Prevention of Right-Wing Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism in ...

On its publication, the inquiry was lauded by the government. In a statement to the House of
Commons soon after the the Report’s publication in 1999, Jack Straw, then the Home Secretary,
acclaimed its fi ndings: “I want this report to serve as a watershed in our attitudes to racism.
I want it to act as a catalyst for permanent and irrevocable change, not just across our public
services but across the whole of our society” (Straw, 1999, HC (series 5) vol.325, col. 393).
Straw continued to outline an action plan detailing the government’s plans for implementimplement-
ing the recommendations of the Inquiry. This is indicative of the fact that institutional racism,
as defi ned by the MacPherson Inquiry, has been adopted as the de facto position of the gov-
ernment in the UK, strongly infl uencing uencing policy, perhaps most signifi cantly, the Race Relations
(Amendment) Act, 1999. This placed a statutory duty on all public sector bodies (including
schools) to to promote racial equality, reforming workforce and employment policies as well as
the implementation of public policy.
The position taken by the government on institutional racism is, however, not without its
discontents. Bhavnani (2001), for example, has criticised the defi nition of institutional racism
adopted by MacPherson for its exclusion of racism based along gendered and class lines.
What kind of multiculturalism?
The political debate around what to do with post-war immigrants from the 60s to the 80s was
underpinned by notions of assimilation and integration; this approach was meant to ignore
ideas of separateness and differences and in consequence adopted the „colour blind“ ap-
proach which was bent on treating everyone as the same (Phillips, 2002). This meant that
base lines of cultural, social, racial and economic differences were ignored. (Ahmed, Cheetham
& Small, 1986: 9). Phillips (2002) identifi es the development of two schools of thought from
the late 1970s to the early 1980s in response to the black presence in the UK. The fi rst was
multiculturalism, which recognised that the assimilationist and colour blind approaches have
failed black communities. The premise of multiculturalism is that the basis of racism is cultural
ignorance and, that by reorienting people‘s ignorance, racism can be conquered and discrimination
decimated. The second approach was anti-racism, which, as Phillips, M. (2002) pos-
tulates, was more interested in dismantling oppressive structures: „... anti-racism emerged
in the wake of the civil unrest of the early 1980s. … Anti-racists saw race, and not culture, as
the central issue in tackling racial disadvantage. Racism was about unequal access to jobs,
housing and education. education. It was based on social and institutional dis crimination on the basis of
colour, and not just on prejudiced views about lifestyles and traditions“ (Phillips, 2002: 131).
Multiculturalism, which saw the solution to racism as cultural education and attitudinal
change, has been criticised by many as a tokenistic gesture trying merely to appease, whilst
anti-racism on the other hand demanded fundamental policy and political changes. In addi-
tion, multiculturalism was seen by many local authorities as a safer option to the anti-racism
approach as the latter was a political hot potato which few politicians wanted to handle.
What was to follow then were growing trends from the 1980s, to ply the ‘multicultural’ and
‘cultural pluralism’ approach and recognise black people as a permanent feature of the British
Racism and Young People in the United Kingdom
85