The United Kingdom

INTRODUCTION

In the Introduction to this book, I referred to the close correlation between poverty and racism, and the way in which they reinforce each other. As Helen Barnard of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation points out, referring to a report on ethnicity by think tank Policy Exchange, it 'does not highlight one of the most important facts about ethnicity in Britain: there is more poverty in every ethnic minority group than among the White British population' (see Figure 1.1). The legacy of empire, therefore, still looms large in the United Kingdom. However, this by no means tells the whole story of racism there. In the Introduction, I argued for a wide-ranging definition of racism. Such a definition must include non-colour-coded racism. In many accounts of racism, assumptions are made that it is solely about skin colour. In reality, significant forms of racism in the United Kingdom are not colour-based. In the immediate post-war period of mass migration, white Irish workers were racialized, along with Asian and African-Caribbean migrants. As immigrants' children entered school, they too were on the receiving end of processes of racialization. With the mechanization of farming, many English Gypsies moved from rural areas to cities and towns, encountering hostile reactions from the local population and from the authorities, with similar consequences of racialization as their children entered the education system. Given the presence in England of Irish Travellers, anti-Gypsy, Roma and Traveller racism is compounded with anti-Irish racism.

Islamophobia became a major form of racism in Britain after the first Gulf War (1990 — 91), intensifying after 9/11 and 7/7. This form of racism may be termed hybridist, in that Muslims may or may not be subject to colour-coded racism and are often marked out not so much by their colour as by their beards and headscarves.

These various and multifaceted forms of colour-coded, noncolour-coded and hybridist racism were made even more convoluted when in 1993 the Maastricht Treaty created the European Union. The integration of the United Kingdom into Europe and the disintegration of Eastern Europe has witnessed yet another form of racism directed at (predominantly) white Eastern European migrant workers and their families: xeno-racism. In addition, in the 1990s 'asylum seekers' became racialized as both centre-right and centre-left parties in Europe began to implement laws that criminalized them. All these types of racism need to be contextualized alongside ongoing and continuing antisemitism, still a significant form of non-colour-coded racism in the second decade of the twenty-first century, with racialization dating back centuries. There can, of course, be permutations among these various forms of racism.

In this chapter, I begin by looking at what I call older colour-coded racism from the colonial era up to the present, concentrating on people of Asian, black African, black African Caribbean and Chinese origins. I go on to examine older non-colour-coded racism, focusing on anti-Irish racism, antisemitism and anti-Gypsy Roma and Traveller (GRT) racism, before turning to a consideration of newer forms of racism. Under this heading, I discuss both newer non-colour-coded racism, namely xenoracism and newer hybridist racism, which can be either colour-coded or non-colour-coded. In this final categorization, I include both Islamophobia (in this section I refer to the decline of state multiculturalism) and antiasylum-seeker racism. Throughout, I relate (changes in) racism to (changes in) the requirements of capitalism, and the ways in which this is mediated by the apparatuses of the state: in particular, the political establishment and the media. I go to make some observations on racism in the run-up to the 2015 general election, before concluding with a discussion of racism in the context of austerity capitalism.

OLDER COLOUR-CODED RACISM: THE COLONIAL ERA AND ITS LEGACY

Empire, Nation and 'Race'

Racialization is of course historically and geographically specific. Thus, in the British colonial era, when Britain ruled vast territories in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and elsewhere, implicit in the rhetoric of imperialism was a racialized concept of 'nation, whereby the British were 'destined' to rule the inferior 'races' in the colonies.

Biological racism at the time of the British Empire was considered a science. One example of scientific racism will suffice, here directed at Africans by a president of the Anthropological Society of London, James Hunt:

there is as good a reason for classifying the Negro as a distinct species from the European as there is for making the ass a distinct species from the zebra; and if we take intelligence into consideration in classification, there is far greater difference between the Negro and the Anglo-Saxon than between the gorilla and chimpanzee ... the analogies are more numerous between the Negro and apes than between the European and the ape. The Negro is inferior intellectually to the European ... the Negro is more humanised when in his natural subordination to the European, than under any other circumstances ... the Negro race can only be humanised and civilised by Europeans ... European civilisation is not suited to the requirements and character of the Negro.

The ongoing ferocious and relentless pursuit of expanding capital accumulation in the days of the British Empire in the nineteenth century has to be seen in the context of competition from other countries, and the need to regenerate British capitalism amid fears that sparsely settled British colonies might be overrun by other European 'races'.

On the affinity between 'race' and class in the European mind in general, but prescient of the attitudes of the...