Joined-Up Politics and Post-Colonial Melancholia

JOINED UF POLITICS AND POST-COLONIAL MELANCHOLIA Paul Gilroy D a ve Le w i s, European Stories, Reflection (det ail), 1995, C- t ype p h o t o g r ap h i c print , co l l ect i o n of t h e art ist . riting at the dawn of the cold war, George Orwell likened the predicament of socialists to the position of a doctor struggling against the odds to keep a "hopeless case" alive. More than twenty years beyond the finest flowering of this country's anti- racist youth movements, its residual antiracists have grown accustomed to similar feelings of obligation, determination, constraint and misplaced hope. Tonight's consideration of the diversification and transformation of our country must begin by honoring those, who like the Lawrence family1 and their core support, have struggled for so long to make Britain a freer, more just and more humane place. I would like to communicate respect and appreciation for those brave and diligent people who have worked in climates of hatred, ridicule and indifference to try and make what we used to call "anti- racism" part of the process of calculation engaged in by governments, markets and other social institutions. I feel that we value them and their half- hidden and often disreputable traditions of political action most effectively at this point, by moving firmly against the recent but nonetheless mythical notion that Britain has sorted out the discrete issues of "race" and ethnicity in an exemplary manner and is now a wholly successful multi- cultural society to which the rest of Europe can turn for inspiration and guidance. That view is tempting . It has a certain superficial plausibility, but we must be cautious about buying in to it. It is attractive above all because it suggests that there is nothing else to be done. The hard work is in the past. From this angle, the belated official response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the institutional failures that compounded that tragedy provide solid proof of an irreversible commitment to taking racism out of our civic culture. This convenient view fits easily into the idea that widespread shame at the failures of our police and courts have made some degree of opposition to racism an essential component in the cathartic re- definition of British decency that we have just witnessed —a historic triumph which may in due course be claimed for the tattered regimental honors of New Labour. In contrast to that mistaken approach, I want to suggest that a great deal more hard work lies ahead. This apprehension also obliges me to say unambiguously that, especially when seen through the blood- stained frame of racialised politics, New Labour's post- colonial Britain is in a precarious, divided and volatile condition. Everything is not all right. Social inequalities may be decreasing but economic inequality is growing. The politics of "race" is inescapably intertwined with them both. Better testsof Britain's cultural diversity will materialize when economic conditions are worse than they are now. The great tide of sympathy for the Lawrence family suggests that some denizens of Middle England have turned away from the sly, self- effacing but always statesmanlike, populist race- talk of Enoch Powell2 and his many followers but that historic opportunity has not been seized upon by New Labour and identified as a powerful means to communicate their modernizing ' break with that unsavory past. We need to consider exactly why it is William and Ffion3 rather than Tony and Cherie who felt they had something to gain by demonstrating their command of the post- colonial art of jumping up in The Grove. The role of Paul Dacre's Daily Mail4 in the Lawrence case confirms that the Tories know something about the political calculus of "race"and gender that Millbank5 is still waiting to learn. Our rulers appear to be caught between one world where the idea that Britain has nurtured relatively peaceful encounters with difference is a minor political asset, and another more important one where being tough on immigrants of all types affords them real political advantages. The media narration of the Lawrences' tragedy demonstrated a reversal of the comforting...