Racist or not, Mr Security had to go
Last Thursday, Patrick Mercer, the Conservative party’s spokesman for “homeland security”, was sacked from David Cameron’s shadow cabinet for giving an interview to the Times. He was reacting to the establishment of a “new antiracism trade union” established by Private Marlon Clancy, who alleged that he had suffered racist abuse while in the Army. You can read his words here, but the gist of it was that language considered racial abuse in the outside world were commonplace in the Army, particularly when “egging on” a slow soldier, that fat and ginger-haired people get similar treatment, that some soldiers from ethnic minorities use racism as an excuse to cover up their shortcomings, and that the vast majority of soldiers have “a degree of colour-blindness” which makes differences disappear when the uniform is put on.
The Tory party has had a long history of ugly incidents involving racism. The best-known of the modern era was Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, which warned that blood would flow if the country continued its policy of allowing Asian workers to bring family members from back home. More recently, at the 1997 election a sitting MP called for the castration of “black bastards” who rape (and also claimed that the Birmingham Six, jailed for terrorist attacks after being “pressured” by police into confessing to them, were guilty). There have been a series of minor incidents since 1997, and the party leadership has responded robustly to overt racism, but a party which fights two general elections by playing to the bigoted talk radio vote can only expect this.
What is significant about the Mercer incident is not what Mercer said but what it reveals about the party. It is not as if he was dishing out racist abuse; indeed, those who knew him when he was in the Army say that he was not a racist, even though there were racists there. He was not even defending actual racist abuse. Sunny Hundal compares his words with those of Ron Atkinson, who referred to the footballer Marcel Desailly as “what is known in some schools as a f\*\*king lazy thick nigger”. The obvious difference is that Atkinson was actually issuing racist abuse, not simply suggesting that words commonly used as such are sometimes acceptable, depending on the context. Atkinson made the remarks because he did not realise that the microphones were switched on. It wasn’t a case of in vino veritas, as some said after Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant became news; it was a case of someone saying what he thought, believing that he could get away with it.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that commenters on the BBC’s open comment system generally support Mercer (comment boxes are often full of bigoted nonsense), but Mercer got support from unexpected quarters, such as Rachel from North London, who concurred that insults of all kinds are commonplace and that Mercer (whom Rachel has met many times) simply said so. However, besides Sunny Hundal, two opinion pieces hostile to Mercer were published in the Observer today: this one from Andrew Rawnsley and this one from Nirpal Dhaliwal. Rawnsley has trawled the Conservative blogs and found much sympathy for Mercer and concludes that the Tory grass-roots are not behind Cameron’s plan to make the party more minority-friendly; indeed, both David Davis (former leadership candidate, with whom Mercer was associated) and Kenneth Clarke (Chanceller under John Major) have indicated that he should return to the front bench eventually.
Of course, if the party is to make its face less white, it needs to attract the support of actual ethnic minority voters in their home areas; the A-list will not do this, because it relies on getting provincial, predominantly white, local associations to choose people from out of area just because the leadership likes them. If the association likes them, and considers them a winning prospect, fine; but you cannot make the Party more black-friendly or Asian-friendly – and especially more Muslim-friendly – by getting voters in some provincial safe Tory seat to vote for a black or Asian Tory when they would, in fact, normally vote for any Tory. Attitudes like Mercer’s, even if not actually racist, indicate a lack of awareness of the issue. Black people who’ve been in the Army say that racist abuse does go on, even if it didn’t go on in front of him and even if he wasn’t behind any of it himself. I’ve personally not witnessed a racist attack, or witnessed what I was certain was police harrassing Blacks in the streets, but I’m not stupid enough to say it doesn’t go on. He dismissed the idea of an anti-racist Army union as “rot”, and seemed not to acknowledge that such behaviour really does go on and is not just about egging them on.
The one issue which has been missed in all of this, however, is whether his post – that of spokesman on “homeland security” – should exist at all. That such a department was set up in the USA after 9/11 is understandable; this country has seen nothing of that magnitude in more than five years since. Yes, there has been one successful attack, and one which failed (either because it was carried out by incompetents or because it was an attempt to scare people, depending on who you believe), and the police have supposedly foiled a few more, but since no more have actually been successful, this demonstrates that they are at least doing their job, even if a few innocent people have been hurt along the way. Admittedly, David Cameron announced in a speech last November that his party did not propose a department along the lines of the American DHS, but an entire security department still means better-funded securocrats with more toys (and more expensive ones at that), no doubt meaning more, but not necessarily more effective, policing and surveillance. It is all very well championing civil liberties by opposing ID cards, and taking a tough stand on race issues when the issue is the use of racist language, but an increase in doors being kicked in at 4am because the “security forces” need be less choosy about which “intelligence” they follow up is not conducive to civil liberties in the communities targeted, nor to better race or community relations.
