Review
What exactly did BBC Two intend to do in its ‘White Season’? Why did they organise a survey, not randomly as claimed, but aimed at white people with a very specific question about being ‘voiceless’ and unrepresented. Was it to manipulate the message that people in Britain feel that ‘nobody speaks for them’ and that they are ‘becoming invisible’ in order to serve the purpose of a race and not a class agenda? The ‘White Season’ was launched by a discussion based on a small telephone poll of 1,012 white British adults aged 18+ which showed that 58% of white working class people felt nobody speaks for people like them and 46% of white middle class people felt the same. Newsnight guest speaker Bob Crow of the RMT energetically agreed that the Labour government and the media do not represent the interests of, and in fact attack, the working class but, he asserted, this is entirely a matter of class, not of race.
BBC2, however, clearly had an agenda to view the white British working class as particular victims of neglect and dispossession by the Labour government. This is the political stance of not only the British National Party but of an increasing section of the media and professional class who have historically played exactly this role of encouraging and justifying the racism of others.
The series kicked off with a documentary about Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech against immigration from the British Commonwealth in which he predicted that ‘in 15 or 20 years the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’ and ‘rivers of blood would be shed’. Then, as now, racists protest that they are not allowed to say what they think and Powell was congratulated 40 years ago for ‘daring to speak out’. The BBC ‘White Season’ was promoted on this idea of fearless ‘speaking out’. The series was anchored by a much repeated trailer which shows a shaven-headed man’s face being blacked up with writing by brown hands over the words, ‘Is the white working class in Britain becoming invisible?’ What emerged from the series of documentaries is that the white working class are, some of them, old and grumpily retired in Wibsey’s Working Men’s Club; young and unemployed in Peterborough where equally white eastern European casual, seasonal workers do the unwanted agri-business jobs of harvesting and packing; hardly present in the multicultural primary school in Birmingham which has never had more than 10 white children on its register at a time; dysfunctional in Moving On where a young girl embraces the Islam of her school friends as a sanctuary from a chaotic world; and neighbourly in All White in Barking where an English and an African couple become friendly and even the BNP activist has an Anglo/Nigerian grandchild. Then there is the Jewish social club of 50 years standing whose members have mixed views about old Monty and his live-in carer/girlfriend Betty from Uganda. ‘Invisible’ does not even rate in this.
The most opportunistic racist game of all was to call a documentary on Easington in County Durham, The Whitest Place in Britain. White had nothing to do with it. This ex-mining village could have been named as the most shamefully abandoned and de-populated working class community in Britain. The fate of Easington represents an attack on whole sections of the British working class who are alienated as a result of the closure of entire industries, the rundown of manufacturing and council housing, the assault on trade unions and the deregulation of the labour market. Instead of showing what results from the British ruling class homage to big business and privatisation, the BBC provides a running commentary on the racial composition of a defeated community.
Michael Moore, the director of Sicko and Bowling for Columbine, among other films, published a best seller in 2002 called Stupid White Men. His targets were the neo-conservatives, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and their associates whose politics are dominated by militarism, greed and power. He happily included both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in the Stupid White Men class of person. The BBC Two’s ‘White Season’ could have targeted the parallel folk and institutions in Britain dominated by the equally stupid white ruling class which would include the judiciary, the armed forces, the civil service and indeed the BBC itself. It still remains a puzzle why the ‘White Season’ flirted with the provocative suggestion that Enoch Powell represents the ideals of ‘free speech’. Are they stupid?
Susan Davidson
