Candy floss racism

8216;Big Brother8217; should not detract from efforts Britain8217;s made to inculcate anti-racist behaviour

The Shilpa Shetty-Big Brother episode has led to a lot of debate in India as well as UK and raised the issue of racism in Britain to a high pitch. Whenever I was asked on the three or four TV programmes I took part in while in India last week, I said that BB was a trashy programme and that what had happened to Shilpa if indeed it did happen since she keeps on changing her story is deplorable, but even so it is 8216;candy floss racism8217;. The issue of racism in Britain is a serious one, which everyone in public life takes very much as a priority issue. This is why even a small infringement on the anti-racist behaviour such as displayed by Jade Goody became an issue on which the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer had to say something.

Yet it was all a media hype designed by the producers Endemol to increase the ratings and it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. BB is a programme where they choose people deliberately for their aggressive, foul-mouthed behaviour. For some reason this sort of person has become a favourite of TV comedy shows as, for instance, the Vicky Pollard character in Little Britain 8212; a foulmouthed teenage woman in a wheelchair played by a man. So insulting Shilpa was par for the course; it just spilled over into racism. Yet at its heart it was a matter of class not race. Shilpa was posh and Jade is chav, as the expressions go. Here was middle class versus working class and white working class at that. Jade has made millions by being exactly as she was on BB; it is her brand. Shilpa should have known better.

There is, however, a point that racism is also a matter of class. At the level of posh middle class people, racism takes the form at worst of a verbal insult. Yet that is not serious though deplorable.

Britain has tried, over the last forty years I have been here, very hard to inculcate non-racist behaviour. Multiculturalism is under attack nowadays but it tried successfully in my view over the seventies and eighties to make sure in primary and secondary schools, in local authority housing allocation and in hiring practices that as far as possible everyone was treated as equal. This is why when the bombs exploded on 7/7/2005 and four Muslim men were said to be the suicide bombers the question everyone asked was, why did British Muslims do this? They did not say these were foreigners but that they were British. The agonising question being asked now is, did multiculturalism fail in allowing each racial/ethnic minority its separate sphere and not insist on assimilation into mainstream culture? After all we are now in the second, if not the third generation since the first batch arrived from the 8216;New that is, black and brown Commonwealth8217;.

Racism is felt most by the poor. It manifests itself in low achievement at schools, bad housing, lack of jobs, lack of safety as the poor go about their business in mixed areas.

The poor white families who are also in the same situation 8212; bad housing, unemployment, low educational achievements 8212; resent the black/brown ethnic minorities. It is Bangladeshi that is, British of Bangladeshi origin a couple of generations ago and Pakistani women taking their children to school who suffer abuse and sometimes physical attack.

Among the ethnic minorities the Caribbean and Indian origin families have done well. They have professional jobs, live in private housing and go to good schools and universities. The African and the South Asian Muslims of Bangladesh and Pakistani origin have lagged behind in education and they depend on public housing, which has become scarce since Mrs Thatcher sold off council houses and new ones don8217;t get built any longer.

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These are problems of income inequality and poverty which affect whites and non-whites who are poor. It is not to condone racism, but look at its real manifestations. Yet efforts are being made constantly by policymakers to 8220;do something about it8221;. Public policy is avowedly anti-racist. Black and brown citizens are in high positions. The leader of the House of Lords is Valerie Amos a black woman of Guyanese descent. There are other black ministers in the House of Lords as well as nearly thirty non-white Lords and Baronesses. Usha Prashar, who came from east Africa but is of Indian origin, is the chairperson of the Judicial Appointments Commission. Can India imagine, for example, elevating, say, a Singapore Chinese lawyer or a Nigerian academic to high positions?

Yet there is no room for complacency. When London won the Olympics for 2012, it was its multiracial and diverse character which gave it the edge over Paris. But when a young black boy, Stephen Lawrence, was murdered a decade ago and police failed despite several attempts to bring four white young men to justice, even the rightwing tabloid press was appalled. The Daily Mail led a campaign to name the guilty. A commission appointed to investigate police failure concluded that there was 8220;institutional racism8221; in the police force. Recently the Iraq war and the bombings have made Muslims targets of suspicion and sometimes outright attack. An effort is being made to recruit more ethnic minorities to the police, yet much more needs to be done.

And yet when I first arrived in London in 1965 you saw signs about blacks not wanted as tenants. Today those signs are gone. Walk around London today and you will see more non-white faces than white faces. London, indeed Britain, is a multicultural space. It has problems, but it is coping with them.

The writer is Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics and a member of the House of Lords