Why is the Labour Party caving-in to the Greens?

In Brighton & Hove, the council’s CRT intervention into schools is based on zero hard evidence of a problem. The council failed to consult parents, it hid its ideological belief in CRT from the committee when seeking approval (the 5 year programme has cost of half a million and its rising), and now marches onward largely because Labour opposition councillors seem struck dumb by it all. Is the fear of being thought racist at the root of this? has the city’s Labour group become true believers in the new ‘woke left’ ideology?

The questions proliferate. Does Labour’s ‘memorandum of understanding’ with the Greens include some sort of pact on all things ‘anti-racism’ however perverse the policies are? Can the Momentum radicals even be described as leftwing at all?

The Labour Party in this city remain dominated by the Corbyn-left. But if ‘left’ still refers to the collective struggle of working people to unite and demand improved pay and conditions (and for greater involvement in the shaping of society) then should we assume that the conversion of Labour councillors to Green Party-style identity politics is a temporary tactic? Are the optics on seeming to oppose ‘anti-racism’ just too awkward? …too inflaming of a loyal core of middle class voters to risk?

Perhaps. Yet, working-class solidarity – aka the sheer strength of ‘the many’ (who labour) over ‘the few’ (who reap the rewards) – presents a mortal threat to identity politics. Identity politics (and Critical Race Theory is arguably its purest form), as well intentioned as it might be, serves only to erode our common bonds. CRT is happily adopted by local government leaders. Senior officers and their chosen private sector consultants operate freely as enthusiastic proponents of CRT in schools – who elected them? The fact that these same ideas are happily adopted by giant multi-national corporations and tech companies across the globe, ought to offer left-wingers a clue as to what’s going on here.  

Critical Race Theory and the Left.    

It’s strange in a way. Brighton’s Labour Party councillors have forgotten (or never knew?) that Critical Race Theory is antithetical to its tradition. CRT and its camp followers – Di’Angelo, Kendi, Eddo-Lodge et al (collectively we might define this school of thought as Systemic Racism Ideology) has left-wing surface appeal but dig deeper and you’ll see that class struggle has been replaced by a concept of racial struggle. Exponents protest at such a depiction. They will quickly mention how their ideas walk hand-in-hand with an ‘intersectional’ approach. They will protest that ‘class’, like gender and other social and cultural factors, is taken into account.

But It isn’t. Class is always relegated. Instead, ‘race’, and specifically ‘whiteness’ and ‘white supremacy’ is located at the heart of every social interaction.

Last year Hannah Clare described CRT as the council’s “lens for understanding racism…”. This is indeed how CRT exponents describe their expertise but probably not a statement the council’s CRT adviser at Race Matters intended her to say out loud. For CRT to be successfully installed into state education it need not name itself or elaborate on the CRT method. That would too easily signpost parents to the fact that CRT is a contested belief system rather than the modern, enlightened choice of experts. Its methodology has merely to be trained into willing teachers in order that teachers can weave it into their daily practice.

During the past year, as numerous councillors acquainted themselves with a petition titled ‘Stop the council teaching our kids that they are racists or victims of their classmates’ the accusation that CRT is entering schools generated considerable misunderstanding. To be clear, critics like myself were not suggesting primary school pupils were being required to discuss the work of Kimberly Crenshaw or Derrick Bell (or Di’Angelo or Kendi) in circle time. We are suggesting that pupils will be (and already are) on the receiving end of those teachers recently trained by the council’s recommended ‘Racial Literacy 101’ programme. In other words, schools will use CRT as the basis for practice, embedding its approach into all aspects of school life. It is this that presents an identifiable harm to children just as our petition describes.

The first version of ‘The Anti-Racist Schools Strategy’ avoided all mention of CRT (perhaps worrying that the CYPS councillors would react adversely). However, in November 2020 the strategy was approved. References to ‘Racial Literacy’ and quotes from CRT exponents like Professor David Gillborn were peppered throughout this first draft. Recognising that Cllr Clare had already let the cat out of the bag, a second version of the strategy (dated September 2021) chose to outline a more user-friendly common-sense definition of CRT.

In its Appendix Version 2 states:

There has been an increase in interest in understanding racism as a systemic issue using a Critical Race Theory approach, and a move away from framing racism as only an issue of interpersonal interactions.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a framework that has been used for decades to analyse social and organisational systems based on the premise that:

•          Racial groupings are not grounded in meaningful biological differences between humans, but are socially constructed ideas

•          Racism operates both in acts of overt discrimination (by individuals or formal rules), and in subtler operations (biases, individual or organisational power)

•          The unequal distribution of power in economic, political, social and cultural structures and systems, between White people and People of Colour, must be considered in examining issues of racism

•          Issues of racism must be understood both in a historical context, and through the lived experiences of marginalised peoples.

(Gillborn, 2008)

[See p14, Appendix 1 of ‘Brighton & Hove Anti-Racist Schools Strategy for Early Years, School and College Settings – V2’ . Note: the latest version (version 3, only released to me and then to councillors) has dropped Appendix 1 (ask me for a copy)]

For those of us keen to have a fuller, more honest explanation of CRT, Gillborn is equally helpful:

The notion of ‘White supremacy’ occupies a central role in CRT but the term is used in a particular way that differs from its usual understanding in mainstream writing… [  ] in CRT the more important, hidden, and pervasive form of White supremacy lies in the operation of forces that saturate the everyday mundane actions and policies which shape the world in the interests of White people.

This quote comes from an academic paper subtitled ‘a reply to Dave Hill’. Older Brighton and Hove Labour Party councillors may recall that Dave Hill was a Labour councillor here back in 1983 and ran in the 2010 General Election as a candidate in Brighton Kemp Town for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition and again in the 2015 general election as a TUSC candidate in Hove and Portslade. 

More to the point Dave Hill is one of Britain’s most vociferous critics of CRT in education. As a British Marxist politician, an academic and an education activist, Hill clashed with Gillborn a number of times. Though at pains to praise critical race theorists like Gillborn for their opposition to racism, Hill rightly took exception to the skewed statistics emanating from CRT analysis of school GCSE attainment scores. Hill did not argue that racism is non-existent in educational settings (for example, teacher labelling and low expectations), but rather questioned why CRT ignores realities such as the presence of high achieving Indian pupils.

In the paper that infuriated Gillborn, Hill writes:

… “white supremacy” as a CRT form of explaining inequalities is not only not supported by statistics, but that in terms of theorising and deriving policy from theory, such a term is too blunt, ignores xeno-racism, and the racialisation of the poor white working class [   ] it downplays social class factors in educational and social alienation.

Hill argued:

…the very political and – importantly – economic basis of the state to which Gillborn scarcely refers is capitalism; the exploitation of the labour power of the working class, black, white, men, women. [As marxists] we cannot accept the theory of `White Supremacy” as the dominant form of oppression and exploitation in capitalist society.

That Marxists and Socialists are at odds with CRT shouldn’t surprise us (though not Brighton’s Labour-left councillors it seems).  On page 2 of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001), godfathers of CRT (along with Derrick Bell) Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic describe CRT openly and honestly:

“Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law”. [my emphasis in bold]

Throwing in a reference to enlightenment rationalism for good measure, we see the mission of CRT in its true colours. This is not to suggest, however, that powerful figures like Hannah Clare and Deb Austin view CRT in this way. Its possible they barely have a view other than they like the sound of it. Their top-line understanding of CRT ideology probably rests on the training they took from the CRT consultant who wrote the strategy and now delivers the ‘racial literacy’ teacher training.

Despite regarding themselves as radical left thinkers, Labour-left councillors appear to take a relaxed view of CRT. I’m not convinced they appreciate the threat it poses. Politically they seem keen to embrace it. The flowering of the ‘woke left’ means Labour’s warm reception of the councils anti-racist schools strategy isn’t so strange at all. This is more about the game of politics than political thinking. One Labour councillor told me “we’re too busy. We don’t have time to analyse!” If anything, old-school Labour councillors – especially those who have been teachers – are more likely to be troubled by what they can plainly see as the flaws of CRT.

Whether on gender identity issues or anti-racism, the conversion to the cause of critical social justice (aka ‘woke’ ideology) was already well underway by 2020. But it was halfway through 2020 that CRT (whether anyone had heard of it or not) provided the impetus for both Labour and Green councillors to uncritically adopt the new-look “anti-racism”.

CRT slipped into schools cloaked in the language of BLM protests. The phrases ‘White Privilege’, ‘White Supremacy’ and ‘Systemic Racism’ proliferated. What had been an obscure scholarly field became the rationale for slogans, recommended books, mandatory council staff diversity training and hastily put together school lessons. Thus it came to pass that this fringe backwater of academia, born of Harvard Law School in the 1970s (and influenced by those forerunners of post-modernism known as the Frankfurt School), entered strategy documents and ‘racial literacy’ teacher training.

Exponents of Systemic Racism Ideology (CRT academics like Gillborn, training gurus like Robin Di’Angelo and the bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi) could not in their wildest dreams have imagined the events of 2020 that mainstreamed their previously marginal ideas. Coronovirus and lockdown conspired to create a cultural climate whereby the reaction to the killing of George Floyd precipitated not just mass protest across the US and Britain but extraordinary levels of establishment backing. BLM was endorsed by the royal family, the football Premier League, multinational corporations, senior politicians and just about every council leadership across the land.

Pledges issued by organisations to ‘dismantle’ white supremacy came thick and fast. Usually accompanied by self-effacing statements denouncing their own institutional racism, authorities like BHCC were especially enthusiastic. But did Labour (still in charge of the council during the climactic month of June 2020) really understand what ‘White Supremacy’ meant? Did it ever question the eerie absence of a class analysis? Did the nod toward ‘intersectionality’ really convince them? Indeed, did any Labour councillor ever get as far as realising that in the lexicon of CRT “systemic racism” means something quite different to left (and liberal) understandings of racist social structures?

Of course its true that, historically, the left always understood racism to be more than mere individual prejudice or hateful acts (on this much CRT belief makes the right noises). The left understood the structural nature of racism not as something emanating from ‘whiteness’ but as a social force driven by the divide and rule needs of a capitalist ruling elite. The 1970s and 80s exemplified this. Despite new race legislation, the governing class gave tacit sanction to individual prejudice through a discreet (or not so discreet) process egged along by police, politicians, magistrates, housing services and so on.

The Green Party/‘Woke Left’ identity politics brand of anti-racism versus the left tradition.

In the context of 1980s struggles, both liberal and left conceptions of anti-racism shared the universalist thinking underpinning the ‘colourblind’ ethos: namely, that everyone should be treated the same irrespective of racial difference or skin colour.

A fellow veteran of 1980s/early 90s anti-racism activism (and the group Workers Against Racism) was Kenan Malik. Now an Observer columnist, he recalls how activists thought about anti-racism back then. As Malik puts it, compared to now, we took certain things as self-evident… “that fighting racism meant treating everybody equally despite their differences, not differently because of them. This was the essence of universalism”. CRT correctly accepts that ‘race’ is a biological fiction but perversely reinstates the concept by making skin-color the most important thing about us. Skin-colour designated ‘non-white’ becomes the organising principle that replaces class unity.

Again, Malik puts it well, “today’s antiracists continually confuse the edict ‘You can’t fight racism if you ignore racial divisions’ with the demand ‘you can only fight racism by celebrating [non-white] racial identity’”.   

Two things mark out systemic racism ideology (aka the CRT approach) as antithetical to left-wing anti-racism:

First is that a left approach rejects ‘White Supremacy’ and even in class struggle terms its approach would never pronounce racism as hard-wired over centuries. In British society today it would never countenance racism as ‘White Privilege’ flowing in the veins of all white people (however poor they may be); as somehow maintaining its mysterious presence in all the nooks a crannies of everyday life; as something hidden inside the ‘untutored minds’ of those yet to see the light and embrace CRT. It would certainly never regard anything ‘hard-wired’ as near impossible to change. That would be a politics of despair.

A left political outlook is (or should be) dedicated to change. The extraordinary changes in UK race relations since the 70s/80s era were driven by the dogged presence of a growing ethnic diversity but also by hard-won battles mounted by a united front of workers. We campaigned under a banner of ‘black and white unite and fight’ viewing equality under the law as literally the right to be regarded as one human race. Today such demands for ‘sameness’ are casually overturned, as Malik so eloquently states, by the demand that black and white be treated as racially apart.

The left may disagree on how much progress was made by those past fights (I suspect Dave Hill and I would disagree), but the insertion of a timeless battle against ‘White Supremacy’ bids to obscure people’s sense of reality. As racism is defeated, so it is clawed back by a new insidious approach which sees macroaggressions emanating from white people as an epidemic. I would say (though Green councillors may faint to hear me say it) today, with superdiversity buzzing and most people comfortable with it, it’s precisely the rarity of racist incidents and tension between white and non-white citizens that make occurrences so shocking and so endlessly discussed. I’m glad we’re shocked – nobody was in the 1980s because everyday racism ruled.  

Which brings me to the second thing that marks out (or should mark out) systemic racism ideology from the left-wing tradition of anti-racism. Part of the current determination to conjure evidence of racism entails an extraordinary lapse in basic analytical skills. Conflating evidence of ethnic disparity with evidence of racism is a basic and quite unforgivable category error. Poor educational outcomes for British African Caribbean pupils should not be automatically subject to a default explanation of ‘racism’. Again Malik nails it:

Two assumptions underlie the disproportionality principle: first, that race, ethnicity and culture (and these are often seen as interchangeable) are the most important labels we can place on people; and second, that there is necessarily a causal relationship between membership of such a group and disproportionalities between groups. Neither assumption is valid.

Minority groups are not homogeneous entities, but are as divided by issues of class, sex, age, geographical location, and so on, as the rest of the population. These factors often shape individuals’ lives far more than do race, ethnicity or culture.

The strange political amnesia of Labour on class is summed up by the figure of David Lammy. Lammy used to make this point so well (indeed, as a working class boy from Tottenham it came from the heart).  Lammy emphasised the need for working-class communities – black and white – to promote fatherhood. This would help to tackle issues that are especially acute among young black men  – problems like educational underachievement, disproportionate exclusion levels, and high crime rates. As recently as 2018, in an interview with GQ, Lammy pondered on Oxbridge and who gets there: ‘This is not about colour but class. Even when kids do get the grades they don’t apply…’ In an interview last year, he said:

‘Let’s imagine a young man in a housing estate – white or black – he lives with his mum and three siblings in a two-bedroom flat. He’s going to go down the stairwell to smoke his joint. He’s going to get stopped and searched by the police. He might get a criminal record. There might be an assumption that he has intent to supply. He won’t be able to get a job, because he’ll have a criminal record…’.

Last year, like so many Labour politicians, the CRT-compliant Lammy of today greeted the publication of Tony Sewell’s Cred report with this tweet: ‘Like so many in Britain’s Black community I’m tired! … tired of the endless debate about whether structural racism exists”. Vilifying the Sewell report was de regueur for the left though many it seems still haven’t read it (this was true of the Brighton training, see Note 1). Left commentators convinced one another that the Cred report had denied the existence of institutional racism. It wasn’t true. The report found that institutional racism does exist in some areas and simply argued that the term was wrong when used as a description for UK society at large. The report found “numerous factors behind disparities, including socio-economic background, educational failure and family breakdown” (in other words it challenged lazy applications the default explanation of a monolithic institutional/structural/systemic racism).

A few weeks ago, when Kemi Badenoch endorsed the Cred report and launched the governments Inclusive Britain action plan, Halima Begum of Runnymede demonstrated an open-mindedness that Labour in Brighton and Hove would do well to get on board with.

Our communities are made up of individuals of different ethnicities who all share overlapping commonalities that bind us, including – in addition to class – age, gender, faith and sexual orientation. These identities impact every aspect of our lives in complex ways that move beyond a singular discussion of race. It is on this basis that for more than a decade the Runnymede Trust has been calling for all members of the working class to be offered protections under the Equality Act, regardless of their ethnicity, in acknowledgment of the vulnerabilities that exist across society.

There are reasons to be optimistic about the government’s action plan. 

[Read her Guardian piece here]

Let me say this to the Labour opposition at BHCC, it’s never too late to re-visit bad policy and make it right. In July 2020 the council did indeed commit the category error of conflating evidence of disparity with evidence of racism. The very first paragraph of senior officer Emma McDermott’s report to TECC (29^th July 2020 ‘Becoming an Anti-Racist Council’) states:

This report sets out the immediate actions the council is taking to become an anti-racist council and how it will work with Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups in the city – long and newly established – that have been fighting against racism and racial inequality. There is a significant body of research that demonstrates the structural inequality experienced by Black, Asian and minority ethnic people – in education, in employment, in health outcomes, with the latter starkly evidenced by the disproportionate impact of COVID19 on some Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. [my emphasis in bold]

It took me a year but under the FOIA Ms McDermott sent me the body of research she referred to. It comprised of a reading list that could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as “a body of research”. However, at that moment in 2020, with many presuming a link between structural racism and the disproportionate impact of Covid-19, it was forgivable. But again, to Labour councillors I want to say wake up! we have the information now and you should look at it. (You can read my Spiked article on Covid, health inequalities and bizarre accusation of systemic racism here).

Also at this July TECC a Green councillor reported on Sussex police stop and search. She stated that BAME people (perhaps she meant ‘black’?) were almost ten times as likely than white to be stopped and searched over the past year and that this is sure proof of institutional racism.

Yet, the ‘more likely than white’ assertion doesn’t factor-in movements in and out of Sussex – student populations, tourists or ‘county line’ visitors. It presumes all stops are random police stops. However, individuals known to the police are stopped multiple times. It ignores the ‘available population’ factor (that is, people present out and about, on street corners and so on). This group is more likely to be African Carribean/white working class boys/young men and, once factored-in, disparity suffered by PoC citizens in relation to overall ethnic resident population shares (never mind visitors) vanishes. Indeed, in one national study ‘white’ became the group found to be over-represented in stop and search data.

Last – in Brighton, as with other south coast towns, police are responding to the ‘Rescue and Response’ initiative. Victims of county lines criminals, often black teens, who are missing from home are not being targeted by racist policing. True, young black males fit the profile for missing persons and are wrongly stopped but others are county lines victims – they are being rescued. Indeed, police are doing this in response to the heartfelt pleas of distraught black mothers.

In Bola Anike’s recent open letter to council leaders (published in B&H News) she writes:

The idea that “systemic racism” is “prevalent and endemic” in UK society is likewise a belief not a fact. This belief in “systemic racism” is typically supported by dubious data that conflates disparity with discrimination, falsely classifying the former as evidence of the latter.

Bola felt the need to defend herself against Hannah Clare’s underhand tactics at a recent CYPS committee (Clare effectively disavowed and distorted the content of Bola’s Deputation by endorsing the muddled sentiments of a rival one seeming, though not intentionally, to take aim at Bola). The point about conflating disparity with discrimination is well put in this open letter. Racism hasn’t vanished but presuming it to be driving every ethnic disparity does the cause of anti-racism no favours. As with Britain itself, the non-white population of Brighton has every right to be understood as also – and often disproportionately – working class. To be working class is to be more prone to poverty. As such, a great deal of the adversity faced by black working class citizens is shared by white working class citizens. Labour leftists in Brighton are right to keep a critical eye on the evidence – racism still exists – but they will rue the day that they cowed to a politically convenient fiction about ‘systemic racism’ when they know all too well the evidence is so very weak. To Labour I want to say why let Hannah Clare and her private sector race experts dominate you?

Racialising Schools: The human cost of a bad policy addressing an imaginary problem.

Political expediency, the game of politics …whatever tactical reason Labour leaders have for its supporting the anti-racist schools strategy (despite its CYPS members calling for better scrutiny), they must stay true to the opposition role of scrutinising it. Certainly, ignoring the adverse impact of the Green Party’s race-policies on children in schools would be unforgivable.

With Green council leaders (and, it seems, senior officers) locked-in to the mind-set of CRT/Systemic Racism Ideology (an ideology that disavows enlightenment rationalism), no amount of appeals to reasoning and to facts will alter their resolve.

Fortunately, the electorate hasn’t given up on reason or fact. The campaign group Don’t Divide Us (which I support) has produced a Case Study on the council’s anti-racism strategy for schools and specifically on the ‘Racial Literacy 101’ (RL101) training it has been offering to teachers. The Case Study dissects both the failures of democratic policy making during the development of the strategy and the extraordinary secrecy surrounding the content of the training. With the training materials leaked to the Telegraph, the council was obliged to formally release the slides (though not accompanying audio) to all 54 of its councillors. In possession of the leaked RL101 content, DDUs Case Study presented councillors with a transcript of the audio and an analysis of the CRT thread running through all of it.

The Racial Literacy 101 teacher training delivered in Brighton schools evidences some of the ways that the council’s CRT approach is at odds with the Public Sector Equality Duty to ‘foster good relations between groups who share a relevant protected characteristic and those who do not’. The ‘White Supremacy Pyramid’ (a slide used in RL101) provides a good example of this.

As DDUs Case Study states:

Intended to illustrate the operation of overt and covert ‘white supremacy’ the triangle shows ‘lynching’ and at the top, supposedly created and reinforced by things like ‘denial of white privilege’ and ‘colourblindness.’ The pyramid is intended to demonstrate a spurious causal relationship between philosophical belief in the principle of colourblindness or disagreement with the concept of inherited racial ‘privilege’ and horrors such as racist murder.

As I write, BHCC are keen to assert that the training, because it is for teachers, should not imply that it will form the basis for pupil lessons. At a recent committee, Cllr McNair asked Cllr Clare, “Surely training for teachers is usually so it can be passed on to children. If this is not the case, why are teachers being trained?”. Cllr Clare replied: “Teachers are being given support to talk about race and the issues surrounding race in their classroom. The material that has been provided to counsellors by email is clearly for staff. [ ] Teachers are professionals and they attend training as part of their CPD to inform their teaching. That does not mean that every training we offer teachers is taught in the classroom”.

And yet, in the latest version (V3) of the council’s strategy, under ‘Racial Literacy for Children and Pupils’ it states:

Some aspects of pupil racial literacy can be addressed through curricula changes.
However, particularly at key stages 2/3/4 pupils additionally need specific racial
literacy focussed lessons as part of their PSHE and critical thinking programmes. 

Cllr Clare’s attempt to infer that teacher training need not correlate to pupil lessons looks even weaker when new council Education Adviser Camille Kumar spoke at this same meeting to promote ‘Pupil of colour workshop programmes’. “Alongside the workshops, staff of colour were trained to continue delivery of this support”, writes Kumar in her report.

If by suggesting pupils will not be confronted with teacher viewpoints and lesson plans (teaching ‘white supremacy’ (flipside = black victimhood) and ‘white privilege’ as integral to ‘systemic racism’), Cllr Clare now thinks she has bought the strategy an exemption from criticism it is a short sighted ploy.

For the Labour opposition, alarm bells should be ringing by now but staying quiet appears to be the collective decision. It will left to parents and campaigners to scrutinise what happens next in the city’s schools in the name of “anti-racism”. One idea mentioned in Kumar’s report was separating non-white pupils out from their classmates and sending them on residentials:

Scoping is underway to determine levels of interest and appropriateness of a series of single or cross setting residentials for pupils of colour who have completed the workshop programme.

This is Systemic Racism Ideology slowly revealing itself in all of its racialising and divisive forms. Where is the Labour opposition? Whatever happened to the old left’s anti-racist tradition of universalism?

Welcome to Woke Left-on-Sea. Here the council want to teach children that ‘race’ = skin-colour = a white/not white binary (which is absurd). They also want to teach children that sex is not a binary (but lets discuss that another day).