The Ongoing Project of Re-Racializing Britain

After completing my book Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Palgrave 2014), I'm now thinking about how race and class works in the present conjuncture given the deep embeddedness of racism but also the creation of a relatively durable culture of anti-racism in parts of British society as a result of the anti-systemic struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. I believe that the political culture of anti-racism helped sustain important spaces of hope, enabling the black and brown British to breathe a less suffocating air, to make important advances economically, politically and socially, and thereby ensure a better and happier life for their children and grandchildren during the 1980s and 1990s. Just some of the important markers of this social transformation – effected amid a period of consolidating neoliberalism and all the more remarkable for that – included the growing representation of racialized minority groups across a wider range of occupational groups, the emergence of an everyday multiculture characterised by what Paul Gilroy has termed a “spontaneous tolerance and openness evident in the underworld of Britain’s convivial culture” and, of course, the acknowledgement by the ruling elites – often reluctantly – that Britain was now a multicultural society.

Since the onset of the 21st century, however, those fragile gains with their promise of a better future have found themselves under grave attack. The riots in the Northern English mill towns during the summer of 2001 combined with the rapidly changing geo-political situation in the aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in 2002 were formative moments in the consolidation of a new racialized enemy within – ‘the Muslim’. Significantly, the dominant components of this modality of racism draw with increasing regularity on feminist and gay discourses of liberation – suitably de-fanged and shorn of their emancipatory potential – and pressed into service by neoliberals and their intellectual mouthpieces in so-called think-tanks. The effect has been to increasingly legitimise claims that Muslim culture (whatever that means!) and the Muslim presence more generally is in some sense incompatible with modern British values of tolerance and diversity. That is, femonationalist (the association of feminism with nationalist ideology) and homonationalist (that is, the association of gay rights with nationalist ideology) ways of thinking have aided the consolidation of a new consensus on race and difference – encompassing elements of all social classes – in which anti-Muslim racism forms an intrinsic justification for the elite turn away from multiculturalism, and towards an assimilatory nationalism. Indeed, multiculturalism itself – denoting state recognition of cultural and ethnic diversity within a nation-state – has been alleged to perpetuate feelings of separation and racial division.

The political conjuncture has worsened still further since 2007, when the British economy spiralled into depression as part of the global economic collapse. Today, the gains of anti-racism are under genuine threat as concerns about Muslims, immigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere threaten to fuse with the Lib-Con coalition government’s enforcement of a scale of public sector spending cuts unprecedented in British history since the formation of the modern welfare state. While all the main political parties call for “the people” to “tighten their belts” and “make sacrifices in the national interest” because “we are all in this together”, some critics have usefully drawn attention to how such discourses mask the deeply classed nature of “austerity”. Campaigners have also drawn political attention to the disproportionate impact of the cuts and changes to economic policies on women. What is less widely recognised, however, is that such spending cuts will impact disproportionately on racialized minorities. It was precisely the public sector and related areas of social life that were forced open by anti-racist collective action in the 1970s and 1980s. It helped prevent the catastrophe that otherwise would have befallen racialized minorities when manufacturing – in which they were overwhelmingly represented – was destroyed by the Conservatives in the early 1980s. Now that catastrophe threatens Britain’s racialized minorities anew, as the Lib-Con pact aim to complete the neoliberal revolution first initiated under Thatcher.

In any conjunctural analysis, one must undertake an assessment of the social forces that oppose the dominant consensus, and critically assess their capacity to construct meaningful resistance. What such an exercise reveals is that political opposition to neoliberalism today is more fragmented and weaker than in the 1970s and 1980s. The two primary agents of anti-racist mobilisation in those years – black self-organisation and socialist-led working class resistance – have both been severely weakened in the intervening decades, making the likelihood of effective collective opposition more remote. The black subject fragmented in the late 1980s, in part as a result of its own success in forcing open various sites of British society to racialized minorities. Those racialized minority groups, people from South Asian, African and Caribbean backgrounds that had coalesced around the ideology of political blackness to challenge an all-pervasive colour-coded racism disintegrated into their component parts as each group made varying levels of progress within British society. As a result, the structural foundations that bound this alliance together in a coalition of the racialized poor dissipated, along with the political moment of decolonisation and civil rights, leaving little possibility today of a return to the anti-racist politics of blackness.

At the same time, while class remains a fundamental source of inequality, the working class subject that briefly emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s has also been comprehensively defeated. Further, the idea of socialism as an emancipatory political project lost much of its appeal amid the collapse of the state socialist regimes in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s such that today it has little purchase among large swathes of the working class. And the traditional party of the working class – Labour – cognisant of such changes through its mediated relationship to the opinion formers of Marxism Today long ago forsook its commitment to building a democratic socialist society.

In this interregnum, other intellectual currents have tried to fill the void in the Labour Party, including most notably Blue Labour, which has influenced Ed Miliband’s more recent formulation of “One Nation Labour”. Blue Labour’s intellectual founders, who include Maurice Glasman, have spoken of the “paradoxes of Labour’s tradition” arguing that it needs to “address the crisis of its political philosophy and to recover its historic sense of purpose” by “rebuilding a strong and enduring relationship with the people”. They suggest that working class voters will be won back to Labour through a re-discovery of its socially conservative roots, with an approach that emphasises concern for “family, faith, and flag”. However, such a conservative message is likely to resonate only with certain categories of workers, particularly those who are concerned about questions of race, immigration and Europe amongst others. And its rather narrow conception of the working class fails in particular to consider how such a message might play to a working class in England that today is increasingly characterised by ethnic diversity. What these Labour intellectuals have also failed to recognise is the structuring power of racism throughout British society, including within the working class, and the extent to which visions of “the people” have been deeply racialized. Any progressive political projects that attempt to invoke notions of the people today must actively seek to both acknowledge this contradictory and complex history of racism, and plot ways of moving beyond it and its structuring effects in the present conjuncture.

Satnam Virdee, University of Glasgow, March 2015