Author: Rod Liddle
Publication: The Sunday Times
Date: June 29, 2008
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4231174.ece
Introduction: Just to be accused of racism,
however unfairly, can get you fired from public life
The left-wing "journalist" and professional
agitator Marc Wadsworth has struck the first blow against the new mayor of
London, Boris Johnson - and has done so on territory upon which Boris felt
himself, perhaps rightly, to be vulnerable.
Wadsworth interviewed Johnson's senior political
adviser, James McGrath, for a blog read by almost nobody (The-Latest.com).
Why McGrath bothered to talk to the man - over a nice cup of coffee - may
remain for ever a mystery.
Anyway, Wadsworth recorded their conversation
and then wrote it up, revealing to his handful of readers the shocking racism
at the core of Johnson's new regime. Wadsworth himself pronounced it "breathtaking";
others have suggested that it called to mind the "language of the BNP".
Within 48 hours, McGrath was sacked.
What precisely happened was this: during the
course of their conversation, Wadsworth quoted the unsubstantiated and frankly
risible comments of a more prominent black journalist and supporter of Ken
Living-stone, Darcus Howe, who had said that with Boris as mayor of London
many black Londoners might decide to return to the Caribbean. What do you
have to say to that, Wadsworth inquired. McGrath, in exasperation and some
irritation, replied: "Well, let them go if they don't like it here."
That's the "breathtaking" stuff
to which Wadsworth alluded - although he also claimed that McGrath's last
riposte to him was "politically incorrect" and thus presumably "breathtaking"
too.
McGrath had said to Wadsworth: "I know
where you are on the radar, sunshine," having suffered a series of extremely
partisan questions. I assume it's the word "sunshine" to which Wadsworth
objected, although it seems to me one of the milder epithets one might throw
at Marc Wadsworth. Whatever, within a very short space of time indeed, McGrath
was out of a job, for having divested himself of a "racist" comment.
And here's the justification for the sacking:
one commentator, Sunny Hundal, said that telling black people to clear off
"has deep associations with BNP language and terminology". Another
said: "We have heard similar comments from racists." So in fact
nobody suggested that McGrath had been racist - he clearly hadn't - merely
that racists had said the same sort of thing in the past. So now you can be
done not for being racist per se, but for saying things that aren't actually
racist but that people who are known to be racist might have said. Bizarre.
Johnson still sacked him, in what the Tory
blogger Iain Dale called a "despicable and cowardly" act. Clearly,
the mayor took advice from the party leader, David Cameron, and it would seem
even more detailed advice from the Conservative head spin doctor, Andy Coulson.
Either way, McGrath is out of a job, which is a personal tragedy for him and,
more to the point, a worry for the rest of us.
There is nothing in what McGrath said that
could possibly be construed as racist unless you were hellbent on seeing it
that way, to the occlusion of all recourse to semantics, grammar and syntax.
Clearly he meant that people, regardless of their ethnic origin, who had no
wish to stay in London while Johnson was mayor could clear off.
A bit brusque, maybe, but in what possible
sense is it racist? Indeed, both Cameron and Johnson accepted that he hadn't
been "racist" - in which case, why sack the man? McGrath, incidentally,
is an immigrant himself - an Australian, as it happens. Or, as was often reported
last week, a "nononsense" Australian . . . as Australians always
are. Now there's a racist stereotype for you. James McGrath, Aussie: speaks
his mind, likes a few tinnies and an agreeable Sheila, a nononsense bloke.
Both Cameron and Johnson have form, of course,
albeit different sorts of form - heads and tails form, in a way. Long before
he stood for mayor, Johnson wrote these words about a forthcoming trip to
Africa by Tony Blair, then prime minister: "The tribal warriors will
all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief", and there
was the famous reference to "flag-waving piccaninnies".
It was satire, of course, and very funny too
- but you would bet against the likes of Marc Wadsworth accepting it as such.
He would be less likely to break out in a watermelon smile than to howl at
the moon: "Raaacissst!" And Wadsworth would have more of a point,
you might argue, than he did when ruining the career of James McGrath.
On the other side of the coin, Cameron has
expended some considerable energy sacking people for saying things that aren't
remotely racist but might possibly be construed as such by the likes of Wadsworth.
Two obvious and fairly recent examples spring to mind.
Nigel Hastilow, a prospective candidate from
the West Midlands, wrote: "When you ask people in the Black Country what
the single biggest problem facing the country is, most say immigration . .
. many insist that Enoch Powell was right." Sacked - for reporting what
his constituents said to him, all of which was in line with both Conservative
policy and indeed the latest opinion polls, which cited immigration as the
most important issue facing the country.
Some time before Hastilow's defenestration,
there was the case of Patrick Mercer, the party's frontbench spokesman on
homeland security, and his comments about life in the army - of which he knew
a great deal, having departed from the Sherwood Foresters in the rank of lieutenant-colonel,
been mentioned in dispatches, that sort of thing.
Mercer had said of the rough and tumble of
army life: "If someone is slow on the assault course, you'd get people
shouting: 'Come on, you fat bastard', 'Come on, you ginger bastard', 'Come
on, you black bastard'." Mercer opined that all these insults were examples
of bullying that should be stamped out. Nonetheless, he was sacked from his
frontbench post. Sacked, incredibly, for pointing out incidents of racism
and saying they were wrong.
There are plenty who would argue that politically
- rather than morally or logically - this tough line from Cameron, the no-tolerance
business, is quite correct if the party is to be seen as sufficiently disciplined
to govern the country.
Leaving aside the morality and logic for a
moment - sacking people for comments that everyone, including Cameron, agrees
are not remotely racist - it is another example of the stifling of free, plain
speaking and, by extension, plain thinking.
It means that whenever a politician is required
to address an issue that has specific relevance to one or another of our ethnic
minorities - gun crime, educational underachievement, immigration, minority
religions, terrorism - he or she will do so very gingerly, if at all.
The problem will be skirted around and more
often than not left unsaid. Better to let the problem fester than run the
risk of being stitched up likea kipper by some opportunist like Wadsworth
and then being peremptorily removed from your post.
One reason it has become easier for the ovine
bleat of "raaaccisst" to be issued right, left and centre is the
much broader definition of the term, as introduced by the government.
The police are now required to treat any criminal
matter that the victim claims was racially motivated as being racially motivated,
full stop. Even if it palpably isn't. If the "victim" says it's
racist, then it is racist, and there's an end to it.
Pretty much every ill that befalls someone
could conceivably be put down to racism. And this institutionalising of victimhood,
this über-sensitivity, has crept into our political discourse and our
culture in general, despite the suspicion that the vast majority of our ethnic
minority citizens find the whole thing invidious and insulting.
If there is hope, then it may come, oddly
enough, from the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Its boss, Trevor Phillips,
professes himself sick and tired of these endless, corrosive debates about
what is supposedly racist and what isn't.
"We want people to be allowed to speak
freely," he told me, although he would not be drawn on the instances
mentioned above. "You should be okay to say anything you like so long
as it's not calculated to offend."
The commission is holding a seminar next month
on race and language, in an attempt to arrive at some sort of consensus on
the matter. Normally, if a quango met to discuss what sort of language we
should all be allowed to use, one would treat it with intense suspicion, if
not outright hostility; but I fancy that Phillips and co are probably rather
more on the side of liberty and freedom of speech than Conservative Central
Office.
Maybe James McGrath should wander along and
offer his tuppence-worth. Certainly he has no intention of retracting his
"breathtaking" response to Wadsworth, because he doesn't think that
what he said was wrong in any way.
In a neatly ironic twist, given his comments
to Wadsworth, it was McGrath who actually left the country as soon as he was
relieved of his post, although one hopes he'll be back.
