After the Greater London Council was abolished the London local authorities tried to keep its policy development alive in the London Strategic Policy Unit — but without practical questions of managing government to deal with, many in the Unit descended into mutual recriminations and grievance procedures. It was, say Stuart Lansley, Sue Goss, and Christian Wolmar, ‘wracked by internal conflict’, ‘bedevilled by industrial disputes, mainly around minor complaints of racism’, and ‘much grinding of political axes’.5 The generalisation of the tribunal model of moderating workplace conflict has been an inspiration for writers like Mark Lawson (who novelised his own investigation on charges of ‘bullying’ at the BBC as The Allegations), David Mamet (whose play Oleanna deals with sex-discrimination charges), and Philip Roth (on race charges in his novel The Human Stain).
In November 2014, Dr Matt Taylor led the Rosetta mission team, who landed a rocket, Philae on a Comet B67. It was a first that ought to have been widely celebrated. It was televised. For the recording Taylor wore a shirt, designed by his friend Elly Prizeman, that she had given him for his birthday. The shirt was in a rockabilly style, cut from a printed fabric with pattern of Fifties pin-up girls — the overall effect was camp, such as would not have looked out of place in a lesbian bar. Taylor was roundly denounced by a number of women scientists for his ‘sexist shirt’, which earned the hashtag ‘shirtstorm’. Taylor went back on television the following day to make a tearful apology for the hurt he had caused, without intending to.
The following June, biologist Tim Hunt, part of a team that won the Nobel Prize for identifying the protein molecules that govern the sub-division of cells, was invited to give a talk in South Korea at the World Conference of Science Journalists about women in science. Hunt gave a self-mocking speech about being an old dinosaur with outmoded ideas, and hoping that people like him were not holding women scientists back. Irony-deficient science media lecturer Connie St Louis called Hunt on his ‘sexism’, and he was hauled over the coals. Back in London a senior official at University College London, where Hunt held an emeritus position, demanded he resign or be sacked, and he went, with his partner the immunologist Mary Collins.
These clashes were read very differently by people on either side of the argument. For those who were campaigning for more women in science Taylor’s shirt and Tim Hunt’s asides were just the tip of the iceberg of a culture of discrimination. For many, though, the targets seemed to be trivial, and the reaction intolerant.
Even the House of Commons was caught up in the ‘call-out culture’. During a hotly fought election for London Mayor in April 2016, Prime Minister David Cameron tried to brand the Labour candidate Sadiq Khan an ‘extremist’ for having shared a platform with the Islamist Suliman Gani. Labour MPs shouted ‘racist’ at the Prime Minister. The following week the Tory politician Boris Johnson alluded to US President Barack Obama’s Kenyan ancestry, drawing a stinging attack from Labour’s John McDonnell: ‘another example of dog-whistle racism from senior Tories’. The Conservative press retaliated by trawling through Labour MPs’ Twitter feeds to find examples of anti-Semitic comments, such as Naz Shah’s call for Israeli Jews to be relocated to New York. Defending Shah, Ken Livingstone blurted out in a radio interview that Hitler was a Zionist — an interpretation of history that was lost on most, sounding like an even worse example of anti-Semitism than the one he was defending. So it was that the architect of the Greater London Council’s pioneering equal opportunities policies was himself suspended from the Labour Party on grounds of race discrimination. Clearly the accusations and counter-accusations of racism and anti-Semitism in these exchanges were a long way from a debate over policy, descending instead into a ‘call-out culture’ better suited to the National Union of Students’ annual conference than the Palace of Westminster.6
The heightened fear of causing — or being seen to cause — discrimination has been called at various times ‘political correctness’, the ‘call-out culture’ (as in ‘I am going to call you out on that’), the pitfalls of ‘identity politics’, and even the ‘oppression Olympics’. Some right-wing commentators, like the Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn, have made hay with the allegation of ‘political correctness gone mad’. Defenders of equal opportunities policies have replied that ‘political correctness gone mad’ is a formula that allows reactionaries to make light of discrimination. But all of the terms listed above were not coined by right-wing critics, but rather by anti-discrimination activists, trying to understand where they had gone wrong. It was not Richard Littlejohn who first coined the parody ‘politically correct’, but student activists fed up with being lectured by dogmatic Maoists; so too with the ‘call-out culture’, the ‘oppression Olympics’, and the problems of ‘identity politics’.
Only in the rarefied atmosphere of ‘identity politics’ could it be ever thought of as an advantage to be discriminated against, or that to be so would grant you greater authority. Ordinarily to be discriminated against is to lose out, to lose rights and resources, and indeed to lose face. So it is in most of Britain. Failure is not something to be pleased about. Only in the hothouse atmosphere of equal opportunities does any advantage attach to being the victim of discrimination, where this is the basis of a claim laid against an employer, or a colleague. This advantage, let it be said, is both fleeting and illusory. Even where compensation is made for a wrong, the claimant must present themselves as the wronged party in a way that entrenches that wrong. The act of compensation, so far from hurting employers or higher authorities, enhances their power over the workforce. Where claims are made against peers the damage to all far outweighs any justice achieved. Mutual distrust has long been the quiet backdrop to liberal competition, and in equal opportunities policies that mutual distrust is given the force of just claims against discrimination. In the oppression Olympics, everyone loses.
Intersectionality
The American legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw developed a way of addressing the many levels of discrimination, which she called ‘intersectional’. She was concerned with the way that black women were made invisible both in anti-racist and feminist movements. ‘The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge’, she wrote, ‘but rather the opposite — that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences’. Moreover, she thought, ‘ignoring differences within groups contribute to tension among groups’.7 Crenshaw’s metaphor of an intersection recommended itself to many anti-discrimination activists because it seemed to suggest a way to manage the competing claims of different discriminations. The intersectional approach, though, only leads to more divisions.
The many rifts among the feminist collective that ran the magazine Spare Rib anticipated some of the debates that later would test college campuses. First there were arguments over the priority of heterosexual and lesbian feminists, and then, later, between white and black feminists. In 1980 the collective announced that ‘personal rifts and political disagreements opened up that had until then lain relatively dormant’, so that ‘it has been difficult to produce work and get along in a sisterly spirit’. The argument broke out over an article ‘about the gap in the movement between heterosexual women and lesbians and the dominance’ as one contributor saw it ‘of the idea that women should have nothing to do with men’. In reaction, three others thought that ‘she expressed her views in anti-lesbian and heterosexist ways and so this article should not be published’.8 By 1990 it was common for divisions to open up on race lines, so Thethani Sangoma wrote ‘as African women we suffer a triple oppression of national, class and gender exploitation’. She chided that for black women, white feminists were one manifestation of the problem. The collective was clearly moved by the appeal of Third World liberation. An editorial in the July 1992 issue looked back over 20 years of Spare Rib, but curiously said nothing about women — concentrating instead on ‘imperialism’s brutal campaign of genocide’. But by that time much of the magazine’s readership had falle
n away, alienated by the guilt-tripping judgments. Soon afterwards Spare Rib closed.
The divisions amongst the feminists grew. Some hoped that socialist feminism would overcome the differences, but it just turned out to be another split. Among the socialist feminists Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright wrote a manifesto called Beyond the Fragments, which anticipated much of the intersectionality argument. Wainwright thought that it was wrong to merge the movements. ‘There are good reasons for each movement controlling its own autonomy — women, blacks, gays, youth and national minorities have interests which may sometimes be antagonistic to each other both now and probably in a socialist society.’9
In 2013 ‘intersectional’ feminism was pointedly excluding what they called ‘Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists’. The intersectionalists thought that transgender women were women, and welcome in the women’s movement, while the Radical Feminists thought they were men, who were not welcome in women-only spaces. The conference organised by the Radical Feminist group was chased underground, as the other camp told the Camden Irish Centre where it was to take place that it would not be safe. When journalists Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill wrote strident attacks on transsexual demands to be treated as women in the Guardian newspaper they were vilified. There was even a protest organised outside the newspaper’s office; and astonishingly the Guardian Media Group agreed to rewrite history by removing the article from their website. The struggle for intersectionality continued with the demand that journalist and Justice for Women founder Julie Bindel be refused a platform at a Manchester University Debating Union event on pornography, because she too was a ‘TERF’ (Bindel withdrew after death threats).
One of the drivers of the college-based debates over identity was the institution since the early 1990s of Student Union women’s officers, and later diversity officers.10 Student Unions have often been the sites of extreme and position-mongering arguments, so polarised because they are of relatively little moment. Student occupations and demonstrations carry less weight than strikes or walkouts in profitable businesses or essential services. All the same, student life has long been an important part of the intellectual culture of the country. Student activism in the 1990s, on the other hand, was in a downward spiral of apathy and disengagement. Women’s officers and diversity officers struggled to organise campaigns that justified their offices. Talking to a relatively small group of active students who went to General Meetings, they were rhetorically strident as they were socially unimportant. Still they were fertile ground for the arguments over the intersection of racism and feminism.
In 2015 the whole argument over Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism blew up again when the veteran women’s rights’ activist Germaine Greer (who had written in a similar vein to Julie Burchill) was invited to speak at the University of Cardiff. Trans-activist Payton Quinn, along with the Student Union’s women’s officer, Rachel Melhuish, organised a petition to ban Greer, which attracted more than a thousand signatures (a counter-petition did similarly well, but was not much noticed). In the event Cardiff University went ahead with the meeting. A picket outside against the ‘transphobic’ Greer gathered at most 15 protestors.
It was a peculiar thing that the targets of these angry protests seemed more often to be radicals, like the feminists Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer, or like George Galloway and Tony Benn (both pilloried as ‘rape apologists’ for supporting the internet activist Julian Assange accused of rape), or veteran gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell (attacked, nonsensically as a ‘transphobe’, for defending Germaine Greer’s right to speak). So too, the films Stonewall (about a gay riot against police harassment) and Suffragette were both attacked for not including minorities (transgendered in the case of Stonewall and black women in the case of Suffragette). The champions of intersectionality are never happier than when they are taking down someone who is trying to make a radical case, just not radical enough. As Sigmund Freud told Sandor Ferenczi, ‘there is no revolutionary who is not knocked out of the field by a more radical one’.11
These storms were largely ignored by the greater part of the population, galvanising only a small minority of activists around discrimination issues. The radical posturing was in inverse proportion to the importance they carried. Intersectionality looked like just another word for sectarianism.
Whiteness and white privilege
New ways of looking at the race question worked out by sociologists in the 1990s turned from investigating the social conditions of ethnic minorities to addressing the way that ‘whiteness’ was ‘constructed’. The argument was that it was a mistake to look at the non-white ethnic group as the exceptional case, and to ignore the dominant race — white people, too, must be put under the microscope.12 Some of these analyses were generous, even elegiac, like Darcus Howe’s Channel 4 series White Tribe, or Michael Collins’ book, The Likes of Us — as if marking the passing of a once-great people.
On the whole, though, the analysis of whiteness is critical, and emphasises the privileged position of whiteness. Ian Macdonald and Gus John outlined the base assumption behind the Race Awareness Training they found in Manchester schools, that ‘there is uniform access to power by all whites, and a uniform denial of access and power to all blacks’.13
The argument that white Britons were privileged recovered a lot of nineteenth-century ideas, like ‘white supremacy’, the colour bar, and colonialism. These terms were now highlighted by the critics of ‘whiteness’ as problems to be attacked, where once they were ideals that were defended by colonists. The out-of-date words are supposed to highlight the way that things have not changed, at least not under the surface. But just as much they show us how much has changed. Colour bars have been illegal in Briton since 1965, and informal discrimination since 1976. Apartheid, the last systematic colour bar in the former Empire, was dismantled in 1994.
The charge that white people in Britain today gain by the disadvantage of black people is true if you look at the question as one of distribution and social averages. Statistical advantage can be demonstrated in the ethnic wage differential, wealth distribution, and employment. However, this is to look at average differentials rather than a substantial relation of exploitation. Working-class white people produce more goods than they ever get back in wages — they are exploited themselves, rather than privileged. Research by the Institute of Fiscal Studies shows that white Britons are less likely to go to university than black and Asian Britons. That recent differential advantage would not prove that black students were ‘privileged’ as against whites, and certainly not that black students gained at the expense of whites — rather, say the researchers, it is evidence of the underperformance of white working-class school leavers.14
The idea of white privilege in a modern setting was outlined by Peggy McIntosh, an associate director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, in her short essay ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’. McIntosh says that ‘I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious’. The privileges that she thinks we take for granted are material goods, like ‘I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area that I can afford and in which I would want to live’; and they also include assumptions of respect and civility, such as ‘I can be pretty sure that my neighbours in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me’; and they include spiritual resources, such as ‘When I am told about our national heritage or about civilization, I am shown that people of my colour made it what it is’. The list, which includes many more points, is well-made and well-worth looking at, even in the knowledge that it could not be exhaustive.15
There is, however, a problem with casting the advantages of ‘whiteness’, as McIntosh presents them, as privileges. These are for the most part rights of citizenship, not privileges. The meaning of ‘privilege’ is a private law, such as were enjoyed by feudal lords in the
medieval world, an elite minority. To move freely and organise independently, to strike contracts, including contracts of labour, and to take part in the election of the government in Westminster, and locally, as well as participation in the school board — all of these are not privileges, but rights, and rights that were fought for over many generations. Not the privileges of a minority, but the rights of the majority. The struggle against race discrimination has been a struggle to extend those rights so that they are not denied to people on the grounds of colour (as the struggle against sex discrimination was to extend those rights to women). Re-casting those rights as unearned ‘privileges’ diminishes their validity, in argument (just as these self-same rights are being diminished in fact, by successive government incursions on our civil liberties and rights of representation). A greater attention to the privileges of whiteness comes, ironically, at a time when racial differences carry less weight, and society has committed itself to remedial action to address such inequalities.
Labour’s confusions over immigration
One area that remains heavily contested and crucially important is that of immigration to Britain. Under the Blair-Brown governments of 1997-2010 the mood towards immigration oscillated sharply between favourable and unfavourable, as the focus shifted from welcoming migrants, to harsh action against ‘illegal’ migrants. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008. Rates of migration changed markedly rising from around 50,000 a year in 1995 to something like three times that number in the years that followed.
The Equal Opportunities Revolution Page 27