29.04.1999

After Brixton and Brick Lane

Our anti-racism and theirs

There are two ways the left can react to New Labour’s anti-racist crusade. One is to capitulate to Blair and form the left wing of the establishment’s top-down anti-racism. The other is to recognise the shift in the ruling class’s ideology and re-articulate a militant and revolutionary working class anti-racism - one that unites our class, not splinters it along the lines of ethnic supplicants to the bourgeois state.

This task has become more urgent with what now seems likely as the development of a racist terror campaign by the ‘White Wolves’ - an isolated and tiny ultra-right grouping. In the aftermath of the Brixton and Brick Lane bombs, the police are out in force in an attempt to prove their anti-racist credentials. And, much to the chagrin of the dogmatic left which can only say ‘police -racist to the core’, their attempts at top-down, official anti-racist policing will be genuine.

Since the Macpherson report came out, the government, the police and almost all other sections of the establishment have been gushing with well-meaning, hand-wringing platitudes about racism in British society. Stung by the dislocation caused by Thatcherism - from the Brixton riots of 1981, the miners’ Great Strike and the anti-Poll Tax movement - Blairism continues the ruling class’s neo-liberalism, but is attempting it with a human face.

Anti-racism, as a bottom-up movement, reacted to Thatcher’s open class war in the 1980s. As part of New Labour’s programme of ‘inclusiveness and opportunity’, and constitutional reform from above, it is being coopted as an integral part of bourgeois ideology.

One prominent black figure who epitomises official anti-racism is Trevor Phillips, possible Labour candidate for London mayor. Writing in The Observer, Phillips reported on his previous day’s outing with Her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police in Brixton.

“The afternoon had the feel of a village gathering. The local police chief, Simon Foy, was out with one of the Met’s top brass, Dennis O’Connor, swapping jokes with members of the black group doing the leafleting. A dreadlocked eccentric followed us with a poetic stream of consciousness ... A righteous rastaman took a leaflet ... No one questioned what a group of predominantly black people were doing on the streets supporting a police investigation. Few refused to take leaflets. It was so different from the past, when any cooperation was suspect. But something exceptional had happened. The people here were reacting as Londoners, not as black or white, or pro- or and anti-police” (‘Racists know the game is up’ The Observer April 25).

It is this official anti-racism which must be challenged. But all that most of the left can do is say that people such as Phillips are just liars - they are dupes or Uncle Toms, covering up for the racist state.

In condemning the fascist attacks of the past two weeks, Phillips said:

“We have been able to achieve this [a stable nation formed by waves of immigrants] over 1,000 years by developing a very simple set of values which we now take for granted as the secret of Englishness - decency, tolerance, respect for privacy and individualism which the rest of the world sees in us ... These are the very values that the scum who bomb English communities are threatening ... Those who claim to be defending the land of their birth are doing precisely the opposite.”

Draped in the flag of St George, Phillips condemns the fascists as having not an anti-human or anti-working class ideology, but an anti-English ideology. This points to the content of his official anti-racism - national chauvinism. And this is what the left must grasp if it is to re-articulate a new anti-racism from below.

Our main enemy remains the bourgeois state, not Hitler-saluting nutcases. As the state adopts anti-racism - changing its content - and becomes the proponent of a new, reactionary and chauvinist anti-racism, communists must come up with new answers.

Marcus Larsen