For months the British secular and religious press had hummed with controversy because a South African cricket team chosen on apartheid lines was due to play in England this summer. Bishops who had no known views on the new morality and who had maintained stoical reticence at rumors of God’s death showed that after all some things are too sacred for silence: there followed the wondrous spectacle of bishop pitted against bishop, expressing themselves on this issue with that deadly English courtesy which can be more terrible than any medieval malediction.
Last year the white South African rugby football team was here. Match after match was marked by uproar. Thousands of police were deployed, hundreds of anti-apartheid demonstrators were arrested. As in recent American and present Ulster and South African occasions, the left wing came under suspicion (what would we do without “subversive elements”?). Then it was noticed that some leading churchmen and a fair proportion of the respectable middle-aged were marching, too. Perhaps the full implications of the Rhodesian tragedy (it is no less) were making themselves felt. The argument that relations with South Africa, never cordial since that country’s withdrawal from the British Commonwealth in 1961, could be improved through sporting links became less convincing in the context of two white teams in competition.
Demands came from many quarters, including the British Council of Churches, that the 1970 cricket tour be canceled. Young hotheads defaced cricket grounds and promised physical disruption of the matches. Freelance entomologists claimed to be breeding locusts, half a million of which would devour the grassy surface so necessary for the game. Kidnap threats were made to cricketing families. The cricket council stood firm, saying cancellation would have to be a government decision—a neat bit of hot-potato-passing to a prime minister who had himself encouraged peaceful demonstrations, but whose party’s bid for reelection for a further term of office was ironically due to be decided on June 18—the very day of the first England-South Africa game.
It should be understood that peaceful demonstration was the object of the majority of protesters, one of whose leaders is David Sheppard, old England cricket captain and new bishop of Woolwich (distinguished from the old by one sports writer who speaks of “the good cricketer, not the bad theologian”). The Wilson government operated brinkmanship to the utmost but finally was driven to “request” that the cricket council cancel the tour. Heady with success, the young non-peaceable protesters plan further action, such as renewed boycott of South African goods. This led to a cartoon in which a father is saying to his hippie offspring. “You’re quite right, son. It’s immoral to live on the earnings of trade with South Africa, and I expect you’ll insist on handing back part of your student grant.”
Disingenuous, yes, but it shows how singlemindedness and myopia sometimes go together. While appreciating the fallacy inherent in diverting attention from one evil by pointing to another, I have grave misgivings about our violent young. Do they show as much compassion for those victimized in Prague as in Pretoria? Do they work less spectacularly and more constructively to improve relations in their own communities? When next the Australian cricket team comes to these islands, will there be demonstrations against that country’s treatment of its aboriginals (one of whom claimed last year that his race’s exclusion from the armed forces was apartheid in reverse)? Indeed, looking round our far-flung British commonwealth of nations, one could find evidence that every color, including white, is somewhere the victim of discrimination.
One does not need to range the world for examples, for they are close at hand; no one comes to this subject with clean hands. Even for many Christians it involves selective indignation, and the temptation to isolate one single evil from its background of a whole fallen world. For years Britain boasted that it had no race problem. Now we are obliged to think differently. The Race Relations Act came into force in 1965, and its provisions were extended in 1968. Honest attempts to observe it and deliberate attempts to evade it have shown how difficult things are.
The authorities have done their best but have at times forsaken imagination for scrupulosity, and a farcical situation has emerged. The Race Relations Act is laudably color blind and cares not whether a man’s origins are Tongan or tartan. An exiled Scottish physician advertised in an English newspaper for a “Scottish daily [domestic] for Scottish family; able to do some plain cooking”—in other words, someone who could prepare porridge properly. The doctor was warned by the race-relations board that an offense had been committed, as the wording displayed racial discrimination. Little wonder that advertisers for French polishers and Siamese cats became neurotic about rushing into print. The board censured a Pakistani who advertised in the window of his own home for an English lodger who could help teach his five children the English language. A well-known columnist complained in his newspaper that after the taxi he had ordered had been appropriated by a Negro, he could not call the latter a thieving scoundrel, though he manifestly was.
A country town not far from London found that 95 per cent of its citizens did not want colored neighbors. Ghettos have sprung up; London has some schools in which children from immigrant families form more than 80 per cent of the enrollment. In East London, “Paki(stani)-bashing” has become a regular sport of youthful thugs known as “skinheads.” Second-generation immigrants are now old and able enough to apply for employment with higher qualification than the white English. The reasons given for rejection by employers will have a familiar ring to Americans: existing staff wouldn’t like it; customers would object; immigrants are reputedly indolent and footloose. The ambivalence of trade-union attitudes in some cases has prompted satirical challenge on the vaunted brotherhood of man.
Needless to say, I’ve done no more than give a few illustrations of something that will trouble Britain deeply and increasingly in years to come. The sting came when an Indian Christian said in a symposium on race: “It is impossible to distinguish in Britain between a Christian and a non-Christian by his behavior. Where the colored immigrant is concerned they all behave alike.” Said one immigrant woman with magnificent charity: “I studied the people. It’s not their fault. It’s the fault of the weather makes them like that.” Take that in conjunction with the Anglican bishop who planned to foil the South African cricketers by having his people pray for rain, and you can see just how muddled the whole thing is.
J. D. DOUGLAS
