‘May we bring harmony’? Thatcher’s legacy on ‘race’

Riots and the rise of ethnicity

But it was the riots from April to July of 1981, which burned in twenty-six cities, that caused her to change tack. Her monetarist policies had blighted the futures of working-class youth and they were ripe for rebellion. They and the declining areas they came from had to be kept in check. Lord Heseltine was allowed a regeneration budget for Liverpool, one of the most affected cities. ² But for the rest of the country, an ethnic policy of appeasement, following on Lord Scarman’s findings of ‘disadvantage’ would be implemented. ³ Thatcher’s government wanted the communities to police their own. The Urban Programme, which had hitherto had a small budget, was suddenly increased to £270m and 200 new ‘ethnic projects’ were approved in 1982/3. The monies from this programme, with a small contribution locally, were disbursed by local authorities to local projects meeting local needs. And those needs were being ethnically defined.

While Labour, Liberal and Tory politicians all seemed content with this result, it was left to organisations like the Institute of Race Relations, and especially its director A. Sivanandan, to point out the political damage being wrought. ⁴ For instead of actually addressing racial injustice, the programme redefined the problem as one of cultural disadvantage and went on to reinforce cultural differences without making any changes to a discriminatory system. (Though the riots in the northern towns of 2001 and bombings of 7/7 2005 brought politicians to question the wisdom of ethnic policies and opt instead for ‘cohesion’ strategies, they were never, any more than under Thatcher, to address the structural racism around jobs, housing, schooling, policing, immigration, criminal justice, which lay behind much of the disaffection.)

Embedding of the New Right

The second legacy comes from the new form of racism which arose under Thatcher cultivated by politicians, academics, journalists who, as a group, became known as the New Right. ⁵ Not based, as the fascist extremists were, on biological difference and arguing fundamentally about numbers of immigrants, it was based on cultural difference and the need to defend ‘our’ way of life (which effectively also meant not interfering in racism’s free rein). Thatcher’s natural Edwardian views about British moral superiority might never have got such a political purchase had it not been for two things: that the advisers closest to her such as Alfred Sherman and Keith Joseph ⁶ were deeply influenced by free marketeer Milton Friedman and by free-from-all-state shackles F. A. Hayek, and that after some forty years of struggle against injustice and discrimination, black people, particularly those born here, were not prepared to accept second-class status. Thatcher and her coterie seemed quite aghast that the ‘uppity’ Blacks were openly fighting for their rights. And it was the collision over the legitimacy of cultural pluralism and the need for anti-racism that was to mark battle after battle with local authorities, over equality policies, multiracial education, including the curriculum and the teaching of history, during the 1980s.

The critiques from within the New Right spanned a number of concerns about anti-racism: that it was indoctrination, denied individuality and freedom, insisted on equality of outcome and therefore was a precursor to social engineering, was policing thought, was denigrating a noble British history. For in fact, they argued, racism was being massively overplayed as an issue affecting people’s lives by leftwing agitators. Multiculturalism and multicultural education were threats because they implied that all cultures were equally valid, valuable and moral, which they were not. We were at risk of diluting national, Christian values.

Anti-racism and cultural pluralism were the scourge of the New Right: be it the changing of street names to honour new heroes or the anti-racist year 1984/5 pronounced by the Greater London Council. And very often completely untrue stories, for example, about not being able to ask for ‘black coffee’, sing ‘Baa Baa Black sheep’ or the removal of Tufty the squirrel from a Lambeth road safety campaign, made for their exciting copy. And then there were the attacks on the Swann Report on multiracial education and the Institute of Race Relations, for producing anti-racist booklets for young people. Ray Honeyford, a Bradford head teacher, forced to take early retirement after making certain pejorative observations in the Times Educational Supplement and Salisbury Review about ethnic minorities, became a cause célèbre as a race martyr and then a columnist in his own right. ⁷

A few opinion-formers could not have changed the discourse so decisively, save that they had at their command the Daily Mail, the Sun, The Times, Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. ⁸ Academics turned columnists, proprietors turned polemicists, politicians turned leader-writers, a whole host of New Rightists (many of them members of the Salisbury Group which grew out of Peterhouse College and later were to produce the Salisbury Review) managed to find a place time after time to denounce the anti-racist Left. Academics like Roger Scruton, Caroline Cox, Anthony Flew and John Vincent always seemed to have an in on this subject. But then so too did Ronald Butt, Paul Johnson, Peregrine Worsthorne, Alfred Sherman, Andrew Alexander, T. E. Utley, Roy Kerridge, Honor Tracy and so many more. The media, the many think-tanks on the Right such as the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Social Affairs Unit and the Hillgate Group, working closely with politicians very close to Thatcher, managed to have an inordinate impact.

It is almost a quarter of a century since Thatcher was forced from office and yet the ideological mark left by the New Right is profound (in part because its influence was never challenged by the subsequent John Major and Labour governments). The New Right managed to change the role of the press in forming opinion on race matters and hence terms of debate forever. It took anti-racism, a struggle for justice, and established it as a form of tyranny – to be denounced as ‘political correctness’. It reclaimed patriotism and reread the history of slavery and empire as an attempt to impose collective guilt. It denounced cultural pluralists for putting national values at risk. It recast black protesters as the cause of ‘racial mischief’ and the real bigots. And in a last gasp, over the Macpherson report, it attempted to redefine racism as needing intent so as to prove it could only be attributed to individuals not institutions. ⁹

Thatcher’s New Right established what is today a commonsense nativism – which has stripped the political culture of group rights, internationalism, and history. It paved the way for Cameron’s landmark ‘multiculturalism has failed’ speech of 2011 ¹⁰ and Michael Gove’s whitening of the history curriculum, ¹¹ and the much more general acceptance of views, ranging from those of Andrew Green and Christopher Caldwell to David Goodhart, ¹² that the nation is under threat from cultural pluralism, i.e. immigrants, and we need a more assertive integration policy, i.e. assimilation.