Never mind bame games: we need to talk about race | thearticle

_Parturient montes__, nascetur ridiculus mus _is Horace’s original version of _Much Ado About Nothing_, or how the mountains gave birth to a ridiculous little mouse. Such sentiments will

surely be the only reaction to the news that the grandly named “Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities” set up by Boris Johnson as the Black Lives Matter protests exploded last summer has

come up with just one proposal. The Commission was meant to help reduce the simmering tensions over institutional and other forms of racism finally being accepted as a major problem in

Britain. Their proposal is to ban the acronym “BAME” (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) as a general describer for non-white people in Britain. They are right that it is clunky, not specific

enough – where do Roma and travellers fit in? — and British Jews dispute whether they should be categorised as an ethnic minority or not. But good luck with finding a replacement. The 2011

Census gave a choice of 18 ethnic groups we might belong to. The 2021 Census has even more. Ever since Enoch Powell exploded into national public political consciousness with his racist 

“Rivers of blood” speech that made immigration into a political theme — one that continued from 1968 to the Brexit plebiscite 50 years later — we have not known what words to use. The

Conservative Party notoriously won what we would now call a “red wall” seat in 1964 in the Black Country (the industrial area north west of Birmingham), when their candidate used the N-word

in his main campaign slogan to defeat the sitting Labour MP. The “N” word was a regular chant in football stadiums well into the 1970s, just as the Y-word for Jews was (and still is) in some

London clubs. I worked for the BBC as young journalist in the 1970s in Birmingham and the newsroom scratched its collective liberal head trying to work out what was permissible. “Black” was

hard and American. It did not cover the growing Kashmiri, East African, Indian and Bangladeshi populations. It was normal for newspapers to insert “coloured”, but even then that smacked of

Powellite racism. As an NUJ official in 1975, I wrote to the editor of the _Daily Telegraph_ in protest at a front page splash under the headline: “ASIAN FATHER OF 12 ON £5000 ANNUAL WELFARE

PAYMENTS.” If you dug into the story, this man in Coventry was unemployed and very ill with cancer and other ailments. His wife was disabled. Some of his children also had medical

conditions. And, yes, if you added all the miserable benefits they got, it came to a princely £100 a week. I asked the _Daily Telegraph_’s Editor (then Bill Deedes, a distinguished

journalist and also a Tory MP) why the man’s ethnicity – Asian — was in the front page headline. He wrote back to say the story was factually accurate, which it was, and went on: “If we had

not mentioned the fact the man was an Asian most of our readers would have assumed he was Irish.” I assume he was serious. In 1978 I wrote a pamphlet for the NUJ – “Black and White. Race

Reporting in Britain.” It was based on an NUJ survey which showed there was no non-white reporter anywhere on the BBC or ITN or writing for national papers. The pamphlet put forward

guidelines on reporting any story so as to avoid all references to a person’s colour or ethnicity, unless 100 per cent germane to the news story. I was denounced by the eminent columnist

Bernard Levin in _The Times_ as someone trying to dictate to the sturdy British journalist what he or she could or couldn’t write. The terms “woke” or “politically correct” had not been

coined then, but Levin was quite clear that all this concern about race was utter Left-wing nonsense and should be ignored. Meanwhile the descriptive terms kept changing. For a while the

American formulation “persons of colour” was used. Then “Afro-Caribbean”, lumping together people from two continents. “Pakistani heritage” became current in local government, but few

journalists seemed to know that most British citizens in that category were Kashmiri. Sri Lankans are very different from Bangladeshis, but in truth nearly everyone from any of these

communities who might make it into the news today is as British as I am — and I don’t have a drop of English blood in me.  The Federation of Poles of Great Britain once published a list of

50 hate headlines about “Polish killer”, “Polish thug”, “Polish rapist”, “Polish thief” all written to present Europeans from Poland living and working here in the most negative possible

light. The headlines all came from one paper, the _Daily Mail_, and were part of the press campaign to denigrate Europeans and stoke up xenophobic dislike of Europe among voters. In recent

years there seemed to be some agreement on using BAME, or Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic. According to “British Future”, the think tank run by Sunder Katwala, 47 per cent of minority

ethnic Britons are confident about the “meaning of BAME as a term”, with 29 per cent saying they were not familiar with it at all. Boris Johnson and the ageing ideologues from the former

Revolutionary Communist Party, who have a strange influence over his thinking on social policy, may imagine that abolishing BAME as a describer will solve the problem of structural and

institutional racism. They will find, as many have in the last 50 years, that the problem is not about adjectives but something much more political. The truth is that the politics of racial

or national identity are seen as vote-winners by those unscrupulous enough to capitalise on prejudice. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering

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