A fond farewell to the Commission for Racial Equality

Less a rage against the dying of the light, more a prolonged, high-pitched whine of complaint and self-justification, the sound of a swarm of badly earthed strimmers, heard from a distance on an early autumn morning. The Commission for Racial Equality has issued its valedictory press release before its duties are acquired by the Commission for Equality and Human Rights next month. The new organisation, headed by Trevor Phillips, will co-ordinate all manner of whining on behalf of absolutely anybody who considers him- or herself to be oppressed and victimised and discriminated against by the vindictive white male hegemony. Good luck to it.

The CRE, meanwhile, has left us with a threat that 15 government departments may be taken to court — at our expense, presumably — because they haven’t checked the precise ethnic origin of everyone who works for them. There is no suggestion that the departments have discriminated against British Caribbeans, or British Bangladeshis, or British Static Travellers (yes, there really is that wonderful category); merely that they haven’t yet asked everyone if they’re properly and nicely white or not. The crime is one of ‘non-compliance’. And along with that, the report churns out the usual stuff about how Britain is ever more segregated, socially and in the workplace, and that extremism ‘both political and religious’ is on the rise. To which we might say: well, yep — and whose fault is that, then?

For the first 25 years of its 31-year existence, the CRE was cheerfully wedded to the notion of multiculturalism, wherein Britain’s disparate communities were encouraged to remain apart and preserve their own cultural values, which were every bit as valid, in a very real sense, as those of the indigenous white majority. At the same time, of course, white working-class communities were urged not to remain apart, but to embrace change, or risk being called racist.