LABOUR shrugs off criticism of its record on racism, regarding even the views of Martin Forde KC — the barrister it itself selected to investigate racism uncovered in a leaked report — as unworthy of comment.
Sir Keir Starmer, gifted a commanding poll lead by an imploding Tory Party and plummeting living standards, assumes he has nothing to fear.
The left in his own party is cowed, unable even to unite in defence of former leader Jeremy Corbyn when little over three years ago his mere presence on a party platform prompted thunderous ovations.
A mass media controlled by the Establishment is not going to hound him over evidence of anti-black racism in the party, as it hounded Corbyn over anti-semitism allegations. It is not interested in the Forde report, or the leaked report, or anything that might revisit the question of whether Corbyn was really the monster it portrayed him as.
Whether Starmer cares or not, though, there are reasons the labour movement cannot afford to let this lie.
At a time when the Tory Party is all but encouraging fascist street mobilisations with its vile rhetoric on refugees, and trampling on international treaties to deprive asylum-seekers of their rights, we are let down by an opposition whose anti-racism is purely decorative or, worse, only deployed for factional purposes.
The difference between committed anti-racist leadership and Labour’s current crop of cynical politicians was clear on Saturday, when Corbyn marched at the head of a huge solidarity demonstration while Labour frontbenchers can only criticise the cost and inefficiency of the Tory war on refugees.
Sir Keir was not on the demo — because Labour is no longer a “party of protest,” no doubt — but his insinuation that street politics don’t work is belied by the facts.
The Corbyn leadership forced the resignation of home secretary Amber Rudd over the Windrush scandal. It forced a U-turn by the majority Tory government of David Cameron on accepting child refugees.
It did so by mobilising public anger at state racism. Sir Keir’s “grown-up” politics has not delivered any comparable defeat on the government.
Institutional racism is a big issue. Just this week the scale of it in the country’s largest police force has been detailed in a withering report.
We have recently emerged from a pandemic that killed proportionately higher numbers of black people — though a Tory-commissioned report assured us that this was not due to racism but because “black and south Asian people are more likely to live in urban areas with higher population density and levels of deprivation; work in higher-risk occupations … and to live with older relatives …”
A liberal reduction of racism to expressions of prejudice has so warped the discussion that evidence of systematic oppression in housing, poverty and labour market segregation can actually be deployed as alternatives to racism as explanations for black people dying.
The need for a serious anti-racist movement to counter such nonsense and begin addressing real oppression is clear. And the audience exists.
The Black Lives Matter movement and the associated attacks on the legacy of colonialism and slavery in Britain opened eyes to the connections between our imperial past and our racist present.
The huge strike wave has mobilised workers in great numbers to challenge a state they see lying about them, the work they do and the reasons they have walked out — and many of those workers are black.
The labour movement is speaking for, and to, a wider cross-section of society than for decades.
It can play a truly positive role in developing a mass anti-racist understanding to challenge the fascists surrounding hotels, the race-baiters in the Cabinet and the liberals giving ground to both.
But it will lack credibility in that fight if it allows the party it founded to pick and choose when racism is a problem.
