Diane Abbott: What Goodhart and others can learn

The most striking thing about David Goodhart’s recent BBC Radio 4 programme on Black politics is his fathomless ignorance of the Black community.

He puts forward the reasonable theory that there might be a new Black politics. Then he goes further and claims to be able to define it. His proposition is that the old Black politics was defined by a sense of racial grievance and by ignorant and unlettered Blacks manipulated by the White left. The new Black politician, according to Goodhart, doesn’t talk about race, and is embodied by figures like erstwhile Tory candidate Shaun Bailey. If Goodhart knew anything about Black people, he would know there have always been figures like Bailey. Bailey gushes to Goodhart about his close friendship with Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. “I love Georgie,” he says. You could find a Shaun Bailey in certain upper class drawing rooms at any time since the 1920s. They would have gushed about their White “friends” in exactly the same way. The truth about Shaun Bailey’s claims to Black leadership is his failure to get elected in one of London’s most multicultural constituencies.

Goodhart does touch on one fact. But he does not know how to interpret it. The Black community, as late as the seventies, was majority Caribbean. Now it is majority African and from all parts of the continent: not just British West Africa, but Ethiopia, Somalia and (increasingly) francophone Africa. Knowing nothing about Black people, Goodhart does not understand the significance of this demographic change. The post-war Caribbean leadership of Britain’s Black community had distinctive characteristics. Politics in post-war Caribbean was rooted in the sugar unions.

Leaders like Trinidad’s Eric Williams and Guyana’s Forbes Burnham all looked to organised labour. This was particularly true of Jamaica, where the majority of post-war Black immigrants came from. There, leaders of the two opposing parties, the JLP’s Alexander Bustamante and the PNP’s Norman Manley, both had unions as their political base. Norman’s heir, Michael Manley, made his reputation as a tough sugar union trade leader. So a collectivist approach to politics and a grasp of labour movement basics was in the DNA of an earlier generation of Black community activists. It is also true that many Black activists of the 1970s had studied in Britain alongside students from all over the Caribbean and Africa. Their politics had been shaped by a unifying opposition to colonialism. A unified, internationalist and anti-colonial approach came naturally to them and to the Black leadership they provided well into the 1980s.

One of the big differences in British Black politics now is that the Black community is now majority African. The African community brings tremendous cultural richness to British life. But trade unionism was never the over-riding feature of African politics that it was in the Caribbean. And because they come from all parts of Africa, Black people no longer have the unifying experience of British colonialism. So the Black community has to relearn the lesson of not allowing institutions to play divide and rule.

But (sadly) the issues facing people of colour are largely the same e.g. employment, education and police harassment. And it will all get worse in the current climate of austerity. Slashing public sector employment, for instance, will hit Black people harder than any group. It was never more important to analyse social policy for the effects of institutional racism. Instead Goodhart seems to deride those concerned with racism are somehow “fighting the last war.”

Goodhart also tries to illustrate his old politics/new politics paradigm by comparing and contrasting Bernie Grant and, his successor as MP for Tottenham, David Lammy. But he does them both an injustice. I knew Bernie well. He was a much more complex figure than Goodhart allows. And David Lammy is far more than just a Labour version of Sean Bailey.

Politics, including Black politics, constantly evolves. But Goodhart sets out a false dichotomy between acceptable Black politicians who don’t talk about racism and unacceptable ones who do. In his programme he was careful to avoid talking to anyone who did not fit into his paradigm. Notably he spoke to only one woman, Linda Bellos, and completely ignored mainstream Black female activists and politicians like Ros Howell, Sybil Phoenix, Claudia Webbe or Dawn Butler. Maybe because it is our sons who get stopped and searched, Black women have never been able to afford the luxury of claiming that racism has gone away. It would be easy to dismiss him. But Goodhart now runs a key left-leaning think tank Demos. This summer’s disturbances make it vital to understand what is happening in Britain’s Black community and the inner city generally. So Goodhart’s leadership of Demos calls into question the organisation’s ability to offer a fact-based analysis of the actual history and life experiences of Black Britons.

Diane Abbott MP