1

Please note that this programme transcript is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose.

RADIO 4

RADIO CURRENT AFFAIRS

ANALYSIS A New Black Politics?

TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY

Presenter: David Goodhart Producer: Hannah Barnes Editor: Innes Bowen

BBC Room 1210 White City 201 Wood Lane W12 7TS

(020) 8752 7279

Broadcast date: 31.10.11 2030-2100 Repeat date: 06.11.11 2130-2200 CD number: PLN144/11VT1044 Duration: 27’39” 2

Shaun Bailey West London Conservative activist and youth worker

Stafford Scott Grew up in Tottenham in the 1970s and now acts as a race equality consultant

Trevor Phillips Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission

Linda Bellos Leader of Lambeth council in 1986, now runs a successful business in Norfolk

Bill Bush Former adviser at the GLC

Kwasi Kwarteng Conservative MP for Spelthorne in Middlesex

David Lammy Labour MP for Tottenham

Marcus Broadwater Farm Estate resident, in his late twenties and out of work 3

GOODHART: Black politics in Britain is changing. A new generation is taking over with different attitudes and concerns. It was watching the response to England’s summer riots that brought this home to me.

I am old enough to remember the Tottenham riots of 1985. Police officer Keith Blakelock was hacked to death in disturbances following the death of a black woman, Cynthia Jarrett. , then the black leader of Haringey Council famously refused to condemn the rioters.

ARCHIVE, BERNIE GRANT:

GRANT: I condemn the behaviour of the police in this whole affair. I also regret the death of the police officer and I also regret the death of Mrs Cynthia Jarrett.

QUESTION: But you don’t condemn the rioting.

GRANT: The fact is that the young people were provoked in their own words by the police behaviour not only on Saturday night but also throughout the summer.

GOODHART: Compare that with the unequivocal condemnation of this year’s rioters by David Lammy who succeeded Grant as Tottenham’s second black MP.

ARCHIVE, DAVID LAMMY:

LAMMY: A community that was already hurting has now had the heart ripped out of it. We have officers in hospital, some of whom are seriously injured. This is a disgrace. This must stop.

GOODHART: 1985 and 2011 were very different kinds of riots, though they both had the Broadwater Farm estate, and conflict between young black men and the police at their epicentre.

But in the TV debates that followed this year’s trouble, alongside the old radicals pointing the finger at police racism, there were also new voices like Tory activist Shaun Bailey, the authentically “street” black west Londoner placing as much stress on a culture of victimhood.

BAILEY: Being seen as the angry, poor criminal sat in a corner is the problem of black people, and we are fed up of it. I think our community has been raised up in dependency. I think we’re the chosen victims and I hope to be a part of changing that… 4

GOODHART: In this programme we’ll speak to those claiming to be part of a new kind of black politics, a truer reflection – they say - of the variety of views held by black Britons, and we’ll also talk to their critics.

SCOTT: I can’t remember a time when there was less clear black politics than there is today. And if you’re talking about black politicians in parliament, personally I don’t want to be disrespectful to the brothers and sisters who are there, but they’re not black politicians. They’re politicians who happen to be black

GOODHART: The Anglo-African Caribbean story has become a happier one in recent decades but it is also the original sin of post war immigration. When the first generation arrived in the late 1940s and 1950s, they wanted to embrace the mother country. In return, they met indifference and hostility, even the churches closed their doors to them.

But the second and third generations battled to change Britain in the 1970s and 80s hand in hand with the young white left.

MUSIC: THE SPECIALS: RACIST FRIEND

GOODHART: This new era was typified by bands like The Specials – who, with their two tone line-up, symbolised black and white people struggling together for racial justice.

When I was at university in the late 1970s I remember a black leftist student leader coming to address us, and his afro hair-do was a familiar sight bobbing around at the front of most big protests at the time. Now, that same man - - is chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and sees his own prominence then as part of a bigger political story.

PHILLIPS: If you think of race politics as a way of looking at what’s happening in politics more generally, then it becomes much more interesting. When I first got into public life, you know I was the first black president of the National Union of Students and, by the way, the only one so far, that was all kind of a big deal, because I think around that time what we saw was the beginning of the disappearance really of the classic Left cause, which is the working class. After got elected in 79 and so on, actually after several years of riots and youth unemployment, particularly amongst black people, race presented itself as a great alternative rallying cause for progressive politics.

GOODHART: This is what is sometimes called the “cultural shift” of the left away from bread and butter working class politics towards building not just a two-tone alliance like the Specials, but a rainbow coalition of oppressed minorities. 5

ARCHIVE, BELLOS:

BELLOS: I actually represent three forms of oppression at one time and a lot of us have a common experience of being kept out of power.

GOODHART: In the context of 1980s politics, you didn’t get more oppressed than who was a black, Jewish lesbian.

Bellos, who became leader of Lambeth council in 1986, now runs a successful business in rustic Norfolk. Back in the 1980s, just after the Brixton riots – or uprisings as they’re sometimes known, she was a leading member of the Black Sections campaign which aimed at getting black Labour Party candidates selected for councils and parliamentary seats.

BELLOS: We must mention the uprisings of 1981 which made I think a profound impact upon Britain. For the first time Britain recognised that we so- called immigrants were actually here to stay and we weren’t going to be treated as second class citizens. And Black Sections I think came out of that. And there are people who at the time argued that we were being marginal, but actually we weren’t talking about creating a black political party. We were talking about creating a Labour Party that represented all of its people rather than just ignoring the black vote, expecting that we would loyally vote Labour. At that time we talked about black being… it was a political expression. We were talking about African, Asian, Caribbean, and indeed anybody who identified because of obviously their skin colour with racism.

GOODHART: And this politics was successful. Autonomous organisation is today often associated with separatism, but then it seemed necessary to break down barriers. By the late 1980s there was a clutch of black Labour MPs, a black bishop and leader and the number of ethnic minority local councillors soared to hit the 500 mark by the early 1990s.

But, this was also the hey-day of the so-called loony left councils. And there was a deep immaturity about some of the rainbow coalition politics as Bill Bush, Ken Livingstone’s right hand man at the in the early 80s, recalls:

BUSH: The black activists - these were newly arrived into mainstream political discourse. And much of what they did, motivated by anger, was also conditioned by an immaturity in understanding quite what the system was and how to work it.

And what you might call the Liberal Left establishment itself had a colossal immaturity in knowing how to deal with a group where it had lots of sympathy but very few cultural and other reference points. This was the vogue in British politics, that if you take each aggrieved niche - so angry feminist, the angry gay community, the angry black community, trade unionists - somehow these niches stitched together created an electoral majority. 6

BUSH: And in this naïveté people who should not have got through the system did get through the system. Two women of African origin who were selected to be Labour candidates, their agenda included, for example, support for female circumcision. They wanted black only schools and various other really quite extreme demands. Of course these could not be met. They understandably got quite aggrieved, and in the end joined the Tory Party.

GOODHART: Brent Labour party got into trouble with the African women because it had decided to impose a 50% minority councillor quota on itself and there were simply not enough experienced people to go round.

Many of the stories about the young town hall idealists were made up by hostile newspapers - but a fair amount of looniness did actually happen. Bill Bush recalls long discussions about whether Irish people and gypsies should be classified as black because they too had been oppressed at the hands of a white elite. Incidentally, when we use the word black in this programme we mean people of African or African Caribbean descent.

Not only did this politics fail to deliver electoral success for the Labour party, Trevor Phillips suggests that it wasn’t great for ordinary black people either.

PHILLIPS: In a sense, what you saw in the first half of the 80s was the left outsourcing its anger and its outrage to ethnic minorities. And that is what really characterised “black” politics. Though it’s fantastic for those who are politically active, those who are radical and particularly those who are on the left, it’s not fantastic for the majority of the community. First of all, it put the African Caribbean community in a box, parts of which it doesn’t feel comfortable with. African Caribbeans historically are socially conservative and there are some aspects of left politics that that community as a whole is not comfortable with - for example its hostility to organised religion. Most African Caribbean people, they do go to church or belong to a church or like church. Secondly, there’s a sort of built-in problem. In order to sustain your significance in this kind of politics, you have to be a really good victim. If the whole point of the politics is to improve the position of African and Caribbean people, the more successful you become, the less convincing you are as a source of victimhood. So actually there’s a sort of built-in obsolescence to this political status.

GOODHART: The leftist race politics of the 1980s now seems like another country. The political, and street, battles of that era did help to marginalise overt racism—a major survey in 2001 found only 2% of British people admitted to being very prejudiced. 7

GOODHART: Moreover Britain’s black community has itself changed fundamentally in the past generation - for most of the post-war period black in Britain has meant African Caribbean but now people of direct African descent are in the majority. And especially those from West Africa are doing pretty well - a higher proportion of African males are in middle class jobs than white men. British Africans do not carry the psychological scar of slavery and often came here as students in the 1960s when African Caribbeans were coming as workers. This is now reflected in a wider range of political affiliations - rather unnoticed the Tory party now has four black MPs, all of whom are from African backgrounds.

KWARTENG: I think it’s very true to say that a lot of the West African immigrants were people who had quite a high level of education.

GOODHART: No it’s not Boris Johnson, its Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng whose campaign team once described him as the black Boris. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge.

KWARTENG: They were people who were… you would call middle class and perhaps it’s not surprising that their children were people who felt that they could participate in things like politics and wanted to get on in that way. I think also it had a lot to do with the nature of colonialism in those countries. For instance, I think in Ghana there was a significant population that had been to secondary school. There was a University of Ghana which had been established as a college of the University of London.

LAMMY: Look, I don’t think it’s as simple as Africans doing well and Caribbeans not doing so well.

GOODHART: Tottenham MP David Lammy, whose parents were born in the Caribbean.

LAMMY: The truth is that that immigration after the war, the Windrush Generation, was predominantly Caribbean and we know the story: no Irish, no blacks, no dogs. And the experience of the children of those people - my dad arrived here in 1956 - was not a high point for Britain. Too many young black boys, particularly, growing up in Britain in the late 60s and 1970s were failed in the education system, and I’m afraid some of the experience that we are experiencing is the legacy of that - the children of those people living on. But that’s not the only experience because of course the other phenomenon is black Caribbean women doing extremely well.

GOODHART: David Lammy is a Labour MP and it’s the Labour Party which has historically owned these issues of racial justice. Today, about 80 per cent of black people still vote Labour - but as they disperse through society that high proportion is likely to shrink, as it already has done with the relatively successful Hindu Indians. 8

GOODHART: Shaun Bailey, the West London Tory activist of Jamaican background, explains why he is a Tory.

BAILEY: I think I’m a result of the win that black activists have had in the past. Our politics is becoming more sophisticated and we’re spread out.

I think why Labour owned those issues is because - let’s give credit where credit’s due - they attached themselves to them first, understood them and dealt with some of it. But I think now black communities are reaching a point where they think well hold on a second, at our heart, at least socially, we’re very conservative and we are now beginning to compromise some of our core beliefs.

GOODHART: Your critics would say that you’re just a rather eccentric figure - a combination of black street and Toryism and that actually Labour still does own these issues

BAILEY: It would be false to sit here and say all black people vote Tory now. It’s a small amount of black people. Being seen as the angry, poor criminal sat in a corner is the problem of black people, and we are fed up of it. A black schoolboy said to me. “Why are you a Tory because there’s no black people there?” And I said, “That’s exactly why I’m a Tory.” And I said to him, “You as a growing black man, wherever you go into a situation and there’s no black people, that’s exactly where we’re meant to be.”

GOODHART: So, while economics and racial justice issues may have pushed black people to the left in the 1980s, there is that powerful strand of social conservatism at the grassroots that both Trevor Phillips and Shaun Bailey mention, and which has always created tensions with secular liberals and black radicals.

Former Ken Livingstone adviser at the GLC, Bill Bush, recalls the huge gulf between ordinary black parents and the political activists, who wanted to create black-only schools, complete with a separate curriculum.

BUSH: I was involved in consultations with black parents about what did they actually want. And what was striking was in meeting after meeting after meeting, the black parents who turned up in huge numbers - they wanted their kids to be well educated. They would use words like ‘discipline’ which of course were a red rag to the left wing bull, they wanted school uniforms, they wanted their kids to be part of the mainstream because unless they were part of the mainstream, they weren’t going to get jobs. Perfectly reasonable expectations and a thousand miles away from the black left leadership agenda for education.

GOODHART: The new black politics is not only more representative of those black parents Bill Bush recalls, it also rejects the idea that being publicly critical of parts of “the community” is a kind of betrayal. David Lammy is reluctant to blame the racism of British society for the social problems that are particularly acute among African Caribbeans. 9

LAMMY: I think we have to acknowledge today that whilst discrimination and racism remain issues, they are not the profound issues that they once were, and that there are a whole host of other social concerns that concern what happened to second and third generation black communities and broader issues that largely pertain to class. There are issues of work and worklessness, cultural issues to tackle - fatherhood, for example. You know, I challenge the idea of a baby father, a presumption that it’s okay to have children as a result of a casual relationship with a number of different women. And I think that having a relationship with your kids in the context of modern Britain is really essential.

GOODHART: And this politics is also about facing up to one of the most sensitive issues facing black communities, the disproportionate levels of crime. Conservative activist Shaun Bailey.

BAILEY: You can be a black man doing really spectacular things, but your best friend will be in jail. And that’s why we have a realistic talk about crime.

Let’s take the Chancellor. He’s a pal of mine. I love Georgie, yeah. Georgie has no experience of anybody who’s in jail. I’m deeply involved in politics. I have many a friend who’s in jail as we speak. And that just shows you the different situations that black existence has to answer.

GOODHART: And you’re also much more likely to be stopped and searched, say, than I am.

BAILEY: This is one of the big problems for the black community. So if you talk about stop and search, you’ve got the old brigade who are very angry about the police in general. And rightly so. Let’s be clear, they didn’t make it up. And then you’ve got the new brigade saying well if we don’t stop and search our children are the children that die, so we need it but we don’t like it. And the problem is if you’re from the old brigade, you do not want the black community having a good relationship with the police because you lose your social and political power. And that’s our conundrum. I want us to remember that we suffer from crime more than anybody else, so let’s think about how we interact with the police.

GOODHART: Not everyone agrees that there is such a thing as a new black politics. Stafford Scott grew up in Tottenham in the 1970s and now acts as a race equality consultant.

He’s a protégée of the late Bernie Grant, one of the first black MPs in Britain, who we heard earlier refusing to condemn the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots.

Stafford Scott regards the whole new black political class as a sell-out:

SCOTT: I can’t remember a time when there was less clear black politics than there is today. And if you’re talking about black politicians in parliament, they’re not black politicians. They’re politicians who happen to be black. 10

GOODHART: So what should a good black politician be doing today?

SCOTT: One of the great white cons of the 80s was when they told us that representation was somehow going to make a difference. Representation should make a difference. But for representation to make a difference for black people, it means that black people have to select and elect their representatives, and nobody represents the grassroots black community - when I look on the TV and I see Diane Abbott, she’s not talking about my experiences, she sounds like a posh white MP. When I speak to David Lammy, he appears and behaves just like a white MP. All we can do is compare and contrast with what we knew before. Brother Bernie Grant. I so miss Bernie Grant because he didn’t just hang out in parliament, he was someone who cared passionately about injustice. It wasn’t just about race, he wasn’t against us.

GOODHART: Stafford Scott took us to the Broadwater Farm estate, also the birthplace of Mark Duggan, whose death at the hands of police triggered the riots in Tottenham this summer.

He introduced us to Marcus, who’s in his late twenties and out of work:

MARCUS: No-one ain’t helping them. No-one ain’t saying “Yeah come, we’ve got this workshop doing or we’ve got this doing.” You get me?

GOODHART: Ok, but I suppose the argument between us in a way is you’re saying that there are these objective real world barriers out there. I’m saying well yes there may be barriers, but there’s also a very big barrier in people’s minds. If people think that there’s a stitch-up against them, then it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.

MARCUS: (over) No, no, no. Look, I find it hard to get work out here, so I said to myself you know what, I’m going to do a little a SIA security course. You understand, you get me? Like there’s loads of security jobs out there right now. And I’ve got my badge, innit? I’ve had my badge for like nearly three months now, and not one company has got back to me. Why is that? What is it really? It’s a set-up man, it’s just a set-up.

(MUSIC: SIRENS)

GOODHART: Much of the hard end of today’s black street culture echoes the old politics of racial grievance and the idea that white society is a closed shop that can only be challenged through violence.

Some of this nihilistic worldview is amplified by a form of hard core rap music called grime. And even quite mainstream stars like Dizzee Rascal write songs, like his hit Sirens, that talk matter of factly about committing random violence. 11

GOODHART: The accompanying video shows Dizzee himself literally being hunted down and killed like a fox by white faced, red-coated riders on horse-back with horns and a pack of dogs.

I asked David Lammy, who is Marcus’s MP, how worried he was about the power of this street discourse and the idea that white society is a brutal stitch up that crushes the spirit of young black men.

LAMMY: I’m very worried. We should all be incredibly worried. It’s not unique to Tottenham. But, look, let me just say something else that’s quite tough here. I grew up in a house where I was very clear the world was not fair. And in that context I’m damned pleased that I had a mother that helped me with resilience, so I’m not that keen to say that everything must be down to the . We’ve also got to be clear about the resilience that’s necessary, about the get up and go that’s necessary, and about the role of community in this.

GOODHART: This, I think, is getting close to the heart of the matter. Is British society still to blame for some of the real problems facing some young black, urban men, or are they the authors of their own misfortune or at least victims of an ideology that says they can only fail in British society, thus ensuring that they do?

What ultimately divides what Shaun Bailey calls the old brigade from the new brigade is differing views about racism. No black politician, or black person for that matter, will tell you that it has disappeared. But the new brigade say it is not the problem it once was and refuse to be defined by it.

Some, like Stafford Scott, do not accept that.

SCOTT: White England hasn’t learnt anything. White England has learnt how to cover up its racism. It hasn’t changed…

GOODHART: (Over) I mean what you say is challenged by lots and lots of other black politicians who were around in the 80s, who took part in those battles and think that a lot has changed since then. You may disagree…

SCOTT: (over) A lot has changed for them, boss. Racism has not gone. The battles of the 80s that addressed overt racism on the street, so now my children do not walk down the street and get called “coon” and “wog” and “nigger” in the way that used to happen to me. That’s unacceptable. The reason that they don’t get called these things isn’t because some people do not believe these things. It’s because people know that there’s going to be a consequence if you do that.

People say things have changed, and then when you look at the baseline statistics they tell you that they haven’t. Exclusion from school - higher than it was in the 80s; unemployment - running about 50% between young black boys between the ages of 16 and 24; stop and search. 12

PHILLIPS: Every piece of objective evidence says that the new politics have got to be right. If you survey people today, the old not on my street test, not with my daughter test, we’re in a completely different world.

GOODHART: Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

PHILLIPS: People who want to pretend that nothing has changed are not looking reality in the face and they are doing the British people a real injustice. The issue that people really ought to be addressing is what account do we have of African Caribbean under achievement in school, under employment? Why is it that some communities have arrived and faced similar kinds of prejudice - for example East African Asians - but are now amongst the wealthiest and significant communities in our society? That era of protest politics ought to be over for us. We’ve got to ask those questions seriously rather than simply constantly bleating on about what other people did to us and how they should do something different.

GOODHART: There is certainly a new generation of black politicians emerging, and not all of them in the Conservative party, who don’t feel they have to do race.

Kwasi Kwarteng, MP for Spelthorne in Middlesex.

KWARTENG: I think the assumption with an ethnic politician certainly 20 or 30 years ago was that they were there primarily to represent their ethnic constituency, if you like. But my situation is slightly different and so it would be foolish of me simply to say that I was representing black or ethnic interests when my constituents are 95% of white British origin. Obviously my ethnic background is a very important part of who I am. But surely as a Member of Parliament representing the constituency I do, there’s a much wider range of concerns that I have to engage with.

PHILLIPS: Well, I think it’s fantastic. What we’re observing is that for the first time in my lifetime, I guess, the thing that is determining the way that prominent black figures behave politically is the same thing that determines how white figures behave politically - i.e. what is in the interest of me and my family, what does my experience tell me is the right way to go about things? That’s got to be a good thing, hasn’t it? I mean that’s the point of integration. Not that we all become the same, but that actually we’re different but not different because of our colour.

GOODHART: Trevor Phillips.

So is something like a post-racial politics emerging in Britain? The very development that Stafford Scott declares so negative: people who are not black politicians, but politicians who happen to be black, is what others celebrate as part of the normalisation of the black presence in British politics. 13

GOODHART: That’s all very well… or is it? I put that question to 80s activist Linda Bellos.

You now have a generation of black politicians who are not primarily interested in issues of race, and surely that’s a good thing?

BELLOS: Well, I think what’s more worrying is they’re not interested in issues of class, and that goes for the white politicians as well. We’re down to individuals and individualism. So we have some I’m sure outstanding individual black MPs, but they’re not representing and they’re not speaking up on behalf of their working class constituents, black or white. But that’s true for white MPs as well.

GOODHART: But surely this is not so much about class as underclass. About a group of people - black and white, but disproportionately black - who have got stuck, who have not thrived in the era of economic liberalism and to whom social liberalism has often been more a curse than a liberation.

They should not be abandoned, but nor is their cause a modern version of the civil rights movement - whatever their street culture or the community workers who speak for them might claim. Like those famous generals, they are fighting the last war. Meanwhile David Lammy, Kwasi Kwarteng and others have moved on - they are trying to represent all their constituents and getting on with being ordinary politicians who just happen to be black.