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

Abstract

The legacy of Margaret Thatcher, one of the most controversial prime ministers of the twentieth century, can be found today in the way that nativism has become part of national discourse. She was responsible for ushering in, following the ‘riots’ of 1981 and the Scarman report, policies based on funding the religious and cultural ‘needs’ of different ethnic groups – which finally broke down black politics and also paved the way for cultural separatism, now deemed problematic. And it was on her watch that the New Right, who espoused a cultural as opposed to a biological racism, working from academia, through Conservative think-tanks to a multitude of newspapers, gained ground in a battle against cultural pluralism and anti-racism. It was this changing of the terms of debate on race that has allowed current Tory politicians and ‘opinion-formers’ to take the UK backwards towards monoculturalism and assimilation.

Keywords

anti-racism ethnicism multiculturalism nativism New Right riots swamped Thatcher xenophobe

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Documents released under the thirty-year rule reveal that members of the cabinet actually opposed any such regeneration and wanted places like Liverpool left to rot. It was agreed that only Liverpool could have a regeneration task force and only for one year, and that the amount of money involved be kept secret.

Lord Scarman was asked to investigate the causes of the disturbances in Brixton in 1981 and ‘found’ a distrust of the police and a racial disadvantage, in part caused by problems he decided resided within the West Indian family.

‘The ensuing scramble for government favours and government grants (channelled through local authorities) on the basis of specific ethnic needs and problems served, on the one hand, to deepen ethnic differences and foster ethnic rivalry and, on the other, to widen the definition of ethnicity to include a variety of national and religious groups – Chinese, Cypriots, Greeks, Turks, Irish, Italians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs – till the term became meaningless (except as a means of getting funds).’ A. Sivanandan in ‘RAT and the degradation of black struggle’, Race & Class (Spring 1985).

There were a number of different strains within the New Right – ranging from libertarian beliefs in a laissez-faire economy and individual freedoms to the social authoritarian emphasis on maintaining order and a strong state. See New Right, New Racism by Gordon

Paul

Klug

Francesca

(London, Searchlight, 1984) and The ideology of the New Right (ed) Levitas

Ruth

(Cambridge, Polity Press, 1986).

In 1974, with these two, Thatcher co-founded the rightwing Centre for Policy Studies.

A book setting out the New Right’s line on multiracial education and racism was published; Anti-racism an assault on education and value, edited by Palmer

Frank

(London, Sherwood Press, 1986). See also Gordon

Paul

, ‘The New Right, race and education’, Race & Class (Winter 1988) for the debates in the New Right and its ultimate influence on Tory policy.

For an analysis on how this worked, see Nancy Murray ‘The press and ideology in Thatcher’s Britain’, Race & Class (Winter 1986).

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report … chairman, Sir William Macpherson (London, Home Office, 1999) had found and defined institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police. This definition and finding was to be hotly contested by CIVITAS – the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, which had patrons, trustees and researchers connected both to the group which had produced Anti-racism an assault (op. cit.) and older rightwing think-tanks such as the Institute for Economic Affairs.

10.

The full text of the speech Cameron delivered in Munich in February 2011 in which he said ‘the doctrine of state multiculturalism’ had failed is at http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference/

11.

Proposals by the Secretary of State for Education to change the history curriculum in schools have been widely criticised by academics, historians and teachers for the blinkered emphasis on ‘know[ing] and understand[ing] the story of these islands: how the British people shaped this nation and how Britain influenced the world’. http://www.irr.org.uk/news/goves-history-curriculum-condemned/

12.

Andrew Green, a former diplomat, heads the influential lobby group Migrationwatch UK, Christopher Caldwell is a journalist who has written on the way that Islam is changing Europe, David Goodhart, in his recent book The British Dream, 2013 blames immigration and the persistence of multiculturalism for fragmenting Britain.