Racist? My friend Al fought with me against the National Front
THE day I met Alastair Stewart, I’ll confess I had him down as possibly the poshest and, frankly, whitest boy I’d ever come across.
In the radical student circles of the early 1970s, Al dazzled us all — a handsome, eloquent president of the student union who wore tight trousers, see-through shirts and tousled hair with a Byronic flair.
he was lusted after by all the girls I knew, including one or two of those who claimed to be militant lesbians.
That he shared his name with a famous folk- rock singer who had been Paul Simon’s flatmate lent him a louche star quality, and as the son of a high-ranking military man it was obvious he would succeed in whatever he did.
he hadn’t just been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. God had dusted his cutlery with showbiz glitter, too.
All of which made it even more inexplicable that he should take up Left- wing causes, particularly antiapartheid and the then exotic campaign for lesbian and gay equality.
We were both members of the National Union of Students executive and marched shoulder to shoulder on demonstration after demonstration.
We even ventured behind the Iron Curtain to meet communist student leaders, where I discovered that, even if he wasn’t the full Red Menace, Al was far more radical than I was. Indeed, he abandoned his degree studies at Bristol University to take up activism full-time. ONE of my earliest tasks was to haul the notoriously hard-drinking Stewart out of bed — not always his own — in the morning at NUS conferences. he was the ace in the hole in difficult debates, always ready with a stirring speech.
And it was Al who played a crucial role in persuading the NUS to adopt its first ‘no-platform’ policy.
The idea was that student unions should prohibit explicitly racist parties, such as the violently antiimmigrant National Front, from organising on campuses.
Today, in Britain’s far more liberal climate, it is almost impossible to understand why such an apparently draconian approach should be adopted. But we were a different nation then.
The racially charged atmosphere of the time led to clashes on the streets. Soon after Al and I met, a young maths student, Kevin Gately, was killed during a confrontation with a far-Right demo in 1974.
Our targets were not Right-wing students. The student organiser of the National Front studied at my own university, yet I never campaigned for him to be expelled. We simply wanted to keep peace on campus and protect minority students.
Since then, a mixture of extremism and naivety in the student movement has slowly twisted our early idealism into a dangerous academic authoritarianism.
It started in the 1980s with the banning of Conservative politicians on grounds of their supposed racism, and more recently has skirted the depths of liberal fascism with the cancelling of speeches by well-known radical feminists.
Their sin? To maintain that, while trans people should be treated fairly, there is a difference between women born female and those who have chosen to become anatomically female. even if you disagree with them, they surely have the right to say this in public without being accused of ‘transphobia’. To be fair, many people back in the Seventies warned of this Orwellian drift, arguing that freedom of speech would be threatened by the no-platform policy. Preoccupied by the far-Right surge, we ignored them. Al, a committed anti- racist from the start, was one of the key figures in winning students round to support the policy, despite near-universal criticism of it from senior politicians and the media.
To his credit, unlike those of us who had no choice but to be anti-racists, Al took up the cause out of moral conviction, and never wavered.
how ironic, then, that almost half a century later, it is abuse of the no-platform policy that has led to the end of a distinguished 40-year career in TV journalism, the trade where we both made our living.
It has been widely reported that in Al’s Twitter spat with a former Lib Dem council candidate, Martin Shapland (who happens to be black), he used a quotation from Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure that includes the words ‘angry ape’.
The fact that he had tweeted the quote previously to other individuals — some of whom were not black — seems to have passed his critics by. Dismayingly, Mr Shapland’s initial indignant response that the words must have been a racial slur seems to have frightened Stewart’s employers, ITN, into summoning the newsreader to a crisis meeting. And make no mistake, whatever ITN are saying now about a mutually agreed parting, this was a brutal sacking.
It may be that they wanted shot of an older white man anyway, and this provided a convenient excuse. But according to Stewart’s ethnic-minority colleagues, the accusation of wilful prejudice doesn’t bear a second’s scrutiny.
And I know Al well enough to be sure that, had he been asked to apologise to Martin Shapland, he would have done so without hesitation.
Mr Shapland, for his part, says he would have been happy with an apology.
If ITN had needed advice on how to handle this situation, it wouldn’t have taken ten minutes to unearth a story its reporters covered back in 2009 when harvard professor henry Louis Gates, an African-American, was arrested by a Boston police officer on suspicion of trying to break into a house — which turned out to be his own home.
Instead of pillorying the (white) officer, President Obama, a friend of Gates, summoned the two men to a ‘ beer summit’ at the White house, where they admitted they had both made mistakes and shook hands.
It was what Obama used to call a ‘teachable moment’ — proof that, properly handled, a difficult situation can help us all learn how to get along better.
Instead, ITN panicked. The real story here is of a company ready to sacrifice one of its own highly respected journalists without even consulting the allegedly offended party. HAVING known Al all my adult life, I imagine that he was carried away with his own rhetoric — he never could resist an oratorical flourish. My guess is it never crossed his mind that this tweet could be taken as a racial slur.
he has admitted that the remark was misjudged. Maybe. But it isn’t racist, unless you’re desperate to take it that way.
A cursory inspection of Mr Shapland’s Twitter account shows that he delights in twitting white people about their racial ‘privilege’, and I’m guessing he rather enjoyed the to- and- fro with a celebrity.
But Mr Shapland doesn’t strike me as some sort of snowflake easily wounded by 17th- century banter, however offensive.
he has since said he never wanted Al to be sacked. I suspect he thinks that ITN overreacted badly.
To be honest, most people of colour grow up having to deal with more substantial incoming fire than a fully loaded iambic pentameter.
We black folk are pretty used to detecting racist intent. We can tell when the warm cup of welcome hides the poison of bigotry, and we know when to ignore it and when to kick up a fuss.
But there are more fundamental issues at play here.
That a hammer or a chisel may
be used to cause harm to another person does not mean we forbid carpenters from using these legal implements. The job of a journalist is to tell the truth as he or she sees it, and the fundamental tools of our trade are words.
Increasingly, PC thought police are cruising the social-media landscape looking for language crimes, and every day some phrase or metaphor is removed from the writer’s armoury.
The censor’s pen has been plucked from the Lord Chancellor’s hand and seized by the Twitter mob, and their ceaseless search for racism in virtually any utterance or image is gradually depriving us of the means to tell the story of our world properly.
This matters because the real victims of this reign of terror will not be people like Alastair or, indeed, me.
Yesterday, I spoke to a woman who lost her job with a large trade union for contributing to an academic paper.
Her crime was to argue that women prison officers should not be forced to strip- search anatomically male prisoners just because they have declared themselves female and maintain that they have the right to be admitted to women’s jails.
ACAMBrIDGE researcher, Noah Carl, lost his post simply because he wrote for a journal of which some of his colleagues disapproved. An Oxford Professor, Selina Todd, is now protected by security guards for fear of disruption by those who oppose her ideas on gender.
These examples — and there are many more — are a scandal in a free society. Increasingly, Nineteen Eighty-Four- style self- censorship is dominating workplaces.
You may well say that Alastair Stewart and I are reaping what we sowed with our youthful radicalism. But this is not a moment for seminar-room point- scoring. We should not underestimate the seriousness of what is going on.
Earlier this week, we marked the terrible events of the Holocaust. I do not think it is extreme to recall that long before Auschwitz and other concentration camps were established, the silencing of minorities was seen as a phase that would subside, given time and reasonable voices.
But the words of Pastor Martin Niemoller still echo powerfully down the decades: ‘First they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist . . . then they came for the socialists . . . and then they came for the Jews. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.’
My friend Al is unlike me in as many ways as you can imagine. But I dare not pass by on the other side when he is treated in this way.
If they come for him today, I know that tomorrow they will be coming for me.