“The problem with black politics in Britain.” That was the headline of a recent blogpost by Tony Thomas, a new activist in the party I have recently left, the Liberal Democrats. And, as the title suggests, he argued against efforts to “improve race relations” on grounds that it would only create “resentment, hostility and racial, ethnic competition.”
Sadly black conservatism, in the sense of urging the community to withdraw from the struggle for equality and justice, has as long a tradition as black activism. Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jnr warned against the voices of caution from the community who preferred not to upset white America lest they renege on their vague promises of gradual evolution, and who preferred “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
Comfortable accommodation with a political status quo that shows no desire to tackle the scar of unequal racial outcomes, such as black unemployment running proportionately at more than double the rate of white unemployment, cannot be right or just.
Whether the motivating factor be lack of courage (the fear of antagonising ‘mainstream’ Britain) ignorance (unaware of the evidence), revisionism (colour-blind ‘post-racialism’), a selfish agenda (to gain advancement) or any combination of the above the result is the same; to feed a narrative that works for those that do not wish to change and against those that do.
Thomas’s blog appears to combine the first three elements to varying degrees, leading to a suspicion that the fourth element, advancement within the Liberal Democrats (a party that are on the whole instinctively against positive action on race), underpins it all.
He says: “I have come to reject any notion of a race specific politics…[and] identity politics of the 20th century is a thing of the past and today only exists amongst activists as an exercise in nostalgia.”
In a Twitter conversation I had with Thomas he maintained that Liberal Democrat mainstream policies, such as drug reform, appealed to ethnic minorities, while sidestepping the demand for policies to tackle the big issues like disproportionate black unemployment, which is increasing for African and Caribbean workers even during the recovery as other ethnicities re-enter the workforce.
To suggest that race is a ‘thing of the past’ that implies that race inequality used to exist but doesn’t anymore, which is post-racial delusion at its’ worst.
The assertion that black politics should not exist hardly makes sense without a dissection of the many factors that give rise to black politics in the first place. Not even the cultural revisionism of the late great Professor Stuart Hall made that leap because, whatever Hall’s thoughts were in relation to how black politics is pitched amid churning and constantly changing identities, there was a basic assumption that race and racial unfairness mattered greatly, and so did campaigns to change it for the better.
While ‘black politics’ and the ‘black vote’ are lumped together by Thomas when there are crucial differences. Black politics is a phrase that embraces many race equality campaigns around issues as diverse as deaths in custody, school exclusions, refugee groups and even elements of the anti-religious discrimination and anti-fascist movements, while the ‘black vote’, by contrast, is a term that seeks to unite voters of color around common interests, principally the desire for decision-makers to adopt policies to tackle racial prejudice and the campaign for more decision-makers of color.
What seems to have prompted Thomas’s blog is another blog post, by Paul Hensby on the Operation Black Vote website. Hensby bases his arguments on the power of the black vote in the forthcoming general election, which was illustrated in a report I wrote for OBV earlier this year which showed that the BAME vote was larger than the majority of sitting MPs in marginal (swing) seats, more than enough to sway the result and decide who gets the keys to Downing Street.
While the ‘black vote’ has always been acknowledged, not least by OBV themselves, to be a lose term as diversity in voting patterns across the political spectrum means there is no ‘bloc vote’ as such. That said, there is certainly evidence that race plays a part in elections. UKIP only do half as well in multicultural London compared to the rest of Britain, Ken Livingstone’s vote held firm in the inner cities while Boris Johnson triumphed in the less diverse London suburbs, and 68% of BAME voters supported Labour in the 2010 election, twice the rate of the whole electorate.
Research by the Runnymede Trust and Lord Ashcroft’s Degrees of Separation report show crucial differences in political affiliation by ethnicity, and to ignore that is to engage in the kind of head-in-the-sand approach that saw Mitt Romney win the white American vote but lose to Barack Obama because well over 90% of it went to him. I previously warned that the Liberal Democrats, the party Thomas hopes to rise in, displayed similar tendencies. And while there are some in the Lib Dems who will warm to Thomas’s post-racial views, ultimately a party that ignores both demographics and mounting evidence of structural race inequality will remain mostly-white and increasingly irrelevant to modern Britain.
At a time when the newly-elected party president, Baroness Sal Brinton, suggested during her election campaign that she was favourable to the idea of a ‘race equality inquiry’, the danger is that Thomas’s brand of revisionism, which has virtually no support in the wider world of activists, campaigners and the BAME electorate as a whole, will be absorbed by naive members to try and prevent such an inquiry from taking place.
Black politics has come a long way since the 1960s in tandem with the black community. Through the Sus laws and inner city uprisings, the pioneering Lord David Pitt and the Labour Party Black Sections, the Stephen Lawrence case and race equality laws, black politics and what was happening at the grassroots maintained a connection.
Yet today we have a new generation of BAME MPs who owe patronage to the party machine and fail to speak out against continuing race discrimination, an anti-immigration climate not seen since the days of Enoch Powell, a public narrative that has erased ‘race’ from public policy, and black tenants who face prejudice from would-be landlords just as their grandparents did in the 1960’s. We have come a long way, and slid back a long way.
While there is a need to refresh thinking around how race equality fits with ever-changing identities, particularly among the younger generation, the assimilationist views espoused by Thomas will take us further backwards still. The issue is not one of flushing ‘race politics’ away but of cutting a line between modern identities and assimilation, between culture and fear-infused integration, and strategising a way forward for community organisation and party politics. To work for a positive not negative peace, and to be clear that the time when black politics will no longer be relevant, and the time there will be ‘One Britain’ will be when we are judged by the content of our character not the color of our skin. And all the evidence and everyday experience of many testifies that this is far from reality, and slipping ever further away.
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
