by James Curran
one critical prerequisite is to examine Britain’s understanding of itself. How are the histories of England, Scotland and Wales understood by their people? What do the separate countries stand for, and what does Britain stand for? Of what may citizens be justly proud? How has the imagined nation stood the test of time? What should be preserved, what jettisoned, what revised or reworked? How can everyone have a recognised place within the larger picture?52
Thus, what the Telegraph presents as a bald statement is actually a series of questions for discussion, and the report’s remarks about pride in and preservation of aspects of British history are conveniently ignored.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the role which the paper allots to Jack Straw in the publication of the report. The headline is unequivocal – ‘Straw wants to rewrite our history’ – and unequivocally wrong, as there is nothing in the article that remotely substantiates such a wild accusation. In fact, Straw’s role in the report was limited to launching it. However, it is abundantly clear, and becomes ever more so as the controversy develops, that it is Straw in particular and Labour in general which are the Telegraph’s (and other Conservative papers’) real target. Thus, the article states that ‘although the Government finds some of the report’s recommendations unwelcome, particularly on asylum and immigration policy, it apparently accepts the thrust of its conclusions’, and Home Office minister Mike O’Brien is quoted to the effect that: ‘This is a timely report which adds much to the current debate on multi-ethnic Britain. The Government is profoundly committed to racial equality and the celebration of diversity. We are a multi-cultural society’. Similarly, the editorial, headed ‘The British race’, begins: ‘It is astonishing that ministers should have welcomed the sub-Marxist gibberish’ contained in the report, and concludes that: ‘Under the guise of “multi-culturalism”, 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’.
A galvanic reaction
It is extremely important to realise that the passages of the report which so enraged the Telegraph occupy just over three pages of its total of 417. Nonetheless, the effect of its reporting on much of the rest of the press was nothing less than galvanic. In spite of the fact that they had review copies of the report, and could have contacted Runnymede to ascertain if the Telegraph report was accurate, journalists on most other papers simply repeated what that Telegraph had said. Thus, that day’s Standard carried an article headed ‘The word “British” is racist – report’, and the late edition of the Sun ran a short piece headlined ‘“British” is race slur’. The next day, the Mail ditched the front page article it had intended running and replaced it with one headed ‘Racism slur on the word “British”’; the inside pages were also changed to include a typically partisan run-down of members of the commission which produced the report (similar ‘rogues galleries’ would appear in the Sun (11 October) and the Telegraph (12 October), which resulted in commissioners receiving hate mail and other forms of abuse), a lengthy editorial (‘What an insult to our history and intelligence’), an essay by Paul Johnson, and a hostile commentary by Raj Chandran of the Commission for Racial Equality (‘An insult to all our countrymen’). Similarly, the same day’s Sun ran an article headlined ‘Ministers welcome report which says “British” is racist and all our history must be re-written’, a lengthy piece by its political editor Trevor Kavanagh headed ‘Ministers welcome report which says “British” is a racist word’, an indignant editorial (‘Proud history’) which urged Straw to ‘stick this report in the bin’, and a comment piece (‘It’s ridiculous’) by the athlete Daley Thompson. The Times headed its report ‘Drop the word “British” says race trust’ and the Mirror ran with ‘British is “just another word for prejudice”’.
Indeed, such was the pack mentality of the press on this issue that even the liberal Guardian intermittently joined the fray. Thus, the headline of its main article on 11 October reads: ‘British tag is “coded racism”’, even though the term ‘coded racism’, quotes notwithstanding, appears neither in the report nor in the article itself, which is a characteristically well-informed piece by home affairs editor Alan Travis. The paper did run a broadly welcoming editorial entitled ‘Prescription for harmony’, although this carried the strap ‘But race report is spoilt by bad idea’: this appears to be ‘dropping Britain’ and suggesting that ‘Britain is a racially coded word that should be replaced with the term “community of communities’”, neither of which is recommended by the report. The paper does, however, redeem itself to some extent with an article by Parekh himself, and also one by Gary Younge, which opens with the most pertinent words written during the whole furore: ‘If you really want to take the racial temperature in Britain, you would be better off examining the reactions to the report on multi-ethnic Britain than the report itself’. Only the Independent and the Express succeeded in dealing with the report largely in their own terms, as opposed to following the Telegraph’s tramlines. At that point, the Express was a Labour-supporting paper and owned by the husband of one of the commissioners, Lady Gavron. Its editorial on 12 October observed ‘that a single phrase in a 400-page report into the future of a multiracial Britain has been pounced upon by those determined to suggest that the Government is undermining the identity of this country with mad political correctness’.
It should be pointed out that in a leader on 12 October, headed ‘Don’t diss Britannia’ (which must surely have baffled many of its elderly middle-class readers), the Telegraph slightly modified its original line by stating that ‘the report appeared to suggest’ that Britishness and Englishness were ‘racist’ terms, although in point of fact it appeared to do no such thing. However, this was mentioned merely en passant, and did not affect coverage of the affair either in that paper or elsewhere in the national press. It did publish an article by Parekh on 18 October, which belatedly set the record straight, but the following day ran a letter which misquoted the report and wrongly claimed that Parekh had misrepresented his own report.
Over the next few days, the commissioners were to find themselves described as ‘worthy idiots’, ‘of foreign extraction’ and ‘purblind, self-indulgent and insensitive’ in The Times; ‘middle-class twits’ in the Star; ‘crack-brained’, ‘Left wing cronies’ and ‘a bunch of cranks and losers’ in the Telegraph; ‘left-wing wafflers’ in the Evening Standard; and a ‘second-rate unrepresentative clique’ composed of ‘disconnected, whining liberals’ and ‘self-satisfied champions of liberal orthodoxy’ in the Mail. The report itself was condemned variously as ‘sub-Marxist gibberish’, ‘balderdash’, ‘ridiculous’, ‘burblings’, ‘rhubarb’, ‘an aberrant piece of politically correct lunacy’, ‘potty and sinister’, ‘ignorant clap-trap’ and ‘thoroughly nasty’ in the Telegraph; ‘right-on trendy tosh’ and a ‘pile of cack’ in the Star; ‘tendentious rubbish’, ‘ignorant and dishonest’ and ‘insulting trash’ in the Mail; ‘egregious’, ‘destructive’, displaying ‘ahistorical ignorance’, ‘just plain idiotic’ and ‘wrong in almost every possible way’ in The Sunday Times; and ‘tosh’, ‘dreadful rubbish’ and ‘ludicrous’ in the Sun, whose columnist Richard Littlejohn alleged that if the report’s recommendations were implemented, ‘children will be told lies about their history and encouraged to feel ashamed of their country’ (13 October). Meanwhile, exactly as in the case of the Macpherson report, the Telegraph gave over its letters pages to correspondence much of which would not have been in the least out of place in the official publications of the British National Party or the National Front, in which racism, rage and bile were relieved only by galumphing attempts at ‘humour’ which made Private Eye’s spoof e-mails from ‘Mike Giggler’ side-splitting by comparison.
Targeting Labour
The immediate purpose of all this fury and vituperation was, quite clearly, to force Jack Straw to distance himself from the report, which, just like the Macpherson report, w
as used by sections of the press as a pretext to attack everything about the Labour government which the Right detests, and in particular what it takes to be its attitudes to ethnicity and national identity. It is also important to bear in mind that a general election was widely expected in the next six months. Thus, for example, the Mail editorial (11 October) argued that:
In ordinary circumstances, the report’s clunking prose, flawed argument and lamentable ignorance of history would be risible. But this exercise was launched by Home Secretary Jack Straw. Its conclusions have been welcomed by the Home Office. If not yet official policy, the report reflects New Labour attitudes. Why should anyone be surprised? New Labour has never shown the slightest understanding of this nation’s past, or sympathy with its traditions.
It concluded: ‘The tragedy is that this self-serving exercise by a second-rate, unrepresentative clique is being embraced by Ministers who claim to represent Britain and the British people, but have plainly lost confidence in both’. Similarly, the essay in the same day’s paper by Paul Johnson argued that ‘the Runnymede Trust report, calling for a total re-write of our history and the banning of such terms as “English” and “Britain” as racist, looks like the first move in a New Labour brainwashing exercise designed to destroy our sense of nationhood’.
Further proof of the political motivation of this story, if any was needed, was provided by the Telegraph (12 October), which devoted no less than six self-congratulatory pieces to the conflagration which it had so successfully ignited. A column by Boris Johnson, headed ‘Why I give way to righteous paranoia about Britain’, warns that ‘this is a war over culture, which our side could lose’. One of the major points at issue in this ‘war’ is, of course, the Macpherson report which, as demonstrated above, earned Straw the undying hatred of papers such as the Telegraph. And, inevitably, this hoves into view in its editorial ‘Don’t diss Britannia’, which argues that ‘Mr Straw is unconvincing when he dons the mantle of John Bull. He has pulled a similar stunt before – making much of rowing back from some of the wilder shores of the Macpherson report on “institutionalised racism” in the Metropolitan Police’. Of that report, the editorial alleges that ‘Mr Straw was able to smuggle it past the public by playing the role of commonsense watchdog. So it is with this commission. Mr Straw and Number 10 have distanced themselves from the report’s most offensive comments, but they have not distanced themselves from its substantive proposals’. The editorial concludes that ‘the Conservatives now have an excellent chance to make good their past silence on Macpherson. They must expose the Government’s collusion in this attempt to destroy a thousand years of British history’.
Similarly, the same day’s Sun, in an editorial headed ‘A disgrace’, used the report to lambast one of its favourite Labour targets: the ‘metropolitan elite’:
We cannot tolerate an officially sanctioned Government report that says these things. The fact that the Home Secretary hasn’t binned the ludicrous ‘British is racist’ report is a disgrace. What on earth is going on? Too many in the Government don’t seem to like Britain … The new Establishment – the metropolitan elite – have no confidence in the British. They simply do not understand that patriotism is a good thing. In America, many homes have flags outside. Here, we have a government that appears to think its own people are racists. What a scandal. What a state of affairs.
The overtly party-political thrust of the Telegraph’s campaign was further emphasised on 13 October when it ran a lengthy piece by William Hague entitled ‘Why I am sick of the anti-British disease’. This began:
In the 1970s, the threat from the Left was an economic one and came in the form of militant unions, punitive taxes and picket lines. We called it the British disease. In 2000, the threat from the Left is as much a cultural one, and manifests itself in the tyranny of political correctness and the assault on British culture and history. We should call it the anti-British disease. Never has this cultural threat been more clearly expressed than in the report by the Runnymede commission.
According to Hague:
The report’s recommendations may range from the potty to the sinister, but it is the overall thinking that gave rise to creating the commission in the first place that represents the real threat. For when the commission says that ‘Britishness has systematic racial connotations’, it is betraying a wider agenda of the New Labour elite. These people believe that the very idea of ‘Britain’ is irredeemably tainted by the combination of our imperial history, a concept of nationality that is past its sell-by date and public institutions that are ‘institutionally racist’ In short, they hate who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going.
The report is then lumped together with ‘Cool Britannia’, devolution, ‘Europe’ and every other hate object in Tory demonology to argue that we have a government ‘led by a Prime Minister embarrassed about the country he lives in and the people who elected him’.
The paper also carried an editorial, headed ‘Turning point at Runnymede’. This again explicitly links the Runnymede document with the Macpherson report, of which it states that ‘no more disgracefully unfair document has ever been produced by a judge in modern British history’. However, it argued:
Its bigoted conclusions were accepted with only a whimper of protest by the institutions it criticised. The bullying of the ‘anti-racists’ had won. At last, though, something is changing. To the obvious shock of the comfortable peers, millionaires’ wives and public sector grandeees who lent their names to the report, people are starting to say that they will not take any more. The report’s suggestion that the word ‘British’ is racist has finally frightened even those ministers who thought that they could never go wrong by appeasing such doctrines. Jack Straw and Tony Blair have suddenly changed from their usual approval, and have reached instead for a Union flag in which to wrap themselves. It doesn’t fit very well, but it is interesting that it has happened at all.
Similarly, in the Sun (13 October), Richard Littlejohn claimed that the report
only addresses the agenda of the tiny, self-obsessed, unrepresentative New Labour elite. They’re not so much anti-British, as anti-English. They don’t seem to have a problem with Welsh, Irish or Scottish identity. In fact, they encourage it. That’s because top of their wish list is destroying the United Kingdom and splitting it into its component parts, subordinate to Brussels … A nation in which is nothing but a ‘community of communities’ can not survive as a nation, which is what many in New Labour actually crave.
Anti-Labour sentiment was also very much to the fore in the Sun (18 October) in an attack on the vice chair of the Runnymede Trust, Lady Gavron. She is described as ‘the poetry-loving wife of a millionaire’ and
a quintessential member of the London-based elite that we keep warning you about. Her husband is the ex-chairman of the Guardian Media Group – which owns the Guardian newspaper – the very essence of the commanding heights of metropolitan elitism. Don’t forget that Kate Gavron is only called Lady because her husband got a peerage after donating £500,000 to Labour. She has an agenda of her own which denigrates history, deplores nationhood and dedicates itself to intellectual revolution. She is privileged, moneyed and benefits from the system which she chooses to attack.
Spin and wishful thinking
However, to read most of the press reports of what Jack Straw said at the launch of the report and then to read the entire speech53 is to read about two apparently different events. The tone of the reports can be gathered from headlines such as ‘Straw beats very British retreat over race report’ (Telegraph) and ‘“Proud to be British” Straw raps race report’ (The Times), with even the more friendly papers appearing to join in the fray with ‘Race report angers “proud Briton” Straw’ (Express) and ‘Straw launches scathing attack on “unpatriotic” political left’ (Independent), although in the case of the last two the articles themselves gave a much more balanced account of the event than the headlines would have led the reader to expect.
Most of the lengthy speech by Straw (who had earlier seen a first draft of the report) is actually taken up with fulsome and clearly heartfelt praise for Runnymede’s work over the years. Given the sheer amount of criticism directed at the report by the press, Straw was clearly left with absolutely no option but to respond to it. What he in fact did was to re-write at least parts of the speech which he had intended to deliver, and to delay publication of the Home Office’s official forty-page response. Equally importantly, as Robin Richardson points out54 , and as is clear from two articles in the Independent (12 October) by its home affairs correspondent Ian Burrell, key journalists were briefed by the Home Office in such a way as to accentuate the more critical aspects of the speech, and much of the resulting coverage shows just how readily they accepted the officially spun line.
However, the positive parts of his speech (which also repeatedly praise the Macpherson Report) massively outnumber the few negative comments, which could be taken as its main point only by papers absolutely determined to spin a particular editorial line, or by journalists who believe and then parrot every word that they are told by spin doctors. Straw’s criticisms are actually pretty mild by comparison with his positive remarks, and occur near the end of his speech. What he actually said was that he felt that ‘the Commission were a little grudging in recognising what’s been achieved already’, that ‘I frankly don’t agree with the Commission’ over its views on Britishness (which he quite explicitly contrasted with what the Telegraph alleged its views were), and, via a reference to George Orwell’s famous remark that ‘almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than of stealing from the poor box’, that the task of moulding Britishness into a ‘single shared identity was always going to be a challenge, but it was in my judgement made more difficult by those on the left who turned their backs on concepts of patriotism and who left the field to those on the far right’. And that was it. Indeed, Straw’s strongest criticisms were actually reserved for the Telegraph itself: the Independent (but no other paper) quoted him as being ‘astonished’ at its ‘extraordinary intervention’, but nowhere was reported his remark that it ‘has had [emphasis added] a record of separating its news coverage which, on the whole, has broadly subscribed to the facts, from its opinion which is its business’ – which last remark could be taken as implying that the Telegraph is more of a viewspaper than a newspaper. Nor did any paper see fit to print the unqualified praise for the report voiced on the same day by Baroness Amos, a government Whip in the Lords. In this respect, funeral orations such as those read by The Times (12 October) – ‘the sheer force with which Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, distanced himself from the most controversial aspects of the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain report yesterday shows that this document will not influence official thinking in the future’ – come across as decidedly premature and the product of wishful thinking.