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Lord Desai |
No room for complaceny
London is a multicultural success story. It has it problems – but which major city doesn’t asks Lord Desai
THE Shilpa Shetty-Big Brother episode has led to a lot of debate in India as well as the UK and raised the issue of racism in Britain to a high pitch.
Whenever I was asked on the three or four TV programmes I took part in while in India last week, I said that Big Brother was a trashy programme and that what had happened to Shilpa is deplorable, but even so it is ‘candy floss racism’.
The issue of racism in Britain is a serious one, which everyone in public life takes very much as a priority issue. This is why the racist behaviour displayed by Jade Goody became an issue on which the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer had to say something.
Yet it was all media hype designed by Big Brother’s producers Endemol to increase ratings and it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. BB is a programme where they choose people deliberately for their aggressive, foul-mouthed behaviour.
So insulting Shilpa was par for the course; it just spilled over into racism. Yet at its heart it was a matter of class not race. Shilpa is posh and Jade is a chav, as the expression goes. Here was middle- class versus working-class and white working-class at that. Jade has made millions by being exactly as she was on BB. Shilpa should have known better.
There is, however, a point that racism is also a matter of class. At the level of posh middle class people, racism takes the form at worst of a verbal insult. Yet that is not serious, though deplorable.
Britain has tried – over the last 40 years I have been here – very hard to inculcate non-racist behaviour. Multiculturalism is under attack nowadays but it tried successfully in my view over the 1970s and 1980s to make sure in primary and secondary schools, in local authority housing allocation and in hiring practices that as far as possible everyone was treated equal.
This is why when the bombs exploded on July 7, 2005 and four Muslim men were said to be the suicide bombers the question everyone asked was, why did British Muslims do this? They did not say these men were foreigners but that they were British. The agonising question being asked now is, did multiculturalism fail in allowing each racial/ethnic minority its separate sphere and not insist on assimilation into mainstream culture? After all we are now in the second, if not the third generation since the first batch arrived from the ‘New (that is, black and brown) Commonwealth’.
Racism is felt most by the poor. It manifests itself in low achievement at schools, bad housing, lack of jobs, lack of safety as the poor go about their business in mixed areas.
The poor white families who are also in the same situation – bad housing, unemployment, low educational achievements – resent the minority ethnic groups.
Among the minority ethnic groups the Caribbean and Indian origin families have done well. They have good jobs, live in private housing and go to good schools and universities.
The African and the South Asian Muslims of Bangladesh and Pakistani origin have lagged behind in education and they depend on public housing.
These are problems of income inequality and poverty which affect both whites and non-whites who are poor. This is not to condone racism, but to look at its real manifestations. Yet efforts are being made constantly by policymakers to “do something about it”.
Public policy is avowedly anti-racist. People from miniority ethnic groups are in high positions. The leader of the House of Lords is Valerie Amos, a black woman of Guyanese descent. There are other black ministers in the House of Lords as well as nearly 30 non-white Lords and Baronesses. Usha Prashar, who came from east Africa but is of Indian origin, is the chairwoman of the Judicial Appointments Commission.
Yet there is no room for complacency. When London won the Olympics for 2012, it was its multiracial and diverse character which gave it the edge over Paris. But when a young black boy, Stephen Lawrence, was murdered a decade ago and police failed despite several attempts to bring four white young men to justice, even the right-wing tabloid press was appalled.
The Daily Mail led a campaign to name the guilty. A commission appointed to investigate police failure concluded that there was institutional racism in the police force.
Recently the Iraq war and the bombings have made Muslims targets of suspicion and sometimes outright attack. An effort is being made to recruit more ethnic minorities to the police, yet much more needs to be done.
And yet when I first arrived in London in 1965 you saw signs about blacks not wanted as tenants. Today those signs are gone. Walk around London today and you will see more non-white faces than white faces. London, indeed Britain, is a multicultural space. It has problems, but it is coping with them.
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