Beyond the tower of babble

Blog post by Karim Murji, University of West London, UK

My Identities article, ‘The BBC, public intellectuals, and the making of Five Views of Multiracial Britain’, centres on a series of five television programmes made by the BBC in 1978 and subsequently published as a slim booklet by the Commission for Racial Equality. This is a piece of media and socio-political history though re-viewing it in light of  recent events reveals  some notable contrasts about public intellectuals and the media/the BBC then and now.
 
In August 2024 widespread rioting took place in towns and cities, largely in England though there were also some in Northern Ireland and in Wales. Some of the locations were Aldershot, Birmingham, Blackburn, Blackpool, Bolton, Bristol, Darlington, Hartlepool, High Wycombe, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Nottingham, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Preston, Rotherham, Southport, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Tamworth and Weymouth.

The participants or rioters were overwhelmingly white men, and the core driver appears to have been opposition to migrants and migration. It is widely thought the events followed from the stabbing of several people in Southport, including the fatality of three young girls. On social media this was speedily and falsely attributed to a migrant, with a fabricated Muslim name appearing frequently. A huge policing effort followed by swift justice contained the events, after more than 1500 arrests and nearly 1000 charges.
 
As routine, a huge amount of media and online commentary  about these events followed. In previous work on the 2011 riots in Britain I argued that riots – which are essentially messy and chaotic events – tend to produce preferred readings that match the political inclinations of the speaker/writer. A predominant theme in anti-racist responses has been to see it as the violent public expression of the hostile anti migrant environment created initially by the Conservative government and which is now become the norm in mainstream British politics. This is supported by the ‘stop the boats’ and ‘we want our country back’ chants by the rioters, echoing the political rhetoric was the Conservative government that was deposed in July 2024. On the other hand, broadly right wing commentators maintain that the events are a failure of politics to take seriously the British public's concerns about migration in recent years, and the multiculturalism they say has been enforced on the British nation over more than 50 years. This is re-tread of the tropes of the Brexit movement and the idea of ‘the left behind’ working class, where ‘British’ is coded as white.
 
One way of thinking about what a public intellectual is someone who holds up a mirror to society,  challenges orthodoxy and invites  it to reflect on its condition in ways that may be uncomfortable. Yet all commentators, of the right and left, now think they are challenging orthodoxy, sometimes in the name of ‘free speech’.  And who is this war of words, a babble of competing voices, counts as a public intellectual?  Instant commentary provides an outlet to confirm or reaffirm an already existing viewpoint, what its intellectual content is arguable. What follows from that is a kind of echo chamber where people only hear the views they already think they agree with. There is no ‘public’, just a series of fragmented publics. 
 
Thus a striking contrast between now and the time of Five years of Multiracial Britain is that the latter took place in a time when there were only three television channels in Britain and obviously before the Internet and social media. The speakers were broadcasting rather than narrowcasting; a limited bandwidth perhaps made it easier to identify and to act as public intellectuals. Now, a random tweet from someone with few followers on social media can go viral; people actively use various digital platforms to provide commentary.
 
The academic speakers in Five Views – John Rex, Stuart Hall, Bhikhu Parekh and Alan Little – had free rein to decide what aspect of race and racism they would discuss. Even though the Enoch Powell speech had been made ten years before this series, its linking of race-crime- immigration-nation was still powerful in the political climate of the time. As the 2024 rioters targeted mosques as well as hotels where it is thought that migrants are being housed temporarily, racism is clearly a significant factor in the events. There has been much criticism of politicians calling this just ‘thuggery’, or sometimes ‘far right thuggery’. The reluctance to name it as racism is though more notable in the stance of the BBC.  For much of the time during August 2024 the BBC has referred to the riots as ‘protests’, or ‘anti-migrant protests’, indicating either a blind spot or a simple fear of being drawn into the culture wars.
 
So while we have more public space and more commentators than ever, paradoxically the outcome feels less informed and deliberative.
 
Again the contrast with the 1970s is striking because each of the five speakers, despite their very different political and theoretical orientations, criticised governments for the state of race relations at the time. Perhaps remarkably the idea of BBC balance was never considered in this series. As I show in the article this was because the series was treated as adult education and it was produced by a somewhat marginal part of the BBC. Like other initiatives (such as the Open Door series) these voices from provided resources to understand and analyse racism in Britain, for and to publics beyond the academy. While the context has changed the model this offers is instructive: The challenge for all those of us who seek to combat racism is to find ways of engaging publics with rational and robust evidence based arguments. 

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​Image credit: Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article:
Murji, Karim. (2024). The BBC, public intellectuals, and the making of Five Views of Multi-Racial Britain. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2392975   OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities:

​​‘My Britain is fuck all’ zombie multiculturalism and the race politics of citizenship

​Invoking racism in the public sphere: Two takes on national self‐criticism

Whiteness, populism and the racialisation of the working class in the United Kingdom and the United States