Abstract
Today, just fourteen years after the path-breaking government-sponsored Macpherson Inquiry recognised that the key problem in the UK was not individual prejudice but institutional racism, everything that was gained – in discourse and policy – is being rolled back. Not only is the role of the state in the creation of racism being side-stepped, but racism itself is being redefined so as to absolve the state of any responsibility and visit it, yet again, on the individual. Racism is being displaced from the social and political realms to the psychological, so engendering the racialisation of politics combined with the personalising of racism (the description is Henry Giroux’s). On the one hand, the scourge of racial harassment, which affects hundreds if not thousands of people every day, is being played down and taken out of the national discussion. As Jon Burnett argues in ‘Racial violence and the politics of hate’, it has ‘been dealt with’ as far as state agencies are concerned, via the Macpherson Inquiry. Within criminal justice it has been classified (along with transgenderism, disableism, etc.) as a generalised ‘hate crime’ – and so reduced to individual intolerance. Racial violence, Burnett points out, has, under the impact of globalisation and changing demographics, been dispersed across Britain, but its ‘management’ goes to a cluster of newly formed partnerships and to agencies in the private sector.
On the other hand, in the UK and Europe alike, an ever-more influential media is helping to create a toxic discourse of racialised, sexualised criminal activity about ‘Asian grooming’ gangs picking on vulnerable white girls. Ella Cockbain in ‘Grooming and the “Asian sex gang predator”: the construction of a racial crime threat’ points out in a coldly analytical unpicking of the current narrative (led by The Times) how a lazy interpretation of statistics and a shaky definition of terms can make for a dangerous and self-fulfilling prophecy of ethnicised crime – all the more serious when there are extreme-right parties ever eager to exploit such explosive issues.
While Asians, especially Pakistanis and Muslim men in the North of England’s cities, are the villains in a new moral panic, the panic about the out-of-control black and/or working-class gang is still being perpetuated and now endorsed through the application of the doctrine of joint enterprise – which effectively penalises anyone found to have been in a group of people (usually young) where a crime (usually violent and often involving a fatality) is committed whether or not s/he actually was involved or knew of any intent. Lee Bridges, who has worked with Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA), which campaigns on behalf of the many young people now incarcerated under joint enterprise, shows in ‘The case against joint enterprise’ how reluctant the authorities are to remove or even amend such a blatantly discriminatory piece of legislation.
Meanwhile the UK is set to increasingly echo the US’s incarceration policy towards its ethnic minorities. In 2010 the proportion of blacks amongst prisoners was 14 per cent (while they make up 2 per cent of population), and Asians 7.3 per cent (3.9 per cent of general population). For young people the figures are yet more stark. In 2010/11, 30 per cent of 15–18 year-olds in custody were from BME groups and between 2009/10 and 2010/11 Muslim inmates increased from 13 to 16 per cent.
So it is that neoliberalism, especially at a time of austerity, changes the very nature of racism and criminal justice. The young unemployed, often excluded not just from school but from every institution and avenue, are surplus and unwanted. But the dragnet of joint enterprise serves to corral them. The Asian grooming narrative in its turn presents the white working class, itself suffering from unemployment and benefit cuts, as racialised victims; whilst daily racial attacks, harassment and abuse are now rampant in areas devastated by industrial decline.
One check on the state’s dehumanising drift had been the increasing use by lawyers and campaigners of judicial review to preserve human rights, especially those of migrants and refugees. But, as Frances Webber argues in ‘Dismantling racial justice’, this recourse is to be curtailed (as legal aid is also withdrawn) on the pretext of it being too expensive, time-consuming and antithetical to the market state.