Black Handsworth. Kieran Connell

GLC took the lead in establishing the multicultural model, the Birmingham council embarked on a more cautious path. In 1984 the Labour administration created the Race Relations and Equal Opportunities Committee, but rather than implement the GLC blueprint it made a conscious effort to avoid being identified with the “looney Left.”²² The committee focused on the process of defining the council’s equal opportunities policy; even as late as 1985, it claimed it did “not have a specific fund for supporting organisations of ethnic minority people.” Two years later, because of concerns that its work could harm support among Labour’s electoral base, the committee was abolished and replaced by the Personnel and Equal Opportunities Committee.²³

      In spite of this reticence, throughout the 1980s more funds were being directed by the council toward black and Asian groups and projects, usually under the euphemism “inner-city aid.” In March 1985, for example, the Birmingham City Council’s Economic Development Committee reported that it had made £400,000 available to projects that aimed to improve the employment opportunities of those living in inner areas of the city, where 75 percent of the city’s “ethnic population” lived.²⁴ The West Midlands County Council (WMCC) explicitly set out to fund better community relations and most obviously adopted the language of multiculturalism. The race relations subcommittee of the council was established in 1981 with a remit to “consider matters affecting ethnic minorities” and allocate monies to “voluntary sector organisations involved with ethnic relations matters.” The subcommittee’s response to the rioting certainly illustrates the tendency of the state to assume that if there was a problem in black areas, the remedy could straightforwardly be found with the distribution of funds. In the aftermath of the 1985 rioting in Handsworth, the immediate response of the committee was to express concern about whether black and Asian organizations had been able to gain equal access to the funding that was available. To address this problem the council assigned a community liaison officer to “advise, support and consult voluntary organisations on various issues affecting themselves and the county council.” The subcommittee then set up an emergency “Handsworth Disturbance fund” of £11,000, which was signed off on just days after the riots and was made available specifically to black and Asian groups in the area.²⁵

      The county council system was abolished following passage of the Conservative government’s Local Government Act of 1985 in the context of its ongoing battles with the GLC and attempts made by authorities in the north of England to implement “local socialism.”²⁶ Other bodies began to play a greater role, including the charitable Cadbury Trust, which between 1985 and 1986 allocated a total of £186,933 to “race relations” projects in Birmingham in an attempt to help fill the gap left by the county council.²⁷ And the mid-1980s also witnessed national government becoming increasingly active. According to David Waddington, the Home Office minister responsible for racial minorities between 1983 and 1987, the strategy was to “try and identify the leaders of the various communities with whom the government could deal” with a view to the allocation of monies.²⁸ Following the 1985 riots, Kenneth Clarke, then minister for employment, identified Handsworth as the pilot area that would receive the attention of an inner-city task force, a scheme conceived by the government for areas that were “showing acute signs of economic and social distress.” Almost £5 million of central government money was made available to various projects in Handsworth with the primary object of increasing the employability of people in black and Asian communities. This was to be a “proactive” project, developed alongside community representatives to target particular ethnic minority groups. The task force was regarded as a success, with 73 percent of projects funded regarded as meeting targeted audiences. In 1987 further funds were made available for task forces in sixteen inner-city areas across the country.²⁹

      Policies such as these show how in spite of Thatcher’s rolling back of the state, there was also a parallel willingness on behalf of the government to sanction the kind of focused investment that is rarely associated with the politics of Thatcherism.³⁰ This is not to say that the idea of an inner-city task force did not cause unease within the Thatcher administration. In response to earlier proposals from Home Secretary Douglas Hurd that a program of positive action was required to remedy what he diagnosed as a “thoroughly dangerous situation” in Britain’s inner cities, Oliver Letwin and Hartley Booth, then junior policy advisers to Margaret Thatcher, warned against any further distribution of funds. In overtly racialized terms they suggested that it was unlikely that any increased investment would have a positive effect, given that “lower-class unemployed white people had lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale.” The inner-city unrest, Letwin and Booth made clear, had been caused “solely by [the] individual characters and attitudes” of those involved. As long as this persisted, “all efforts to improve the inner cities [would] founder.” Any funds that were allocated, it was suggested, would merely end up subsidizing the “disco and drug trade” or “Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops.”³¹

      Such comments offer an insight into the inability of some in government to comprehend the black inner city as anything other than profoundly alien. In spite of this, the projects and organizations that were supported by local and national funds—many of which were small grants that covered the cost of new equipment or the employment of temporary project workers—do illustrate the extent to which the inner areas of Britain’s major cities had by the 1980s become sites of a remarkable tapestry of diversity. In Birmingham, organizations supported by the city council included the Bangladeshi Women’s Association, the British Association of Muslims, and the Midlands Vietnamese Association; among the many others the county council supported were the Bethel Church of Jesus Christ, the Selly Oak Punjabi School, the Birmingham Jewish Council, the Sikh Youth Service, the St. Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla Society, and a project to develop resources for teaching black history in schools.³² Thus what Bill Schwarz has described as the haphazard “black locality” of an earlier period, traceable through the presence from the 1950s onward of new black businesses and shops in areas of immigrant settlement, had by the 1980s become a global sensibility that corresponded with a voluntary and local political sector that attempted to advocate on behalf of the particular community it claimed to represent.³³

      Criticisms of this process have been twofold. First, the extent to which groups were actually representative of the constituents on whose behalf they claimed to speak was not always apparent. Certainly groups that were successful in their funding applications possessed no democratic mandate. The 1980s witnessed the rise of the community leaders, generally men from comparatively middle-class backgrounds who, because of their ability to speak the language of the state, were often presumed to be the authentic gatekeepers to the particular ethnic group they claimed to represent. Reflecting on his own ministerial responsibilities, David Waddington admitted that the government was regularly mistaken about “who the real community leaders were” and was too often seduced by “noisy chaps” whose claims of influence within a particular community often did not match reality.³⁴ More than the unaccountability of these processes, however, for Sivanandan and others it was the way in which the state’s embrace of multiculturalism in the 1980s was seen to provoke ethnic divisions that was the program’s most damaging legacy. People began to see their ethnic identity—as opposed to the more inclusive identity of black—as the only way of obtaining either influence or money. The state’s policies “did not respond to the needs of communities,” the writer Kenan Malik has argued, “but to a large degree created those communities by imposing identities on people.”³⁵ If the emphasis on plurality and diversity in the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival occurred in the context of the disorientation experienced by Britain at the moment of decolonization, to Sivanandan the program of multiculturalism that was aimed at black Commonwealth citizens and their descendants in Britain was—echoing the language used by the ACSHO at its African Liberation Day—nothing less than a form of “domestic neocolonialism.”³⁶

      It is certainly striking that the groups who were awarded funding in Birmingham in the 1980s often defined themselves in narrow terms—for example, as the St. Kitts, Nevis, and Anguilla Society, as opposed to the black or even Caribbean society. Allegations of corruption in the distribution of state resources were also commonplace and were often couched in interethnic terms.³⁷ With respect to