The politics of racism is back in vogue

The dog-whistle racism that was Sir Lynton Crosby’s contribution to helping Australian conservatives win and keep power for much of the past 20 years has now become a full-throated screech: in 2019, our top politicians say things that only a few years ago were unspoken, and, on the whole, not much thought.

We shall see next year if the US Congress’s extraordinary resolution denouncing their president as a racist is supported by American voters.

But if it is the new right-wing norm to abuse anyone from elected representatives downwards in racist terms, then an important barrier has been broken.

I have been grappling with the issue of reporting racism since first I began work as a BBC journalist in Birmingham in the era of Enoch Powell. It was common then for newspapers to identify any member of what we now call the BAME community in a news story.

 Anyone accused of committing a crime who wasn’t white who was in court or being hunted by the police was “coloured’ or “Asian.” In 1975, the Daily Telegraph splashed its front page with the headline “Asian Father of 12 on £5000 a year welfare payments.” The story concerned some luckless Indian or Pakistanti immigrant in Coventry who had no job, a serious work injury disability, 12 children (some needing special needs care), and a bed-ridden wife requiring daily care and treatment. So he did indeed get £100 week in a mixture of housing allowance, child allowances, disability benefit.

I wrote privately to the editor of the Daily Telegraph pointing out that while from the point of view of the paper, all welfare payments were probably a bad thing, why did the paper put the racist identification “Asian” into the headline.

He wrote back that the story was accurate – which I did not dispute – and if the paper “had not identified the man as Asian most of our readers would have assumed he was Irish.”

As with the common practice before 1939 of describing some as a “Jew” in a news story, we have moved on from there.

I wrote a pamphlet for the NUJ in 1978 called “Black and White. Race Reporting in Britain” pointing out the BBC and newspapers employed no BAME journalists, and had no community relations correspondents – despite the self-evident racial tension against “immigrants” whipped up in the Enoch Powell years.

Things did get better, but now it is not journalists but politicians who are stoking up tensions against any minority which presents an easy target. Some on the Left are doing it against Jews. President Trump is doing it against Mexican immigrants he calls “rapists.” In the anti-Semitic white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he said there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Now he has said four American members of Congress who are not white should return to their own country. According to Melanie Philips, Trump sees these politicians as fair game because “between them, (they) have taken positions that are anti-American, anti-white and anti-Jewish.”

Others have defended Trump, just as many defend Boris Johnson’s use of the word “letter-box” to describe Muslim women who wear burkas, or “picaninnies” to describe young black children. Oh, it is just irony, his defenders say and Johnson insists he is being “satirical”, just as Trump swerves away from his original insults by saying he has been misinterpreted.

Defenders of the disastrously stupid approach of Jeremy Corbyn and his inner clique to dealing with leftist anti-Jewish ideology adopt the same line of defence. Trump or Johnson, racist? Come off it. Some of their top associates are BAME citizens. Corbyn, anti-Semitic? Don’t be stupid, some of the biggest critics of Zionism and Israel are Jews.

Trump says he does not have a “racist bone in his body” just as Corbyn insists he has never harboured animosity to Jews in his life. Their supporters fan out to defend their heroes – Owen Jones for Corbyn in the Guardian, Melanie Philips for Trump in The Times.

Personally, I have always had a rough rule of thumb used in endless debates and arguments on the left and in the Labour Party about Israel, Jews and Zionism.

It is to substitute another category. I say to Labour friends: “Try saying gay or black for Jew/Zionist and see how it sounds or reads.”

But the opposite is also the case. When Trump or Johnson sounds off about BAME citizens, try  “Jews” or indeed “gays”  and see what it sounds like. Writing about Peter Mandelson’s resignation as a minister in 1998, Johnson squeezed in a reference to “tank-top bumboys” in his Daily Telegraph column.

In the Commons not so long ago, anti-Semitic MPs would say to a Jewish MP making a point they disagreed with “Why don’t you go and live in Israel?” A Tory grandee MP (who is still very prominent) said when I was discussing with him the latest Ken Livingstone anti-Jewish stupidity: “Oh for fuck’s sake Denis, the Hebes are getting too big for their foreskins.”

He would never say that out loud, like Trump attacks black members of Congress, but unless we call out as racist that which is designed to denigrate and belittle minorities of any sort, then hate against Muslims, against black people, against Jews, against gays will poison political discourse.

It may win votes. But at what cost?