From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence

Abstract

Nearly two decades separate the Report by Lord Scarman which brought the race riots of 1981 to some sort of official conclusion,1 from the Report by Sir William Macpherson which in 1999 concluded the Official Inquiry into the death of the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence.2 These have been momentous decades in the history of race and the future of Britain as a multicultural society. The routine way to assess this period is to ask whether, taking one thing with another, things haven't gotten better on the racerelations front? This way of framing the question assumes not only that some simple answer can be given, but that the verdict will be positive. The question, however, is not amenable to such simplistic optimisms. It is better to see this period as defined by two more recent events, which stubbornly refuse to be conjugated one with the other. The first was the 1998 'Windrush' celebrations which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival at Tilbury Docks of the S. S. Empire Windrush the troopship which brought West-Indian service volunteers, on home leave in the Caribbean, back to Britain to be demobbed, and which also carried the first post WorldWar-Two West-Indian civilian migrants. The anniversary was widely construed as marking 'the irresistible rise of multi-ethnic Britain' and became the source of much self-congratulation.3 The second was the Macpherson Inquiry into the attack, at 10.30 in the evening of 22 April 1993, on Stephen Lawrence and Duwayne Brooks, as they waited at a bus-stop in Well Hall Road, Eltham, South London, by five white youths chanting: 'What, what, nigger?' Within sight of several witnesses, Stephen Lawrence was stabbed twice in the chest and died shortly after. The police refused to view the incident as a racial attack, treating Duwayne Brooks, who narrowly escaped with his life, as a suspect; and they failed to arrest anyone for weeks, despite considerable hearsay evidence. Instead, they pursued for several days the wholly unsubstantiated belief that there must have been a fight, somehow involving the two black boys. When five white youths were finally arrested, the identification collapsed and charges were abandoned. Following two internal reviews (the first, which exonerated the Metropolitan Police's handling of the original affair, later described by Macpherson as 'effectively indefensible'),4 the Inquiry found that the Met's handling of the affair 'was marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership by senior officers'.5 The incompetence exposed day after day, as the whole police construction of the events collapsed before the eyes of press and public was indeed staggering. But, Macpherson insisted in 1999, the incompetence could only be explained by 'pernicious and persistent institutional racism'.