by A. N. Wilson
This borough of London was no stranger to violence, nor to racism. In 1991 there had been two murders, of Rolan Adams and Orville Blair, which were thought to be racially motivated, and below the roundabout on Well Hall Road, in July 1992, a young Asian, Rohit Duggal, was murdered. This had been a knife murder by one Peter Thompson who was convicted of the crime at the Old Bailey.
What made the Lawrence case special was that no one was prosecuted for the crime in spite of the fact that no one appeared in much doubt about the identity of the killers. The inquest into Stephen Lawrence’s death took place at Southwark Crown Court in February 1997. It had taken so long–getting on for five years after the murder–because of the failure of the Crown Prosecution Service to bring anyone to justice, followed by an unsuccessful private prosecution, brought by Neville and Doreen Lawrence, against five white youths with a known history of knife crime and racist abuse. The matter had been sub judice until the coroner’s jury heard the evidence again and decreed–‘Stephen Lawrence was unlawfully killed in a completely unprovoked racist attack by five white youths.’10
The next day the Daily Mail carried as its front-page headline a single word in two-inch-high letters: MURDERERS.
The Daily Mail today takes the unprecedented step of naming five young men as murderers. They may not have been convicted in a court of law, but police are sure that David Norris, Neil Acourt, Jamie Acourt, Gary Dobson and Luke Knight are the white youths who killed black teenager Stephen Lawrence. We are naming them because, despite a criminal case, a private prosecution and an inquest, there has still been no justice for Stephen, who was stabbed to death in a racist attack four years ago.
One or more of the five may have a valid defence to the charge which has been repeatedly levelled against them. So far they have steadfastly refused every opportunity to offer such a defence. Four have refused to give any alibi for that night in April 1993. One initially offered an alibi, but it did not stand up when police checked it out. This week the five refused to answer any questions at the inquest on Stephen, citing their legal right of privilege not to say anything which might incriminate them…
If these men are innocent they now have every opportunity to clear their names in legal action against The Daily Mail. They would have to give evidence and a jury in possession of all the facts would finally be able to decide.11
None of the five ever sued the Mail for libel. Doreen Lawrence was probably right to believe that an open accusation of murder in an English newspaper was ‘unheard of’.12 Neil Acourt, the prime suspect, had a history of stabbing, had been implicated in a stabbing incident in an Eltham Wimpy Bar; he appears to have been present at the knifing of a boy called Stacey Benefield by David Norris. The boys were run-of-the-mill south London miscreants whose upbringing more or less guaranteed a life of crime. (The Acourts’ mother, Patricia, was the sister of Terry Stuart, convicted burglar and drug trafficker. Luke Knight was related to the East End gangster Ronnie Knight–and so on, and so on.)
Only a percentage of murders ever get solved. Nevertheless, to most observers the Lawrence story was particularly horrifying, not merely because a promising eighteen-year-old had been savagely massacred at a bus stop, but because the police could have done so much more to prosecute his killers. More than this, the first of the public inquiries into the Lawrence murder–that conducted by the Kent police force–uncovered a direct connection between ‘unsatisfactory’ policemen and the family of David Norris (which included Clifford Norris, whose big drugs racket had involved the corruption of a number of officers.13).
In the second inquiry into the case, headed by Sir William Macpherson–a former High Court judge–and submitted to the Home Secretary in February 1999–the incompetence of the police was mercilessly exposed, but it did not, as such, accuse the officers investigating the murder of corruption. Rather, it indicated that the catalogue of misjudgements, the failure to act on early tip-offs or to make early arrests, ‘the botched surveillance, the failure to pursue leads swiftly and systematically; the mishandling of potential witnesses; the poor organization when the arrest finally came.14 had been enormously exacerbated by one factor: race.
Unwitting racism can arise because of a lack of understanding, ignorance or mistaken beliefs. It can arise from well-intentioned but patronising words or actions. It can arise from unfamiliarity with the behaviour or cultural traditions of people or families from minority ethnic communities. It can arise from racist stereotyping of black people as potential criminals or troublemakers. Often this arises out of uncritical self-understanding born out of an inflexible police ethos of the ‘traditional’ way of doing things. Furthermore, such attitudes can thrive in a tightly knit community, so that there can be a collective failure to detect and to outlaw this breed of racism. The police canteen can too easily be its breeding ground.
In her book about her son’s murder, Doreen Lawrence described walking down Well Hall Road after she had viewed her son’s dead body and left the morgue. The spot where the murder happened is not, she emphasised, an obviously sinister place. Unlike the bleak estates of tower blocks which litter the poorer parts of south London, and unlike the working-class estate of council houses where the Lawrences themselves lived, ‘Well Hall Road was a different world to the one we lived in. It all looked so Olde English…The streets all have poets’ names: Rochester, Congreve, Lovelace. There is green in front of the houses, and plane trees line the road. Right opposite where Stephen finally fell down dying there is a Catholic church built in warm brown brick. It has the look of the 1920s, the look of an Agatha Christie film on TV rather than the gritty back streets of Woolwich or Peckham. If my son had not died there I would probably think it was a nice area, almost leafy and like a village… I couldn’t believe that such an area could produce people who would commit such a horrific crime. But the Englishness was like a mockery now, and the fake old-world features a way of saying to me, You don’t belong here in our little world, come here if you dare.’15
The Macpherson Report, and Mrs Lawrence, both saw a conservative, small ‘c’, old-fashioned England as itself colluding with the murder. The police had failed in imagination; but by extension, to use the old cliché mocked so mercilessly by the Peter Simple fantasies in the Daily Telegraph, we were all guilty. Sir Paul Condon, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was called upon by one member of the Macpherson Inquiry panel, John Sentamu, then Bishop of Stepney, later Archbishop of York, to make a public confession of institutional racism. ‘It seems to me, Sir Paul, that the door is open. It is like when Winnie Mandela was challenged in the Truth Commission in South Africa by Desmond Tutu to acknowledge that she had done wrong and she just did it and suddenly a whole burden of weight… melted away…If we are to go forward, I say to you now, just say, “Yes, I acknowledge institutional racism in the police” and then in a way the whole thing is over and we can go forward together. That is my question. Could you do that today?’
Sir Paul could not. Although there were calls for Sir Paul’s resignation after the Macpherson Report was published, he stuck it out.
In Deptford, south-east London, ten million pounds were spent on an architectural centre in Stephen Lawrence’s memory. The Turner Prize–winner Chris Ofili designed eight windows which cost £15,000 each. Within a week of the centre being opened in February 2008, these windows had been smashed by youthful local racists.16
The case of Stephen Lawrence was a shocking but unfortunately far from unique example of how little at ease with itself Mr Major’s Britain was. Liberal commentary, from TV studio, leader article or lecture podium, found it easy to denounce the police as racist boneheads, and some of the officers concerned in the Lawrence investigation appeared to be parodies of a caricature, almost anxious to conform to stereotype.
The police were condemned by Macpherson as institutional racists. Racism in some form is very hard in most human beings to disentangle from a sense of their own identity, who they are in relation to others. Awareness is one thing
, of course, and lack of impartiality, lack of manners, lack of common decency, are others. If the police behaved stereotypically towards black youths, it would only be fair to point out that a significant majority of street crime in London, involving muggings, stabbings, shootings, was perpetrated by black youths, themselves, it would seem, intent upon behaving according to stereotype.
In January 1998, the Runnymede Trust, ‘an independent think-tank devoted to the cause of promoting racial justice in Britain’, set up the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. Under the chair-manship of Bhiku Parekh, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Hull, the Commission had over twenty members, including Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Trevor Phillips and Andrew Marr. Its report, based on an extensive survey of ‘the current state of multi-ethnic Britain’17 painted a depressing picture of urban Britain, and there is a marked contrast between the architecturally wrecked, socially divided, crime and poverty-ridden cities they visited over a two-year period, and their bright hope that, by following their recommendations, it would have been possible for their fellow citizens to build ‘a relaxed and self-confident multicultural Britain’.18 They made, for example, two visits to Toxteth, scene of riots in 1981. On the first visit, they were pleased to find ‘a group of local black activists working on youth sports and arts projects’. But when they returned to the ‘Social Centre of Excellence’ (a disused church) they found only dilapidation. Carved stones from the old building had been looted, and the vandals appeared to have triumphed.19 Though hoping to build a mutually tolerant, ‘vibrant’ society, their innumerable witnesses told them of an atmosphere of unrelenting racial abuse and tension. ‘I still don’t feel British,’ said one witness. ‘Because I know we haven’t been fully accepted. We still walk down the street and get called a Paki.’20
One of the Commission’s fundamental premises was that ‘Race, as is now widely acknowledged, is a social and political construct, not a biological or genetic fact’…‘There is more genetic variation within any one so-called race than there is between races.’21 This would have been a point well made had they been arguing with some nineteenth-century prophet of racial differences such as Charles Darwin or Houston Stewart Chamberlain, or with their most sinister twentieth-century followers in the German National Socialist movement. Nearly all British citizens, however, in the twenty-first century used the word race interchangeably with what the Commissioners call ethnicity. Their pages are full of the statistics concerning Afro-Caribbean, Bangladeshi, Irish and other citizens. This is the sense in which the word ‘race’ was currently being used. Whatever word is used, the experience of the different groups was markedly different. It notes, for example, that, ‘African-Caribbean children start school at the age of five at much the same standard as the national average. By the age of 10, however, they have fallen behind. The difference is greater than in English. At the age of 16 the proportion of African-Caribbean students achieving five higher-grade GCSE passes (grades A*–C) is considerably less than half the national average.’22 Clearly crude racial theories do not explain this phenomenon and probably no one in the educational world, at the period under discussion, would have advanced them–though Charles Darwin would have done, and it was a curious feature of the age that many of the keenest progressives who wished to celebrate multi-culturalism were also fervent supporters of Darwinist assaults on religion.
Perhaps the single most depressing statistic in the Commission’s findings came from the United States of America. At any one time since the 1960s, almost one in three of all African American males was either in prison or under some form of penal supervision.23 The statistics are drawn from the American researcher Loic Wacquant, and an article entitled ‘From welfare state to prison state: imprisoning the American poor’. For whatever unhappy reason, a high proportion of Afro-Caribbean young males in Britain during the period looked as if they were going the same way. The British prison system would be asked to supply the service which in times past had been effected by the workhouse and the press gang.
How to promote a sense of belonging among the alienated, ethnically diverse peoples of Britain? That was the question the Commission set themselves. They turned to the wisdom of the works of Nigerian-born, bearded Ben Okri (born 1959) whose novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for fiction in 1991. Okri, a charming, smiling man, who celebrated the primitive joys of Nigerian rustics in his stories, while enjoying the hospitality of London salonnières, had written, ‘Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves and you change the individuals and nations… Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.’24
In furtherance of their scheme of improvement, the Commission proposed ‘rethinking the National Story’.25 They proposed radically rethinking the notion that ‘the British are an island race, their mentality shaped by a long and sturdy independence, free from foreign contaminations’.26 It would be interesting to know how many schoolchildren of our times had been taught ‘Our Island Story’ as it was taught in schools and schoolrooms before the Second World War. Many otherwise well-educated students managed to get through school knowing almost no history at all by the standards of their grandparents: a smattering of the Tudors, a sortie into the First World War and for many that was about it. But the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain made it clear that if any school were to revive history teaching of the old sort–the dates of all the Kings and Queens of England, the Spanish Armada, the Civil War, Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham, Nelson at Trafalgar–they might be in danger of upsetting the project. There was not space in their book to spell out in detail what the alternative history of Britain might have been, though predictable hints are given–‘When I think of British history’, someone wrote to us, ‘I think of Oliver Cromwell’s campaign of genocide in Ireland, the 1688 settlement and the crushing of Irish resistance it involved, the Gordon riots, the 1801 Act of Union, the Murphy riots, the Black and Tans’, etc.27 Praise is also given to a permanent exhibit at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich depicting a ‘Jane Austen-like figure sipping tea with a sugar-bowl on the table beside her. From beneath the floor at her feet a manacled black arm reached out as if from the hold of a slave ship, and as if to show the source of her comfort and wealth.’28
What is striking about the picture of Britain’s past here is its negativity. If they had formed a basis for the National Curriculum, would the teachers have told the children, as earlier generations were told, that Cromwell, as well as being brutal to the Irish, was the hero of modern republicanism, and the builder-up of the British navy? Would they have been told that the 1688–89 ‘Glorious Revolution’ saved Britain from becoming a Bourbon-style monarchical dictatorship, shackled to an intolerant Roman Catholicism? Would the terrible story of slavery have included the fact, of which many British people through generations have been proud, that it was the British who abolished the abominable slave trade, a trade originating in Africa, and perpetrated by Africans on their fellow Africans? And would the children have been taught to sing the words of that great anti-slaving anthem, ‘Rule, Britannia!’? Whether they had or they hadn’t, it would seem unlikely to have interested either the hoodlums who vandalised the Toxteth Social Centre of Excellence or the many, many persons of ‘minority ethnic’ origin who told the Commission that they did not ‘feel British’, that their loyalties and responses were not to some nebulous ‘Britain’, which was visibly breaking up around them, but to their own families and friends. Would not their testimony have been closer to Margaret Thatcher’s candid admission that there was no longer such a thing as society?
Part Seven
The Project
25
New Labour
The ‘career politician’ was a ph
enomenon of our times, comparable to the career television presenter. Phillip Schofield left school at seventeen and worked as a bookings clerk at Broadcasting House in London. His family moved to New Zealand two years later, and he became a TV presenter for a programme called Shazam! Thereafter, he was imprisoned in the television. It was as if he was actually locked up inside the box. When he came back to England in 1985 he became a ‘children’s presenter’, and between 1987 and 1993 he presented Going Live!. It was one of those programmes which take up the desultory Saturday mornings of children whose parents cannot be bothered to play with them or suggest they do something interesting. Schofield remained in television, moving on to present programmes for grown-ups. By the time he was co-hosting Dancing on Ice, he was said to have secured a £5 million two-year deal. His hair had turned white. He was already looking like an old man, the televisual equivalent of Dickens’s Mr Dorrit, the ‘Father of the Marshalsea’, who had been in the debtor’s gaol so long that it had come to feel like home. Schofield once presented I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, one of the programmes in which a group of people are incarcerated together and spied upon by the cameras. By a supreme irony of language, these exercises in artificial group sadism were called ‘reality shows’. Did something in Schofield scream ‘Get me out of here?’ or had he become the twenty-first-century equivalent of the figures on Keats’s Grecian Urn, ‘for ever piping songs for ever new’, frozen in artifice.1