The polictics of race

Anyone would think there was a general election on the way. The left is accusing the right of racism, while the Tories hurl back charges of political correctness. For many deprived urban communities, mean-while, such name-calling is an irrelevance more at home in school playgrounds than with the tense reality of multicultural life. In Bradford, rioters have been hauled back to a bitter truce, while Oldham seems poised on the cusp of racial war.

The Runnymede Trust evoked hysterical reactions last year when it suggested that the word British had racist connotations. Yet a further section of the report, albeit a far less newsworthy one, pointed out Britain has the best race relations in Europe. Unlike such countries as Austria and France, neo-Nazis here have always been confined to a lunatic fringe. They have been kept in their place not by outrage and censorship - after all, these are the very things most likely to imbue the far right with the persecuted glamour it craves - but a simple refusal among the vast majority of British people to take them in any way seriously.

Is this because we a nation of instinctive moderates? Perhaps. But we also have to thank a quarter of a century of race relations laws for creating a consensus of tolerance in the media and politics.

This consensus is in danger of being shattered. Admittedly, we always had the odd Powell or Tebbit character, mouthing off from the sidelines in language far more reactionary than any William Hague would utter. But the difference today is that an entire mainstream political party has set out an immigration and asylum policy which assumes all non-British people, until they can prove otherwise, to be cheats and criminals.

The Conservatives may be right when they argue they are policies which strike a chord with a large proportion of British people. After all, there is nastiness, selfishness or violence lurking deep within the psyches of most of us. But we trust the lawmakers to keep these instincts in check, not pander to them for the sake of a few cheap votes.

For a sign of how far the terms of debate are shifting, look no further than the Labour party. When Hague last year accused Home Secretary Jack Straw of being soft on asylum, Straw's defensive reaction was a tacit acknowledgement that 'bloody foreigners' are a necessary evil. It took Robin Cook to challenge that underlying assumption and point out overseas input is more often enriching - yet even he, with one eye on the opinion polls, had to dilute his argument with mud-slinging and political point scoring.

This is not to suggest that blame for the inter-racial lawlessness in Bradford and Oldham should be laid with politicians. No, it has more to do with an unfortunate charac-teristic of young men, which is that when they gather in packs they intimidate. The more the group's identity is strength-ened, for example by a distinct colour or language, the truer this becomes.

Allegations were made last week that Oldham was acquiring 'no-go zones' where white people would be made to feel unwelcome. Having grown up in Oldham, I would say this was always an unspoken fact of life. The area where I lived and the school I attended were almost exclusively white. I knew others were equally strongly Asian, but I never went there and they never visited us. It wasn't that we had anything against each other - we just had different orbits.

I didn't experience the so-called 'melting pot' until college, and by then it was too late. They were already in their gangs and we were in ours.

As long as young people in towns like Oldham grow up insulated from other cultures, the insidious suspicion which leads to gang mentalities will persist. These will only break down when we have true integration - and that means sharing the same streets, jobs and past-times, not just the same town. But the further towards the right the Conservatives move our national mind-set, and the more Labour acquiesces to this, the more psychological obstacles will be placed in the way of this goal.