Of course Oliver Letwin’s observations to Margaret Thatcher after the Broadwater Farm disturbances were outrageous in 1985. They remain so today. The sheer casual dismissiveness towards black Britain displayed by Letwin and his co-author, Hartley Booth (now a Methodist minister), takes the breath away. Though both men grew up in north London, less than 30 minutes’ drive from the Farm, the slurs reflected the sort of gossip still heard from time to time among white people whose principal exposure to black people are the dealers from whom they buy their drugs.
I grew up and lived in the Tottenham area. I went to school in White Hart Lane, just a few hundred yards from the Farm. My family worshipped up the road in Finsbury Park. For a period, Keith Blakelock, the policeman who was hacked to death in the rioting, had been our beat cop.
We were, and remain today, a hard-working, deeply religious bunch of people. Many of our parents had more than one job to support their families. They made countless sacrifices to help the next generation escape the twin traps of poverty and racial discrimination. Yet none of this figured in the picture painted by Letwin and Booth.
They weren’t only wrong about blacks. They claimed that “working-class whites” never rioted. Yet after the 1958 Notting Hill “race” riots, at the time the worst disturbances in living memory, the overwhelming majority of those arrested by the police were white, as were all the young men jailed. The riots had, in fact, been started by white teddy boys who had been spoiling for a fight for months.
So Letwin has much to apologise for and he’s had the grace to accept that his advice was plain wrong. Of course, there’s much more that he and the prime minister can do to atone. But I won’t be joining the lynch mob out to get Letwin.
One reason is that he is not the only one who should be reflecting on past attitudes. Three decades ago, such sentiments were common and shared across the political spectrum. I was once briefed by a Foreign Office official to “watch out” for the Tanzanians at an international conference – they were “the nigger in the woodpile”, he told us. I guess that the remark would have gone unnoticed if I hadn’t been in the room. He apologised.
Even some of those now attacking the prime minister’s policy chief would do well to review their own utterances. According to a report in the splendid archives of the Bernie Grant Trust , the Daily Mirror put responsibility for the Broadwater Farm disturbances squarely “at the door of the black community”. The paper’s editorial, headed “vicious and inevitable”, ends with the words: “For the sake of all decent, law-abiding people – the vast majority of their leaders have got to take control of their own communities, especially the young.”
The media weren’t the only culprits. On 6 October 1986, the Sun quoted an unnamed Haringey Labour councillor, almost certainly a contemporary of the present Labour leader, who was on the council until 1983: “Bernie Grant is like the leader of a black tribe – always looking for battles and shaking his spear. He sees all whites as his enemies.” I can find no record of that councillor being disciplined or called upon to resign.
The second reason I won’t be getting out my flaming torch and pitchfork is that even if you wanted to demonstrate that Tories are closet racists who haven’t changed their attitudes since 1986, Letwin is probably the worst example you could find. Whatever he may have said in 1986, in recent times his actions show the zeal of a religious convert to the cause of young black people. Ten years ago, he became one of the moving spirits behind the Social Mobility Foundation, which has since made it possible for thousands of young black people to gain places in our most prestigious universities.
Latterly, he has worked with Operation Black Vote to sponsor minority black politicians in his party; the Conservative party now has 18 minority MPs, up from a handful 10 years ago. And – for better or for worse – he was the minister held responsible for handing up to £40m of taxpayers’ money to the collapsed charity Kids Company, many of whose clients came from black communities.
The third reason for not joining the hue and cry surrounding the minister is that it carries a strong whiff of hypocrisy. Many who have had little to say about race equality in recent years have suddenly become its most vociferous champions. At Labour’s last conference, neither Jeremy Corbyn, its leader, nor Andy Burnham, the shadow home secretary, mentioned the topic in their set-piece speeches. Nor did Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the third party, the SNP, in her closing address to the party’s annual conference.
It is faintly sickening to find that black lives only seem to matter when their suffering can benefit white politicians. David Cameron, presumably encouraged by his policy guru, on the other hand, did talk about the issue directly in his major conference speech, but words are cheap. If Letwin and his boss really want to show contrition, there are three key steps they could take.
First, they need to fulfil Cameron’s promise to attack job discrimination at the highest levels, particularly in the professions. The people of colour who are most bitter about their exclusion are not poorly qualified young black men – they are highly qualified minority doctors, lawyers and academics, who have done all that society has asked of them, yet somehow never make it to become consultants, judges and QCs and professors. According to the Runnymede Trust, fewer than one half of one per cent of Britain’s professors are black; there are just 17 black women holding university chairs. Not only is this unjust, it is profoundly discouraging to the next generation. These people do not need more training or positive discrimination. What they need is fairness and transparency in appointments, many of which are controlled by government itself.
The second task is to transform Britain’s business leadership. Work by our team at Green Park Diversity Analytics shows that the minority component of our big company boards has fallen over the past year. Cameron and his colleagues need to throw their full weight behind the 2020 Campaign launched in 2014 by Sir John Parker, chairman of the giant mining company Anglo-American, to bring more ethnic diversity to Britain’s boards; it can be done – two of Parker’s board of 12 are black African women.
The third step that Letwin and his colleagues could take is to sort out our data protection regime, which prohibits recruitment agencies from holding ethnicity information. This bizarre prohibition means recruiters cannot show companies diverse lists of candidates without fear of breaking the law.
The Letwin saga has begun to degenerate into a slanging match between white people competing to show that they are less “racist” than their political opponents. The issue of how we foster racial equality is being lost in a blur of virtue signalling. It would be great if, for once, the warring parties thought less about their own reputations and more about tackling racial injustice for real.