The roots of multiculturalism?

I had one of the most surreal interviews of my life last week.  I had arranged to meet and interview Lord David Waddington, a Tory Home Secretary in the last year of Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister.  I was keen to speak to him because prior to becoming Home Secretary, Waddington was Home Office Minister responsible for racial minorities and I thought it would be useful to ask him about the government’s policies on race relations as research for my PhD on Handsworth in the 1980s.  The interview got off to a bad start, however, when Waddington didn’t turn up for our original date and I found myself sitting in the House of Lords reception for half an hour next to the former Tory leader Michael Howard (I can confirm that there is indeed something of the night about him).  Things got even more surreal, however, the following day when I finally got my interview with Waddington.

Lord David Waddington

Now in his eighties and about to retire for a political career spanning more than four decades, Waddington also spent time working as a barrister.  He hit the headlines in 1976 when he led the defence of Stefan Kiszko, a tax clerk who was wrongly accused of the murder of a twelve-year-old girl.  Kiszko’s defence team made a number of significant mistakes, and he would go on to serve sixteen years in prison for a crime that he did not commit.

Waddington has represented three different constituencies as a Conservative MP following his first election victory in 1968.  Margaret Thatcher made him Home Secretary in 1989, following a four-year stint in the Home Office.  It was this period that I was keen to discuss with him because, as he puts it, he was ‘in charge of immigration and race relations’. Waddington found this to be an ‘uncomfortable mix because there were a lot of controversial decisions to be made about immigration, sometimes that didn’t help me in my work of making many of these new communities feel more at home’.

Waddington regarded his remit as minister as being to ‘make immigrant communities feel that the government were as concerned with their welfare as we were with the welfare of anybody else’.  But he clearly felt that this remit put him in some awkward situations.  Individuals would often ask him to personally intervene to allow a family member entry into the UK.  Waddington remembered the particular case of an Asian owner of a nearby cornershop giving him free groceries in the mistaken belief that Waddington had personally allowed a family member of the shopkeeper to enter the country.

It was at this point that the interview took a turn for the bizarre.  As he was recounting the story about the man in the cornershop, Waddington began adopting a mock-Asian accent similar to that of Apu, the Asian shopkeeper in The Simpson’s.  Continually in our interview, whenever he recounted meeting members of the Asian community, Waddington would use the same impression.  It was the kind of act that might be passable from a late-night comedian on Channel 4, but coming from a former Home Office minister previously in charge of immigrant welfare, sitting in the House of Lords, it seemed inappropriate to say the least.

Having been born in 1929, at the height of the British Empire, it is tempting to see Waddington as a product of his time. When Waddington attended Oxford following the Second World War, the British Empire covered a quarter of the world’s land mass.  The year Waddington first entered parliament coincided with Enoch Powell’s now infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, in which he forecast a coming race war in Britain as a result of too many ‘coloured’ immigrants having been allowed in.  Powell was sacked from the Tory shadow cabinet, but Margaret Thatcher took many of his proposals on board following her election victory in 1979.  Waddington has consistently called for tighter immigration controls throughout his political career,

Yet despite all this, when Waddington wasn’t making impressions that frankly bordered on the racist, he made some insightful points about the Tory approach to racial minorities, many of which had a resonance with the policies that are regularly adopted in Britain today.

The key approach adopted in the 1980s, Waddington recalled, was an attempt to ‘identify the leaders of the various communities, with whom the government could deal.  If there was a problem, well, we asked so-and-so how best he thinks it should be tackled’.  The self-evident problem of this was that not everyone who claimed to be community leaders had any practical influence on the ground.  ‘We were often mistaken’, Waddington admitted.  ‘We would always get these noisy chaps who claim to be terribly influential within a particular community, but then you dig below the surface and they probably aren’t at all’.  Yet this is strategy that has continually been adopted by governments, the most recent example being with the anti-extremism policies often aimed at Muslim communities.

There was a more fundamental problem associated with the policies adopted by the Tories in the 1980s.  For Waddington, its key downside was that it ‘encouraged a form of separate development’.  For example, ‘if you fund a community centre for the Pakistani community, the Pakistani community are going to use that community centre and they aren’t going to go anywhere else’.  Given the current Prime Minister’s recent comments about the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism, and the anxieties over a perceived lack of integration of certain communities, Waddington’s comments suggest the roots of these themes might lie in the policies of the 1980s.  This is something that has recently been argued by the author and critic Kenan Malik, who sees the allocation of government funding on the basis of ethnicity as one of the key causes of the later rise in religious extremism in Britain.

Waddington is clearly something of a political dinosaur and it is frankly farcical that he was seen as the best man for the job of engaging with racial minorities in this country as recently as the 1980s.  But Waddington, almost in spite of himself, raises some critical points that are relevant to the current debates on multiculturalism.  ‘We should have tried other techniques to make people part of the wider community’, he says.  But how?  Is it possible for a government to do this without patronising the communities involved?  Is it even in a government’s remit to do attempt to do this?  Even thirty years later, these remain the unanswered questions.