Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Interesting and nuanced piece by Sunder Katwala on race in Britain:

Britain's racism problem—we've made progress, but not enough
Any ethnic minority figure with a public profile is just one click away from the bigots
By Sunder Katwala
July 14, 2021
August/September 2021

As a 47-year-old British son of an Indian and an Irish immigrant, let me start with three memories. First, 1988: at Goodison Park, squirming in my seat as my fellow supporters sang "Everton are white" to celebrate being one of the few English football teams not to have any black players at the time. Second, 1999: being asked "why don't you lot go back to where you come from?" as I got off the bus in Eltham—but, over 20 years on, that was the last time somebody was directly racist to my face. Third and finally, this month, though it could have been last month or the month before, checking my replies on Twitter and finding a swarm of abuse of the kind I'd once thought was consigned to the past.

Similar memories and personal experiences will be shared by others among my generation. What do I take from them? That racism still exists—only we have driven much of it into the shadows. But it remains there, lurking, liable to being reactivated by the opportunities for anonymous abuse that platforms like Twitter allow too easily.

So I am not content with the real progress we have made. If there is one practical lesson to distil from this mixed picture, it is that we would do well to avoid lapsing into the sort of ultra-polarised race "debate" that consumes America's very different society. Republicans and Democrats seem to live in completely different countries to one another. For American voters, race now sits alongside guns and abortion as an issue on which there seems little scope—or indeed effort—to find common ground. Pushing race up the agenda has been double-edged for equality campaigners: the opportunity to make overdue changes is there, but it can often be hindered by the polarisation that ultimately condemned the country to four years of Donald Trump. And yet, remarkably, an awful lot of people on both sides in Britain seem oblivious to the risks of importing such polarisation.

Two truths, two tribes

This spring, the prime minister's own race adviser, Samuel Kasumu, left his Downing Street role warning that "there are some people in the government who feel like the right way to win is to pick a fight on the culture war and to exploit division." Although it had been set up in response to the heat of last summer's Black Lives Matter protests, when Tony Sewell's Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities eventually published its report this March, it certainly didn't cool the temperature. It joined the dots between some interesting but divergent points to reach one sweeping conclusion: that Britain was no longer "systemically racist." To some at least, the report appeared to point to the success of particular communities with the intention of challenging others to "get their act together." Anti-racist campaigners immediately responded with a call for the government to disown the report.

In the hyper-polarised debate stoked by Sewell's commission, the government and its critics were at loggerheads, accusing each other of operating in bad faith while dismissing the evidence concerning, respectively, the progress made in British race relations or the persistence of discrimination. This binary argument crowds out appreciation of a reality in which two things are true at once. Yes, we have indeed come a long way; but it is also true that racism and discrimination persist.

To consolidate progress in combating prejudice, we cannot merely import the language and noise around race in America. We need a homegrown agenda for change that is meaningful to our specific UK context. One that seeks out common ground defined by widely (though not universally) shared basic anti-racist foundations that reforms can be built on. This hope is not just conjecture. My thinktank, British Future, has been discussing these issues with representative members of the public across the UK, hearing the views of both ethnic minority and white citizens. We have uncovered a debate that is far from binary. There is a broad consensus, across ethnic groups, that Britain isn't America on race. Yet there is understandably wariness, too, about leaping to the conclusion that race is an American problem that Britain has sorted out.

Mixed picture

These nuanced attitudes reflect a nuanced reality. The story of opportunity and disadvantage is complex. In education, ethnic minority Britons are now more likely to have a degree than their white British peers, but this educational success doesn't always translate into the world of work. One recent study found that citizens with a name like Khalid or Kalisha have to send, on average, 60 per cent more job applications to get a positive response from employers than those with a name like Kevin or Katharine—evidence that systematic disparities persist. Stubborn inequalities in mental health and criminal justice co-exist with the increasing presence of minorities in leadership roles.

This mixed picture can be seen as a glass half-empty or half-full. But at least there is agreement on one thing: counterposing a "white British" group against an aggregate "ethnic minority" group obscures more than it explains, with greater differences now found between those from different minorities. Indian and Chinese students top the educational league tables, while Pakistani children often languish. Not for nothing did Black Lives Matter channel concern about the specificity of anti-black (as opposed to, say, anti-Asian) prejudice and discrimination. But even here there are twists: the Sewell report highlights the growing divergence between Black Caribbean and Black African outcomes.

My heritage puts me in three groups—Irish British, Indian British and "mixed" British—and so the negative "out-group" caricature of each was softened and diminished. Being mixed race has moved from being a social problem, thought likely to cause an identity crisis for children, to an identity that is celebrated as proof of integration. Even benign caricatures can be limiting, but it is striking that the British Indian image now includes as many positive stereotypes as negative ones. As for the common anti-Irish prejudice heard when I was growing up, much of it faded alongside the sounds of the IRA's bombs.

But while it got easier to be Irish in Britain, it has got harder to be a British Muslim—a group now at the sharp end of most public debates about identity and integration since 9/11 and 7/7. Over a third of the population say that they would be uncomfortable with the idea of a prime minister who was Muslim, which is far more than the fifth who admit that they would feel uneasy about an ethnic minority leader.

Yet what's going on within individual ethnic groups is often more interesting than developments between them. When it comes to minority voters and citizens, it is too common to discuss them as one bloc and forget about those crucial cleavages—age, education and social class—that are endlessly used to frame the majority in this post-Brexit era. This is a serious mistake, because shifts across generations—in education, opportunities and expectations—are actually greater among minorities, due to how profoundly the effects of integration into the UK play out between them.

Britain has one big advantage over most countries in western Europe in grappling with all this: it collects the relevant data. On the continent, an outdated allergy to working with race has led to a reliance on "country of parental birth" as a decreasingly effective proxy. Consequently, while we were able to identify the deep ethnic disparities Covid deaths, Sweden and France have had to rely on anecdote. We have the facts to establish the complex, comprehensive picture: but we must still be prepared to face it. The trouble is that the facts about social change are often less important than the different ways we feel about them.

Generation gap

Has change on race been fast or slow? This is the question to answer if you want to understand why we talk past each other. The same social changes can feel dizzyingly fast and frustratingly slow at the same time.

Having been born in a Yorkshire hospital in the mid-1970s, I am part of a generation that personally experienced significant shifts. For a start, the overt racism heard on the terraces in my youth was largely muted over the course of the 1990s. Then, largely in the years after I graduated, there was a significant opening up of opportunities in professional and public life, in a labour market where ethnic minority leaders had previously been rare.

Days after my 18th birthday I cast my first vote, in a general election where the number of minority MPs edged up to six, fewer than one per cent. At the time such under-representation was ignored as a fringe issue. Today, with a majority Conservative government that many young radicals are quick to call racist, there are 65. That represents a ten-fold improvement during my adult lifetime, significantly narrowing the gap with the ethnic diversity of the electorate. And however distasteful its politics are for many on the anti-racist left, Boris Johnson's Vote Leave government, unlike any before it, features a chancellor, home secretary and now health secretary from an ethnic minority background.

So I understand why older, white Britons feel that they have already done a good deal to adjust to diversity. Even those who talk of "political correctness going too far" will often also acknowledge that there was initially a valid point—for example by accepting that the old racist jokes had to go. But they often also find themselves discombobulated by the newly assertive anti-racist challenge of the 2020s. Given that we now have anti-discrimination laws on the statute book, and The Black and White Minstrel Show has long gone from television, they are often baffled by what—exactly—their country is meant to be doing wrong.

But it is important to empathise too with the young black perspective, which finds the journey towards equality too slow. Stories about the retreat of the National Front or the silencing of 1980s monkey chants lack relevance to those born in this century. Their test is not whether horizons have expanded since their grandparents stepped off the Windrush three-quarters of a century ago. The very success of integration gives them an expectation of being more than merely tolerated. For example, while we can cheer the fact that a quarter of new graduate cohorts are not white, we should not be surprised that this generation is acutely aware of how boardroom diversity lags behind—closer to one in twelve. Being told this represents progress—because most FTSE 100 boards in the UK were all-white only five years ago—hardly draws the sting. Young people see closed doors, whereas less-educated parents would often not see a door at all—at least not one that had anything to do with them.

It is also because of the success of integration that we see a similar generational divergence among the majority group. Young white citizens live at far less of a social distance from their minority counterparts than their parents do. And so it is not only people of different ethnicities, but also different generations of all skin colours, who are increasingly talking past each other on race.

To see this, ask a binary question: "Is Britain systemically racist?" Among white Britons, 28 per cent say yes and 40 per cent no. Among minorities, the balance is flipped: 43 per cent believe the country is systemically racist, while 26 per cent do not. It's a big difference, though it is striking that the median member of both groups is on the fence. Break things down by age, however, and we can flip the picture: a plurality of younger white Britons do see Britain as systemically racist, while a plurality of ethnic minority over-55s disagree.

Amid these divergent discourses we find rising scepticism among the young that there has been any progress at all. Before we dismiss this, it's as well to remember that it could be connected to direct experience. Although I live in a society where reputable surveys suggest that far fewer people hold overtly prejudiced attitudes than in the past, I now come across them much more often: I'm personally in receipt of considerably more racist abuse in the 2020s than in the 2000s. Why? Because technology reduces the distance between us. Any ethnic minority figure with a public profile is one click away from the bigots. As well as being a problem in its own right, online racism corrodes all faith in progress. Digital "spaces" need to be secured against it, in the same way that school playgrounds, buses and stadiums were secured a generation ago.

The American curse

Online abuse encourages emotional identification with geographically distant minorities, just as online connection results in messages, ideas and slogans being shared between campaigners. But Britain isn't America on race—particularly when it comes to guns and violence. These differences are widely acknowledged, including by many British Black Lives Matter supporters who are nonetheless anxious not to downplay the real challenges that Britain still faces.

America is far more diverse overall, and also considerably more polarised over race issues: divided by partisan politics, geography and faith. Black Americans make up 13 per cent of the population, compared to three per cent for the black British. Unlike African Americans, written into their nation's history from the beginning through slavery, black Britons have—within living memory—been an overwhelmingly immigrant group, with a distinctive post-Windrush story. Different institutions have given rise to a very different geography, with black British people far less segregated than African Americans and, as both a cause and consequence of that, inter-ethnic relationships are very different too. British-born people of Black Caribbean heritage are four times more likely than African Americans to have a white partner. These disparities considerably narrow the market in the UK for raging American arguments about "cultural appropriation," which to older British ears might seem to embody siloed and segregationist logic.

In spite of this, the Black Lives Matter message has a fair measure of support in the UK. The protests were backed by just under half of the white population, with a quarter opposed and another quarter on the fence. The balance was even more "pro" among graduates, left-wingers and younger people, as among ethnic minority Britons as a whole. That is notable because black Britons constitute less than a quarter of the total number of minority Britons. There is, then, still inter-minority solidarity which can be mobilised around a campaign that specifically highlights anti-black racism. But of course the issues it raised went further too: two-thirds of ethnic minorities from non-black backgrounds saw their own concerns about racism reflected in the protests.

So Britain needs a homegrown agenda for race equality, one that is selective about which aspects of the transatlantic picture are truly relevant. The most significant historian of the black British experience, David Olusoga, has argued that "the American template for black history cannot function in Britain," with its very different post-imperial context. The easily caricatured language of "decolonising the curriculum," he explains, actually misstates the core argument: the need to recognise the centrality of empire in shaping all our identities, white as well as black.

We should aim to succeed where America has too often failed, by forging broad coalitions that can tackle both racial and class disadvantage, while holding in check the temptation to trade in competing grievances. People agree there is white advantage and ethnic minority disadvantage. But to anyone who is feeling hard-pressed—that is most people, most of the time—the language of "white privilege" triggers an aggravating conflict between race and class. British Future's polling across minority and majority groups finds that just about every other imaginable way of making the argument about the challenges faced by minorities is more successful in moving hearts and minds.

Facing the future

Insofar as Britain has managed a "debate" about race, it has been sporadic and crisis-driven. Everything has been framed by flashpoints—Enoch Powell, the 1981 Brixton riots, Stephen Lawrence's murder, the 2001 disturbances in the mill towns. Yet ever-increasing diversity—with a sixth of the population now coming from an ethnic minority background, and rising—surely requires a steadier and more sustained conversation.

The subject's salience will rise, which could catalyse overdue changes. Given the importance of all the generational, educational and geographical slants in racial attitudes, it is the institutions of the so-called "metropolitan elite"—in education, business and civic society—that will be the first to have to show they can put their warm words about solidarity into practice. Major corporations might prefer to be charged with appearing "woke" than "anti-woke," and will perhaps seek to replicate the way they have begun tracking progress on gender. Charities lag behind both the private and public sector in recruiting, retaining and progressing ethnic minorities. Lily-white charity boards could soon be a flashpoint, as well as a source of reputational risk. And while FTSE 100 firms have been quietly making rapid progress towards eliminating all-white boardrooms by 2022, the charity sector publicly agonises without any analogous, sector-wide commitments to address its diversity deficit.

Yet if the fracturing of attitudes presents opportunities, there are also risks. There is—newly confirmed in research published by international initiative More in Common—a British aversion to polarisation. Only a broader consensus, if it can be achieved, can unlock wider changes. The public has an appetite for stronger action, for example on hate crime, including on social media; on tackling bias in job recruitment; and in ensuring Britain's growing diversity is mirrored at the top of major institutions. But the dynamics of polarisation threaten the ability to entrench reform here. Unchecked, social media becomes too easily split between two warring tribes. And that process will only accelerate if the government takes every opportunity to start symbolic scraps over history, symbols like flags and statues, or the very existence of systemic racism, provoking the opposition to respond in kind. Whether Britain is, in the end, condemned to an entrenched US-style racial politics will depend on whether the parties choose to bond with their own political tribe, or instead build bridges across divides.

Both main parties can speak confidently to around a third of the country on race. In the short term, the right can gain from the generational polarisation: older people are more likely to vote, while the more liberal young are clustered in big cities and university towns, reducing their clout under our majoritarian voting system. But "anti-woke" politics are not a straightforward gift to the right. Yes, defending Churchill's statue and the Last Night of the Proms from real or imagined threats can be popular. But to carry the centre ground, it is also necessary to show respect for the deep social shift towards racial tolerance (and, for that matter, regarding gay rights and the emancipation of women). And while the right may be able to count on a large grey vote for now, it would not be wise to bank on today's youth becoming any less anti-racist as they grow older.

Perhaps it is only natural that the left should push for faster change, while conservatives emphasise how far we have come. But given an alliance of anti-racists with Britain's political left has driven much of the progress we have seen on racial equality, the cause is not well served by Labour and the broader left's current refusal to "own" it. While Labour politicians hail the founding of the NHS more often than they criticise its shortcomings, they rarely make much of the real advances ushered in by successive waves of race equality legislation since the mid-1960s under successive Labour administrations. The left should proudly acknowledge those achievements as foundations to build on. It is an oddity that it is instead the centre-right, which until 2010 contributed relatively little to our escape from the days of "no dogs, no blacks and no Irish" lettings, that now champions Britain as a model of diversity that other white-majority countries would do well to follow.

Whether race unites or divides will depend on how the public conversation is led. The growing gulf between generations means that we may be fated to disagree, even over the very terms in which we discuss it. Yet it is possible to find considerably more common ground if we actively seek it—focusing less on the divisive identity battles, and more on what, practically, we in Britain could do to tackle anew the prejudice and discrimination that exists today.

Sunder Katwala

Sunder Katwala is director of British Future, an independent thinktank on immigration, integration and identity. Previously, he was general secretary of the Fabian Society

[Tamas]

OMG this is awesome. 

Some Telegraph guy explaining the reason behind the EU-UK row of the NI Protocol is a divergence in philosophies. It starts around 17:30:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000y2rg/politics-live-22072021

Goes something like this:

...there was a divergence in philosophies, which for many of us Leavers is precisely why we voted to leave the EU. The EU's view was, 'You've agreed to this so presumably you're going to adhere to it, you're going to stick to the letter of what it is we've agreed to.'
The British view was, 'You can tell this is a fudge, so I presume we're going to find some way either to reform it and tinker with it in the future, or ignore it and get around it.'
... And that's why we're stuck. The EU's very sense of integrity comes from the writing of rules, the upholding of rulles, the adherence to rules. Britain is trying to do something different.

At least he is honest I guess.

[Josquius]

I really have gained a lot of respect for the EU in recent years for quite how much patience and being the bigger man they have shown against the Tories constantly openly stating they are untrustworthy gits.


In other news... I had no idea Everton were such cunts. They really aren't the team I'd think of taking that mantle at all. Kind of throws my image of Liverpool into doubt.

[The Brain]

Rogue states gotta rogue.

[Sheilbh]

OMG this is awesome. 

Some Telegraph guy explaining the reason behind the EU-UK row of the NI Protocol is a divergence in philosophies. It starts around 17:30:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000y2rg/politics-live-22072021

Goes something like this:

...there was a divergence in philosophies, which for many of us Leavers is precisely why we voted to leave the EU. The EU's view was, 'You've agreed to this so presumably you're going to adhere to it, you're going to stick to the letter of what it is we've agreed to.'
The British view was, 'You can tell this is a fudge, so I presume we're going to find some way either to reform it and tinker with it in the future, or ignore it and get around it.'
... And that's why we're stuck. The EU's very sense of integrity comes from the writing of rules, the upholding of rulles, the adherence to rules. Britain is trying to do something different.

At least he is honest I guess.

I always enjoy Tim Stanley

But I'm fairly sure this is self-serving bullshit It reminds me of the more persuasive Wolfgang Streeck piece on Swexit (or the refusal to Swenter) where he wonders if basically certain forms of popular sovereignty are incompatible with the European model: in particular British (majoritarian power in an unconstrained legislature) and the Swiss (plebiscitary democracy). In these models of democracy the idea of a, to nick an Italian phrase, an external bind clashes directly with the idea of democracy and popular sovereignty - how can x court/commission overrule a policy we endorsed in referendum or from our elected majority government? See here: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/swexit.

I think this is sort of a cozy Brexiteer version of that sort of argument that actually the difficulties of the NIP don't prove the problems of Brexit but precisely why Brexit was necessary. But I think this is self-serving bullshit because it's basically an argument for Brexit and a bit of a trope of Brexiteers: Europe as rule-bound, legalist, bureaucratic entity v British politics which is comfortable with ambiguity or a fudge or muddling through based on what is politically possible, but uncomfortable with binding rules. And there's a nugget of truth to it (though I'm less convinced than by the Streeck argument) but as I say the ultimate conclusion is that this just proves why Brexit (and Tim Stanley) were right all along.

In other news... I had no idea Everton were such cunts. They really aren't the team I'd think of taking that mantle at all. Kind of throws my image of Liverpool into doubt.

Yeah - sad to say Everton were one of the most racist clubs in the 80s

The 90s changed a lot - especially after the signing of Daniel Amokachi who I think was Everton's first (definitely) black big-name player.

[The Brain]

I'm shocked that a nation of perfidious shopkeepers don't sign agreements in good faith.

[The Larch]

So... London is flooded? 

[Agelastus]

So... London is flooded? 

Yes, flash floods - for the second time this month.

Whereas this month I keep getting weather warnings for thunderstorms that never arrive.

[mongers]

So... London is flooded? 

Yes, flash floods - for the second time this month.

Whereas this month I keep getting weather warnings for thunderstorms that never arrive.

A bit like that here on Sunday. Yet I was down at the coast during the afternoon and looking across the water to the Isle of Wight, it looked like the whole northern half of the island was coated in a bright white curtain of water, looked intense even from 5-6 miles away.

When I got home, I saw on the bbc news site, the area had one of the five or so flood warnings in the country, two of which were for the above London floods.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah there were bad flash floods in West London earlier in the month - I think that was the storm that then went across Belgium and Germany.

This time seems bad and the storm was absolutely biblical yesterday, the worst hit areas seem to have been East London - especially around Stratford. But the footage of the storm drains erupting like a geyser near Hammersmith Bridge was also pretty terrifying. I think some hospitals had to declare an emergency and move people out because they were getting flooded.

But, luckily, I don't think there's been any fatalities or many casualties reported.

On a super-local level I am amazed how quick things have returned to normal around me. At about lunch time yesterday I'd guess there was about 2-3 inches of rain in the courtyard of my block of flats and it was still pounding down - I was slightly concerned because my flat is on the ground floor. But it stopped raining about about 5-6 pm and I had a look outside last night and it had mostly drained away from the courtyard. The forecast was it'd be raining all week but it's actually pleasantly sunny right now and the courtyard is dry again.

Edit: The storm drain geyser at Hammersmith Bridge:
https://twitter.com/thurybjork/status/1419330221963087873?s=20

[Tamas]

I am less than 30 miles west from middle of London and all we had was like 10 drops of rain yesterday.

[garbon]

Oddly for once I was understated in my statement about this compared to Brits (in weather thread).

[Sheilbh]

I am less than 30 miles west from middle of London and all we had was like 10 drops of rain yesterday.

Yeah - I had that a couple of weeks ago with the crazy flash floods in West London. I was maybe 10 miles away in a park in South London, turned on Twitter and there was a river running down Portobello Road.

Oddly for once I was understated in my statement about this compared to Brits (in weather thread).

Edit: Interesting polling on restrictions - basically most people are getting a little more comfortable with crowded places but only the young are starting to take off their masks and not by much:


And the perversity of all this is Tory voters love restrictions (and are older so follow them more) - so "freedom day" hurt the Tories with their own voters but actually boosted the view of some Labour voters (who don't like restrictions, and are younger)


I think my overall view is the same that actually the way people are behaving doesn't necessarily track to strict legal requirements but their own internal risk calculation, but overall most people are still cautious.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I thought the storm-drain geyser was pretty impressive 

[The Brain]

Freedom Day? Can you get fries with that?