Yahoo Finance Britain had a chance to talk about race 20 years ago. Let's get it right this time
Could this year prove a turning point for racial politics, identity and nationhood in Britain? The Black Lives Matter movement has cut through to the mainstream and dovetailed with the racial and ethnic disproportionalities reflected in Covid-19 mortality rates, and the wider inequalities these lay bare. On the other hand, and waiting for us to come out of lockdown, is Brexit and all the cleavages it has deepened.
The UK shares much in common with other European countries that have never made peace with their colonial pasts, not least in how postcolonial populations migrated to the societies that their forebears made wealthy. But it is worth reflecting on the distinctiveness of Britain’s own near recent history, and where there might have been other opportunities to reflect on the big questions about who and what we are. One moment in particular stands out.
At the turn of the millennium, and after 18 long years of Tory rule, a Labour government was still in its first term with a massive majority and political capital to spend. This was a long overdue opening to rethink the national story. The Stephen Lawrence inquiry had given cause to reflect on institutional racism, and the government declared a commitment to creating a country where racial diversity was “celebrated”. At the same time, activists, commentators and academics were labouring on a state-of-the-nation-type report. Published by the Runnymede Trust in 2000, the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, to give its full title, is a salutary lesson, precisely because it foresaw two decades ago the present discussion of British nationhood.
Central to the report’s chair, the political philosopher Bhikhu Parekh, was the idea that there is a difference between the identities of nations and people’s national identities. By this, Parekh and other commissioners meant that the formal representation of a country ought to be reconfigured so as to reflect the identifications of its people – shifting in Britain’s case from a laissez-faire “multicultural drift” to a concerted, policy-based recognition of how postcolonial Britons had remade Britain. The clue was in the title: the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain – a conversation that might add to and expand the racial equality discourses of the 1980s in ways that shifted some of the burden of change on to white majorities too.
As the late Stuart Hall, who sat on the commission, put it: “We described the growing tendency for ethnic minority people to identify themselves as Black-British or British-Asian as a positive sign of their ‘claim to belong’. But belonging is a tricky concept, requiring both identification and recognition.” In other words, the “problem” of national identity rested not with black and ethnic minorities, it was white majorities and the state who needed to catch up. For Hall, as for other commissioners, the challenge was to take account of “inescapable changes” including postwar migration, the end of empire, devolution and globalisation.
Revisiting the report in 2020, it is a strikingly measured and sophisticated attempt to reconcile a changing national identity with an honest and necessary account of its origins; to forge a country that did not disenfranchise its black and ethnic minorities. This is why the commission recommended that central government take steps in formally declaring Britain “a multicultural society” – it was hoped that such an approach would begin to invalidate the social and political inequalities derived from postcolonial migration and settlement.
One question we might ask today is, was it naive, too celebratory? It certainly reflected a cumulative political movement that had followed the migrations of the parents and grandparents of many of Britain’s post-immigrant ethnic minorities, who had exercised their Commonwealth citizenship and moved to its metropole. If the shameful Windrush deportations tell us nothing else, it is that any meaningful sense of belonging for many black and ethnic-minority Britons will remain unachieved unless the country is able to recognise its imperial moorings.
This key point was overlooked in the clamour at the time to decry the report as an assault on national identity, specifically focusing on the report’s central observation that the idea of Britishness carried “largely unspoken racial connotations”. The Daily Telegraph’s Philip Johnston accused it of wanting to “rewrite our history”. It also incurred the wrath of some prominent liberals who considered its approach a grave challenge to liberalism, not least those recommendations in it which promoted diversity as a means to reach equality.
None other than Lord Anthony Lester, one of the founders of the Runnymede Trust and a key architect of Britain’s race-equality legislation, said of the report that: “Much of the more theoretical sections is written entirely from the perspective of victims.” The home secretary, Jack Straw, meanwhile, went lukewarm on learning of the backlash, and eventually attacked the report’s recommendations in line with the middle-England electorate whom Labour seemed unwilling to confront.
Related: Britain is not America. But we too are disfigured by deep and pervasive racism | David Olusoga
The report warned us that institutional and personally mediated racism had cultivated systemic inequality that needed to be recognised. Institutional racism then, just as now, “unwittingly” allowed white people to gain more from the education system, the criminal justice system, the labour market, and the health system, while also affording marginal attention to the racial dimensions of policy responses in these sectors. It was precisely in these areas that the report recommended measurable interventions.
In a number of ways, where we are today reflects a failure to seize this opportunity to remake ideas of Britishness, by critically engaging with our past in order to cultivate a meaningful version of our present and future. But we can still learn its lessons by naming racial inequalities and not pretending these are an aberration in an otherwise race-less, meritocratic society; by truly learning about our colonial history and jettisoning Dunkirk myths about Britain doing everything on its own and against the odds.; and taking ownership of racial inequalities as part of our story as a society without being defensive.
The population of Britain has changed. At the last census nearly one-tenth of people in England and Wales were cohabiting or married in a mixed relationship. How depressing it would be if we continue to repeat the same avoidance of our racial story.
• Nasar Meer is a professor of race, identity and citizenship at the University of Edinburgh
