Diane Abbott, cultural hegemony and the killing of Stephen Lawrence

The clever thing about so much of what happens in this country is that it happens with subtlety, and the issue of race and cultural identity is an area where some of that subtlety finds its most nuanced expression. We all know that the murderers of Stephen Lawrence are racists. They personify racism in its most crass and brutal form. We know that TV programmes such as Alf Garnett and Bless thy Neighbour were racist and we have learnt that the Metropolitan Police were or are institutionally racist. But are all white people racist as is implied by Diane Abbott's tweet.

The killing of Stephen Lawrence and the events that have followed it, represent many of the essential characteristics of the embedded nature of racism in the UK. The appalling hate expressed in the act and the recordings that the police made during their investigations are its most extreme manifestation. Then there is the overt racism of the police officers involved in the initial enquiry and the institutional racism that defended their practise. But perhaps the most disingenuous aspect, is the way in which Stephen Lawrence has become an icon of our (the white community's) absolution and redemption. By eulogising the work and struggle of Stephen's parents it seems as if we are trying to absolve ourselves of our complicity in sustaining the culture that killed him and that has kept his killers safe for a generation, and for some of them it will be longer. The conviction of two of his murderers is not evidence that Britain has finally become an intrinsically multi-racial and culturally inclusive society, it is evidence that we were ashamed of what had happened and have done our best to make amends for the Lawrences. But what we should never be allowed to believe, is that convicting them deals with the culture that killed him.

Stephen Lawrence was killed by racist thugs, who were protected by their friends and families and racist policemen; who in turn were employed by a racist institution, that was sustained by the racist beliefs of a society that believed that street crime was a problem for the black community. We might want to believe that Stephen Lawrence's murder couldn't happen again or that racially motivated policing doesn't unfairly affect the black community. But it is an expression of our racism that people die, get stopped and are arrested because they are black. It is also an expression of our racism that we still accept that this is acceptable or deny its existence. But our racism doesn't stop there and a much more subtle example of how racism works in this country was demonstrated during the last election.

The interlinking and articulation of the issues of racism and immigration has a long and well documented history. The Duffy Gate, scandal that arguably cost Gordon Brown the election, was a classic example of the extent to which racially ambiguous beliefs have come to be accepted as legitimate.  Gillian Duffy's association of mass immigration and the exploitation the benefit system may or may not make her a bigoted woman but they were views that were based on a racially stereotyped perception of eastern European immigration. What was most revealing about the response to this was not that Gordon Brown had referred to her as a bigoted woman, but rather that there was universal acceptance that there was nothing wrong with anything she had said. And what has been almost as shocking, has been the way in which Gillian Duffy has been feted as a heroin of the working class. It is this acceptance, that is indicative of the extent to which racial stereotyping is a norm that has become acceptable within our society.

And now the media has turned its attention on Diane Abbott  for having the courage to state what is actually obvious. That an essentially white community is embedded within its culture and that is able to maintain its dominance by dividing and stereo-typing its minority communities.We have done it with the Jewish Community, the Irish Community and are still doing it with the Muslim and Black communities. Its nothing new, its recognised in the literature and as Stuart Hall has demonstrated, it is dominated by representations of black people as good or bad or as co-operative and unco-operative. You can all guess which category Diane Abbott falls into.

As a black MP, Diane Abbott has managed to survive in a society that is nowhere near as inclusive as it believes it is. Some things have improved, but the racism that killed Stephen and allows some of his murderers to stay free is sustained by the actions and acceptance of all of us. We all hear racist comments and then pretend we haven't, we all have racists in our families and do not condemn them. All that Diane has done is to speak up for a community that still experiences racism on an everyday basis. She has challenged the complacency of a dominant white community and been slapped down by a party that fails to understand that the struggle against racism has barely begun and that is now far too ready to tolerate racism in its support.

So to return to the implication behind Diane's tweet - that white people maintain their cultural hegemony through division and rule and that as such all white people are racist. Self evidently we are not all the kind of racist thug that kills and nor are we all the kind of racist whose practice would affect the conduct of a police investigation. I personally do not believe that stigmatising immigrants is an effective way of dealing with the debt crisis. However, I have never been stopped and searched and neither has my son, but I know that if I were a black man this would not be the case. But this injustice and the myriad other forms of discrimination that that are an integral characteristic of a multi-faceted black Britain have not stirred my outrage - I have remained a passive beneficiary of my community's cultural dominance. So does my tolerance of this injustice make me a racist? On occasions it probably does because even the passive tolerance of racism allows it to flourish and as it flourishes the community that is an integral part of who I am retains its hegemony.

         

The Problem with Politicians and the Equalities Act 2010

The problem with politicians - is that they have convinced themselves, that being voted into government gives them the right to take a wrecking ball to the society in which we live and to the rights and privileges that we have grown rather fond of. It is probably a characteristic of most new governments all of which are hungry for power and change when they come into office, but there is probably no better example of radical wrecking ball politics than this government. Whether you are talking about the revolution that is being imposed upon the Health Service, the Welfare Reform Bill or the proposals to change the way in which we support disabled children; all of these represent policy changes that involve a significant restructuring of the way in which services are delivered. You might argue that this is a government's right or even obligation - that if it was in their manifesto (however, vaguely) they are simply exercising their mandate. Perhaps - but actually I'm not so sure.

For a while it has  been accepted that many of the services that are provided by government, play an important role in enabling equality of opportunity across society and that without that intervention significant numbers of people would have difficulty in playing a full or even a partial role as citizens. The experiences of people from a the vast number of minority groups supports this belief. Moreover, the expectation that government has a role to play in promoting equality of opportunity was acknowledged in law in the Equalities Act 2010, which fully recognises the role that government plays in tackling discrimination and promoting equality of opportunity.

One of the slightly more technical provisions of the Act lies in the responsibility that public authorities have to assess the impact of any changes that they are making on people with protected characteristics.  So in this way if a local authority was intending to change the way in which they allocate funding to children with additional needs they would have to assess the likely impact of its funding strategy and ensure that the changes that it proposes are unlikely to discriminate against a person with a protected characteristic, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations.

Which is all well and good but what does such an impact assessment entail? According  to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, the Equalities Act 2010 does not state specifically how an equalities impact assessment should be carried out, however it does state that previous equalities and human rights case law suggests that it is preferable that the assessment of a policy's impact should be carried out before that policy is implemented. The presumption being that if you don't do it before you put a policy in place, that policy is unlikely to be able to take full account of the needs of the whole population.

Central to being able to carry out any effective equalities impact assessment, is the existence of an evidence base which can then be used to predict the likely impact of a policy. This is where it gets problematic for governments that want to revolutionise the way that things are done -where is the evidence base against which they can assess the likely equalities impact of the changes that they are proposing.

Lets take for example the changes that the government is proposing to the way in which Children with Special Educational Needs are supported. Its Green Paper Support and Aspiration (DofE,2011) suggests a number of ways in which support for children and young people with SEN might be re-organised. Some of these suggestions such as the development of a local offer of information about services are well established and researched proposals, for which a significant evidence base can be identified. In this way an equalities impact assessment (which currently is not available on the DofE website) would be able to assess the potential impact of  such a Local Offer and can legitimately test ways in which it might be implemented. However, where a policy initiative is not based upon an evidence base then any attempt to test that policy initiative during a pathfinder has to be defined as the generation of new knowledge. Which is how the National Research Ethics Service defines research.  An example of this would be the Green Papers proposal to pilot a combined assessment and do away with the Statutory Assessment Process, a combination of measures for which only a partial evidence base exists. The evidence for this can be found in the Pathfinder Specification for Support and Aspiration  which identifies a significant number of objectives amongst which are:

• Exploring how one planning process could be used for children and young people from birth to 25, and how this would work in particular at key transition points;
• Exploring ways in which the three main areas of support (education, social care and health) could be joined together in a single plan that focuses on achieving better outcomes, for example improved health, for children and young people;
• Identifying the professionals and experts that need to be involved in the planning process to secure the best support and establishing the lead professional who is accountable for the delivery of that support;
• Exploring ways in which the single plan could be linked to the commissioning process, to bring about an improved match between available services, and children and young people’s identified needs, anticipating their arrival at different points in the system and ensuring that support and provision is in place when children and young people need it;
• Exploring how the new health reform structures can be used to improve services for children and young people, for example exploring the opportunity for the Health and Wellbeing Board to promote strategic coordination or identifying the expertise required by clinical commissioning groups;
• Aligning resources, such as through pooled budgets, between agencies and services to improve delivery of support services for children and young people;
• Exploring how the support in the single plan could be transferable across local authority boundaries when families move home (i.e education, health and social care);
• Exploring how mediation could improve parents’ and carers’ experience of the system when they don’t feel the support they are being offered is the right support;
• Exploring how to achieve value for money and efficiencies in the new system; and

http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/s/single%20plan%20and%20assessment%20pathfinder%20itt.pdf

 

The extensive use of the word 'explore' is the give away because in every instance the use of the word 'research' would have made more sense.

So why does it matter that the evidence base required for an equalities impact assessment is research?  The answer lies in the range of protections for participants and clinicians that are built into a research project. Participants have to be fully informed about what is involved, they have to protected from harm and the project has to be put together in a way that it meets a range of rigorous quality standards and requirements as  outlined in the Health and Social Care Research Governance Framework (2005). In short it has to be done properly and it has to have ethics approval from properly constituted Research Ethics Committee.    

So what I am arguing is that because of the requirements of the Equalities Act 2010, government reforms must either have an evidence base with which to support the changes they are proposing or they must test their proposals through properly constituted and ethically approved research projects - otherwise the Pathfinders in which they are generating new knowledge are effectively conducting illegal research. It is my belief that many of the Pathfinder Projects currently being used to test new policy across government are in effect carrying out illegal research and that both the National Research Ethics Service  and the Equalities Commission should investigate the way in which the governments more radical reforms are being piloted and implemented.

What the implications of this are for governments who want to inflict radical change on us I'm not yet sure, but if it means that policy has to be properly researched and assessed before it can be inflicted on us then that would be not bad thing.

    

Bradley Manning and Barack Obama - a struggle for the soul of America

In the Cairo Speech that he made shortly after coming into office President Obama said:

And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter our principles. 9/11 was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.


So America will defend itself respectful of the sovereignty of nations and the rule of law. And we will do so in partnership with Muslim communities which are also threatened. The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer.

Barack Obama is a President who was elected on the back of a campaign that drew heavily on the ideals and principles that he refers to, principles that form the cornerstone of much of what is good in the world, and principles that are embedded in the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence. But the ongoing conduct of the Obama Presidency shows that they are ideals that are difficult to sustain and defend. This has particularly been the case with regard to his conduct and behaviour in the pursuit of the war on Terror and in the wars in Iraq and Aghanistan, where he has failed to live up to the standards that were set out by his nations founding fathers and the aspirations of his Cairo speech.

For example the extra-judicial killing of Osama bin Laden and of numerous other leading Al Queda figures, might appear justiiable   if  Al Queda is viewed as enemy combatants rather than terrorists. But if that is the case it is likely that the killing of the unarmed and surrendered Bin Laden was an act that failed to live up to the rule of law that Obama refers to in his Cairo Speech, never mind the treatment of prisoners required Geneva Convention and the International Court in The Hague.

But perhaps Obama's greatest betrayal of the principles and values that constitute the idea of America has been his willingness to tolerate the killing of innocents. The undeclared war on parts of Pakistan and the people who live there has taken little account of the lives of the families who live in Waziristan. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism between 391 and 780 Civilians have been killed in what they describe as the Drone Wars, a total that includes 175 children. The CIA's response and justification of these killings is that they are far fewer in number and an unavoidable consequence of the need to prosecute the war on terror. Whilst the Brookings Institute put the ratio between civilians killed to combatants killed was as high as 10 to 1 and the probable total, far in excess of that suggested by either.

Irrespective of the truth, the conduct of the war in this way, is dependent upon a conception of the lives of the people of Waziristan that see's them as less entitled to human rights than US citizens and to the notion that the killing of a terrorist may need to be bought with the blood of innocents. It is an approach to justice that has paralells in history to which no nation should aspire.


The consequence is that rather than making the US and her allies safer, the way in which the war on Terror has been conducted has succeeded,as Byman predicted, in making an enemy of Pakistan and in recruiting another generation of young men to violent extremism.  For all the billions of dollars that have been spent and for all of the lives that have been lost. The way in which the war against Terror has been conducted has meant that the US has failed to be 'respectful of sovereignty and  the rule of law' and has failed to live up to the standards and morals that define it as a nation .

It is in this light that the actions of Bradley Manning and Wikileaks need to be viewed. The disclosure of the actions of the state has laid bare some things of significance and some that are not. It has brought down on them the full might of the US State and its more partisan media, which now portrays both as traitors to the nation. But Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should not be seen as enemies of America but rather as champions of the ideas and principles that are central to its identity. It is equally the case that in acting as they have done they have not betrayed the American People but committed themselves to a struggle for the soul of the nation because America is not a government or even an army - it is an idea.