A New World Order

"I first read this book on entering Parliament in 2000. I thought it was a wonderful collection of essays that spanned the black diaspora. I reread it recently and it is still incredibly fresh. Caryl Phillips writes beautifully, and he is gentle in approaching what is a very difficult, complex and easily caricatured subject. Some of his writing feels like fiction, some of it is academic and some is more journalistic in feel. So he’s a very versatile writer. He explains issues of race and plurality incredibly well. In his introduction “The Burden of Race” he talks about Ralph Ellison, and how Ellison understood that race is potent and racism is present as a force, but culturally it can shut out any other discourse and be incredibly stifling. Caryl, while he doesn’t talk about the riots, does get into the depth and complexity with which class, culture and race intersect and have done so throughout time. In my book I get into the policy detail of the immigration tensions in a country like Britain. Month by month there are tensions for the welfare state between a communitarian understanding of fairness – where if you pay into a welfare system and fall on hard times then you can take out of it, for instance by getting into the queue for a council house – and a needs-based understanding of fairness, where if you arrive from a foreign country with nothing, ie as an asylum seeker, you are at the head of the queue. Both systems are fair, but we need to better understand where priorities lie when there are limited resources. And also how immigration can reduce wages at the bottom end. We live in a society where if you’re middle class and your cappuccino is being served by a new arrival to the country, it’s all great. But if you are on a housing estate sharing scare resources, there are real tensions. Riots, wherever they happen, usually begin with an act of brutality – and it is usually an act of police brutality. The riot in Tottenham began in the same way [after the police shooting of Mark Duggan]. But the UK riots had different characteristics. Across the country, we saw people of different races rioting. We did not see a pitched battle with the police. We saw a nihilism that was an attack on the community itself – an attack on their neighbours’ shops and their neighbours’ homes. Arson was not confined to police cars. There was even a London bus that was set alight, and a local post office brought to the ground. We also saw widespread looting that began that first night in Tottenham. Running out of [electrical goods shop] Comet with a DVD player or an Xbox, whole families were caught on CCTV helping themselves to loot. That struck me as incredible hyper-individualism. Just as the banking crisis is not only about regulation but about selfishness and greed, it seems to me that the riots too were not only about race or the police but about selfishness and greed."