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The liberal agenda: a warning
In this Guardian article (see link below) Lord Adonis (sorry, he writes as Andrew Adonis; he clearly doesn’t approve of the title he’s accepted – how democratic, indeed how liberal, that is!) describes the late Roy Jenkins as “the most transformational liberal home secretary ever” because, apparently, “he legalised both homosexuality and abortion in one of the most skilful ministerial manoeuvres of parliamentary history.” It’s true that Jenkins was Home Secretary at the time. But it was, of course, the determined campaigns by gays and women that were the crucial elements leading to those changes in the law, not really Jenkins. His image at the time, and his image as handed down through the decades, is that he was the great white hope of the liberal intelligentsia. But I’ll tell you what else he did. He voted to cancel the British passports of the Kenyan Asians who fled to the UK from Kenya in 1967-68, thus pandering to the hostile campaigns against them by Enoch Powell, Duncan Sandys and the fascists of the National Front.
The Kenyan Asians were never called refugees but, effectively, that’s what they were. Their presence in Kenya was part of colonial history and their departure a result of the decolonisation process in East Africa. After independence in 1963 Kenya adopted a policy of Africanisation: in the civil service, Africans had to be rapidly promoted; in private firms, Africans had to be employed at worker and management levels. At the time of independence Asians had been offered Kenyan or British citizenship, and many of them chose British. But the 1967 Trade Licensing Act in Kenya made it illegal for non-citizens to trade in rural or outlying urban areas and in a wide range of goods, and many Asians were forced out of business. Many turned to the UK for help. In 1963 the Conservative government, though fresh from passing the first restrictive Commonwealth Immigrants Act, reassured the Kenyan Asians that their UK citizenship was secure. In March 1968 the Labour government, though fresh from declaring Jenkins’ liberal agenda, cancelled this agreement and passed a new Commonwealth Immigrants Act which removed their UK citizenship. In the space of 72 hours. And what happened to the bright, shiny new liberals in the Labour cabinet when the vote was taken? They voted for it. Roy Hattersley expressed remorse 31 years later in an interview (the following quotation and the later quotation from the Jenkins interview come from the Channel 4 documentary Playing the Race Card, which was first broadcast in October-November1999; they are reproduced from memory and are correct in their substance, but may not be word-for-word):
Shirley [Williams] and I stayed up into the small hours discussing what we should do. When you go into politics you want to achieve certain things, but you can’t achieve everything and you often have to make compromises. But there are some things you shouldn’t compromise on, and this was one of them. We should have resigned rather than vote for it.
And Jenkins? He had become Chancellor by the time the Act was passed. He also explained himself 31 years later: he was Chancellor, he explained, travelling abroad and signing deals and agreements with a host of countries. So, he explained,
I think people would have thought it really rather trivial if I had resigned on this issue.
So beware of liberals bearing gifts. And beware of Lord Adonis, who says in the article that Jenkins “was my hero and later my mentor”. He also says that he “fell politically in love with Tony Blair” (what a careful statement that is!). I’m glad he’s against the idea of breaking away from Labour to form a new party (at least at the moment – remember he’s a liberal). But I suspect he will do his best to undermine Corbyn every chance he gets.
To end on a lighter note: he points out that the SDP failed in their aim in the 1980s to “break the mould of British politics”. Tony Benn once captured this failure perfectly to a Question Time audience:
The SDP was formed to break the mould of British politics and last week they held their annual conference in a telephone kiosk in Plymouth.[1]
His Lordship’s article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/24/labour-party-split-sdp-tories-england
[1] David Owen, a former Labour Foreign Secretary and one of the “Gang of Four” who founded the SDP, was the MP for Plymouth.
“Liberal agenda” masks “political cowardice”
After donning the white trousers (see previous blog: https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/pinching-the-tories-white-trousers/ ) what did Labour do?
Race relations
After Labour’s tightening of immigration controls following the 1964 election, the rest of the 1960s saw the development of a new approach to race and immigration in the UK: the race-relations approach. This was tacitly supported by the Conservatives, who were also worried by the uncertain consequences of the racial hatred stirred up at Smethwick. Conservative frontbencher Robert Carr saw the consensus between the two parties as “a marriage … of convenience – not from the heart.”[1] Labour insisted that its liberal credentials were intact because the approach’s emphasis on integration was the key to social peace, the mark of a “civilised society”. But (crucially, and to justify the tightening-up of the Act) it would have to include immigration controls if it was to be successful. In 1965 Home Office minister Roy Hattersley expressed it thus: “Integration without control is impossible, but control without integration is indefensible.”[2] When Roy Jenkins became home secretary in 1966 he laid out his policy stall in a speech which was to become a foundation text for the new approach. He emphasised the integration side of Hattersley’s equation, defining it both negatively and positively:
“I do not regard [integration] as meaning the loss, by immigrants, of their own national characteristics and culture. I do not think we need in this country a “melting pot”, which will turn everyone out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone’s misplaced vision of the stereotyped Englishman.”[3]
He defined integration positively as “cultural diversity, coupled with equality of opportunity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance”, and added: “If we are to maintain any sort of world reputation for civilised living and social cohesion, we must get far nearer to its achievement than is the case today.” Here was the moral, political and social justification for his liberal agenda and the multicultural society that would evolve from it.
Contradiction
There was, however, a contradiction at the heart of the approach which has dogged it ever since: it is inconsistent to claim to want to celebrate cultural diversity in society on the one hand and discriminate against black and Asian immigrants on the other. Thirty-four years later Roy Hattersley admitted as much: “If your immigration restrictions are too repressive you encourage bad race relations rather than encourage contentment and satisfaction, because you are saying, ‘We can’t afford any more of these people here’, and the implication is that there is something undesirable about these people.”[4] The truth is that race relations policy was not the result of high principle (as suggested by Gaitskell’s opposition to the 1962 Act or by Jenkins’s exposition of his liberal agenda) but of the complete abandonment of principle after 1964. After Smethwick “the government panicked”, explained Barbara Castle. The tightening-up of restrictions by Labour was done “out of political cowardice, not political conviction.”[5] So the whole liberal project had its origin in a surrender to racism.
A “half-hearted affair” for “a people apart”
This helps to explain the weakness of the first Race Relations Act in 1965 and the inadequacies of the second in 1968. The 1965 Act prohibited “incitement to racial hatred” but did not cover discrimination in housing and employment, did not contain criminal sanctions against those who discriminated, and did not apply to the police. A. Sivanandan, working at the Institute for Race Relations, described it as “a half-hearted affair which merely forbade discrimination in ‘places of public resort’ and, by default, encouraged discrimination in everything else: housing, employment, etc.”[6] Moreover, the Race Relations Board, set up under the Act to provide for a conciliation process to deal with discrimination in public places, sent the wrong message: “To ordinary blacks,” Sivanandan argued, such structures “were irrelevant: liaison and conciliation seemed to define them as a people apart who somehow needed to be fitted into the mainstream of British society – when all they were seeking was the same rights as other citizens.” The ineffectiveness both of the Act and the Board is summed up by Hayter:
“The first person to be charged under this Act was Michael X, a black militant. When Duncan Sandys, a prominent Tory MP, attacked a government report on education by stating that ‘The breeding of millions of half-caste children will merely produce a generation of misfits and increase social tension’, the Race Relations Board was unable or unwilling to prosecute him.”[7]
The 1968 Race Relations Act went further by bringing employment and housing into its ambit, but its inadequacies were apparent:
“The Act introduced fines on employers who were found to discriminate on the grounds of race, and compensation, but not reinstatement, for the people discriminated against … but the enforcement powers of the Race Relations Board remained weak.”[8]
Moreover, the anti-discrimination provisions still did not apply to the police. Jenkins had faced opposition from the police when discussing the first Act and in 1968 the new home secretary, James Callaghan, bowed to similar pressure. The year 1968 also saw the passing of another Commonwealth Immigrants Act.
In the next blog: the Kenyan Asians and Enoch Powell.
[1] Playing the Race Card, October-November 1999, Channel Four Television, London.
[2] Favell, A. (2001), Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain, Palgrave, Basingstoke, p. 104.
[3] Cited, ibid.
[4] Playing the Race Card, October-November 1999, Channel Four Television, London.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Cited, Fryer, P. (1984), Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain, Pluto Press, London, p. 383.
[7] Hayter, T. (2000), Open Borders: the Case against Immigration Controls, Pluto Press, London, p. 35.
[8] Ibid.
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