Practical policies and racist labelling

norman dennis, 14 December 2004

European legislation and judicial rulings that override English law increasingly disable policies that in their intention and application are designed only to address practical problems. If any present or proposed policy can be represented with any trace of plausibility by the now widely state-subsidised pressure groups of self-defined “races” or “ethnic communities” as one that implies that members of their “race” or “community” are disproportionately at fault, then the policy is denounced as “racist”.
In everyday discourse, anti-racist rhetoric increasingly stifles discussions of various possible policies by labelling as “racist” wide swathes of opinion that has to do with empirical matters of conduct or culture, and nothing to do with race.

Cases where advocacy of or opposition to a policy is racist are not, of course, the subject of this piece. The subject of this piece is those cases where no racism can be detected. For the anti-racist, the racism of such an opponent is then said to be “incipient”, “crypto-”, “unconscious”, “institutional”, or to be racism with some other label that equally requires no actual evidence to justify its use.
For example, racists oppose immigration. But is opposition to immigration necessarily racist? Some well-off people oppose immigration as a drain on their taxes by people who have not paid any. Some poorly-off people oppose it as drain on welfare resources their own families would otherwise themselves enjoy. Are such arguments just a cover for the real reason they oppose immigration, that they are racists?
The laws of the “settlement” and “removal” of individuals and families, which operated in England from 1662, show that opposition to immigration has been—and therefore today can be—completely divorced from either racial or ethnic considerations.
Up to quite recent times, the laws of settlement and removal controlled internal immigration from one parish into another in England. If a person became “a charge upon the parish”, the parish authorities could deport that person and his or her family to the parish where they had “settlement”—roughly, to their home parish.
Until 1795 such a family from another parish could be deported if the parish authorities thought it might claim welfare benefits; after that, only if it did claim benefits.
A Royal Commission on the Poor Laws reported that in 1907 there were still 12,000 people a year affected by these internal migration laws. The Poor Law Act of 1930 had (much mitigated) clauses dealing with settlement and removal, and problems of settlement still arose during the Second World War.
The completely non-racist arguments of the Poor Relief Act of 1662, which remained the rationale of internal settlement and removal for nearly three hundred years in this country, was that there was a practical problem that had to be tackled by practical policy.
The English welfare laws, as they bore on the internal migration of individuals and their families, can be legitimately condemned on various grounds as having been to an extreme degree abhorrent. But it is completely impossible to find anything racist in them:
that whereas by reason of some defects in the law, poor people are not restrained from going from one parish to another, and therefore do endeavour to settle themselves in those parishes where there is the best stock [note: of welfare provisions], the largest commons or wastes to build cottages, and the most woods for them to burn and destroy; and when they have consumed it, then to another parish, and at last become rogues and vagabonds, to the great discouragement of parishes to provide stock, where it is liable to be devoured by strangers;
be it therefore enacted … that it shall and may be lawful, upon complaint made by the … overseers of the poor of any parish to any justice of the peace … that any person or persons are likely to be chargeable to the parish … to remove and convey such a person or persons to such parish where he or they were last legally settled …
These comments have not been arguments for or against legal immigration, illegal immigration, economic migration or asylum. The sole issue they address is the anti-racist’s condemnation of any opposition to immigration, on any grounds, as overt or covert racism.
They are arguments about the entirely different domains of race on the one hand–genetics–and culture on the other–social beliefs and arrangements for attending to a society’s business.
An element in anti-racist ideology is hostility to the teaching by the host country of its cultural history, that is to say, the account of the way it has handled, by its customs. laws, and inbuilt attitudes and beliefs, the problems that arise in the course of individual and national life.
National history, however, is not solely a celebration of racist chauvinism and an instrument of ethnic-minority humiliation. It is also a record that can be drawn on to show decisively that certain generalisations are palpably false, in this case, the standard generalisation of the anti-racist lobbies that whatever the opponents say or even believe, opposition to immigration always has racial or ethnic prejudices at its core.