Sky Views: Are both our major political parties racist?
Tuesday 24 April 2018 08:02, UK
By Lewis Goodall, Political Correspondent
Enoch Powell, whose ghost has hovered eerily over politics of late, used to respond with fiery indignation if anyone accused him of racism.
"I always invite them to define to the word," he haughtily retorted to the BBC's Sue Lawley, when he was her castaway on Desert Island Discs in 1989.
Lawley replied that "I would presume it would be a person not desirous of having people living alongside an indigenous population because of the colour of their skin".
Powell considered the contention for a moment and then replied: "If it turns upon on colour I would return a negative but for the rest of your question I do not believe that the Indians wish to see 40 million Europeans going to live in the Republic of India."
Powell spent much of the rest of his life after Rivers of Blood batting away accusations of racism.
He was a master of language and through that skill the splitting of the thinnest of thin hairs. His clever verbal contortions is one of the reasons why so many people think he wasn't a racist.
When making a special report on the man and his life last week I was surprised by the number of people (even ethnic minority voters) who agreed that the man who delivered the most incendiary speech by any major politician since the war, didn't fit the racialist bill.
Many said something like this: that Powell was not a racist because he would never think that whites were inherently superior to blacks or Asians. I suspect that in as far as it goes, that's probably true.
Powell, who adored India and its culture, is unlikely to have believed whites had intrinsic superiority to non-whites.
However, such a definition sets the parameters of racism very narrowly. The belief of inherent racial superiority is a relatively exotic prejudice, nurtured only by the especially tin-headed.
But that, surely, cannot be the only criterion of racism? In Powell's case, using inflammatory language like "picanninies", arguing for a system which tolerates systemic discrimination on the grounds of race; arguing that the national character would be eroded by native-born descendants of immigrants; if this isn't racist then what is? What value can the word have?
Contrary to what Powell would have us believe, there is more than one kind of racism and more than one way for individuals or institutions to betray it.
Yet recently we seem to have succumbed to Powell-itis. We have reduced racism to a sort of moral madness, which only the most extreme of us can exhibit. In recent months, this has allowed our politicians off the hook.
Which is where, the Labour Shadow Equalities Secretary, Dawn Butler, comes in.
On Sunday, speaking to my colleague Niall Paterson, she spoke with rightful anger about the way the Windrush generation had been treated. She accused the government and Theresa May personally of racism. She said the government was "institutionally racist".
This was a strong charge and it needed some clarity. She said that institutional racism was when an organisation "fosters a [negative] environment which affects one particular race or group".
The government says that no-one had any intention of this happening. That is a matter of interpretation. But leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the "hostile environment" policy, there is no doubt that it affected one racial group more than others and made the lives of the people in that group worse.
I do not believe any member of the government is a racist. But ministers made these decisions blithely, without apparent thought or much regard for the fact that their decisions would affect so many black British residents and citizens in particular so badly.
It therefore does not matter about the individuals' personal beliefs or intent, what is in their souls; the net sum of the policy can be described as having the characteristics of the "institutional racism" that Ms. Butler described.
But the problem for Labour is that if that is true of the government, it is just as true for them. Look again at Ms Butler's words, chew them over. Institutional racism is when an institution's policies or practices foster an environment which negatively affects a "one race or group" in particular.
It doesn't take a genius to draw a line from that to the charges of anti-semitism which have rocked the party over the last month.
Yet, curiously and perhaps uncomfortably for Labour, the response from Jeremy Corbyn and his top lieutenants mirrors the rhetoric of the government he so lambasts over Windrush.
Corbyn responded to accusations of anti-semitism: "The idea that I am some kind of racist or anti-Semitic person is beyond appalling, disgusting and deeply offensive. I have spent my life opposing racism."
It took much longer for him to accept that his party had a problem. He seemed incapable of accepting that although he personally would never be anti-semitic, he was presiding over a party where such abuse was taking place and being tolerated.
The party's processes seemed slow and many in the leadership seemed unwilling to change them. This prejudice was not taking place against any other racial or ethnic group, only Jews.
I've spoken to Jewish party members who feel targeted and isolated and ignored by the party hierarchy and consider its processes useless and designed to let anti-semites off the hook.
They think the party has a toxic environment for Jews and Jews alone. Jeremy Corbyn's party therefore met his own equalities secretary's definition of institutional racism.
We don't need to take Dawn Butler's word for it. The man who wrote the book on institutional racism, Lord MacPherson, who chaired the inquiry into the investigation of Stephen Lawrence's death, defined institutional racism as follows:
"The collective failure of an organisation to provide appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin.
"It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage ethnic minority people."
Read that. And consider the twin sagas of the Tories' Windrush and Labour's anti-semitism. And ask yourself if either emerges without stain.
It's a sad state of affairs when the main political parties of the United Kingdom, two of the great parties of the Western world, have devised policies or tolerated attitudes which have shown signs of institutional racism. But that, in 2018, is where we are.