:: Opinion

The art and craft of British racism

By Farrukh Dhondy

Oct 17 : "Tally ho! Tally hoo! Tally Ha ha ha ha ha!"

From Invocations To Call Mounted Fools Into A Ring (With apologies to Shakespeare from Bachchoo)

I once wrote a film called Split Wide Open (directed by Dev Benegal) in which a young Indo-Morrocan actress called Laila Rouass starred. Ms Rouass has gone far beyond the credits she gained as the heroine of SWO, has had lead parts in several British TV serials and has appeared for the past weeks on a very popular show called Strictly Come Dancing. As all the contestants do, she ballroom dances with a professional partner who steers her through the eliminative competition.

Last week, as part of an episode approaching the finals, she and her partner, Anton du Beke, were being followed by the camera in rehearsal when she brought in some fake-tan spray. Anton jokingly said that if she wore that she would "look like a Paki". Laila took it as a racial slur and burst into tears. Anton apologised, said it was in jest, but the incident became huge news.

It was, the newspapers said, a repeat of the incident in which Shilpa Shetty was called a "popadom" by the late Jade Goody on the TV "reality" show Big Brother. There was a big fuss about "racism" after that incident too, but my sentiments were at the time firmly on the side of hapless idiots like Jade and her mother who had no other insight into character, or handle on notoriety than a crude racial insult. I pitied their ignorance and knew that Ms Shetty with all her beauty and talent and was far above what she, and a vast number of the viewers, regarded as the British equivalent of "trailer trash". It was petty reflexive racism — to be pitied.

I would not say the same about the leader of the British National Party (BNP), one Nick Griffin who is next week to be given a panellist’s seat on the BBC’s prestigious political show Question Time. His neo-fascist, avowedly racist (they don’t allow anyone but whites to join and their main policy plank is repatriation of immigrants) party won two seats in the elections to the European Parliament and the BBC probably calculate that an exposure of their views would be counter-productive to their cause and that a ban on their representation on TV would assist it.

I support the BBC in this decision. Griffin, Cambridge educated and politely accented, must be given enough rope to hang himself. It is not that I don’t think he and his ilk are pernicious, but I firmly believe that the majority of the British public are not racists.

Pockets remain. My youngest daughter, Best Beloved (not her name, but the one I have stolen as a sobriquet from Kipling), enrolled at the age of 12 in a secondary school in Henley-on-Thames, a backwater, wife-swapping, menopausal town some 45 miles from London and joined up with a gang of boys and girls whom she found the most accessible and outgoing in her year. In time the pairing and preferring jealousies and tensions in the group caught up and two of the boys in her friendship group began a campaign of racist persecution against Best Beloved. They called her "Paki" and soon even the girls of the group joined in and ostracised her for no transgressive fault of hers.

Best Beloved is sensitive but toughened and though she cried she did absorb the idea that the racism of children was born out of ignorance, bad upbringing and we constantly urged her to keep the family motto firmly in mind and use it as a mantra: "The intelligent must make concessions".

Other friends from her earlier years rallied round and soon the hapless racist boys were isolated, even repentant, and all was well.

This was not the Nick Griffin or BNP sort of racism. Not even the laddish banter of Anton du Beke. It was the Jade Goody reflexive, not reflective, sort as this sort of taunt has no vicious or Right-leaning political convictions reinforcing it. It’s the sort of racism that will come out shouting for some of the BNP’s sentiments, but will never, in the cold light of day, put them in power.

Much more pernicious and sneaky is the racism of the nouveau riche and jumped up middle classes, the financial grabbers of Britain. I recently came across the fact that a group of them, with whom I have no contact or truck, have referred to me, in front of my 15-year-old daughter and her friends, as "Rasputin". It is said with venom and is, of course, as ignorant as it is vulgar. As any schoolchild who can refer to Wikipedia will know, Rasputin was a charismatic monk who held the undying loyalty of the Czarina by professing to cure her son of haemophilia. There is no parallel fascination, spell or magic claim that I can be accused of. The only similarity I suppose is that I am not white British and neither was Rasputin. It’s just a more pretentious way of saying "Paki" or of Jade Goody’s "poppadum" — pretentious because in a half-witted way it thinks even idiotic or mistaken references to history give the insult a veneer of wit and status. And that paraded in front of a 15-year-old!

Not that Best Beloved hasn’t a perspicacious grasp of the suburban morality of this money-insulated low-life and can see that acquired accents do not ladies or gentlemen make.

The serious point here is that even in Oswald Mosley’s day the working classes of Britain didn’t support the British union of Fascists. There have been no serious Right-wing phalanxes of opinion in the last hundred years that have gathered momentum. The Rasputin-wallahs are losers. The closest one came was the electorate of Margaret Thatcher’s Tories who relied on exactly this lower middle class-wanting-desperately-to-be-considered-upper-crust toffs as their base. They had nothing to do with the gentry or middle classes of the previous centuries and Victorian era who gave Britain its colonies and a vast amount of its civilisation.

Jade Goody and her ilk, probably a small number of the parents and disfunctional families of some of the racist taunters in Best Beloved’s school, got left out of that civilisation, but any view of their type and talent will demonstrate that they are as much or more victims than the people they call "popadums".

Not so the "Rasputin-wallahs" who mistake a crudity for an aphorism and brazenly parade their ignorance and vulgarity before children with no thought to the child’s emotional sensitivities. The shame — but then busybodies have none.