People in Glass Houses

For the past five years, I have written extensively about American politics, history and sociology. (I don’t believe it possible to separate the three.) I have been critical particularly of the interpretation of the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, as well as racial discrimination, which featured slavery at the very start of the Republic and continues to manifest itself in such actions as police violence against African Americans. However, over the past few days, I have been reminded of the proverb, ‘people in glass houses should not throw stones.’ There is a real possibility that the leaders of our major political parties are racist. So, this week, the blog will make a U turn and look at life in UK in relation to racism.

Let’s start with a definition of racism: “prejudice, discrimination or antagonism directed against someone of a different race or colour based on a belief that one’s own race or colour is superior.”   There are other definitions but those I’ve seen are all along similar lines.

In 1947, the SS “Empire Windrush” landed in the Port of London. Its passengers were from the Caribbean, having been invited to Britain by the Labour government to help with this country’s major post-war problem: a labour shortage and the need to fill jobs to work in transport, health, schools and other public institutions.  Bus drivers and conductors, nurses and hospital porters, school janitors and cooks were in short supply. People arriving on the Windrush and other ships helped immensely and were rewarded with legal immigrant status. However, appropriate documentation - passports, identity cards and the like - were not provided.

Fast forward to the 21^st century. Immigration in UK has become a political hot potato. The British people, it was said by the press, especially The Daily Mail and The Daily Express, are concerned by high levels of illegal immigration, although the Home Office, the responsible institution for this matter, had no figures or data to establish with any accuracy the extent of the problem. In the political debate, the distinction between legal and illegal was blurred.

In May, 2006, John Reid, the man PM Tony Blair appointed as Home Secretary and an acknowledged “safe pair of hands,” admitted that the beleaguered Immigration Directorate in the Home Office was not fit for purpose. This was an extraordinary statement, never defined. A vast Office of State was simply a failure in coping with immigration.

Reid ordered a fundamental overhaul but it failed, as evidenced by the attitudes of Home Office personnel towards the Windrush generation. Citizens who left UK for a family celebration or holiday to the Caribbean have been denied re-entry. Windrush generation people have been denied treatment by the National Health Service because they cannot prove British citizenship. There is an immense catalogue of wrongdoings on record by the Home Office against people who are living in this country lawfully as British citizens. Only recently has the media given major news coverage to the scandal, despite efforts of MPs like David Lammy to bring the Windrush situation to parliamentary and public attention.

In 2014, the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, introduced new laws intended to create a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants. I do not go so far as to say there were elements of Nazism in the new legislation but there should be a principle that a civilised country like UK should not act in a hostile manner to anyone. Mrs May was warned that Windrush people and their undocumented descendants who, I remind you, are resident legally, would be penalized by the new laws. The warning was ignored.  

Last week, we had the spectacle of Mrs May’s successor at the Home Office, Amber Rudd, denying to a Parliamentary Committee that the Home Office set targets to reduce illegal immigrants only for her to return to Parliament the following day to admit that there were indeed targets for deportation, although only for internal monitoring. Like Mrs May, Mrs Rudd was aware of the Windrush problem but until the press exposed the scandal, she chose to ignore it. More of Mrs Rudd later.

The government policy, which has damaged and destroyed the lives of people who live here legally but who have been treated as illegals, is nothing less than appalling and tantamount to racism. Yet no Minister has resigned, nor has any civil servant been fired. So much for accountability. But this is politics. Mrs Rudd is taking the flack for Mrs May. If either had true honour, both would resign. The Conservatives cannot expect me to vote for a Party that endorses racism and takes no action to make people accountable. I hope they get a drubbing at the ballot box in this week’s London local council elections.

To make matters worse, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, is now perceived as in thrall to an unelected but powerful left wing group, Momentum, who have encouraged antisemitism within the Party. Antisemitism can be defined as hostility to or prejudice against Jews. It is racism in specific form. A recent key test for Corbyn is the disciplinary hearing of Labour activist Marc Wadsworth, who challenged a Jewish Labour MP, Ruth Smeeth, for working “hand in hand” with the media against Labour. Wadsworth’s heckling was viewed as personal abuse and bullying and on Friday he was expelled from the Party. He commented, “Jeremy doesn’t see that I did anything wrong.”

Labour Against the Witch-Hunt is a campaign group set up to protest against Labour Party member expulsions, often caused through antisemitism. The emotive term “witch-hunt” indicates where some sympathies lie in eradicating the problem. Significantly, these groups perceive the expulsions as attacks upon Corbyn personally. Consequently, this highlights likely antisemitic sympathies in the heart of the Labour Party, not on the periphery as Baroness Shami Chakrabati, a Labour Party politician, would have us think. She chaired a 2016 investigation into allegations of antisemitism and other forms of racism in the Labour Party and found racism virtually non-existent. The report is widely regarded as a whitewash.

Labour Against the Witch-Hunt and probably Momentum will have many cases to argue and protest as more instances of antisemitism are exposed. Another Labour man and former MP, Ken Livingstone, has been suspended by Labour for anti-Semitic statements, including that Hitler was a Zionist. Corbyn, himself, speaks of Hezbollah and Hammas as “our friends.” He espouses the Palestinian cause, arguably with justification. However, he never balances it by speaking for Israel’s position.

Last week, Corbyn’s hopes of reassuring the Jewish community over his efforts to combat antisemitism suffered a serious blow after Jewish leaders labelled their meeting with him “disappointing, a missed opportunity” with nothing achieved. The heads of the Jewish Leadership Council and Board of Deputies said Corbyn had failed to agree to any of their requests, including stronger personal leadership, a swift resolution of party disciplinary cases, including Livingstone’s, and Labour adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.

All of this has arisen because Corbyn has done little or nothing to eradicate antisemitism from the Party. He says he wants to stamp out antisemitism in the Party but hides behind Labour committees which delay or defer decision making on issues relating to the subject. However, last week, under pressure from some of his own MPs, Corbyn finally issued a condemnation of antisemitism, saying the party’s structures were unfit for purpose and that it must confront the fact that a number of members held antisemitic views. He said that in the past fortnight alone, more than 20 individuals had been suspended from party membership, and more were being investigated. What took him and the Party so long?

What has happened to the liberal democracy in which I was raised and live my life? In an op-ed piece last Saturday, Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian reminded his readers of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. Danny Boyle master-minded a spectacle of the history of Great Britain and featured so much of what was best of the British multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, tolerant society. I cannot judge how badly it has been affected by the recent actions of our political leaders. Why are we constantly fighting a battle over race not just at grass roots but in parliament?

Late on Sunday night, Mrs Rudd resigned as Home Secretary. Her reason: “inadvertently misleading MPs over targets for reporting illegal immigrants.” It is a great pity that she failed to be honest. Rather than imply that blame should not be attributed to her but to civil servants who failed to brief her properly, it would have been so much better and refreshing had she said she can no longer support an immigration policy which, at its base, is racist. By resigning, Mrs May’s back is exposed.

Before Mrs Rudd resigned, I wrote: “What worries me greatly is that the two leaders of UK’s major political parties are either racist or cannot see the racism in their words. The Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, wrote: ‘People should be judged not by what they say but what they do.’ He was so right. May, Rudd and Corbyn are in public life and we have the right to judge them. I find them wanting and hope they go. However, in all likelihood, they will stay in post until they answer at the ballot box. They are not the type of people who do the right or honourable thing.”