Racist Britain?

Carol Thatcher is the latest high profile Briton to cause offence with a gauche comment. She won’t be the last, says Alex Wade.

Amid its present travails, Wikipedians recently found that they had to act quickly to restore Margaret Thatcher to her rightful place in history. The online encyclopedia had been sabotaged not so as to suggest that the former British Prime Minister had left this mortal coil, but, worse, to maintain that she had never existed. For a few heady moments on Wikipedia, Thatcherism was a fiction.

There are those who would be only too happy to learn that the Thatcher Years were less distant memory and more collective hallucination. Not least, perhaps, BBC executives, who are today reeling from Carol Thatcher’s characterization of a tennis player as a “golliwog”. The Iron Lady’s daughter allegedly made the comment during a conversation with fellow presenters after filming last Thursday for ‘The One Show’, a BBC television programme in which she has appeared as a regular roving reporter for the last three years.

Cue scandal. “We’re no longer going to be working with [Ms Thatcher] on ‘The One Show’,” said a BBC spokesman. He added that Thatcher’s comments would widely be seen as “unacceptable,” and given that her job on the show was to talk to a diverse range of people, “it’s very difficult to continue in that capacity.”

Thatcher’s alleged faux pas – or, depending on your point of view, blatant demonstration of unthinking racism – comes on hot on the heels of a similarly ill-advised comment by Prince Harry. The Prince, who, in 2005, went to a party dressed in the uniform of the German Afrika Corps, complete with a swastika armband for good measure, was caught on video referring to a fellow Sandhurst officer cadet as a “Paki”. He maintained that no offence was meant, as was also the plea in mitigation by Clarence House in January when the Prince’s father was found to be in the habit of referring to Kolin Dhillon, a fellow member of Cirencester Polo Club, by the moniker “Sooty”.

Indeed, not only was Prince Charles, the heir apparent, not racist, but Mr Dhillon went on record to say that he enjoyed his soubriquet. “I enjoy being called Sooty by my friends who I am sure universally use the name as a term of affection with no offence meant or felt,” he said. He added that so far as he was concerned, “The Prince of Wales is a man of zero prejudice and both his sons have always been most respectful.”

The problem, as these incidents illustrate all too well, is that respect, in Britain, is often only skin deep, no more than a superficial doffing of a cap of convenience. Carol Thatcher may have been brought up in an era which featured black doll-like characters on jam jars, one in which terms like “Paki” were commonplace, but we’re supposed to have moved on. We don’t need to be PC zealots to acknowledge that the way in which we use language shapes our consciousness, and yet across three generations – from the man who would be King, to a former Prime Minster’s daughter, to blundering, gung-ho Prince – racist stereotypes are repeated, promulgated and, yet worse, excused.

In the wake of Thatcher’s apparent reclamation of the term “golliwog” tubs will be thumped from Cirencester to Chelsea as middle Britain laments the incursion of political correctness on our ancient ways. We’re not that bad, people will say, and besides, no offence was meant. It was just an innocent, albeit misguided, slip of the tongue. Perhaps, indeed, a black, golliwog-friendly tennis player will be trumpeted by the media. He’ll be wheeled out to say that the jam jars were OK, really, and that he doesn’t mind Thatcher’s reminder of their existence. And maybe, just maybe, Wikipedia will be updated to maintain that, along with Thatcherism, racism never happened in modern Britain.

Photo: New Sox. 

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