Stephen Lawrence and the politics of race

Why did the Stephen Lawrence story catch the public imagination so dramatically? There are countless miscarriages of justice every year, some of them just as serious, which most people have never heard of. Lawrence stuck mainly of course because it was a racial morality tale. Indeed from that day in 1993 when the original racially motivated attack took place, right up to yesterday's verdict, the Stephen Lawrence story has provided a kind of running commentary on the politics of race in Britain. And I would venture to say that there is something both to celebrate and to regret in that unfolding story.

One obvious thing to celebrate is how long ago 1993 now seems in attitudes to race. Already by the early 1990s Britain was becoming more relaxed about racial difference and overt racism was becoming rarer, though not as rare as it is today. But there were certain places, like the working class suburbs of south London, and certain institutions, like the police force, where the liberal tolerance of metropolitan Britain was not embraced. That is probably still true today, though one of the great achievements of the Lawrence case—and the Macpherson inquiry that it gave rise to—is just how much attention the police now pay to racial violence. (And contrary to the usual claims, there is no longer a disproportionate number of ethnic minority deaths in police custody.)

This matters enormously because of the "original sin" of post-war British immigration—the often appalling way that African Caribbeans were treated in the 1950s and 1960s by the place they identified with and admired as the "mother country." The anger and failure that came to be associated with African Caribbean life in Britain is partly derived from those early years. And the experience lived on in every racial slight or bad encounter with the police, including in Tottenham at the start of the riots last year. It resonated in a collective memory and reinforced a negative stereotype of white authority. The murder of Stephen Lawrence resonated particularly strongly, because he seemed to be the best of young black Britain—bright, ambitious—brought down by the worst of England, the delinquent, criminal, end of the white working class. The stereotype of the young, criminal black man undermining respectable white society was reversed.

So when black Britons heard of the murder, then heard of the police bungling the inquiry, they would have most likely had a collective assumption about British injustice and prejudice proved. The fact that this has now been so noisily and publicly disproved will not satisfy the hard-liners of black politics who still think that Britain is irredeemably racist, but for the ordinary black person it will have contributed to a more positive image of their country.

What is there to regret in the case? It is partly that the Stephen Lawrence case has become emblematic of an excessive racialisation of the public domain. Racial justice seems to be the only kind that our divided society can agree upon. I remember opening the Evening Standard on the tube the other day and finding almost half the paper about racial incidents (Sepp Blatter, Lawrence case, John Terry, Tiger Woods and his caddy).

An element of this was even reflected in the reporting of the Lawrence case. Although the failure of the police inquiry clearly seems to have had a racial element, Doreen Lawrence's own memoir And Still I Rise describes how the friendly relationship between some Eltham police officers and local gangsters such as David Norris's father, Clifford, was another factor in the Lawrence case and in other local miscarriages of justice. But this non-racial gangland aspect of the case was rarely reported.

More broadly if the Stephen Lawrence case may help to diminish a black grievance culture, it is likely to increase a white working class one. This is not because many people in Eltham sympathise with the obviously extreme and anti-social behaviour of Gary Dobson and David Norris. But there is a widespread feeling that the whole area, perhaps the whole culture of white working class south London, has been traduced as dumb, violent and racist throughout the Lawrence story.

This is part of a broader story of how parts of white working class London, especially in the east and the south, felt that they had to accommodate the changes required by post-war immigration—and often felt squeezed out to Essex or north Kent—and then had to endure lectures about racism from middle class liberals whose lives had not been changed at all.

The Lawrence family and their supporters should enjoy their moment of triumph, as should the Daily Mail, and the Labour party (that did so much to keep the case alive with the Macpherson inquiry and then the change to the double jeopardy rule). But I can't help feeling that the Lawrence case also highlights new divisions between a minority-friendly elite liberalism and the disaffected white working class of south London and north Kent, that feels the rest of the world sees it in the crumpled figures of Gary Dobson and David Norris.