COLD WAR and WEASEL WORDS

This response by the Director of JUST West Yorkshire, Ratna Lachman is in response to an article in the Yorkshire Post on the 21st of April profiling Trevor Philips's address on the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech

Race equality chief warns of ethnic 'cold war'   Yorkshire Post 21 April 2008 8:43 AM

The most recent claim made by the Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Philips  that uncontrolled immigration has led to a "cold war" between ethnic communities introduces incendiary terminology  into the discourse around race relations on the 40^th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech. It plays to the same version of politics which marked Powell out as an arch-racist. It ill becomes his position as the appointed ‘guardian' of communities who are already reeling from the effects of the war on terror, the introduction of draconian terror legislation and a climate in which visible minorities are increasingly under siege, because it only serves to legitimise the far right agenda. As a beneficiary of an immigration policy which afforded him a place in British society, his comments reek of double standards which create an us and them version of politics, rather than one which seeks to bridge racial, ethnic, religious and cultural divides. His introduction of damaging terminology into the lexicon of race relations – passive apartheid, sleepwalking into segregation, fully-fledged ghettos and now cold war – has effectively killed off the institutional racism agenda and let local councils, the police and health services off the hook. In its place it has ushered in the community cohesion agenda which has placed a disproportionate burden for good race relations on visible minorities. Implicit in the concept of equalities and human rights which Trevor Philips has so proudly claimed as a badge of identity for his Commission, is the notion of shared rights and responsibilities between citizens. The state and its instruments in this respect are the arbiters in creating the foundations of a just, fair and equal society. The newly created Commission appears to have abdicated its responsibilities at the starter’s gun. His concern about the experience of “settled communities” speaks of a shameless attempt at populism. If he had expressed the same outrage at the travesty of an entire generation of Black young people brought up under the shadow of stop and search, a migrant workforce working for paltry wages, an entire community criminalized under the government’s war on terror and the attrition of our basic civil and human rights – perhaps then we may give his analysis some credence. Until then his equation of immigration with the resurgence of the far right and the attribution of blame for our overcrowded railways on immigrants rather than the failure of the government and railway companies to invest in an adequate transport infrastructure speaks to the moral and leadership bankruptcy at the heart of the Commission.  Although written in 2006, Andrew Gilligan’s article in The London Evening Standard continues to have a resonance even today.

“Powell’s motives for predicting a race war (which never materialised) were simple enough: political ambition. Phillips’ motives are harder to guess. To the despair of many, he has already won his desired job as head of the Government’s new equality ’super-regulator’.

Perhaps it’s simply this: Phillips is a former journalist. We hacks love the sound of our own voices, and we can’t resist a simple, dramatic story. But we should never be placed in positions of responsibility.” (PHILLIPS CRIES WOLF OVER RACIAL TENSIONS
Evening Standard - 23/10/2006).