ONLY BLACKS NEED APPLY

Rod Liddle despairs of social services

departments that insist on 'same-race' adoption

pair of blunt shears, is very greasy. Clothes: total grunge. A dirty nylon rucksack lies crumpled at his feet. According to Mick the Australian, a bum who's in the same game, he's a functioning alcoholic.

When Johnny has got enough people together, he launches into his spiel, which starts with a long autobiographical ramble. Then off you go, stopping at the least interesting places so that Johnny can talk at great length about the least interesting aspects of their history and appearance. He kills everything he touches stone-dead. When you get to the Trevi Fountain and he tells you that he needs to nip up to his room nearby 'to have a wash', you slip off with a sigh of relief, reflecting that while Johnny the Irishman does indeed need a wash, the real explanation for his disappearance probably lies elsewhere.

There are also a number of employment opportunities for expats in Rome's many pubs (a recent fashion that looks set to endure). Take David, the charming 30year-old Scottish barman at the Fiddler's Elbow. He works at least 40 hours a week, never knocks off before two in the morning, but is permanently broke. Earlier this year his finances were so dire that when he wasn't working at the pub he was reduced to trawling the area around the Colosseum on behalf of some 'cultural association'. It almost finished him off.

Oh, and the organised pub-crawls — a new phenomenon, this, and one that fills the Romans with disgust — need staff, too, to herd the puking flocks of young, mainly American tourists from one watering hole to the next.

And so it goes on: variations on the same theme.

No, barring an improbable stroke of luck, Rome is no longer viable for any Briton who wants to abandon the rat-race for some gentler occupation in foreign parts. But for anyone who fancies a second career as a bum the Eternal City is becoming more viable by the day. THIS is a cab-driver's story and it is, in a sense, about race relations. There are a lot of cab-drivers' stories about race relations, and not many of them are very interesting. This one is, I think.

Njoema is the cab-driver in question. She is a 43-year-old Nigerian woman. Or, rather, she is half-Nigerian, half-Irish. Remember that vital qualification — it will come in useful later on. Njoema wasn't always a cab-driver; once she was a trained and adept nurse in the NHS, and when she gave that up she fostered children. Fostering children was something that she thought she was very good at. But she will never foster children again, now, she says, after everything that happened to her. Certainly not in London. Britain is desperately short of foster parents, so this is a shame.

A few years ago, Njoema was asked to foster a baby girl of Sri Lankan descent whose mother had been murdered by her father and who had, thus, been orphaned at the age of two weeks. That's a terrible way to come into the world, isn't it? Fortunately, this benighted baby went to a pretty good family, with Njoema. It is a big deal to foster a baby from the age of two weeks, as I'm sure you can imagine: taking on a tiny baby that isn't yours. But Njoema did OK; the baby thrived and seemed to be very happy. The social-services people seemed pleased, too. They said that when the child was old enough they'd try to find someone who might adopt the kid; being well-brought-up and well-adjusted in a happy family, that shouldn't be too much of a problem, they reckoned.

Trouble is, Njoema made the mistake of loving the child. An easy thing to do, really — the girl had come to her scarcely formed as a human being. She had brought up the little one with all the investments of time and commitment and care that a real mother would give. So, when the child was four years old and ready to be adopted, Njoema and her partner applied to be the adoptive parents.

Now, bear in mind that you get a good weekly wage for fostering children: something in excess of £100 per child. Njoema was prepared to give that up — you get nothing for adopting, apart, of course, from the child. The case went before the social workers and they said no, I'm afraid you can't. The child will have to go to somebody else. As you can guess, a distraught Njoema asked why, why, why — what have we done wrong? Are we bad parents? Is she at risk from us in some way? The social-services people said, no, don't be silly, you're great parents, it's not that. And Njoema said OK, then, what is it? And the social-services people said this. They said: you're the wrong colour. If we're honest, you're not black enough, really. The girl's properly — if you'll excuse the phraseology — black. You're only 50 per cent black. There's an insuperable mismatch here, sorry. And many, many thanks, obviously, for all your hard work, by the way.

Well. I don't know if, in social-services departments, they have some sort of colour chart like the ones you get on toasters, giving shades of brown from golden to virtually noir. Seems like they might well do. Njoema, for what it's worth, is, by my estimation, reasonably black. Certainly 'black' in the old political sense of 'black', meaning not part of the monstrous evil white hegemony. Quite black, then — but, unhappily, not quite black enough. So she argued and argued and lost. The child was taken away to new parents who were the right colour. That process, you might think, would be traumatic. For mother and child. But that's what happened.

This cab-driver's story is not an unfamiliar one, I suppose. It is still the ruling orthodoxy among many social workers and social-services departments that children requiring adoption should be placed with parents who are from their own, or a familiar, cultural background. I am not sure how long and how far they have to look for potential parents to adopt children who have, say, a Zambian-Estonian genetic heritage. Or are a mix of Burmese and Manx. Or Catalan and Eritrean. I should think that they have a difficult time of it, the social workers, sorting that stuff out. Maybe they just resort to the toaster chart, in the end. Just do it on colour; makes it all a lot simpler.

I can just about see how an eight-yearold, working-class. African-Caribbean child uprooted from his or her milieu might feel temporarily dislocated and uncomfortable placed in a bourgeois Caucasian family. I say that I can just about see that: I don't know that I would use the child's brief sense of bewilderment as the defining argument to bar adoption on such grounds. But then, perhaps I am too simplistic about this sort of thing. To me, the primacy placed upon 'same-race' adoptions seems to be the very essence of racism — particularly so in the case of a child who is two weeks old when separated from her natural parents and can, therefore, have absorbed nothing from her indigenous culture, whatever that might be.

The other argument, as you might predict, is that when the child reaches the age of, say, LS, it will feel enraged and embittered at having been divorced from its natural racial heritage and, as a result, sue somebody — i.e., the local council. But nobody can give me the figures as to how often this has actually happened or the results of the consequent court cases when it has happened, if at all. Fear of litigation is becoming a sort of catch-all excuse for all manner of iniquities and stupidities, so perhaps we should not be surprised.

The truth is that something politically weird happened to social-services departments in the mid-1970s, and the process has not yet been arrested — even if there has been an improvement over the last half-dozen years. To show you how far out of kilter with the mainstream these localcouncil departments are, one of the politicians who has been most engaged in battling with them on this issue is Simon Hmilies, the Liberal Democrat MP for Southwark and Bermondsey. I know Simon Hughes, and he is a very good MP indeed, but you could hardly call him a crusty right-winger. He is on the left of his own party, which is well to the left of the other two. But he has been appalled and exasperated by the hurt and trauma needlessly inflicted on children and potential parents by the rigid, doctrinaire policies of his own local council. It was not always the issue of race: sometimes adoptions were turned down because ghastly bourgeois adoptive parents wished to take care of an 'onest, 'appy little working-class child. Too bizarre.

Things are changing, he thinks, and have certainly changed for the better in his own area. But are they changing quickly enough elsewhere? The principle remains in place, even if it is not so rigidly enforced as it once was. These days it is 'preferable' for children to be placed with adoptive parents of the same race. The council which dealt with Njoema told me that race was 'important' but not the 'most important' contributory factor in deciding placement. And they added that they were at this moment finalising the placement of two black children with white adoptive parents. 'You see,' they said, encouragingly, 'it can happen.' Why doesn't it happen all the time?

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.