Calling a spade a spade
Richard West
The Manchester Guardian, although a liberal and tolerant newspaper, used always to name the race of those who came up in court. It was a 'Jew pedlar', in February 1831, who got a pair of gold ear-rings by false pretences. It was 'an Israelite named Reiss' who in the same year defrauded a Manchester lodging-house keeper of £3. The newspaper got a laugh out of the Jewish pedlar who stole a ham, as also out of the pickpocket Isaac Jacob, who told the police: 'Me hungry belly; no moneysh ; so me took tic-tac'. The best radical journalist of that age, William Cobbett, constantly railed at 'Jews and jobbers' complaining, for instance, that the descendant of an aristocrat, Who had come over with the Normans, had been bought out by Solomon Levine 'who Came over with the Dutch and the Deni'.
The modern Guardian, like most of the daily newspapers, refrains from stating the racial origin of a person appearing in court. Indeed new legislation will soon make it Illegal to print information that could bring any ethnic group into disrepute, a law intended to safeguard black immigrants. It may soon be illegal for me to state my °Pinion that the identification of people's race and even opprobious comments about their race, should be allowed and may even he healthy.
The objection to this argument is that the Crimes of Hitler against the Jews were so horrendous that no expression of racial dislike should ever again be allowed in case it provoked a similar outrage. This objection rests on the fallacy that Hitler came to Oovver because he loathed the Jews. In fact the Germans (in contrast to Hitler's fellowAustrians) were not particularly hostile to the Jews and voted for Hitler because he promised to beat inflation. It was only after Hitler got power that the Germans, indeed the Jews themselves, saw that his antiSemitic ravings were serious.
Moreover, there is a real distinction in kind as well as degree between the murderous hatred of Hitler towards the Jews, and the observations quoted from the Guardian. In the 1820s a large proportion of poor irnmigrant Jews were indeed pedlars and also often convicted of theft or of receiving stolen goods: The character of Fagin, which to us seems so grotesque, was recognisable to Dickens's readers and was not, 1 think, intended as a caricature of the Jews in general.
It was largely because of the bad publicity 'ron-1 court cases like those I have quoted, that Britain's Jewish community tried so hard and successfully to improve itself and remove its ill-doers. Jewish criminals learned to fear Jewish jurors;• habitual beggars or
thieves were packed off to America. As a result, so one learns from Bill Williams's first-rate new book The Making of Manchester Jewry 1740-1875, the Jews soon lost their reputation as Fagins and came to be liked and respected citizens. As far as one knows, the many Jewish Manchester Guardian readers did not complain or think it odd that the newspaper stated their race or mentioned the fact that they followed a different religion and way of life. Just as the Jewish community took a pride in those who won fame and honour, so it accepted the shame of its criminals.
The decline of anti-semitism in Britain is due not to the Race Relations Act or similar legislation but to the fact that Jews are no longer conspicuous in unpopular callings such as pedlar or pawnbroker. There are, however, a sadly large proportion of Jews in shady businesses such as property speculation, who give a bad name to the whole community. As newspapers have discovered, any attack on property speculators earns the accusation of anti-semitism. This charge was made against critics of Harold Wilson's resignation honours list. Yet none of these critics that I know of objected to Wilson giving honours to Jews; only to certain particular Jews, whose contribution to public life was of doubtful value.
Will hostility to the Irish cease if nothing rude is written about them in British newspapers? I doubt it. As with the Jews, hostility to the Irish had its origin in the fact that, for reasons hardly their fault, they behaved in a way that made them unpopular. They were poor, frequently drunk and violent, often politically radical. The fact that we the English were largely responsible for the wretched state of the Irish did not make them any more likeable in the eyes of the British public. This century; as the Irish community in this country grew more prosperous, a new kind of anti-lrish feeling arose from political differences. At the time of the Birmingham bombings, two years ago, antiIrish feeling found expression in newspaper
articles that broke every clause of the Race Relations Act. Yet I think that the printed abuse, and still more the jokes, actually lowered tension and anti-Irish sentiment. And just as the Jews were ashamed of their pedlar criminals, so the Irish turned on the IRA terrorists who brought disgrace to their countrymen. The failure of the IRA in this country is largely due to the enmity of the resident Irish community.
The new Race Relations Act was no doubt designed to prevent attacks on coloured immigrants from the Indian sub-continent and the Caribbean. But can it really help? There are already perfectly adequate laws to stop the publication of statements likely to cause a breach of the peace, or any violence. No amount of new laws can eradicate all dislike or fear of these newcomers. No law can make people love each other. A law that forbids a newspaper to publish the race of a criminal-1 am thinking specifically of the recent 'muggings' in South London—seems calculated to make racial hostility worse. For one thing, the West Indian community will not be shamed, as the Jews once were, into dealing with the miscreants in their midst. Worse, the British newspaper readers will jump to the conclusion that all muggings, and any other crimes, are committed by coloured immigrants.
The demand for censorship of writings on race receives support from two groups of people: well-meaning liberals who want to make people good through the 'nanny state', and ill-meaning Trotskyists who want an excuse for a punch-up with the National Front and other ill-meaning groups on the right. Neither group, I imagine, would want the law to apply to racial abuse of the English. Fair enough. If the British use torture in Ireland they can expect and deserve the same kind of abuse that the Irish got in England after the pub bombings. (I do not imagine that English immigrants to Australia want a law to guard them from attack, although they, after the Yugoslays, are the most detested minority group.) While there is no need for a law to prevent abuse of a racial or religious group, there is need for a law to suppress organisations committed to violence against a racial group. The Nazi Party was one such organisation. The IRA is another. The Irish government's recent legislation to ban support for the IRA was welcome. Our new legislation is not.
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