Racism in Notts: Remembering Stephen Lawrence

Since the death of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, there have been at least 126 racist murders, over 1 million racist incidents, and over 100,000 racially aggravated offences officially recorded by police forces across the country. Old-fashioned racism has not gone away.

Around the time of Stephen's murder, there were eleven racist murders, two of these murders – Rolan Adams and Rohit Duggal – were in the same area, and in September 1993, Derek Beackon from the BNP became the party’s first elected councillor in Millwall.

Around this time, the BNP had started to change. It no longer talked about kicking out the immigrants; instead we saw campaigns against planning applications for mosques in East London, leaflets about Labour councils giving preferential treatment to muslims, and “rights for whites” marches.

The campaign against Islam was a success and, within a short time, other political parties sang the same tune. By 1995 five Conservative councillors in Newham campaigned as “Conservatives Against Labours’ Unfair Ethnic Policies” and in Tower Hamlets, even the Liberal Democrats campaigned to stop the planning application for a local mosque.

Within a decade, Michael Howard campaigned with the slogan “Let's be clear. It's not racist to talk about immigration.” At the time, Tony Blair called this the politics of desperation, yet by 2014 Labour front bench MP, Yvette Cooper campaigned on the same slogan and Blair’s “politics of desperation” was now mainstream.  

Alongside this, we also saw blatant racism in the popular press. In 2006, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees counted that Britain’s popular press had produced 8,163 scare stories about asylum seekers between 2002 and 2005; just under four per day. The institutionalized racism described in the Macpherson Inquiry grew stronger, and the recent fiasco about the stateless victims from the Windrush generation is just one recent example. 

We shouldn’t be surprised that racism has moved into the mainstream. The past three years’ worth of Nottingham police data on race hate crimes shows that we see more race hate crime in public places, on routes to and from transport links, hospitals, parks, schools and shops; in Nottingham City Centre, Worksop and Mansfield Town Centre. The victims are UK or overseas university students, along with BME people involved in the night-time economy, such as doormen or taxi drivers, and people who work in the transport sector such as bus drivers.

When I’ve spoken to members of the muslim community, I’ve found that all of them have experienced racism, but only a couple had officially complained. Likewise, people from Poland, Russian-speaking networks, the Roma network, and the Italian and Spanish communities, tell me they’ve faced daily racist abuse and sometimes assaults.

The Macpherson report in the death of Stephen Lawrence was groundbreaking because for the first time the government was forced to acknowledge the institutions were at fault, not individuals. It’s the collective outcome that matters, yet more and more social problems are blamed on individuals.

If blaming individuals, rather than tackling the policies of institutions, is how we currently deal with racism, we desperately need advocacy agencies to help people. As far as I’m aware, there are no BME groups providing casework or advocacy support to victims of race and faith hate crime in Nottingham, just groups with focus on training and awareness-raising courses that provide support for existing third-party reporting schemes.

It’s the 25^th anniversary of the death of Stephen Lawrence, but also fifty years since Enoch Powell’s River of Blood speech. Today is an apt time for us to reflect on how things have changed, and more importantly, where we are heading.

Racism 25 Years On: Nottingham Commemorating Stephen Lawrence takes place at The Chase Neighbourhood Centre, St Ann's, NG3 4EZ. Register for the event here.