Contradictions in the System
Throughout the advance of the language of equality of opportunity there have been a number of sharp conflicts. To the proponents of change, it seemed clear that these were just the complaints of the old order, the backlash against progress. But that is not always the case. As with any emerging regulatory regime there are moments when the imposition of order provokes a reaction. Some of these early conflicts took place in the local authorities that first experimented with equal opportunities.
In 1986 Brent Council suspended the popular head teacher of the Sudbury Infants School, Maureen McGoldrick, who had been accused of refusing to take on a teacher because she was black, which McGoldrick denied. McGoldrick was exonerated by a panel of the governing body, but the local authority overruled them and suspended her. The Brent Teachers Association supported McGoldrick, as did local parents; even the teaching candidate Miss Khan, who had later been taken on, joined the strike against McGoldrick’s suspension. Only the Socialist Teachers’ Alliance joined Brent LEA opposing the strike — a position they later regretted as they were denounced as ‘parasites’ on black parents’ struggles. ‘Brent appeared to be defending only its own prerogatives and procedures, rather than the community’s rights’, reported Marxism Today: ‘the council appeared to be defending their own right to hire and fire, when they were defending their perfectly sound anti-racist policy’. But the Council were indeed defending their procedures when the community had already decided for McGoldrick.1
Ron Anderson, chair of the education committee in Brent, argued that the Brent Teachers Association was really pushing ‘their own campaign against compulsory Race Awareness Training courses’ and other anti-racist policies. RAT courses were often a source of conflict. In 1986 an inquiry into race relations in Manchester schools was launched under Ian Macdonald and Gus John after the murder of Ahmed Iqbal Ullah at the Burnage High School. The report looked at the culture of ethnically divided gangs in Manchester schools. They also drew attention to the way that Race Awareness Training had been put in place. ‘In practice it has been an unmitigated disaster’, they said, ‘leading to polarisation between black and white and to a potentially greater racial conflict’. ‘Since the assumption is that black students are the victims of immoral behaviour of the white students’, Macdonald and John summed up, ‘white students almost inevitably become the “baddies”’.2
In Lambeth a conflict broke out between social workers and the Council when 600 walked out in protest at disciplinary hearings called after the murder of a young girl, Tyra Henry, by her father in 1984. The issue was fraught with tensions over race. The girl and her father were black, the social workers mostly white. Under pressure to act, Lambeth Council set up an internal tribunal of four, two of them race advisers, to look at the case. Social workers felt that the first report, issued after two weeks, was unfair: ‘Akin to a show trial in Eastern Europe’, said the British Association of Social Workers Southwark chairman, John Wheeler: ‘people were dragged forward and hectored and shouted at’. The chair of Lambeth Social Services argued that the black councillors understood the black community better: ‘A lot of us are more in touch with communities than the social worker.’ When the Council announced disciplinary action against three social workers a mass meeting of the department staff voted no confidence in Janet Boateng and her vice-chairman Stephen Bubb. An independent inquiry into Tyra Henry’s death, under Stephen Sedley, QC, concluded that the issue of race had contributed to the child’s death, but not in the way that was thought. The social workers’ lack of confidence to confront the black parents meant that they did not take action in time. Sedley also found ‘tension’ between Boateng’s social services committee and the social workers.3 Arguably the climate of distrust at Lambeth compounded the social workers’ caution.
The call-out culture
With the rise of equal opportunities, a number of sharp clashes over apparently rival claims and policies broke out. As the champions of these newer ways of understanding workplace relations were finding their feet, there were some ugly clashes. One gay activist described the mood at the Greater London Council, working on questions of equality around sexuality and class: ‘It was’, she wrote, ‘a system that was ripe for guilt-tripping and denunciations’, adding, ‘GLC equalities at times resembled a wartime bunker or a city under siege, riven by internal strife’.4
Believing that the political issues being advanced were crucial and could brook no compromise without betrayal, many of the activists working around equality issues painted themselves into corners. These conflicts were particularly bitter once equality issues were put into grievance procedures and codes of conduct. It was quite common in the local authority offices in the 1980s to find two or more co-workers locked in mutually antagonistic grievances taken out against one another, alleging discrimination. Where the claims made were evenly balanced in justice, as between a white woman and a black man, each alleging discrimination against the other, these disputes could go on for months with the work in the office paralysed as each party called on all other employees to take sides, the two glowering at each other over mountains of paperwork, all relating to their case, rather than their employment, which consumed their every moment.
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.
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 fallen 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.
In 2000 Minister Barbara Roche gave a speech at the Institute of Public Policy Research. Roche framed the question by contrasting Britain, and its perceived skills gap, and countries including the United States and Australia, who were using migration to grow their economies: ‘We are in competition for the brightest and best talents. The market for skilled labour is a global market and not necessarily a buyers’ market’, she said. The answer was to relax immigration controls and let more in. Roche was cautious and there were some caveats, but the message was clear enough to irritate the opposition Conservative Party. Later, she recalled: ‘I wanted to be the first minister to say that migration is a good thing. It is.’16
Roche’s speech came after a discussion in the Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair’s Cabinet Office think-tank. A paper, titled ‘RDS Occasional Paper no. 67, Migration: an economic and social analysis’, made the argument that more migration was good for Britain. The argument was widely taken up by many. Will Hutton, citing the development economist Nigel Harris, argued that
as long as demand for labour is buoyant, the existence of a supply of immigrant labour at lower wage rates in some sectors will so boost their fortunes that, by increasing employment overall, incomes and output in aggregate will, in turn, be lifted through spending, begetting more spending in a classic Keynesian multiplier.17
Professor of Social Policy Peter Taylor-Gooby wrote that ‘immigrants are not a burden on the taxpayer, they are a benefit, because there are not enough children being born in the UK to work and finance our pensions and healthcare’.18
Some of the ways that the rules were changed to make them more liberal were: first, the repeal of the ‘primary purpose rule’ which had made it more difficult for men from the Indian sub-continent to bring their wives to Britain; second, the bringing in of a right of appeal (in 2000) where family visas were not allowed; and also the Human Rights Act (1998) which made it harder to deport people, and gave them rights in British courts from the point that they were in the country.19
One of the stranger outcomes of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act of 2000 was that it was ‘legal to discriminate on the basis of nationality or ethnic or national origin (but not race or colour)’ only ‘when ministers expressly authorise this’ — and this in particular ‘covers the area of immigration, asylum and nationality law’. In other words, the immigration service had to ask express permission if they were going to discriminate. Following the letter of the law, perhaps to absurdity, as reported by the Commission for Racial Equality, ‘since April 2001 there have been three ministerial authorisations permitting immigration officers to discriminate’. ‘The first authorisation allows discrimination when it can be shown that people of a particular nationality have broken, or will try to break, immigration laws’, the Commission explained. Further, ‘the second authorisation’ — to discriminate — ‘allows immigration officers to examine passengers from specified groups with particular care’. The groups identified were those of ‘Chinese origin presenting a Malaysian or Japanese passport’, Kurds, Roma, Albanians, Tamils, Somalis, and Afghans. The Commission registered their objection ‘that this could amount to racially discriminatory treatment’. The third authorisation to discriminate allowed immigration officers to ‘pilot a project to analyse the language used by asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Somalia and Sri Lanka’.20 You might have thought that it was impossible to restrict immigration without discrimination. But such was the government’s care over the new Race Relations Act that they thought it would be possible to have non-racist immigration controls, and where that was not possible, that it would be best if discrimination was specifically authorised.
Labour’s schizophrenia on immigration saw them scrambling to appear hard on the question in 2015
According to one of the policy wonks that drew up the original Cabinet policy document, Andrew Neather, the original went even further before it was toned down. He wrote that ‘earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’. More, Neather said, ‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended — even if this wasn’t its main purpose — to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.21
These arguments were being made at the height of the re-motivation of the Labour Party as ‘New Labour’, and indeed the country as ‘New Britain’, by its youthful Prime Minister, Tony Blair. A speech he gave the year before the change in immigration policy contrasted his vision for a New Britain with the ‘forces of conservatism’. The forces of conservatism were all those holding us back. As Blair said, he was for a ‘progressive politics distinguishing itself from conservatism of left or right’. Blair argued that these were ‘the old prejudices, where foreign means bad’, and ‘Where multiculturalism is not something to celebrate, but a left-wing conspiracy to destroy their way of life.’ The future was coming whether we liked it or not, and ‘these forces of change driving the future don’t stop at national boundaries.’
In that moment of self-confidence, Blair and his Cabinet believed that increased immigration was a part of the new changes that were making Britain into a multicultural country, one in which the right would not win power again, and where the dinosaurs of ‘Old Labour’ — in particular the trade union defenders of state socialism — were relegated to obscurity.
The liberal intent of Labour’s immigration policy, however, was undermined by their caution about winning over ordinary people to support immigration. They did not — perhaps could not — do that because they had defined their new political project in direct opposition to the party’s own working-class base. The old Labour supporters were the ‘forces of conservatism’, too. A new multicultural Britain was conceived as an escape from Labour’s commitments to its heartlands in the formerly industrial north of the country. The Labour Party’s psephologists were telling them that most Britons did not like immigration.
One thing was for sure: they did not like the economic argument for immigration, since its premise was that immigration was good for the economy because it would keep wages down. Another kind of movement might have been able to win over working-class support for immigration. But Labour’s dilemma was that it thought of immigration and multicultural Britain as a de-throning of the old Labour heartlands. It was for that reason that the Labour Party was nervous about race and immigration.
While Barbara Roche was talking about relaxing inward migration, Home Secretary Jack Straw was cracking down on illegal ‘people trafficking’. In April 2000 Straw had himself filmed working alongside the immigration police in Dover. As a truck was searched and a Kosovan stowaway captured, Straw gurned for the cameras and blamed truck drivers for taking money for getting people in. The news that the police would be searching for stowaways had consequences — people took more desperate measures to get through. Fifty-eight Chinese men and women were being smuggled in inside a sealed refrigerated truck. When the lorry was opened all were suffocated. Straw said that the deaths were a ‘stark warning to others’ who might be tempted to come. It was an ugly moment that showed the other side of the government’s immigration policy.
Over the winter of 2008-09, workers at the Lindsey oil refinery in North Lincolnshire walked out on strike, protesting at the company’s preference for contract labour from Portugal and other European countries. Prime Minister Gordon Brown was at pains to say that he supported the case of ‘British jobs for British workers’. A Downing Street spokesman explained that the contracts had been issued for foreign labour when there was a labour shortage in Britain, which was ‘obviously not now the case’.22
Some Labour supporters were already hostile to immigration, before Gordon Brown’s volte face. David Goodhart, the Prospect editor and most recently director of Demos, makes the argument that social democratic government must control its own borders. So, too, does the veteran commentator Polly Toynbee argue that immigrants ‘hold down the pay rate for all other low-paid workers, keeping wage inflation remarkably low and the Bank of England very happy’. Of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Toynbee says they ‘embrace the inevitability of globalisation, but make a deliberately class-blind analysis’ — meaning that immigration hurts the working class. Toynbee’s argument makes sense if you see the working class as bounded by national borders, and all of those migrants marooned in Calais as outside of the working class (the ‘British working class’, perhaps). The force of her argument is that the case for immigration that was being made by the government was a case for boosting profits at the expense of workers: ‘Of course the wealthy want an immigration free-for-all’, she writes.23 But the case that should be made is the one that sees working-class solidarity that goes beyond national borders — which is a case for defending workers’ rights to free movement alongside a defence of workers’ wages, as well as their political right to be consulted about a change in policy, rather than have a policy surreptitiously foisted upon them.
In the election the following year, Labour were clearly on the defensive about their immigration policy. They were seen to have foisted an unwanted immigration on a sceptical public. To liberally-minded people it was a concession to listen to those who were sceptical about immigration. But that was the problem. Ordinary people needed to be won over if it was to be more than an elite policy to hold down wages. In the middle of the election campaign Gordon Brown was persuaded to talk to a voter, Gillian Duffy, who was critical of the policy. The exchange was forced, and the Prime Minister, not known for his personal touch, was struggling to make the case. Worse, when he moved on, he forgot that his television microphone was still attached to his lapel. In the car Brown was recorded telling his handlers ‘that was a disaster’. But it was his view of Duffy that stood out: ‘Ugh everything! She’s just a sort of bigoted woman that said she used to be Labour. I mean it’s just ridiculous. I don’t know why Sue brought her up towards me.’ It was a turning point in the election. Everyone could see that it was Brown who was bigoted — bigoted in his contempt for Gillian Duffy. For Labour, the idea of winning working-class voters over to immigration was too hard. First they tried to bring in the policy round the voters’ backs. And then when that failed the party simply reversed its policy, and clamped down on immigration.
Since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government took office in 2010, and since the majority Conservative administration was elected in 2015, there has been a surprising continuity in policy over immigration. Government policy still remains committed to race equality in Britain — most recently launching a new campaign to advance progress towards equality early in 2016 — while at the same time promising to stem inward migration. Politicians were talking tough on immigration, but still people came, adding to the sense that the politicians were lying, and allowing it to happen without admitting that it was happening. The great weakness of those who favoured a more liberal immigration policy was that they had not won a political consensus in favour of greater migration, but were believed to have connived at that result. The widespread feeling that immigration had not helped poorer communities in the country’s depressed industrial towns doubtless added to the vote to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum. Fears that the referendum campaign itself would provoke greater hostility to migrants were demonstrated by a spike in recorded race attacks. The difficulty for the ‘Vote to Remain’ camp was that they were seen to be the establishment, whereas as the ‘Leavers’ spoke to a large swathe of England that felt that it had lost out in the globalised economy.
As we have seen, social disorder in Bradford and Oldham in 2001 caused something of a re-think on race in Britain, and in particular about the merits of the multicultural society. Herman Ouseley’s report on the Bradford riots — cautiously — echoed some of the points that Gus John and Ian Macdonald made in their inquiry into Manchester’s schools, that some of the policies to promote the social integration of ethnic minorities had had the opposite effect, leading to division, and even social apartheid. The point was taken up by Trevor Phillips when he took over at the Commission for Racial Equality. Are we, he asked, ‘sleepwalking into segregation’?24 It was an extended argument which, he despaired, had been edited down into three words ‘Multiculturalism is dead’.
Phillips explained himself at length in an article, where he said:
The institutional response to the demand for inclusion has been cynical and bureaucratic — a series of bribes designed to appease community leaders coupled with gestures to assuage liberal guilt, while leaving systemic racism and inequality untouched. Multiculturalism is in danger of becoming a sleight of hand in which ethnic minorities are distracted by tokens of recognition, while being excluded from the real business. The smile of recognition has turned into a rictus grin on the face of institutional racism.25
Phillips’ argument was not so different from the criticism of ‘tokenism’ that black activists made against the Commission for Racial Equality back in the late Seventies. This time, though, it was being made by the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality. Phillips was saying that the policy that was supposed to fix division was actually disguising it, even contributing to it.
Another approach was argued by Munira Mirza, London’s Deputy Mayor for Education and Culture. Mirza talked about the improvements in the lot of black people in Britain, but asked whether the legislation was helping. She highlighted the Equality Act (2000) and the duty it put on 43,000 public authorities ‘to promote good relations between persons of different racial groups’. As Mirza explained, this obligation has ‘spawned an industry of behaviour management and control in workplaces, schools, fire stations, hospitals, councils and government departments’. As she saw it, ‘Hard-pressed public institutions are required to employ ethnic monitors, diversity trainers and equality impact assessors in order to guard against costly legal action’. The question remained, ‘does this heightened awareness of racism help to stamp it out?’ Mirza’s answer was surprising: ‘Quite the opposite. It creates a climate of suspicion and anxiety. Suddenly your colleague is a potential victim of your unwitting racism. A minor slight can be seen as an offence.’26 Mirza was pointing to one unexpected consequence of the way that society had changed to accommodate equal opportunities.
Trevor Phillips
One way to understand the point is to look at the contradictory evidence on race prejudice. By one measure, the evidence would seem to be that race prejudice today is getting worse. That measure is the result of an opinion poll survey question: ‘Do you think race relations in Britain are getting worse?’ The answer is that nearly half think that race prejudice has got worse, while less than a third think it has got better. Those are depressing results. But they are not the whole story. They are questions about what people think other people are like. Other kinds of questions ask about what respondents themselves feel about race. These get different results. There are two questions: one is ‘Would you mind working for an employer who was black or Asian?’; the other is ‘Would you mind being married to someone who is black or Asian?’ This question has been asked by pollsters for many years now, so that we have a time series mapping of this particular expression of prejudice. Two things stand out. The first is that over time fewer people are offended by the idea of working for someone of another race, as fewer are offended by the idea of marrying someone of another race. The second thing is that attitudes become consistently more liberal the younger the respondent.27 Put together the two different poll results point to a remarkable outcome. First people are pessimistic about race relations, thinking that they are getting worse. The second is that individually, white people are becoming more liberal, less prejudiced against black and brown people. Munira Mirza’s vision of a society that is managing racial divisions quite well on an informal basis in its own civil interactions, but at an institutional level is distrustful of people’s abilities to cope with racial difference, is right.
The criticism of multiculturalism that Phillips and Mirza had made, that the policies might prove more divisive than unifying, were taken up by Britain’s new Prime Minister David Cameron in February 2011. Cameron’s speech was in part a response to the continuing challenge of Al Qaeda to British foreign policy, and the perception that Islamic extremists in Britain were not being confronted. Cameron argued that ‘state multiculturalism has failed’.
A genuinely liberal country ‘believes in certain values and actively promotes them’, he said, outlining what he meant: ‘Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights, regardless of race, sex or sexuality.’ Cameron went on to argue that under the ‘doctrine of state multiculturalism’, different cultures have been encouraged to live separate lives.
Reaction to Cameron’s speech was dogmatic. Hassan Mahmadallie argued that Cameron was wrong because ‘the notion that multiculturalism was ever an official state policy is simply not true’ — and this in a volume entitled Defending Multiculturalism. Salma Yaqoob argued that ‘Cameron’s latest attack on our multicultural society is only a continuation’ of Trevor Phillips’ arguments.28 Substantially, however, it was hard to see what the differences were between Cameron and his critics. Both sides believed in social solidarity, and both sides believed in defending minority rights. The argument just seemed to be another example of the ‘call-out culture’, where the Prime Minister’s critics were keen to portray him as a racist, to score political points.
Looking back at the contradictions of the equal opportunities revolution, what stands out is that the top-down anti-discrimination measures reveal themselves to be instruments of labour discipline, in the hands of the employers and the authorities, to dominate employees. Even where these acts of domination are in favour of minorities, they enhance the power of the elite over the mass. More, the policies derive their power from division. Diversity in the workforce, diversity in society, must be managed. As Kimberlé Crenshaw argues it, diversity is not to be overcome, but maintained and formalised. Policies and organisations that were supposed to help to address inequality have ended up institutionalising it.