by Chris Bayliss, Artillery Row
Social and ideological shifts mean that we face an increasingly divided future
In politics, it can be hard to tell the difference between a passing fad and an emerging orthodoxy. Those who don’t pay too much attention to progressive dogma can find themselves caught out. Ideas we may previously have dismissed as political fashion accessories for radical poseurs can suddenly turn into the kind of inevitability to which we are encouraged to reconcile ourselves.
Ideas like Net Zero made such a transformation, practically overnight — as, briefly, did a bewildering array of concepts relating to gender. Out of all of the radical ideas being touted today, I think “reparations” for transatlantic slavery is the most likely to be next.
Until recently, it was the kind of idea that was indulged in supposedly serious places only because of its harmless outlandishness. It is now being taken deadly seriously, by a number of African and Caribbean governments, the Church of England, and several prominent black British public figures. Polling demonstrates that a broad majority of the British public are, somewhat unsurprisingly, firmly opposed to the idea, other than among the Afro-Caribbean community itself among whom reparations are overwhelmingly popular.
Does support for reparations among British citizens of Afro-Caribbean heritage say anything about their degree of “integration” in British society? My instinctive reaction was that, of course, it did. In an episode of The Critic Show in January, in which Tom Jones and I discussed Samuel Rubenstein’s review of Sir Lenny Henry’s book The Big Payback, I ventured the thought that Sir Lenny coming out for reparations in this manner represented the end of the line for the vision of a supposedly multicultural Britain. Others, however — including those who have no time at all for the reparations campaign — have firmly resisted this, and have insisted we should think about it in political terms, not as an issue of integration.