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Drum: DEMOCRACY II
Would you rip up the Geneva
Convention that would have
saved Michael Howard’s
grandmother in the holocaust?
Six years ago, with the release of the Macpherson
report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, I thought
we, in Britain, were living through one such transition.
It felt like an accelerated political journey in which
the rest of Britain had finally caught up with the
way in which the black experience was actually
lived: ‘a privileged moment’ in our racial history.
This was our Rodney King, but without the resulting
riots. At last, here was proof of what black people
had been saying for years: that we had been falling
foul not just of the law of the land, but of the law of
probabilities; evidence that there is a persistent and
consistent propensity to shove us to the bottom of
every available pile and not only leave us there but
blame us for being there as well.
By placing institutional racism at the heart of his
report he drew a direct link between the racist boot
boys and the complacent pen-pushers; between the
black shirts and the blue helmets. It charted a path
from the crudest forms of racism to the most wellconcealed. In short, it exposed the way in which
racism affects all areas of black people’s lives and
infects the institutions we are all part of. It shifted
the focus of the debate from the individual to the
institutional; it encompassed not just the obvious
but the abstruse as well. It showed that racism does
not have one face but many, and sometimes no face
at all.
Six years later, with an election in the offing, it is
patently clear just how short-lived that privileged
moment has been. The British National Party has
become a small but apparently regular feature on the
political landscape. Racist attacks are on the rise.
And the racial discourse of the nation has degraded
to a point scarcely imaginable just a few years ago.
During the 2001 election, with Macpherson’s legacy
still intact, the adoption of racist rhetoric was
considered a liability. The Tories’ refusal to sign a
Commission for Racial Equality pact saying they
would not resort to ‘racially hostile language’ sent
them plummeting in the polls.
This time around the outlook is far bleaker.
Immigration – always a code word for race – is at
the top of the agenda. The trouble is that when it