Culture Wars

by James Curran

  ‘Commissars of the new order’

  Another target of the newspapers’ wrath was, inevitably, the ‘race relations industry’. Thus, the original Telegraph editorial (10 October), complains that there is no evidence that the authors of the report ‘consulted anyone outside the race industry’; the Sun (12 October) condemns the authors as a ‘bunch of left-wing academics and race relations “experts”’; the Telegraph (12 October) attacks the ‘members of the monocultural race relations industry who staffed the commission [who] have written themselves a meal ticket for life as commissars of the new order – all at the expense of our freedoms and traditions’; the Standard (12 October) talks of ‘a committee composed of Left-wing wafflers and professional pillars of the race relations industry’; Richard Littlejohn in the Sun (13 October) derides people ‘who make a good living out of promoting racial division’; and Norman Tebbit in the Mail on Sunday (15 October) argues that ‘racism is not widespread among most of British society, but it permeates every nook and cranny of the race relations industry’, staffed as it is by ‘race relations warriors’.

  In the wake of the disturbances in Oldham in May 2001, Minette Marrin wrote a column, in the Guardian (29 May 2001) in which she claimed that:

  One of the greatest obstacles in the way of good race relations here is multiculturalism. Multiculturalism actually promotes racism. It engenders confusion, resentment and bullying; it encourages division and prevents people developing a shared British identity … Multiculturalism is the idea that all cultures are of equal value, and deserve equal respect – an understandable response to the confusions of mass mobility. Unfortunately it has become overloaded with anxieties about race; in fact to say you are against multiculturalism is pretty much to confess to racism.

  She continued:

  What we must have to live together in harmony is a tolerant, over-arching common culture. We already have one, in what one might call our host culture, but the very idea of a host culture is denounced by multiculturalists as supremacist and racist; people have begun to feel confused by the fear of being thought racist into being ashamed of their own culture. Multiculturalism is always celebrating difference. Of course it is right that everyone should be free to remember their traditions and practise their faith, within the limits of the laws and traditions of this country. Of course all these differences can enrich the common culture … But what we’ve seen too often is a vociferous insistence on ethnic differences, which constantly remind people of their otherness. Worse still, this celebration of ethnic diversity has tended, pointedly, to exclude only one ethnic tradition – Englishness (or sometimes, more loosely, Britishness).

  In Marrin’s view, ‘most astonishing was the Parekh report’s condemnation of the word British. This was truly inflammatory’. According to her ‘that report actually stated “immigrants owe loyalty to the British state, but not to its values, customs and way of life”’. She then asks:

  What could be more destructive of any aspirations to a mixed community? What could be more destructive of the ideal of a multiracial Britain? What can be the point of coming here as an immigrant, if one feels no respect for our way of life? How could anyone truly welcome an immigrant with such a view? How can any minorities already loyal to the British way of life fail to be deeply offended or confused?

  The only problem is, however, that the account that she presents of multiculturalism is a barely recognisable caricature, and, more seriously still, the report did not condemn the word British nor does it contain the words she attributes to it, her use of quotation marks notwithstanding.

  Thus, we return to our starting point in this study of press reaction to the Parekh report: the generation of outrage and controversy based on misquotation and false premises – unfortunately an all too familiar tactic on the part of right-wing newspapers in the UK (and not simply tabloid ones either). Whether this was deliberate on the part of the Telegraph in the first place is impossible to ascertain, but it does not really matter. It did what it did, and most other papers immediately followed suit, without bothering to check the facts, because it suited their ideological agenda to do so. It has been suggested55 that, disappointed that the report was failing to garner much press coverage prior to its publication, certain commissioners, or employees of the PR company hired by Runnymede to promote the report, may have drawn the attention of the Telegraph to what the report said about the connotations of the word ‘Britishness’, hoping thus to generate more column inches. If so, given that paper’s reaction to the Macpherson report, and its immediate effect on subsequent coverage of the report by other right-wing newspapers, they were really quite extraordinarily naïve and foolhardy. Pace Sarah Neal and Eugene McLaughlin,56 there was nothing remotely unpredictable about the press coverage of the report, whose conclusions, even if reported accurately, would have been like waving a red rag at a furiously charging bull, one which had already gored the Macpherson report and was eagerly sniffing out its next victim.

  Conclusion

  The press reaction to the Macpherson and Parekh reports clearly demonstrates that even though Labour had finally managed to ditch the ‘loony’ label, it had by no means assuaged the customary and intense right-wing hostility towards it on the part of both politicians and the press. Its policies on ethnicity would continue to be its Achilles heel, not least because sections of the press have, as we have seen, a long history of hostility to ethnic ‘others’ of one kind or another. What would follow the assaults on the Macpherson and Parekh reports would be a long series of attacks by these papers on ‘multiculturalism’, which they rarely defined and which simply became a boo word for everything which the right loathed about a government which it clearly regarded as treacherous and illegitimate. These attacks became all the more intense in the wake of the urban disturbances in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford in summer 2001. With the attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001 and the London bombings of July 2005 the press began to focus increasingly on Britain’s Muslim communities and to blame Islamic extremism on the consequences of Labour’s ‘multicultural’ policies, which the right repeatedly and consistently represented as having created ethnic ghettos and caused ‘white flight’, with the consequence that the country was ‘sleepwalking to segregation’. This was the phrase coined by Trevor Phillips, then chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, in a speech in September 2005 which received vast amounts of adulatory (if not always accurate) press coverage in Conservative papers.

  What the consequences of these press attacks were for Labour’s actual policies is extremely hard to gauge. They clearly made it very defensive, and desperate to display its patriotic credentials (witness the numerous speeches by the likes of Robin Cook, Gordon Brown and David Blunkett about Britishness). Various newspapers regularly claimed that Blair, Blunkett, Straw and other leading Labour figures had repudiated ‘multiculturalism’, but such was the selectivity of their reporting, and so unclear was what the papers actually meant by ‘multiculturalism’ (which is an extremely slippery term even in less partisan and ideologically driven hands), that it’s extremely difficult to judge what substance, if any, these reports actually had. Much more to the point is Keenan Malik’s observation that ‘much of the contemporary criticism of multiculturalism is driven by racism, bigotry and sheer hatred for the other’57 , which points to the fact that today, opposition to immigrants, immigration and indeed people of colour in general is often expressed indirectly, through opposition to ‘multiculturalism’. In other words, it is frequently a coded form of racism.

  Whatever the case, it would be far too easy to claim that, had it not been for the press onslaught on institutional racism and ‘multiculturalism’, Labour would have pursued policies more in keeping with Macpherson’s and Parekh’s conclusions and recommendations. In particular, the alacrity and zeal with which it set about drastically tightening up on immigration and asylum via the legislation listed above suggests otherwise. As argued elsewhere in this book, Labour’s more right-wing
tendencies cannot simply be explained away by its fear of and subservience to the Conservative press.

  I have concentrated on the Parekh and Macpherson reports in this chapter partly because they were so clearly employed by the press to put Labour on notice during its early years in power. But I have also done so because the bitter assaults on the ‘liberal elite’ have a remarkably contemporary ring to them in the wake of Brexit, and point to much deeper ideological forces at work here. As Andrew Pilkington has argued in respect of the Parekh Report:

  [It] clearly touched a nerve. The hostile media coverage indicated the existence of considerable anger towards the idea that Britain needed to change in fundamental ways. The selective attention paid to national identity and the need to rethink the national story arguably points to anxiety over who we are in a postcolonial world (and it should be noted devolved/European world). Who are we, Brits any longer? Who are we in a world where we seem threatened from below by migrants from other countries that we used to rule and from above by our membership of an organisation dominated by countries who have been our traditional enemies. And who are we when the UK seems to be fragmenting with the restoration of national assembles and parliaments? The hysteria manifest in the media reaction signals the depth of the anxiety.58

  The problem is, however, that the prevalence in so much of the national press of the kinds of views outlined above makes it extremely difficult to conduct public discussion of these kinds of extremely urgent issues. It is clearly highly unpleasant for any government to live with the daily diatribe which is liable at any time, as in the case of the two reports discussed here, to mushroom into a full-blown assault in which truth is the first casualty, and it is also far too tempting for Conservatives, whether in government or opposition to play to the populist press gallery when it suits their cause. Liberal bien pensants who read only the Guardian, Independent, Financial Times or no national newspaper at all can have little idea of the sheer amount of rabid, raging reaction that daily erupts from much of our national press.

  However, discussion of the future direction of Britain is far too important for its terms to be dictated by unelected, unrepresentative and unaccountable newspaper owners, editors and pundits59 , whose daily outpourings have significantly contributed to Britain leaving the EU and to the growth of a particularly toxic and enragé form of English nationalism. But such discussion cannot simply be avoided as too awkward. As Stuart Hall, one of the members of the Commission on the Future of Multi–Ethnic Britain, put it at the time of the report’s publication:

  Britain always was and really is now a nation of nations. It cannot continue to conflate ‘Englishness’ with ‘Britishness’. Some commentators really do suppose that Britain will obliterate all trace of its imperial history, devolve government, integrate with the global economy, play an active role in Europe, treat all minority peoples as equal citizens – and retain its self-understanding intact since Magna Carta! This is not serious analysis, it is cloud cuckoo land. The question of Britishness is a timebomb which is ticking away at the centre of this society and it is either faced and confronted or it will explode in our face in ways which we do not wish.60

  This was a quite remarkably prescient remark, but at the time of writing the omens are not at all hopeful, and this is a situation for which the British national press must take a very considerable share of the blame.

  Notes

  1. T. Blair, New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country (London: Fourth Estate, 1996), p. 71.

  2. C. Smith, Creative Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 36.

  3. M. Leonard, Britain TM (London: Demos, 1997), p. 56.

  4. D. Blunkett, Politics and Progress: Renewing Democracy and Civil Society (London: Politico’s Publishing, 2001), p. 128.

  5. B. Gould, The Unfinished Revolution: How Labour Changed British Politics for Ever (London: Abacus,2011), pp. 46–7.

  6. Ibid., p. 48.

  7. Ibid., p. 253.

  8. See in particular N. Murray, ‘Anti-racists and other demons: the press and ideology in Thatcher’s Britain’, Race & Class, 27(3), 1986, pp. 1–19; P. Gordon and D. Rosenberg, Daily Racism: the Press and Black People in Britain (London: The Runnymede Trust 1989); T. van Dijk, Racism and the Press (London: Routledge, 1991); the SubScribe website (www.sub-scribe.co.uk/).

  9. T. van Dijk, Elite Discourse and Racism (London: Sage, 1993), p. 278.

  10. M. Barker, The New Racism (London: Junction Books, 1981), p. 17.

  11. M. Billig, S. Condor, D. Edwards, M. Gane, Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking (London: Sage, 1988), p. 120.

  12. C. Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1939 (London: Routledge, 1979); T. Kushner and K. Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 19–63.

  13. The best accounts of British policy towards Jewish refugees in the 1930s are L. London, Whitehall and the Jews: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); A.J. Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich (London: Frank Cass, 1994); Kushner and Knox, Refugees, pp. 126–214).

  14. S. Cohen, From the Jews to the Tamils: Britain’s Mistreatment of Refugees (Manchester: South Manchester Law Centre, 1988).

  15. www.bbc.co.uk/news/10409026; http://judeninthemar.org/the-voyage/.

  16. For an excellent account of the parallels between the hostility shown by sections of the press to Jewish refugees and to their contemporary counterparts see A. Karpf, ‘We’ve been here before’, Guardian, 8 June 2002.

  17. T. Kushner, The Battle of Britishness: Immigrant Journeys, 1685 to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 119–38; London, Whitehall; L. London, ‘Whitehall and the refugees: the 1930s and the 1990s’, Patterns of Prejudice, 34(3), 2000, pp. 17–26.

  18. London, Whitehall, p. 13.

  19. London, ‘Whitehall’, p. 18.

  20. For numerous examples of this kind of thinking, see F. Palmer (ed.), Anti-racism: An Assault on Education and Value (London: The Sherwood Press, 1986).

  21. P. Gordon, ‘A dirty war: The New Right and local authority anti-racism’, in W. Ball and J. Solomos (eds), Race and Local Politics, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 176. For further discussion of anti-anti-racism see Murray, ‘Anti-racists’; Gordon and Rosenberg, Daily Racism, pp. 39–51; P. Bonnett, Anti-racism (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 147–68; J. Burnett, ‘Anti-racism: totem and taboo – a review article’, Race & Class, 57:1, 2015, pp. 78–87.

  22. D. Edgar, The Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), p. 133.

  23. B. MacArthur, The Penguin Book of Modern Speeches (London; Penguin, 2017), p. 392.

  24. Quoted in Gordon 1990: 178.

  25. Summarised at www.s-cool.co.uk/a-level/sociology/inequalities/revise-it/the-swann-report-racism.

  26. Tracy was a British travel writer and novelist who regularly wrote for the Telegraph. On occasion her columns defended South Africa, and also WISE (Welsh, Irish, Scottish, English), an anti-immigration organisation founded in 1947 which had links to the National Front and the Monday Club. On 24 December 1977 her column suggested a Christmas present for David Lane, the chair of the CRE, ‘who has just broken a long and welcome silence … with a string a clichés remarkable even for him’. This was ‘a terrace house in Southall, with an ethnic slaughteryard on one side and on the other a temple, with chanting kept up merrily day and night; and a little pied a terre in Notting Hill for the August weekend’.

  27. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William MacPherson of Cluny (London: HMSO, 1999), para. 46.1.

  28. Ibid., para. 6.34.

  29. www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/feb/24/lawrence.ukcrime1

  30. Gary Younge, ‘The death of Stephen Lawrence: the Macpherson Report’, Political Quarterly, 70(3), 1999, p. 330. For a useful discussion of the concept of institutional racism, see J. Bourne, ‘The life and times of institut
ional racism’, Race & Class, 43(2), pp. 7–22.

  31. Ibid., p. 331.

  32. Ibid., p. 332.

  33. Ibid., p. 333.

  34. M. Gillard and L. Flynn, Untouchables: Dirty Cops, Bent Justice and Racism in Scotland Yard (London: Bloomsbury 2012), pp. 394–405. These suggestions, which first appeared in the Independent, 2 April 2001, tended to be dismissed at the time as conspiracy theorising. However, the substantial evidence of press/police collusion which emerged at the Leveson Inquiry, much more of which would doubtless come to light if the second part of the Inquiry took place, lends them weight.

  35. B. Cathcart, The Case of Stephen Lawrence (London: Penguin 2000), p. 416.

  36. Arun Kundnani, ‘“Stumbling on”: race, class and England’, Race & Class, 41(4), 2000, p. 2.

  37. Ibid., p. 16.