THE PAREKH REPORT [2]

The Parakh Report was published on the 11 October 2000. Leaks as to its contents had already been circulating and the Daily Telegraph had already condemned it as ‘sub-Marxist gibberish’.

Pre-publication comments by the then Home Office minister, Mike O’Brian described the report as a ‘timely report which adds much to the current debate on multi-ethnic Britain.’

Jack Straw, as Home Secretary, had been present to help launch of the commission back in 1998.

By the day following publication we were treated to the spectacle of Jack Straw, in full retreat, galloping faster than a routed and broken cavalry regiment. Mr Straw even quoted George Orwell [the passage is the English Rights Campaign’s Quote of the Month for this month]. Regarding the report’s attack on the concept of Britishness, Mr Straw said that he ‘frankly did not agree’ with the report’s authors who he accused of ‘washing their hands of the notion of nationhood.’

Mr Straw even went so far as to say that he was ‘proud to be British’!

Even The Guardian editorial managed a mild criticism!

The part which the press most reacted to related to Britishness and paragraph 3.30 in particular.

The report asked 'Does Britishness have a future?' and answered the question:

'It is entirely plain, however, that the word "British" will never do on its own. Where does this leave Asians, African-Caribbeans and Africans? For them Britishness is a reminder of colonisation and empire…For the British-born generations, seeking to assert their claim to belong, the concept of Englishness often seems inappropriate, since to be English, as the term is in practice used, is to be white. Britishness is not ideal, but at least it appears acceptable, particularly when suitably qualified - Black British, Indian British…'

Paragraph 3.30 then says [italics are the English Rights Campaign emphasis]:

'However, there is one major and so far insuperable barrier. Britishness, as much as Englishness, has systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations. Whiteness nowhere features as an explicit condition of being British, but it is widely understood that Englishness, and therefore by extension Britishness, is racially coded. "There ain't no black in the Union Jack", it has been said. Race is deeply entwined in political culture and with the idea of nation, and underpinned by a distinctively British kind of reticence - to take race and racism seriously, or even to talk about them at all, is bad form, something not done in polite company. This disavowal, combined with "an iron-jawed disinclination to recognise equal human worth and dignity of people who are not white", has proved a lethal combination. Unless these deep-rooted antagonisms to racial and cultural difference can be defeated in practice, as well as symbolically written out of the national story, the idea of a multicultural post-nation remains an empty promise.'

There are nearly 400 pages worth of such and similar views in the report.

Paragraph 3.30 is as disingenuous as it is evil. The paragraph starts by dealing with race and nationhood, then links race with racism, and finally applies the comments concerning racism to race and nationhood - and it does so in way that the more gullible [ie white lefty/liberals and do-gooders] would not notice.

Of course the English, as a racial group, are white! But being English is not the same as having ‘deep-rooted antagonisms to racial and cultural difference’. Nor is being white the same as being English. Nations have historically been formed by racial groups. So what? Being English is not an offence, although the Parekh commissioners treat it as such.

The comment about a ‘post-nation’ is not casual, but a sincere objective. The aim is to destroy any sense of nationhood or patriotism.

The Parekh Report recommended the creation of a 'community of communities' to replace Britain, which was to be required to ‘formally declare itself to be a multicultural society’ [Vince Cable's recent comments have not come out of nowhere]. This also needs to be remembered when dealing with Trevor Phillips’s more recent comments about multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism has not been foisted on Britain by the Teletubbies or Pinky and Perky. No, it has been foisted on us by the British ruling class in general and the race war industry in particular, above all, INCLUDING TREVOR PHILLIPS.

Of the report, The Times wrote:

‘The key figure behind the research idea, conceived in 1997 as Labour swept to power, was the broadcaster Trevor Phillips. His idea was to produce a key piece of research looking seriously at how Britain would develop during the early years of the new century.

Although the trust says it has kept out of party politics, members hoped that many of its ideas would be used by a Labour Government.’

The product of this report and its implementation by Labour is 7/7.

In promoting the report, Lord Parekh wrote in The Independent:

‘National identity is not given once and for all and cannot be preserved as if it were an antique piece of furniture.

The so-called white majority itself consists of groups of people divided along cultural, religious and other lines. This is equally true of the minority. Since Britain does not consist of cohesive majorities and minorities, we should think of it as a looser federation of cultures held together by common bonds of interest and affection and a collective sense of belonging.’

Gary Younge [a black communist] of The Guardian wrote:

‘The Telegraph’s front page headline yesterday: “Straw wants to rewrite our history” begs two central questions. Who do they mean by “our” and precisely what version of history are they talking about... The “our” the Telegraph refers to is essentially white, English and nationalistic. For huge numbers of Scots, Welsh and Irish, not to mention those of Caribbean, Asian, African and Chinese descent the idea that “the description of British will never do on its own” is not news...

Unlike the French tricolore or the American stars and stripes, we do not have a national emblem that stands for a set of notional egalitarian principles or a constitution that would give it meaning. The union flag is a conqueror’s flag that owes its design to the subjugation of England’s neighbours and its reputation to the predatory expeditions which saw Britain steal huge amounts of land, labour and natural resources...

So “Britishness” like the union flag is not neutral.’

Meanwhile, on the 19 October, at the Pavis Centre of the Open University, Stuart Hall made a speech to launch the report. This was ‘webcast to viewers and listeners across the world, including the USA, Mexico and Australia’ [the publication of the report was presented as an international event]. Stuart Hall answered questions after his speech, even from as far afield as Mexico City.

The following is a quote from that speech, which is particularly relevant given Trevor Phillips’s recent comments about equality [given that Stuart Hall is a black communist, it is not surprising that the speech is one long tract of race zealotry and communist ideology]:

‘The first concern is the tension between difference and equality. The projects for social justice, for an end to racial violence and discrimination; the projects for greater social equality and the guarantee of civic and social rights to everyone as an intrinsic aspect of citizenship - all of these projects have customarily been underpinned by a commitment to equality. We should notice at once - given the frequency with which it is invoked - how deep are the ambiguities around this idea. Liberal theorists who support a universal citizenship founded on civic nationalism and individual autonomy believe difference, in any real sense, has no place in the public domain at all. It should be reserved for the private sphere. And they feel that it is possible these days, although I think it’s heroic of them, to separate neatly what is now public from what is now private. However, the equality which they advance - the equality of opportunity, the equality to compete, the equality of so-called level playing fields (and if I hear that term “joined up government” once more! - it belongs to the lexicon of language which should really be ditched)... that is the kind of equality which they have in mind, the equality of the level playing field where we all begin from the same place. And, of course, given our various talents etc we are all going to end up in a different place, but that’s the game. This is, of course, a negative version of equality, it is drawn from the repertoire of classical liberalism - no matter how long ago that was - its commitment to end the constraints to enter social competition, which otherwise should recognise no wider, social or collective commitments. Universal as this liberal discourse now appears to have become, it has never on its own been able to bring social justice to particular groups at risk; or to recognise the persistent strength of collective inequalities; or even to acknowledge that, as human beings, we are dialogically constructed - that is to say, we depend intrinsically on other people and on the “other” - and that we are not simply national, calculative atoms but are also always embedded in a variety of particular relationships and forms of life which have real rights, claims and needs of their own.

Racism is one such particularism which has stubbornly refused to yield in response to the negative version of right, justice or the “good life”, and this is because the differences which racism constructs operate at a deeper level that the formal play of citizenship, equality and individual autonomy. This is compounded by the fact that racism, far from having, as it were, one strand, has in the contemporary world radically expanded its forms.

To the biological racism of skin colour or anti-Semitism we must now add the proliferating forms of racism of cultural difference, of ethnic violence and cleansing, and of religious bigotry which the end of the Cold War and the ethnicization of conflict in its wake has brought into existence. This means that what we might, in our cynical wisdom, define as the old anti-racist agenda of racial justice and social equality, not only remains in force but has compulsorily been intensified. Its need now is greater than it was before and this is because the problem of resisting racial oppression, injustice and violence is compounded by the new need in multicultural societies, not negatively to stop disadvantage, but positively to advance a recognition of diversity as a basis of social being and as a positive goal of social action of government practice, of delivery as a political objective. The fact is that multicultural drift, which is the condition we have been experiencing, can co-exist with racism. There is no intrinsic opposition, no necessary opposition, between multiculturalism and racism: both can flourish. In the moment of the celebration of the arrival of Windrush when Britain congratulated itself on having become, having crossed the line to, a multicultural society, the Stephen Lawrence inquiry opened. Does one cancel out the other? Not at all, both exist, both are real, both are to be found in a society.

Quite apart from this society being unified by some 94 per cent consensus among its mainstream majority, I would suggest that, as a rough guess, on the multicultural question it’s divided into three parts. One group simply couldn’t understand modern life without it. They are mainly young and they live in cities. They just wouldn’t understand modern urban metropolitan existence in which people were ethnically and culturally homogenous: they’re with it. Another group sees that it has happened, thinks that you probably can’t do anything much about it. They have mainly moved out of the urban centres and they think that, as long as they don’t go down to the South East or to any big cities, multiculturalism will leave them alone and certainly will not propose to their daughters. The third group are militantly hostile to multiculturalism. It undermines everything about their being, especially it underwrites the degree to which they are not part of so-called mainstream society. And a minority of those are perfectly prepared to stick knives into multiculturalism, or to throw it into the Thames or to set it alight if they pass it on the streets. Now, that is the real situation produced by multicultural drift. It is not some kind of consensual, homogenous unity from end to end that this is a “great thing” and so we don’t need to think about it anymore.

The new claims which arise, then, from this situation, especially among the ethnic minorities, are, in my view, for a genuinely universal racial justice, for equal outcomes to the major social and economic processes and also - also - for the recognition of difference. That is to say, for both a politics of equality and a politics of recognition.’

And:

‘Paradoxically, cultural belongingness is something of which everybody partakes, everybody is particular in this way. It’s what Marx once called a concrete universal. By definition, a multicultural society must always involve practices and debates between more than one group. There has, therefore, to be some framework in which serious conflicts of outlook, belief and interests can be negotiated, and this can’t be simply the framework of one group writ large or universalized - which was precisely the problem with Eurocentric assimilation. The specific and particular difference of a group or community cannot be asserted absolutely without regard to the wider context provided by all the other to whom particularity acquires a relative value.’

The English Rights Campaign has already responded to Trevor Phillips’s concept of equality in the item dated the 24 September 2005, in which the difference between equality of opportunity and the equality of outcomes was dealt with. Stuart Hall deals with this too and condemns the concept of the equality of opportunity as being ‘classical liberalism’.

[In which case the English Rights Campaign is a classical liberal blog and not a right wing one!]

Stuart Hall and Trevor Phillips are in agreement as to the definition of equality, which is not surprising given that they are both communists.

They are also in agreement in their hostility to the concept of a free society. To them the ordinary people, especially the English, are their’s to manipulate and control. They are also both hostile to the concept of assimilation. Both call for a more aggressive prosecution of the British Inquisition.

On the date of the report’s publication, the Daily Mail also had a forceful editorial that included the following observations:

‘In ordinary circumstances, the report’s clunking prose, flawed argument and lamentable ignorance of history would be risible. But this exercise was launched by Home Secretary Jack Straw. Its conclusions have been welcomed by the Home Office. If not yet official policy, the report reflects New Labour attitudes.’

The Runnymede Trust itself now boasts that ‘over two-thirds of the recommendations of the report acted upon’.

That is the problem. Despite the loud complaints at the time, Labour simply kept its head down and then quietly implemented the report. A trick they are also using with regionalisation, if the face of the lost North East referendum, and with the EU constitution, in the face of the Dutch and French referendums.

The Parekh Report oozes Anglophobia and race war politics from every page. It is a thoroughly evil document.

A detailed examination of the report’s contents will begin shortly.