Stephen Lawrence – Britain, A Liberal Utopia?

By

Dr Mark Featherstone and Dr Siobhan Holohan

On 3rd January 2012 Gary Dobson and David Norris were finally found guilty of the murder of Stephen Lawrence over 18 years after he died of stab wounds in April 1993. The immediate media reaction to the guilty verdict was that two of Stephen’s killers had finally been held to account for his murder and that some kind of justice had been done. However, there was a sub-text to this reaction - Britain has changed in the wake of the Macpherson Report that essentially exposed institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police and argued in favour of victim-centred justice. In other words, the media reaction has been that lessons have been learned. Britain is no longer a racist country, but rather a tolerant, multicultural, nation sensitive to difference.

A decade ago we wrote about the case using discourse analysis to explore media representations around Lawrence. On the basis of this work we argued that the media sought to save the image of Britain as a tolerant multicultural society by scapegoating various groups as ‘racist’ – the killers, as representatives of the racist underbelly of British society, and then the police as a symbol of intolerant British institutions. The central point, here, was that society itself was innocent – the problem resided in deviant others. In our works on the case – ‘The Search for Justice in the Media Age’ (Holohan, Ashgate, 2002) and ‘Multiculturalism, Institutional Law, and Imaginary Justice’ (Featherstone and Holohan, Law and Critique, Vol. 14:1, 2003) – we disagreed with this popular media construction and argued that what we really needed to learn from the Lawrence case was much more profound – we argued that until we learn to take responsibility for the racism running through our society, and stop believing that we can contain it in particular individuals or particular institutions, we will never be able to deal with racial inequality. In other words, we argued that we live in an exclusionary, intolerant, society and that the Lawrence case needed to be taken as a wake up call, rather than a singular event revealing particular criminal elements within society. On the contrary, we wanted to say that those criminal elements were not somehow other, but rather symbolic, hyperbolic, representations of the social whole.

We would make a similar point today by examining the contemporary Lawrence verdict in relation to recent events, such as David Cameron’s condemnation of state multiculturalism speech and the summer riots, which we would argue show that Britain is far from inclusive. Speaking about the failure of multiculturalism early last year (February, 2011), Cameron argued that Britain needed a unified ethnic identity, and that passive tolerance was an invitation to extremism. Advocating a brand of macho ‘muscular liberalism’, Cameron explained that we need less tolerance, and more sense of morality, and the courage to make tough decisions about right and wrong. There was really nothing revolutionary about this speech. In many ways, Britain was ready for this message and had been since 7 / 7, which as we have shown in another article (Featherstone, Holohan, Poole, ‘Discourses of the War on Terror: Constructions of the Islamic Other in the Wake of 7/7’, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, Volume 6, Number 2, 2010) produced widespread racist sentiment in Britain and normalised Islamophobic exclusionary politics. In other words, we would not see Cameron’s advocacy of ‘muscular liberalism’ as objective or neutral, but instead based in notions of right and justice which are essentially white, and also very male, in their construction.

Following 7 / 7 we argued that Britain was moving away from multiculturalism and that this position was becoming more acceptable. Indeed, our view was that British society was becoming increasingly intolerant and exclusive in ethnic, gendered, and class terms. Although, this is not the place to explore each of these social exclusions in depth, in our paper on 7 / 7 we connected the increasing exclusivity of British society to the expansion of neo-liberal economics and the hegemony of an ultra-competitive model of society. We would argue that this exclusivity has been further revealed by the economic crash and the increasing stress this has placed on society. Under pressure, British society has become a more hostile place, and social inequalities based upon divisions such as race, gender, and class have simply widened and become economic and political battlegrounds. Certainly two of these social divisions – race and class – were central to the summer riots, which began on the basis of ethnic tensions between the black community and police in Tottenham, and quickly expanded to take in class divisions between ‘normal’ Britain and the excluded underclass in other cities, such as Manchester.

But what does any of this have to do with Lawrence? Our point is very simple. Against the background of Cameron’s critique of multiculturalism and advocacy of muscular liberalism and the summer riots, we think it would be a mistake to imagine that the contemporary Lawrence verdict says anything about the transformation of Britain into an inclusive utopian society. We cannot use Lawrence as a political football. On the contrary, we would follow Domenico Losurdo, and argue that liberalism has always been a colonial discourse, possessed by an exclusive dark side, which means that the price of tolerance is the construction of some other who is by definition tolerated on the very margins of society. Is this not exactly what the Islamic and underclass other represent today? These people are in society, but only insofar as they inhabit the very margins of the social system. They are in, but out of society. They are marginal others that normal society 'tolerates'. What does this mean and how should we conclude our discussion? Again, we have a simple conclusion. Despite the Lawrence verdict, which has finally seen some kind of justice done in relation to Stephen’s murder in 1993, we would argue that this is no time for complacency and we need to remain critical. As Islamophobia and the summer riots show, Britain is no liberal utopia.

My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding: Do you think the media presents Travellers fairly?

By Guy Woolnough, PhD student in Criminology

The recent series “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” on Channel Four has done a lot to raise the profile of the Gypsy/Traveller/Roma community in Britain and to take reporting of these issues away from prejudice towards balance. The comments on the Channel Four Website are surprisingly positive. Even though some facets of Traveller culture seem very alien and challenging to modern British mores, viewers seem to have responded sympathetically.

My own research has, over the last year, drawn me towards the Traveller community, because in my study of fairs in Victorian England I have frequently found references to Gypsies in the primary sources. The Victorian press invariably used pejorative terms when writing of the Gypsies. One example may suffice to illustrate the point. The Westmorland Gazette reported in October 1871: “This migratory tribe was largely represented (at Brough Hill fair), there being scores of camps along the fair hill, and as many children rolling about in the straw, or playing about outside, as would almost populate a young colony.” The same paper reported, in March 2010: “The detail of a policing strategy to combat crime and anti-social behaviour by Appleby Horse Fair travellers has been revealed at a packed public meeting in Sedbergh.” Which is more racist, the implication that these people might be advantageously dispatched to a remote colony, or the unquestioned equating of Travellers with anti-social behaviour and crime? You might test these statements for yourself by replacing the words “migratory tribe” and “travellers” with “asylum seekers” or some other group of outsiders.

This may explain why I feel positive about the Gypsy Wedding programmes; after at least one hundred and fifty years of negative reporting on Gypsy and Traveller questions, it is delightful to see a programme aimed at the general viewer that aims to be both measured and unprejudiced. It is even more encouraging when the public response is positive.

_______________________________________________

What do you think?  Do you agree with Guy that the public response to the programme was positive?   Do you think the programme succeeded in being measured and positive? Do post your comments...

Holocaust Memorial Day today: memory as political myth

Professor Pnina Werbner has today published a paper, Displaced Enemies, Displaced Memories: Diaspora Memorial Politics of Partition and the Holocaust, arguing that the refusal of the Muslim Council of Britain to attend Holocaust Memorial Day highlights a key dimension of memory as political myth: namely, the sense that time is cyclical. Prior external and internal enemies (in their current manifestations) are apocalyptically destined to threaten the integrity of the nation once more. Hence, ideologies based on political myths draw on both the future hopes and the future fears of people. The paper highlights the similarities between Jewish and Pakistani fears, rooted in the Holocaust and Partition, of a repeated ‘cycle of death and suffering’. These loom large especially for those suffering racism. The more bound people are by their narrow group’s particular symbols and history, the more apocalyptic their vision of this future is likely to be.

You can read more of this paper in: Ethnos, vol. 74:4, Dec. 2009 (pp. 441–464)

The BNP, Racism, and Contemporary Europe

Mark Featherstone

On Thursday night 8 million people watched Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, appear on the BBC’s premier political debating programme, Question Time. The immediate reaction to Griffin’s appearance in the national press may have led one to believe that it was a complete failure for the racist right – on Friday 23rd October The Daily Express explained that ‘BNP Leader Nick Griffin is...A Complete Disgrace to Humanity’ while The Independent wrote that ‘The BBC gave him the oxygen of publicity. He choked’ – but my own reaction to his moment in the full media glare was not so certain.

It is true that Griffin’s appearance was marked by confusion, irrationality, and illogical statements. Even his racism was not logically worked out. That is to say that even Griffin’s abhorrent racist belief that Britain should be maintained exclusively for the benefit of some mythological British people, primarily made up of a mythological white working class, collapsed at various points. These points, when he made the effort to hide his racism behind the veil of a brand of ultra-nationalism able to tolerate minorities, but not displaced peoples seeking asylum, were telling because what they illustrate is what we all know only too well. That is that the BNP are well aware that their racism, the core value of their politics, is beyond the pale and must be hidden from view and never explicitly spoken about if they are ever to achieve any kind of mainstream support.

In my view it was this fact, the fact that BNP must engage in a politics of deception, a politics of deception that cannot possibly work, that rendered Griffin a comic figure on Question Time, a comic figure who had been pushed centre stage, and found himself in a situation he could not possibly cope with in the full glare of the mass media, primarily because he was forced to evade a truth everybody already knows.

However, I was also aware that Griffin’s comic appearance, his appearance as a fool, a clown, would appeal to a specific audience, simply because those already alienated from mainstream politics and turned on to the BNP were unlikely to be persuaded by a situation that could not help but show their man as a fool and the cynical discredited mainstream as a mocking audience, who were well aware of the truth their fool wanted to hide and therefore could not but appear to be to disdainful of their man. In this situation the mainstream parties really needed to resist the temptation to exploit the fool in order to confirm their own moral superiority, because this would, of course, only confirm their own bankruptcy rooted in recent events, such as the expenses scandal.

Unfortunately, I felt that this was a temptation that the mainstream parties could not resist. Herein, then, lay perhaps the main problem with Griffin’s appearance on Question Time and possibly the key factor behind the shocking result of a YouGov poll carried out hours after the broadcast that showed that 22% of British people would ‘seriously consider’ voting BNP in a future local, general, or European election and perhaps more worryingly that ‘more than half of those polled said they agreed...the party had a point in speaking up for the interests of "indigenous, white British people"’ (BBC News, Saturday, 24th October).

That is to say that the main problem with Griffin’s appearance was that the mainstream parties appeared to want to confirm their own superiority by moralising against Griffin, rather than defeating him through rational argumentation. From the point of view of Griffin’s politics this was, of course, totally unnecessary because he was already defeated by his need to hide the truth of his own position, which resulted in ridiculous statements pertaining to the tolerance of the Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunately, though, I believe that the mainstream parties could not resist exploiting Griffin’s comic persona in order to confirm their own moral righteousness, with the result that they only confirmed their own moral bankruptcy.

In my view this was the main result of Griffin’s appearance on Question Time. In other words, by over-playing their morality and tolerance and under-playing their arguments and policies, the mainstream parties have probably confirmed both their own moral bankruptcy and lack of political imagination in the eyes of those who were either alienated from or on the verge of being alienated from the political mainstream. But this begs the question, why would the mainstream parties adopt this approach to dealing with Griffin, the comedy fool?

I think that the answer to this question is that the mainstream parties wanted to simultaneously confirm, boost, or simulate their own tolerance, hide the bankruptcy of their own policies, and finally deflect attention away from the real nature of the political situation in Europe which, as sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and Slavoj Zizek teach us, is already closing in on a form of friendly fascism that cannot speak its name. The truth is that the BNP are amateurs and that they will be defeated if our mainstream parties engage them in reasonable debate over policies, rather than employing empty moralising about the ‘tolerant’ nature of British culture and British politics.

Unfortunately, this is likely to be a lot harder than it sounds, since the empty moralising of the mainstream parties over the blindingly obvious racist nature of the BNP has a very particular purpose, which is to confirm their tolerance and hide their intolerance regarding the flows of homeless, displaced, refugees, and asylum seekers created by the form of globalisation sponsored and advanced by the generation of neo-liberals, including Brown, Sarkozy, and Berlusconi, and the master builders of the immigration architecture of Sangatte and the Schengen zone.

For the social and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek (See his ‘Berlusconi in Tehran’, London Review of Books, 23rd July, 2009), Italy, the new front line of the European battle to control immigration, is dominated by a new form of authoritarian capitalism, led by another comedy fool, Silvio Berlusconi. In Zizek’s view, the popularity of the offensive comedy fool, Berlusconi, who praised Obama for his suntan, in Italy, the front line of immigration and people trafficking in Europe, and laboratory for the new emergent form of authoritarian capitalism, is not coincidental, since what Berlusconi and the new Italy exemplify is a new form of state organisation that is more than happy to exploit the poor workers of the global south for their labour, so that consumers can have cheap training shoes, but not allow them to penetrate its borders, where they would become legally liable for the benefits their labour warrants.

It is the struggle against this situation, the struggle against exploitation based on racial and ethnic inequality, that must be understood as the real front line of anti-racism in Europe today. We know the BNP are racists. But we must recognise that they have, in many respects, already missed the boat. It is not that we are threatened by racism to come, but rather that the racist situation is already upon us. Given this reality, I think that we must resist the temptation to use the abhorrent nature of the BNP to affirm the mythology of the tolerance of contemporary globalisation and instead recognise the racist intolerance already pervading Europe and our own society. It is this situation that we must address if we are to really save our tolerant ideals, rather than simply use the comic fools of the BNP to kid ourselves that we live in a society that is free of racism.

One way to start to achieve this would be to break the popular support for the BNP by illustrating to the alienated white minority who have turned to them in times of need that the problem of contemporary society is not one relating to race and ethnicity, but rather one rooted in the new form of neo-liberal capitalism that plunges everybody, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or age, into a precarious world, where everything is uncertain. The effect of this approach would be to dismantle the mythological connection between precariousness and race that enables the BNP and other parties of the far right to scapegoat minorities, and turn popular attention towards the real problem, the form of capitalism that turns people against each other like never before.

However, this approach presents a utopian challenge. It presents a utopian challenge because such an approach would, of course, require that our political, capitalist, elite really want to do away with the BNP, that they really want to do away with the comedy fools who allow them to simulate their own tolerance and maintain the brand of authoritarian capitalism rooted in exploitation, and that they really want to found a society free of exploitation and racist intolerance.