4 - A Telling Absence

Summary

Chapter 4 explores a more marginalised interpretation of modernisation, which foregrounded race and multiculturalism. Throughout the late twentieth century, the left wrestled with a growingly multiracial society and the rise of both the far right and a more self-confident anti-racist movement in post-colonial Britain. This profoundly shaped the Labour Party, which this chapter illustrates by exploring the 1980s ‘Black Sections’ controversy. Yet, there were only scattered arguments that linked either antiracism or multiculturalism to ‘modernisation’. This chapter explores some isolated explorations of antiracism as modernisation, notably by Ken Livingstone, and explains their intellectual context. However, it also explains why they stalled, stressing institutional and electoral factors, but also the growing discomfort among anti-racist movements with concepts like modernisation. Thus, ‘modernisation’ only became consistently linked with ‘multiculturalism’ in the 2000s, and even then, this association was hotly contested. The implications for Blair’s governments of this absence of race and multiculturalism in 1990s discourses of modernisation are explored at the end of the chapter.