When Norman Tebbit first posed his “cricket test” in 1990 — excoriating Asians and Afro-Caribbeans who failed to support England against India, Pakistan or the West Indies — there was hardly a whisper of dissent from within the Tory Party or the Tory press. Even the Guardian confined its criticism to an appeal for patience while immigrant communities were gradually assimilated into the native culture.
William Hague’s prompt repudiation of Tebbit’s attack on multi-culturalism at a Tory conference fringe meeting shows how far our society has come in recent years. It seems that the “race card” is now more a vote-loser than a vote-winner. Here politicians have followed where others have led the way. Thanks to innumerable hard-fought grass-roots campaigns, the sheer pressure of a changing social reality, and the perseverance of the black communities themselves, more and more people now accept that Britain is and will continue to be made up of people of various colours and religious affiliations.
A couple of years ago I had the strange experience of debating the “cricket test” with its author on Sky TV. Tebbit called me a “racist” (for being “anti-English”) and insisted that he was completely colour-blind. He wanted black people living here to commit themselves to their new country and to demonstrate that commitment by supporting the home side in cricket matches. He condemned the English cricket authorities (rightly) for failing to make greater efforts to bring talented black and Asian cricketers into the professional game.
I pointed out to Tebbit that one of the obstacles to black and Asian cricketers entering the mainstream was his cricket test and the attitudes it encapsulated, above all the illusion that there is or ever has been a single, homogeneous English nation with a shared culture. He answered that without a clear national identity our society would descend into anarchy.
Tebbit is an English cultural nationalist. Subjectively, he doesn’t give a damn whether you’re black or white, so long as you conform to what he considers to be English norms. Objectively, his ideology is a menacing challenge to the right of black people to reside on equal terms with others in this society. His integrationism is one-sided in the extreme.
However, in his own perversely logical way, Tebbit is right to rail against the incoherence of multi-culturalism, in which British society is seen as a neutral host for a plurality of unrelated cultures. Here the multi-culturalists share surprising ground with Tebbit. Both ideologies divide humanity into discreet, inescapable cultural communities. Both deny or ignore the fluid, often contradictory reality of social identities in the modern world and the way those identities are shaped by the changing economic environment.
Recent academic studies have emphasised the diversity among Britain’s black communities, and have sought to categorise social values and perceptions according to “ethnic background”. It’s a short step from cultural essentialism to cultural determinism, and sure enough, we are increasingly told that what counts in the formation of the individual is whether he or she is Indian, Afro-Caribbean, African, East African Asian, East Asian, and in some versions Muslim, Hindu, Christian, etc. Class and gender divisions within these categories are obliterated. The cross-cultural imperatives of collective action are replaced by an appeal to tolerance and an accommodation with the hierarchy of power.
This is why it is so easy for the ideologists of New Britain to combine multi-culturalism with “one nation” rhetoric. In both, a cuddly, inclusive consciousness co-exists with a harsh and unforgiving reality of bitter division and entrenched exclusion. Both define the problem of social exclusion as primarily a cultural one — the result of the way individuals lead their lives, not the way the economy determines the options open to them.
On the ground, the increasing acceptance of multi-cultural Britain has proved only too compatible with a steadily rising number of racial assaults, obscenely disproportionate numbers of black deaths in police custody, a racist immigration regime and the over-representation of black people among the unemployed and the low-waged. Far from engaging in the complex battle with the many-faceted phenomenon of racism, multi-culturalism side-steps the issue. Equal respect for cultures is not the same as social and economic equality for individuals.
The inadequacies of the new, consensual multi-culturalism as an instrument of positive social change have been vividly illustrated in west London recently. Braving insult and death threats from communal Sikh and Muslim gangs — demanding equal respect for their respective cultures — the anti-racist activists of the Southall Monitoring Group have campaigned against religious and other divisions in their community. Secularists in south Asia know only too well the precious ground multi-culturalism has ceded to fundamentalists and others who seek to exploit cultural identities for political ends. In Southall, it is solidarity — not multi-culturalism — which is the watchword in the struggle against racism and for social justice.