Hugh Muir · guardian.co.uk

Sir William Macpherson was not an obvious choice to write the report into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. Educated at Wellington College and Oxford, the son of a brigadier and once a captain in the Scots Guards, he was accused by critics at the outset of insensitivity to race issues. Certainly he seemed too immersed in the establishment to lead a process that would shake it. And yet that was exactly what he did.

No one who attended Macpherson’s hearings in south-east London can forget the key events. Neville Lawrence collapsing as he heard how his son was killed; the five suspects snarling and lashing out as they ran the gauntlet of the crowd outside the hearing, where the most senior police officers in the land would admit their force was guilty of “institutional racism”.

The inquiry was more than a series of meetings in a characterless suite of offices at Elephant and Castle. For the second part of his investigation, the former high court judge journeyed around Britain by train, to six places he and his team – Dr Richard Stone, vicechair of the Runnymede Trust, John Sentamu, now the Archbishop of York, and former police officer Tom Cook – had chosen for their racial significance. They intended to discover whether London was typical of the country.

Sir William has since retired to a life away from the public gaze. But were he to retrace his steps and tour the racial landscape again, as I did this week, he would find a country more at ease with itself, but one that is still struggling with issues he encountered a decade ago.

Ealing

Macpherson’s first stop had long been troubled by racial conflict. Historically, much of the attention focused on Southall but Macpherson set up his inquiry further north, at Greenford. As coordinator of the Stephen Lawrencecampaign, the grouping set up in the aftermath of the murder, Suresh Grover had been a regular at the Elephant and Castle hearings, but this, he recalls now, was a chance to give the local picture. “The local authority and the police were failing to protect black people and we told him so,” he says. “We had seen two racist murders and many people were suffering daily harassment.”

Initially, after the report came out, the black community felt progress wasbeing made, says Grover, but then things started to slide. His organisation, the Monitoring Group, has noticed a shift towards attacks on refugees. There has been a “terrible” official move away from anti-racism and towards community cohesion. “Groups like ours are in dire financial straits because race is well down the pecking order. We moved from Straw to Clarke to Blunkett – and Macpherson went out of the window.”

The Rev David Wise, the white English leader of the predominantly black Greenford Baptist church, was sharply critical of the police at the Macpherson hearings. But he has witnessed a substantial change in attitudes towards them. “The Met has made great efforts. What I don’t now get is people saying the police treated them badly because they are black. The police are not free of racism because they are human beings, but their structures appear to have made a difference. It’s the local authorities and other agencies that don’t treat people well.”

Manchester

In the 1980s and 1990s, Britain’s second-largest city had its own problems with racial violence. In 1986, 13-year-old Ahmed Iqbal Ullah was murdered in a racist attack at Burnage high school. Nasrullah Khan Moghal, head of the Manchester Council for Community Relations, recalls the start to proceedings. “Richard Leese, the leader of the council, spoke first and he immediately said that the city council was institutionally racist. Then the chief constable, David Wilmot, said his police force was institutionally racist too. Bishop Sentamu was dumbfounded.” The organisers were keen not to replicate the atmosphere in London where “virtually every speaker blasted the police”, he says. “We were critical, but things were improving. We felt we had a good story to tell.”

He still does. The authorities, police, council, voluntary sector, are big on partnership working, so “if the police are failing these days, it means we are failing as well”. Racial attacks and incidents of harassment are down over the decade and people are “increasingly happy” about integration, says Moghal. But, like Grover, he has seen a evidence of a new wave of violence aimed at asylum seekers. “We are seeing migrant workers from eastern Europe being harassed. It is no longer black against white.” As in Ealing, the mantra is “community cohesion”, and in Manchester that must include the plight of white people. “Look at Wythenshawe and there is a problem with white unemployment. Many young people have gone into crime and drugs. Many don’t attend school.”

I head to Wythenshawe to see for myself. There are few non-white faces, and even less money. A Poundworld shop faces a Poundland across the street. By his florist hut, Terence Banks is preparing to close up after another slow day. “Look at these lads,” he says. “They’re always out here, school day or not. They don’t have anything to focus on so they get up to things. Sometimes you hear them say that if you’re a certain colour you get anything you want but if you’re white, you won’t. Some just use it as an excuse, but some believe it.”

Tower Hamlets

At his third stop, Macpherson set up camp in York Hall, one of Britain’s most famous boxing venues, in Tower Hamlets, east London. This one of the most diverse boroughs in the country, home to Brick Lane and Banglatown. Junaid Uddin, then 27 and a worker with the Campaign for Police Accountability, recalls: “The police had begun to make some moves towards the community but they were in denial. They certainly did not want to accept anything like institutional racism. Before the inquiry, when we gave our point of view, we were labelled black racists. Afterwards we were seen as specialists.”

Uddin, now a voluntary sector consultant, says the aftermath was beneficial: “The police were at the forefront of changing a whole range of organisations.” Then came September 11. Things have been sticky ever since. “There is something very dangerous going on. We have deep concerns here about Islamophobia and what is going on in the Middle East, but when we voice them we are painted as extremists.”

The Rev Vaughan Jones, who runs a support agency for refugees and asylum seekers, has seen a big change in race relations since he testified to Macpherson. “There are a lot more inter-racial relationships and a lot of learning,” he says. But he also sees a lot of suffering. “Irregular migrants face state harassment instead of community harassment,” he says. “The debate 10 years ago was about established communities, whether they were being treated equally. Now the issue is what defines us as a country: who is included and who is not. It is about exclusion not inclusion.”

Bradford

On 21 October 1998, Macpherson and his team walked into the minefield that was Bradford, the scene of terrible riots three years earlier. Tension between communities and police was still high.

But he knew little, one suspects, of the manoeuvring to try to prevent certain people from talking to him. One person he was never supposed to encounter was Muhammed Taj, a bus driver and an official in the Transport and General Workers’ Union who sat on a council-commissioned investigation into the disturbances but broke away to publish his own report, complaining that the majority document report lacked focus. “I told Sir William there had been so many reports on problems in Bradford and they were just gathering dust,” he told me. “The fault lines were well known. We needed to do something.” What was done wasn’t enough: two years after the publication of the Macpherson report, Bradford was in flames again, provoked by the far-right into the most serious disorder in the UK for two decades. There has been nothing like that since and the authorities have poured millions into the poorest areas. Officers are wedded to community policing. But Taj says he is worried that the explosive elements are all still there.

In Shipley Ralph Berry, a Labour councillor preoccupied with education and community cohesion, seems positive, not least when he reflects that the BNP had four councillors in 2004 and now it is down to two. “If you ask people if they are voting BNP because they hate black people, they will say no. They just want someone to take them seriously. That’s what we are doing.”

Bristol

In 1998, 100 people packed into the hotel function room Macpherson’s team had hired in Bristol. Then the outpouring began. Two men sat together at the inquiry to give evidence jointly. One was Paul Stephenson, who led a bus boycott campaign in Bristol in 1963 against a company that would not employ black people or Asians. The other man was Richard Stokes, the black British guardsman whose career was cut short by racial harassment.

Stephenson moved 25 years ago to a predominantly white suburb. He thought he would be a trailblazer. Instead, his is still the only black family on the street. “I bought this house thinking I was breaking down social barriers,” he says. “The man next door promptly sold his.” His hope has been for more integration and understanding. It still is and Macpherson and the police have helped, he says. “But for every step forward we have made two back.”

Stokes sees progress because “the range of people who will defend racism is decreasing” and “kids are definitely more accepting of different cultures”, but he fears Bristol is still racist. “You need only go two miles out of the city centre to see that attitudes are different. It is class and race. It’s a funny place.”

In the St Paul’s area on the eastern side of the city, where the faces are mainly black and brown, I see a shop filled with DVDs, CDs, trainers, caps and clothing, a shrine to black urban culture. Then I see the owner, who is white. Debbie Reeve’s late husband was Jamaican, she explains.

Birmingham

Macpherson’s final stop was Birmingham. Maxie Hayles, a veteran community activist, says he was responsible for getting the former judge to the city. Even now he is pleased. “We had a nightclub that would not admit black people and the death in custody of

Alton Manning. There were attacks and harassment – all this in Britain’s second city – and they weren’t going to come! It was a joke.” He began a campaign. Soon Macpherson was there.

The meeting itself was turbulent. “The council leader said they were not institutionally racist. The chief constable said the same. Then we spoke about the discrimination and the racial attacks. People knew we were right. We got a standing ovation.”

If there was elation that day, for Maxie and his Birmingham Racial Attacks Monitoring Unit there has been deflation since. “The police still kick and scream about stop and search. They are still institutionally racist. The local authority doesn’t carry out the racial impact assessments that were envisaged. The thing had no teeth.”

Things aren’t better, they’re different. “Few will call you a black bastard but we all saw the list of BNP people,” he says. “It’s about attitude. We know it’s there.”

In a church hall in Handsworth, where black and Asian communities live side by side, Leroy McKoy, a youth worker, tells local teenagers about police hostility and racial conflict in the 1970s. But it is just a history lesson for the boys, for they say they have black friends, white friends, Asian friends, Somalian friends.

“That’s the way it is these days,” says Craig Taylor. His mates agree.

The statistics

Ealing
Population 306,400 (2006) 59% white, 23% Asian, 8.6% black.
Jan-Oct 2008: 3,247 stop and searches; police say 53% were white, 27% “Asian appearance”, 8% “black appearance”.
2008 London mayoral elections BNP came fifth, behind Greens.

Tower Hamlets
Population 196,106 (2001) 51.4% white, 36.6% Asian, 6.5% black.
Jan-Oct 2008 10,236 stop and searches; police say 58% white, 26% “Asian”, 10% “black”

Birmingham
Population 687,406 (2001) 71% white, 20% Asian,
6% black, 3% mixed race.
School population 144,100 – 43.6% white, 35.5% Asian, 5.1% black.

Bradford
Population 467,655 (2001) 78% white, 19% Asian,
1.5% mixed race, 0.92% black.
2008 local elections two BNP councillors elected.

Manchester
Population 392,819 (2001)
81% white, 19% black and minority groups.
2007-8 stop and searches police say increase of 56.6% in people stopped from white groups, and 69.9% in Asian groups, in a year.
2007-8 22.4% of all murder victims were black and 14.3% Asian.

Bristol
Minority ethnic population increased by 62% between 1991 and 2001 to 380,615.
Office for National Statistics gave it a “diversity index” of 0.22 (ie the
probability that two people chosen at random will be from two different
ethnic groups)

 

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