wing journal The Salisbury Review, then edited by Roger Scruton, thereby alienating both his local education authority and many parents of children at his school. The Mail (30 October 1984) gave him a considerable amount of uncontested space to denounce multicultural education as ‘the most dangerous force in Britain today’, whilst the same paper (3 April 1985) alleged that the campaign against Honeyford was the work of extremists who ‘prate of the evils of racism’ but themselves ‘personify fascism’. Absolutely nothing has changed since these words were written. For example, on 5 July 2014, the Telegraph, always one of Honeyford’s most fervent admirers, published an article by Scruton headed ‘Let’s face it – Ray Honeyford got it right on Islam and education’, in which he argued that:

  The anti-white and anti-British pronouncements of the people who were trying to undermine his attempts to provide an equal education to all the children in his school were, to his mind, far more evidently racist than any feature of the curriculum that he was striving to impart.

  Foremost amongst these people, absolutely inevitably, were the Commission for Racial Equality, ‘a quango run by the leftist militants of the day’.

  Institutional racism

  In July 1997, the new Labour home secretary Jack Straw announced an inquiry into matters arising from the murder of Stephen Lawrence. This had been refused point blank by the Tories. The inquiry report, which was published in February 1999, found that the investigation was marked by a ‘combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership by professional officers’.27 Indeed, it argued that all major organisations in British society, and not simply the police, were characterised by institutional racism, which it defined as:

  The collective failure of an organisation to provide appropriate and professional services to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.28

  Speaking in the House of Commons, 24 February 1999, Straw welcomed the report, and stated that:

  The Macpherson inquiry has demonstrated the failings of one very important public institution, the police service. The police do have a special responsibility in our society because day by day they are the immediate guardians of fairness and justice. But we would all be deluding ourselves if we believe that the issues thrown up by this inquiry reflect only on the police. Indeed the implications of this report go much, much wider and the very
process of the inquiry has opened all our eyes to what it is like to be black or Asian in Britain today. And the inquiry process has revealed some fundamental truths about the nature of our society, about our relationships one with another. Some of these truths are uncomfortable but we have to confront them.

  So I want this report to serve as a watershed in our attitudes to racism. I want it to act as a catalyst to permanent and irrevocable change, not just across our public services, but across the whole of our society. This report does not place a responsibility on someone else. It places a responsibility on each one of us.

  We have to make racial equality a reality. The vision, I believe is clear, to create a society where every individual, regardless of colour, of creed, or race, has the same opportunities and respect as his or her neighbour. On race equality let us make Britain a beacon to the world.29

  The concept of institutional racism was originally coined by Black Power activists Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in their 1967 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, and subsequently embraced in Britain by the Institute of Race Relations. As Gary Younge pointed out at the time,30 the importance of Macpherson’s invocation of the notion of institutional racism was that:

  It charted a path from the crudest forms of racism to the most well-concealed; from Stephen’s violent death to the Metropolitan Police’s wilful negligence; from the failure of the Met to recruit ethnic minorities to the need for greater racial and cultural awareness in the national curriculum. In short, it exposed the way in which racism affects all areas of black people’s lives. It shifted the focus of debate from individual prejudice to institutional discrimination; to include not just obvious racism but the obtuse as well. It showed that racism does not have one face but both many faces and no face at all.

  In Younge’s view, it also helped to correct ‘the very unsophisticated concept of race and discrimination under which most of Britain still labours’, which consisted largely of the idea of yobs being unpleasant to black people and overt colour bars in the housing market31 . Younge also argued that the report marked

  a seminal moment in British race relations. This was no longer a debate about how to contain the problems that black people cause by their very presence. This was white people talking to other white people about the problems engendered by their racism. This very fact alone shifted the burden of responsibility off the weary shoulders of those within the black community who are wheeled out after a disturbance and asked to account for and explain the behaviour and grievances of their peers. Instead, white people had to explain themselves to each other.32

  In his view, ‘the report represented a significant shift away from the question: “What are we going to do about these blacks?”’ and towards: ‘“What are we going to do about the racism in our institutions?”’. However, although it ‘advanced the debate about race in Britain; nudging it from talk of muggers and immigrants to issues of disadvantage and affirmative action’,33 very little actually happened as a result, at least in the short term. Given the absolutely ferocious press response to the report’s findings on institutional racism, this is not altogether surprising.

  ‘A flawed and dangerous concept’

  That the report was going to find the Metropolitan Police guilty of ‘institutional racism’ was widely predicted by papers across the political spectrum in the weeks prior to its publication, and certain ones were keen to set the anti-institutional racism hare running as soon as possible. Thus, the Telegraph (8 February) opined that a more serious problem for the police was

  the growing culture of paperwork and political correctness. This condition, unlike racism, really is ‘institutional’ … The number of people who have actually experienced police racism is almost certainly smaller than the number who have suffered from crimes while local policemen were attending racism awareness courses.

  On 16 February, in an ‘Exclusive’ headlined ‘Judge accuses “racist” police’, with the strap ‘Lawrence inquiry chairman points the finger of blame for discrimination at Britain’s entire police force’, the Mail laid down a set of tramlines along which numerous subsequent reports would run, reporting that ‘senior officers fear Leftwing agitators will make political capital out of it, which in turn could deter some officers from tackling black crime’.

  Straw had intended to make a speech to Parliament about the report on the day of its publication, during which he would announce a number of police reforms drawn from the report’s seventy recommendations. But on 21 February the Sunday Telegraph published leaked extracts from the penultimate draft of the report (Version 7). The leaks were published on the front page under the headline ‘Condon must admit Met racism or face sack’, and inside there were two more articles, and a comment piece which argued that institutional racism ‘is an ominous phrase, one that automatically damns everyone in the “institution”, irrespective of their individual attitude’ (that it does no such thing didn’t stop other papers taking precisely the same line, as we shall see) and that it was ‘a flawed and dangerous concept’. This well and truly set the press agenda. Straw injuncted the paper, but, following a media furore, backed down and allowed other papers to reprint what had already been published. A mole hunt in the Home Office was swiftly commenced, but drew a blank. Another possibility, however, is that Scotland Yard officers had stolen the penultimate draft, either by bugging or burglary, and had shown this to the Sunday Telegraph’s political editor, Tom Baldwin.34

  The question inevitably arises: cui bono? Liberal papers’ stress on the issue of institutional racism was almost certainly related to the Home Office’s determination to force Sir Paul Condon, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, to accept publicly that the force was institutionally racist, something which he had repeatedly refused to do, in spite of it being made abundantly clear that his job depended on it. But for right-wing papers, it very usefully distracted attention from the report’s revelations of appalling police incompetence and failure, and provided an opportunity to attack ‘political correctness’ and Labour policies. As Brian Cathcart argued, the Conservative press

  was of one mind: the report was flawed and unbalanced and the idea that all police officers or all white British people were racist was wrong and unjust. Many critics portrayed it as an exercise in political correctness which would make it impossible for the police to uphold the law where black people were concerned.35

  Arun Kundnani, in a seminal piece focussed on the themes which are central to this chapter – press hatred of liberal values (albeit at this time still dressed up as an attack on ‘political correctness’), New Labour represented as unpatriotic to the point of treachery, and an absolute refusal to countenance the idea of racism as systemic in British society – argued:

  The Macpherson report was represented in much of the press as an attack on Englishness and as a capitulation by a cosmopolitan anti-English ruling elite to the foreign concept of political correctness. For a few weeks, newspaper readers bore witness to this staged skirmish between a top-down, liberal anti-racism represented by Macpherson and the common-sense tolerance and moderation of the ordinary Englishman, for whom the papers claimed to speak.36

  He concluded that ‘with the political parties of the Right having lost their way, a newspaper-led English nationalism, which recognises the anxieties of economic globalisation and offers cultural protectionism in response, has become the main opposition to Blair’s government’.37 And as Gary Younge put it, ‘the consequent debate revealed just how little had changed, and intimated how grudging even that change had been, among certain vocal and powerful sections of the white community’.38

  ‘Political correctness gone mad’

  Let us now examine the hostile press reaction to the report, focussing in particular on how it was used to attack New Labour and deny the existence of systemic racism in the UK. The Telegraph (23 February) claimed that `the idea of institutional racism makes policing unworkable’ and rejected it as unprovable. Peter Hitchens in the
Express (23 February) stated that the idea of institutional racism was ‘a wild over-reaction’ and raised fears of a ‘politically correct purge’. Such papers vociferously argued that the real problem with British society was not racism, but the political correctness infecting the liberal establishment. The Mail (24 February 1999) warned of ‘an hysterical witch-hunt that will damage the cause of race relations’ and of the Lawrence’s cause being ‘overtaken by a kind of politically correct McCarthyism’. In its view, the words ‘institutional racism’ could ‘hardly be more chilling’ and ‘they must damn every member of the Force, irrespective of personal beliefs and behaviour. It is precisely the kind of prejudiced blanket condemnation in which genuine racists like to indulge’. It continues: ‘If the police are institutionally racist, must not the same be true of the Home Office, which controls the Force? And of the Government, which controls the Home Office? And indeed of the British people, who elect the Government? The logic of Sir William’s assessment is that the whole country is institutionally racist’. It condemns such a view as ‘political correctness gone mad’ and ‘rampant political correctness’, and accuses the ‘race relations lobby’ (personified here by Sir Herman Ouseley of the hated Commission for Racial Equality) of trying ‘to find a grievance – real or imagined – and exploit it for all it’s worth’. It worries that ‘there is the very real danger that the burgeoning race relations industry will now be encouraged to exert even more influence over every area of British life’. In the same issue, Lynda Lee Potter calls institutional racism ‘an inept, woolly and dangerous phrase which everyone ought to stop using’.39