It would be easy to exaggerate the influence of the New Right. It would be equally easy to dismiss it. But it is worth bearing in mind that shortly after Honeyford was dismissed, he was invited to 10 Downing Street to help advise Margaret Thatcher on Tory education policy. Thatcher has also attended New Right ‘think tanks’, organised by the Conservative Philosophy Group. So too have Paul Johnson, Tom Stoppard, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Enoch Powell.
The essential tenet of the New Right is expressed in the editorial of the first issue of the Salisbury Review, ‘the consciousness of nationhood is the highest form of political consciousness.’ For Maurice Cowling, Scruton’s tutor at Peterhouse in Cambridge, the consciousness of nationhood requires ‘a unity of national sentiment’. Honeyford’s less elegant phrase is the ‘unity notion of culture’. The real sense underlying these rather abstract phrases is expressed in the view the New Right holds of people who are British but not white: as Ajeeb pointed out, Asians are acceptable as long as they behave like whites; if not, they should leave. This explains why anti-racism and multi-racial policies in education are, for the New Right, so inflammatory: they erode the ‘consciousness of nationhood’. For Scruton, anti-racism is virtually treason. In 1985, he wrote that
Those who are concerned about racism in Britain, that call British society ‘racist’, have no genuine attachment to British customs and institutions, or any genuine allegiance to the Crown.
The implications are fascinating to contemplate. John Casey is a Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, and co-founded the Conservative Philosophy Group with Scruton. Four years ago, in a talk entitled ‘One Nation — The Politics of Race’, delivered to the same Conservative Philosophy Group attended by the Prime Minister, Casey proposed that the legal status of Britain’s black community be altered retroactively, ‘so that its members became guest workers … who would eventually, over a period of years, return to their countries of origin. The great majority of people’, Casey added, dissociating himself from the argument, ‘are actually or potentially hostile to the multi-racial society which all decent persons are supposed to accept.’
This ‘great majority’ excludes, I suppose, those who brought over the Afro-Caribbean and Asian workers — encouraged by the British government — to work in the mills, on the railways and in the hospitals. These are the same workers who, along with their children, are now part of the ‘immigrant and immigrant-descended population’ which, according to Casey, should be repatriated. It is strange how the meaning of the word ‘immigrant’ has changed. Americans, Australians, Italians, and Irish are not immigrants. It isn’t Rupert Murdoch, Clive James or Kiri Te Kanawa who will be on their way: it is black people.
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There is a word you hear in Bradford all the time, in pubs, shops, discos, schools and on the streets. The word is ‘culture’. It is a word often used by the New Right, who frequently cite T. S. Eliot: that culture is a whole way of life, manifesting itself in the individual, in the group and in the society. It is everything we do and the particular way in which we do it. For Eliot culture ‘includes all the characteristic activities of the people: Derby Day, Henley regatta, Cowes, the Twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin-table, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century gothic churches and the music of Elgar’.
If one were compiling such a list today there would have to be numerous additions to the characteristic activities of the British people. They would include: yoga exercises, going to Indian restaurants, the music of Bob Marley, the novels of Salman Rushdie, Zen Buddhism, the Hare Krishna Temple, as well as the films of Sylvester Stallone, therapy, hamburgers, visits to gay bars, the dole office and the taking of drugs.
Merely by putting these two, rather arbitrary, lists side by side, it is possible to see the kinds of changes that have occurred in Britain since the end of the war. It is the first list, Eliot’s list, that represents the New Right’s vision of England. And for them unity can only be maintained by opposing those seen to be outside the culture. In an Oxbridge common-room, there is order, tradition, a settled way of doing things. Outside there is chaos: there are the barbarians and philistines.
Among all the talk of unity on the New Right, there is no sense of the vast differences in attitude, life-style and belief, or in class, race and sexual preference, that already exist in British society: the differences between those in work and those out of it; between those who have families and those who don’t; and, importantly, between those who live in the North and those in the South. Sometimes, especially in the poor white areas of Bradford where there is so much squalor, poverty and manifest desperation, I could have been in another country. This was not anything like the south of England.
And of course from the New Right’s talk of unity, we get no sense of the racism all black people face in Britain: the violence, abuse and discrimination in jobs, housing, policing and political life. In 1985 in Bradford there were 111 recorded incidents of racist attacks on Asians, and in the first three months of 1986 there were 79.
But how cold they are, these words: ‘in the first three months of 1986 there were 79’. They describe an Asian man being slashed in a pub by a white gang. Or they describe a Friday evening last April when a taxi company known to employ Asian drivers received a ‘block booking’ for six cabs to collect passengers at the Jack and Jill Nightclub. Mohammed Saeed was the first to arrive. He remembers nothing from then on until he woke seven hours later in the intensive care ward of the hospital. This is because when he arrived, his windscreen and side window were smashed and he drove into a wall. And because he was then dragged from the car, kicked and beaten on the head with iron bars, and left on the pavement unconscious. He was left there because by then the second taxi had arrived, but Mohammed Suleiman, seeing what lay ahead, reversed his car at high speed — but not before the twenty or thirty whites rushing towards him had succeeded in smashing his windows with chair legs and bats. His radio call, warning the other drivers, was received too late by Javed Iqbal. ‘I was’, he told the Guardian later, ‘bedridden for nearly a fortnight and I’ve still got double vision. I can’t go out on my own.’
Wild Women, Wild Men
When I saw them waiting beside their car, I said, ‘You must be freezing.’ It was cold and foggy, the first night of winter, and the two women had matching short skirts and skimpy tops; their legs were bare.
‘We wear what we like,’ Zarina said.
Zarina was the elder of the pair, at twenty-four. For her this wasn’t a job; it was an uprising, mutiny. She was the one with the talent for anarchy and unpredictability that made their show so wild. Qumar was nineteen and seemed more tired and wary. The work could disgust her. And unlike Zarina she did not enjoy the opportunity for mischief and disruption. Qumar had run away from home — her father was a barrister — and worked as a stripper on the Soho circuit, pretending to be Spanish. Zarina had worked as a kissogram. Neither had made much money until they identified themselves as Pakistani Muslims who stripped and did a lesbian double-act. They’d discovered a talent and an audience for it.
The atmosphere was febrile and overwrought. The two women’s behaviour was a cross between a pop star’s and a fugitive’s; they were excited by the notoriety, the money and the danger of what they did. They’d been written up in the Sport and the News of the World. They wanted me and others to write about them. But everything could get out of hand. The danger was real. It gave their lives an edge, but of the two of them only Qumar knew they were doomed. They had excluded themselves from their community and been condemned. And they hadn’t found a safe place among other men and women. Zarina’s temperament wouldn’t allow her to accept this, though she appeared to be the more nervous. Qumar just knew it would end badly but didn’t know how to stop it, perhaps because Zarina didn’t want it to stop. And Qumar was, I think, in love with Zarina.