Culture Wars

by James Curran

  In the Mail, 26 February, Stephen Glover, in an article headed ‘As the Prime Minister damns the entire nation’, argued that ‘following the publication of the Stephen Lawrence report, Tony Blair and Jack Straw have effectively said that white Britons are a nation of racists’, and condemned what he called ‘this post-Macpherson hysterical climate’. He also stated that the government’s reaction to the report and some of its conclusions ‘verge on the lunatic’, and noted that ‘as a retired High Court judge, Sir William has not officially signed up to New Labour. But several of his recommendations have that smack of authoritarianism and obsession with control that we associate with this Government.’ In his view, many of Macpherson’s proposals

  would enhance the power of the State and the police, and cause bitter resentment. Some will also take issue with the cradle to grave indoctrination envisaged by Sir William. ‘If racism is to be eradicated,’ he writes in a particularly preposterous passage, ‘there must be specific and co-ordinated action, both with the agencies themselves and by society at large, particularly through the educational system, from pre-primary school upwards and onwards.’ This is the language of Soviet Russia, not a fuddy-duddy retired High Court judge.

  In an editorial published on 25 February and headed ‘A misguided and unfair report’, the paper invoked the spectre of the ‘loony left’ by arguing that Macpherson’s analysis represented ‘the wild dreams of the left, kept down, just, in the 1980s, and now reaching for power’. Similarly, Leo McKinstry in the Sunday Telegraph (28 February), under the heading `Final triumph for town hall political correctness’, warned that Macpherson had given a ‘sub-marxist analysis of the institutions of contemporary … Britain like a lecturer in sociology from the sixties’ in a report written in the language of `the inner-city council chamber’. Similarly, in the Mail on Sunday (28 February), Stewart Steven expressed his disgust at the fact that in America ‘half-baked so-called academics in so-called disciplines like sociology have produced definition after definition [of racism] owing a good deal to Marxist theory and very little to real people’s lives’ and complained that the Macpherson report had ‘produced a definition of institutional racism which has flown to us from across the Atlantic and the wilder fringes of the race industry there’.

  In The Sunday Times (28 February), Melanie Phillips pursued the anti-anti-racist line, complaining that attempts

  to purify thought are as sinister as they are useless. White people are subjected to managerial McCarthyism; the real needs of black people, meanwhile, are trampled down in the stampede to claim moral virtue. We’ve seen all this played out hideously in ‘anti-racist’ social work and probation …. Similarly, he recommends anti-racist and multicultural education in schools. But we’ve had all that since the 1980s. Teachers have been censoring ‘offensive’ fiction; they won’t teach British political history on the grounds that it is ‘colonialist’ and ‘racist’; we’ve even had multicultural maths. The result has been that white children have been abandoned to an ignorance which breeds prejudice, while black children have been effectively excluded from mainstream culture.

  In her view, ‘anti-racist activists aren’t interested in preventing such tragedies by tackling the real roots of white bigotry. They want instead to prove white society is endemically racist so they can build their empires and wield power over others. The poor Lawrences, who only want justice for their murdered son, have been used’. Macpherson had played the role of ‘useful idiot’ and ‘the age of political correctness has officially arrived’. In the Mail (5 March), Andrew Alexander worried that `beneath the benign face of do-gooders may lurk sinister totalitarian instincts of the sort normally associated with Stalin and Hitler’.

  ‘Something terrible is happening’

  In the Sun (23 February), Richard Littlejohn presented the report as evidence of a new establishment which despised England and hated all its institutions. And in the Sun (2 March 1999) he asked whether Tony Blair’s attacks on racism in Britain meant that Tony Blair had ‘become our first black Prime Minister’. In Littlejohn’s view, for all Blair’s talk of ‘the people’, he actually ‘loathes the English … It has become clear that Blair’s mission is to eradicate, denigrate or undermine every quintessentially English institution from the Metropolitan Police downwards’. Responding to this press onslaught Polly Toynbee published an article in the Guardian (3 March) article headed ‘The white backlash: Macpherson is now a rallying cry for a vision of nation and race that is vile’. In it she argues:

  If you want a perfect model of institutional racism, buy the Telegraph for a whiff of Britain’s conservative establishment. In its leaders and columns the racism is witting and unremitting, proud and disgraceful. It revels in it, rolls in it, abominating politically correct non-racists. Its letters page is the noticeboard for racists …. No, this is not institutional racism – Macpherson describes that as ‘unwitting’ – this is just plain old-fashioned racism.

  Littlejohn renewed his attack in the Sun (5 March) in a piece headed ‘Enemies of the people’, asserting that ‘Toynbee represents an entire class of people who run this country from day to day’, who have ‘a hatred of all British institutions, especially the police’, and are ‘ashamed of [their] own nationality’. Similarly, in the Sunday Telegraph (7 March), Minette Marrin called Toynbee ‘extremely well-connected and influential in Centre and Left of Centre circles and is, generally speaking, a powerful Establishment figure’. In her view, ‘Toynbee’s attitude is typical of the views of a large class of important and influential people in this country. It is typical of the instinctive response of the new Establishment’ who seem ‘positively to enjoy despising the police, and British institutions generally’ and have a dismissive attitude to their own British heritage. She complains that ‘something terrible is happening to public debate if such a person can make such serious public denunciations without any evidence’ (which is demonstrably not the case) and attributes this to a climate encouraged by the report in which ‘something is now racist if someone thinks it is’.

  The Macpherson report had clearly touched a very raw nerve in right-wing circles, and particularly in the press. But beneath the rhetoric about ‘political correctness gone mad’ and the customary attacks on anti-racism, there is clearly something else that is being expressed here, albeit somewhat inchoately, namely that the Labour government is quite simply illegitimate and not fit to be in power. This, of course, is the other side of the coin to the deeply held conviction that the Conservatives are not only the natural but the rightful party of government. What we hear in the pages of these newspapers are the outraged roars of those who feel that they have been politically dispossessed, and that the politicians to whom they have traditionally paid allegiance have been ousted by an interloper, and an illegitimate one at that. This is revenge for the aspirations set out at the start of this chapter, encapsulated in the term ‘Cool Britannia’, which was not coined by New Labour but was routinely employed by the right-wing press in order to denigrate its cultural policies. For these people, the sight of Noel Gallagher drinking champagne with Tony Blair at No. 10 seems to have been utterly traumatic, and to have epitomised an out-of-joint state of affairs which gave rise to a rancid sense of grievance and boiling resentment which found its first major expression in press reaction to the Macpherson report. But much more, and much worse, was to come, as outlined in the following sections.

  What effect the press onslaught actually had on the government and ensuing policy is hard to judge. Alastair Campbell’s diaries record that at this moment Blair was ‘losing his nerve a bit’, ‘feeling a bit scarred’,40 was worried that ‘the whole thing would be used as a stick to beat all the police’,41 ‘that we would lose the support of the police if we weren’t careful’42 and that the report ‘should not lead to an over-the-top mass of new laws and procedures’. He also felt that the government was ‘veering towards the politically correct’,43 which certainly suggests an affinity with some of the ideas expresse
d by the press.

  To begin with, Straw agreed to Macpherson’s recommendation that the provisions of the Race Relations Act 1976, which covers direct (overt) discrimination as well as indirect (institutional) discrimination, should be extended to the police, who had hitherto been exempted. But in the Queen’s speech in November it was announced that the Act would be amended to extend it to the police and other public bodies only in relation to direct discrimination. This was reversed after an outcry. Under the amended Act:

  • Racial discrimination is ‘unacceptable’ and is outlawed in all public authorities, and in those functions of public authorities run by the private sector.

  • Public bodies have a general duty to promote race equality – they have no discretion to decide ‘whether the promotion of race equality is an “appropriate activity”’.

  • They must promote equality of opportunity and ‘good relations’ between people of different racial groups.

  • The general duty to promote race equality is a ‘positive one’ requiring public authorities to be pro-active in seeking to avoid unlawful discrimination before it occurs.44

  This was a relatively modest response to Macpherson’s seventy recommendations, although, in subsequent years, sixty-seven of these led to various specific changes in practice or the law.45 But it can also be argued that the negative and destructive press campaign against the report meant that, even if it did manage to bring the notion of institutional racism into public debate, it failed to open up the issue of systemic and endemic racism as fully as it had intended to do. Furthermore, it should be noted that, not long after it had welcomed the Macpherson report, Labour introduced what would become the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, which its critics regarded as representing institutional racism writ large. This followed on from the 2002 white paper Secure Borders, Safe Havens: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain (in which there was considerably more stress on integration than diversity), and amended existing nationality legislation, already highly restrictive, by:

  • Extending the power to detain asylum seekers;

  • Creating a ‘white list’ of safe countries, whose citizens who have their asylum applications rejected cannot remain in the UK while they mount an appeal;

  • Establishing accommodation (i.e. detention) centres to house asylum seekers for up to six months while their applications were considered;

  • Removing access to support for asylum seekers who were destitute but who did not claim asylum immediately upon arrival.

  For critics of the Act, these measures represented institutional racism writ large. In 2004 the court of appeal found that the final provision breached Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and in October 2004 the home secretary was forced to abandon this policy.

  The future of multi-ethnic Britain

  On 27 January 1998, the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain was launched by the Runnymede Trust, an independent think-tank dedicated to promoting racial justice. Although formally independent of government, it had close ties to Labour, and Jack Straw accepted an invitation to launch the Commission. Its remit was to ‘analyse the current state of multi-ethnic Britain and propose ways of countering racial discrimination and disadvantage … making Britain a confident and vibrant multicultural society at ease with its rich diversity’.46 The ensuing report argued that Britain was ‘both a community of citizens’ and a ‘community of communities, both a liberal and a multicultural society’. Since citizens had ‘differing needs’, equal treatment required ‘full account to be taken of their differences’.47 It argued that building and sustaining a community of citizens and communities would involve:

  • Rethinking the national story and national identity;

  • Understanding that all identities are in a process of transition;

  • Developing a balance between cohesion, equality and difference;

  • Addressing and eliminating all forms of racism;

  • Reducing material inequalities;

  • Building a pluralistic human rights culture.48

  On 10 October 2000, a day before the official launch of the report, and when it was still embargoed, the Telegraph ran a front-page article by its Home Affairs editor, Philip Johnston, headed ’Straw wants to rewrite our history’, with the strap line ‘“British” is a racist word, says report’. The article opens with the words: ‘Britain should be formally recognised as a multi-cultural society whose history needs to be “revised, rethought or jettisoned”, says a report that has been welcomed by ministers’, and continues:

  The inquiry was set up three years ago by the Runnymede Trust, a race equality think tank, and launched by Jack Straw, Home Secretary. Its report, to be published tomorrow, defines the UK as ‘a community of communities’ rather than a nation. It says the description of its inhabitants as British ‘will never do on its own’, largely because the term has ‘racist connotations’.

  Inside, an article by Johnston entitled ‘Thinkers who want to consign our island story to history’ refers to ‘the campaign to turn Britain officially into a multicultural nation’ and calls the report ‘a cauldron of political correctness’. An editorial entitled ‘The British race’ complains that ‘it is astonishing that ministers should have welcomed the sub-Marxist gibberish’ contained in the report, condemns its findings as ‘extreme and tendentious’, alleges that almost all of its authors ‘are directly or indirectly supported by the taxpayer’ and concludes that ‘under the guise of “multiculturalism”, they are advancing their old Marxist dislike of any national culture. It is shameful that the Government should have been cowed into going along with this rubbish’.

  The front-page article contains no less than five major errors in a few lines, but they were absolutely to determine the way in which not only the Telegraph but other papers were to cover the report over subsequent days. The parallel with the Sunday Telegraph’s jumping the gun with the Macpherson report is inescapable.

  First, and most seriously, the report nowhere says that the term ‘British’ has ‘racist connotations’, as the Telegraph’s use of quotation marks clearly suggests. What it actually says is: ‘Britishness, as much as Englishness, has systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations. Whiteness nowhere features as an explicit condition of being British, but it is widely understood that Englishness, and therefore Britishness, is racially coded’. It notes that, for Asians, African-Caribbeans and Africans, ‘Britishness is a reminder of colonisation and empire, and to that extent is not attractive’ but adds that, although ‘Britishness is not ideal … at least it appears acceptable, particularly when suitably qualified – Black British, Indian British, British Muslim, and so on’49 . However, since the Telegraph article, and subsequent ones in the same paper, repeatedly substitute the word ‘racist’ for ‘racial’ one can only assume that the editor took them to mean the same thing, in which case he would also have been bound to agree that the statement of fact: ‘The Telegraph is a national newspaper’ is the same as the judgement: ‘The Telegraph is a nationalist newspaper’.

  Second, the report does not define the UK as a community of communities rather than a nation but simply uses the phrase as a means of picturing how Britain could, and in its opinion, should, develop. It does this as a way of trying to displace a different picture: Britain as consisting of one large homogenous majority plus various small minorities. But nowhere is it suggested that this is how Britain should be re-named. This is what the report actually says:

  It would be consistent with the dictionary definition [of community] to envisage Britain as a community whose three principal constituent parts are England, Scotland and Wales, and to envisage each of the constituent parts as a community, as also each separate region, city, town or borough. Any one individual belongs to several different communities.50

  Third, like so much of the myopically London-based national press, the Telegraph makes the elementary mistake of conflating the United Kingdom and the Britis
h Isles. What the report actually says is this:

  Many acknowledge that ideally there needs to be a way of referring to the larger whole of which Scotland, Wales and England are constituent parts. But the nation state to which they belong is the United Kingdom not Britain … The Good Friday Agreement of 1999 implies that there should be a sense of affiliation to the supranational identity known as ‘these islands’ [that is, including the Republic of Ireland]. Perhaps one day there will be an adjective to refer to this entity, similar in power perhaps to the unifying word ‘Nordic’ in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. But for the present no such adjective is in sight. It is entirely plain, however, that the word ‘British’ will never do on its own.51

  This is self-evidently true as applied to the British Isles, as in the report, and as Philip Johnston would have discovered if he had dropped into a bar in, say, a nationalist part of Derry and informed the assembled company that they were all British. Applied to the United Kingdom, however, it becomes quite a different proposition, and one which the report never puts forward.

  Fourth, to state that the report argues that British history needs to be rewritten, revised, rethought or jettisoned is selective to the point of serious distortion. The passage to which this charge refers merely argues that if Britain is to acquire ‘a broad framework of common belonging’ in which ‘cultural diversity is cherished and celebrated’, then