The Race Card, Again
Abstract
BY SHAMIT SAGGAR AGAINST expectations, the 2001 general election campaign illustrated the depth of ongoing disputes over race and immigration in British politics. These political differences were as much intra-party as interparty in their nature and impact. Some six weeks before polling day, a political row erupted over the Commission for Racial Equalityâs Election Compact. The casual observer of the electoral landscape might have been forgiven for believing that British politics was following the path of the great arguments over race and immigration previously witnessed during the mid- to late 1970s. After more than a generation, the shrillness of those earlier debates could, it appears, be evoked at short notice and with considerable reverberations across the party system. The implication of this picture was serious and potentially alarming. It contained three core elements. Firstly, that political parties continued to assume that a ârace cardâ existed and might be deployed to sap the support of those caught on the wrong side of populist sentiment on race and immigration. This echoed the historic position that the Labour Party had found itself occupying starting with the Smethwick episode in 1964 and climaxing in its much larger electoral vulnerability on the immigration