Political Languages of Race and the Politics of Exclusion by Andy R. Brown

Author:Andy R. Brown [Brown, Andy R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology, Prostitution & Sex Trade
ISBN: 9780429830938
Google: wqubDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-08-16T03:40:08+00:00

The Parliamentary-Leper View

Such an account is not without its contradictory features. One of the most glaring is the schizophrenic portrayal of the undeniable evidence of the Wilson reaction to the loss of his Shadow Foreign secretary to a racialist campaign:

Wilson moved quickly to respond to the Smethwick setback[...]with a spirited but largely ritualistic attack on Peter Griffiths on the first day of the new Parliament. He called upon Sir Alec (Douglas-Home) to repudiate the victor of Smethwick who 'until a further general election restores him to oblivion will serve his term as a parliamentary leper' (Hansard 3.11.1964: c.71; cited in Layton-Hemy 1984: 59-60).

It is possible to challenge this interpretation of Wilson's attack on Griffiths as merely 'ritualistic'. It could be argued that this incident, when viewed in relation to subsequent pronouncements by Wilson and other Labour leaders, is most significant in revealing the idea of 'political racism' associated with Smethwick and the idea of racial language which informs that view. An important plank in the argument for the 'ritualistic' nature of the attack on Griffiths is how it is seen to accompany Labour's volt face over opposition to immigration controls (cf. Foot 1965:184-194): 'though Harold Wilson referred to Griffiths as a 'parliamentary leper', non the less his victory solidified Labour's determination not to be 'soft' on the race question, as demonstrated in the heavily restrictionist 1965 Immigration Act' (Ben-Tovim and Gabriel 1982: 148).

This movement is conventionally accounted for in terms of the thesis of Labour's concession to the principles of pragmatism in the face of the electoral unpopularity of immigration. This movement-from principles to pragmatism allows the condemnation of the Smethwick campaign to become 'merely ritualistic'. In this way, events appear to be motivated by political pragmatism; and principles are merely the public rhetoric which must accompany practical policy implementation (cf. Foot 1965; Katznelson 1976; Reeves 1983). So, in effect the 'electoral fears' perspective is organised around three linking elements: (i) the need to politically neutralise that factor which might lead to political instability; (ii) the subsequent 'volt face' of the Labour party' from opposition to controls to their advocation; (iii) the construction of an elite, bi-partisan consensus, designed to keep 'race' off the political agenda. In fact this syllogism rests upon the key assumption of the certain possibility of the misuse of party politics to exploit 'popular feeling' or 'popular racialism'. This is the lesson of Smethwick-the Griffiths campaign was successful because it succeeded in exploiting such innate popular feeling.

Political disagreement about the 'nature' of this feeling has formed the sub-plot or ideological foundation of postwar parliamentary and political debates, as our analysis in chapters 1, 3 and 4 has demonstrated. The relative positions adapted over this issue appear plainly distilled within the assertion Griffiths himself makes in the 1965 Race Relations Debate: The basic question is this: is it possible to legislate about people's feelings?' (Mr. Peter Griffiths (Smethwick) Race Relations Bill-Second Reading, 3 May 1965; c. 1011). Here, as in the Smethwick reaction, racism is primarily about people's feelings.

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