Race against time

Enoch Powell is alive and well in Blair’s Britain, it seems, going by the sudden resurgence of racial violence. The recent nail bomb attacks in Brixton and Brick Lane and the death threats held out to Asian representatives in the House of Commons mock at British pretensions of having evolved a genuine multicultural society. Indeed, how inadequate and superficial this multiculturalism is was amply demonstrated in the trial of the five white young men accused of having killed Stephen Lawrence, a Black youth, six years ago. The verdict from the Lawrence case that emerged earlier this year exposed not just how well-entrenched racism was in contemporary society, but how well institutionalised it was. Racial hatred in the police force, in particular, came in for sharp comment.

Last week, a caller who said he represented Combat 18, a neo-Nazi gang, claimed responsibility for the Brixton bombing. The call, incidentally, was made from Eltham, where Lawrence was killed. While this may just be a coincidence, there isno getting away from the fact that the Lawrence case has become something of a watershed for race relations in Britain today. All this while, it was the Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities which have had to cope with the terror mounted on them by white supremacist gangs. Right from the fifties, when P&O liners disgorged farmhands fresh from the fields of Jalandhar or Jamaica to run the factories of post-war Britain, it was the Blacks who had to fashion a response to the mindless racism they experienced in their lives. The Lawrence case, with its televised images of the swaggering killers, changed all that. It led to a fair amount of soul-searching within the white community. The consensus was that unless racism was tackled within government institutions, within educational institutions, indeed within civil society at large, the nation’s future trajectory could be severely jeopardised. Coincidentally, the moment of introspec- tion came at a time when calls for Scottish and Welsh independence were becomingmore strident and when the pound, that stodgy old defender of the British way of life, seemed increasingly to be losing out to the euro. Suddenly, questions of nationality and economic identity seemed to telescope into those of racial harmony.

Jack Straw, the home secretary, speaking after the Brick Lane attack last Saturday, spoke for the entire nation when he said that he was appalled by the recent acts of malicious violence. His prime minister, speaking in Washington, stated that his government would make “every effort to find out who was responsible and bring them to justice”. But these are words. They must become action. To ensure the sanity and survival of the Britain of tomorrow, the Britain of today must address its legacy of “malicious violence”, even if it is perpetrated only by a lunatic fringe. For the immediate present, the authorities must ensure the safety not just of its Asian and Afro-Caribbean citizens but of the thousands from Asia who will be arriving to partake of the pleasures ofwatching World Cup cricket soon to be played on the pitches of England.