‘I still don’t understand why those people burned their own neighbourhoods.’
Bosch knew that the fact people like Pounds didn’t understand why ‘those people’ did what they did was one reason they did it, and would have to do it again some day.’
Michael Connelly, The Concrete Blonde
What should Keir Starmer say in his conference speech on 24 September? The government is implementing what appears to be a random selection of policies that don’t add up to a clear purpose. The cabinet is being caricatured as grim puritans with low ambition.
In August, in his rose garden speech at Downing Street, the Prime Minister described the state of the nation in the aftermath of the riots as a “deeply unhealthy society”. The solution, to its “societal black hole”, he said, is “delivery”. But to persuade people to put aside their personal interest in a collective rebuilding of the country requires more than “delivery”.
The Labour government needs to grasp this historical moment and tell a story of national redemption. The absence of this larger imaginative story about England and the wider United Kingdom, about who we are as a people and how we might live together in a multi-ethnic, secular democracy, leaves a vacuum that the right is trying to fill.
In 1997, in more optimistic times, Tony Blair’s New Labour also wanted to tell a story about the country it was leading. I don’t mean the nonsense about Cool Britannia but the more serious effort to grapple with contemporary Britain. That year Jack Straw, the home secretary, attended the launch of a Commission on the “Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain”. It was organised by the Runnymede Trust under the chairmanship of the political theorist Bhikhu Parekh. “We are going to take it very seriously,” Straw said.
The Commission eventually published its report in October 2000. Britain, it said, was at a turning point and had a choice of two directions. Either the country will try and “turn the clock back”, “defending old values” and relying on a “narrow English-dominated backward definition of the nation” or it could seize the opportunity to create “a more flexible, inclusive, cosmopolitan image of itself”.
The report imagined the future of Britain as “a multicultural post-nation” state made up of a community of citizens and a community of communities. Multiculturalism provided the broad framework of a new common belonging in which “cultural diversity is celebrated and cherished”. The reaction to it was hostile. The Daily Telegraph accused Straw of wanting to “rewrite our history” and the Commission of describing “British” as a racist word.
The government sensed the mood and gave it a cool welcome. On the day of the launch, Straw told Parekh and Stuart Hall, the cultural theorist and a commission member, that he intended to publicly oppose the report. He disagreed with its claims that “race is deeply entwined with political culture and the idea of the nation”. He accused the left of impeding change. “Creating a single shared identity out of Britain’s enormous range of races, accents and attitudes was always going to be a challenge,” Straw said. But, he went on, “it was made even more difficult by the way those on the left who had turned their backs on the concept of patriotism”, and “washed their hands of the whole idea of nationhood”.
Straw’s reaction and the hostility of the right more generally defined the rancorous arguments for the next quarter century over what Hall called the deep unresolved character of British multiculturalism. But Straw had misinterpreted the intentions of the commission, Parekh said. He told the Guardian that “there is a very important role for a national common culture and a common civic nationality”. He was “requesting” from the government a discussion and rethinking of a national common culture, not its rejection.
In the last decade the debate in Britain around multiculturalism has become even more polarised. Working-class whites, particularly in the most deprived parts of the country, are being overtaken in education, mental health and social advancement by minority groups. The language of diversity has come to offer them nothing but guilt at “white privilege”. The abuse of thousands of young white working class girls over a decade and across the towns of provincial England by men largely of Pakistani heritage was met by comprehensive institutional failure.
White professionals in schools, health centres, charities, social services, the police, the local Labour council, the media, saw nothing or denied everything about was going on in towns such as Rotherham and Rochdale. Multiculturalism had degenerated into a white liberal fear of being accused of racism and a class contempt for young girls blamed for their own abuse.
The laissez-faire of liberal multiculturalism has no political answers to the breakdown in trust nor to the bitter racialised violence of the August riots. The British state has no institutions for negotiating a common life between different moral and cultural traditions. And by giving diversity an ontological status and elevating it to a moral good, class inequality has been ignored and the elite ownership of the multicultural debate is made invisible.
A multi-ethnic society needs democratic institutions that work like bridges and tables. Bridges both join and separate things. Tables gather people together, joining and separating them. Each group brings their own identity but shares a common bond in the search for a common good.
Liberal multiculturalism is increasingly unable to build these kinds of institutions nor is it capable of reforming existing ones. Resentment among fractions of the white majority has grown into a racial politics of white identity. Ethnic segregation has hardened in northern post-industrial towns. Sectarian religious politics has returned to the mainstream and the growth of Islamist and Salafist political extremism, particularly among younger British Muslims, threatens national security.
Tariq Modood, a consultant on the 1997 Commission, has argued for a multicultural nationalism in response to the failures of liberalism. What might this mean? The nation and its history would be the organising principle of a shared common life. Class would be recognised as the principal driver of inequalities. The whole apparatus of the state and its cultural outliers, the unaccountable Quangos, the BBC, and cultural institutions, dominated by an ideologically homogenous elite class, needs institutional reform, not just for racial equality but to widen class access and make them more representative of the country they govern.
Next year will be the 25th anniversary of the Parekh report and Labour is back in power. Keir Starmer has an opportunity to set the country on a new course by telling a national story of common belonging in which each can recognise their contribution and their place in its history.
[See also: Ed Miliband: “We need to move fast and build things”]
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