Anti-racism movement is not ‘muted’ — it has been left to shrink

Good morning. Whose responsibility is it to lead the fight against antisemitism in the UK? Today’s note looks at what has become a familiar cliché at Westminster and the faulty assumptions underpinning it.

Who should lead the anti-racism movement?

Robert Shrimsley wrote a brilliant column this weekend about the shrinking of Jewish life in the United Kingdom, to which I don’t have anything to add other than I think it is a must-read. And here is what a “whole society” effort against anti-Jewish racism must take as its starting point, as I write in today’s paper.

There was a lot I didn’t have space to discuss, including the question of “whose job is it to lead this stuff anyway?” This is important because many in Westminster and civic society more broadly are labouring under a really dangerous delusion: that there is a strong, effective and influential “anti-racism movement” in the country whose influence could be usefully turned towards fighting antisemitism, but does not turn up with the force and effectiveness it displays for other minorities.

Sarah Sackman, the MP for Finchley and Golders Green, and a minister of state in the Ministry of Justice, this weekend told the Times that the civic society response has been “muted” thus far (emphasis mine):

“For a minority community to come under this sort of sustained level of threat and attack purely for our identity, you would expect in the normal run of things for anti-racist organisations, for trade unions, for cultural leaders to speak out. 

I think what has been notable is, for some time now, a lack of vocal solidarity from the moderate majority. You would expect our anti-racist movement, who quite rightly come out vocally, regularly for other minoritised communities to have responded in kind. 

That response, I think, has been muted so far.”

I have to say in all candour that it is not obvious to me why anyone would expect trade unions to be particularly vocal or effective on issues of race and racism. A lot of Labour politicians seem to imagine that the role of trade unions is to be a sort of generic “Good Things, Incorporated” but their actual role is to represent the specific interests of their members.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Transport and General Workers Union (now part of Unite) backed the Bristol Omnibus Company (a bus operator run by the local authority, then under the Labour Party) in running a colour bar on hiring Black and Asian workers.

In the present day, the Trades Union Congress seems to have released no statements about the largest far-right march in our country’s history. It also appears to have had nothing to say about “Operation Raise the Colours”, a flag campaign that a majority of Britons of all races view as one motivated by overt hostility to ethnic diversity in the UK.

The fact that trade unions aren’t, and cannot be, particularly effective anti-racist organisations is part of why Britain’s “minoritised communities” have historically set up anti-racist organisations, of the kind that Sackman believes to be “muted”. Indeed, many of these organisations were originally founded, or co-founded, by British Jews. Today, one of the most important and consistent grant-givers to the UK’s anti-racism efforts is the Pears Foundation, the product of British Jewish philanthropy.

Speaking of the present day, when I hear people in Westminster talk about how “muted” anti-racist organisations are, I have to ask: what anti-racist organisations? This feels like one of the many ways that the Labour government’s thinking is stuck firmly in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the UK still had prominent, well-funded and broad-based anti-racist organisations with deep connections to the major parties and to civic society.

At present, Action for Race Equality, which recorded a total income last year of a little over £2mn, is, as far as I am aware, the UK’s largest generalist anti-racist organisation. It did speak out against the Golders Green attack and the Heaton Park synagogue attack. So too did British Future, whose total income last year was only about £662,000, as did Hope Not Hate, with its annual income of £985,000.

And if people mean “Black Lives Matter UK”, that organisation has had as much to say on its website about Golders Green as it has about Nick Timothy’s remarks about Muslim prayer in Trafalgar Square or Robert Jenrick’s comments on integration: that is to say, nothing.

But it is not obvious to me why Black Lives Matter UK (to the extent it is still active) should be expected to have more to say about this topic than the “nothing at all” that the Campaign Against Antisemitism (total income: £2.5mn) or the Traveller Movement (£563,000) has to say about prayer in Trafalgar Square. It is in fact, both fine and appropriate for specialist organisations to have their own focus and not to have positions on everything, though on the subject of “community leaders” I would note that the Muslim Council of Britain has also condemned the Golders Green attack.

Perhaps the reason so many at Westminster think these organisations have been silent, and are more well-resourced and influential than they actually are, is because so many at Westminster still use X.

X has an owner who is avowedly hostile to ethnic diversity, and in terms of what the platform amplifies, it consistently favours extremes, particularly of the right. Yes, of course, as long as X drives the UK’s political conversation, the UK’s anti-racism movement is going to be “muted”.

Like all British Jews, I owe the Community Security Trust (annual income in its most recent release: £28mn) a huge amount of gratitude and respect for the vital role it plays in combating the violent terrorist threats that the British Jewish community faces.

But when I read Dave Rich, CST’s policy director, say there is “a huge civil society-shaped hole where nothing is being done to combat this unacceptable, appalling, shameful rise in antisemitism in our country”, I wonder if he has absorbed that the CST now is civil society as far as British anti-racism is concerned. The modal pound spent on anti-racist activity in the UK is spent by the CST.

I don’t mean this to say that the CST can or should spare any of its own resources to beef up the UK’s cash-strapped broader anti-racism movement. Obviously it can’t, given the scale of the threat facing Britain’s Jewish community. But I do think that many in Westminster and many campaigners against antisemitism have not yet grasped that many of the anti-racist organisations they imagine as CST’s “peers” no longer resemble it — because those groups are far smaller than they used to be.

Those decrying the supposed silence of Britain’s anti-racist movement need to face up to the fact that the reason it is “muted” is in part that the long years when the forces of racism in the UK were in retreat have resulted in an anti-racism movement that is a shadow of its former self. Westminster also chooses to hold its political conversations in a space that is hostile to that movement.

They should be alarmed, too, at how long it takes for a movement to succeed: take Black Lives Matter as an example, that organisation was founded in the wake of a police killing in 2012. It took eight years and a pandemic for it to achieve a breakthrough that, in the grand scheme of things, flickered away very quickly. It’s well past time for many at Westminster to stop asking “what is the UK’s anti-racism movement doing to stop this?” and to start asking “what am I doing to recreate the UK’s anti-racism movement?”

Now try this

I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 at the cinema this weekend with my partner. I thought it was better than the original, combining all of the delights of the first one with the added bonus of “this time, Andy and her friends aren’t deeply obnoxious”. As someone who spent a long time in magazine journalism, I also particularly enjoyed the review of the issue jokes. Jonathan Romney did not care for it, however.

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