David Cameron’s policy chief Oliver Letwin has offered an “unreserved apology” for comments he made in 1985 over the Broadwater Farm riot. Unrest was caused, said Letwin, by people with “bad moral attitudes”. He also dismissed plans to encourage black entrepreneurs, saying they would set up in the “disco and drug trade”. But don’t worry because Letwin, a heartbeat away from the PM, says sorry. Well, I’m sorry too and I don’t buy it.
Letwin is not much older than me and my views on racism has not changed one iota since 1985. I opposed racism in all its insidious forms then, I oppose it now. I am trying to remember exactly what times were like in 1985. Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and the Tory Party occupied, as it does now, the right of British politics. In fact, she had taken the Tories so far to the right that “traditional” far right parties like the National Front and the British National Party (BNP) lost huge swathes of support to her government.
What we have here are more stereotypes. Black people all have bad attitudes and you can’t trust them. Not some black people: all of them. It’s racism, blatant racism, pure and simple, and no amount of apologies can change that. It is something that no one says about white people who all good moral attitudes and can be trusted. Apart from the ones who beat up old ladies, of course, or carry out looting in flood-hit areas, but even then no generalisation is made. The Mail is not saying that we are all bad people when a white person commits a serious crime. It isn’t even saying, “Oh that Peter Sutcliffe. What a bad man he is. Typical of white folk, I’m afraid. They’ve all got bad moral attitudes.”
I worked out long ago that fundamentally we are all the same. We are battered and buffeted along the way and our lives are affected by the circumstances in which we evolve. Some of us turn out all right, some of us don’t. But some of us judge, make assumptions, generalisations based on simple prejudice. And that’s what Letwin has done.
Letwin needs to better explain himself. Saying sorry isn’t good enough. Why did he say what he said? Did he mean it then but not now and if so what has changed? Him or black people? The evidence so far suggests neither.
