Racial thinking in the British Labour Party

Lentze, Georg (1997) Racial thinking in the British Labour Party. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

This thesis is a report about my investigations into racial thinking in the British Labour Party between October 1994 and July 1997. The aim of this report is to make a contribution to the debate about racial thinking in British society and beyond by means of a detailed study of racial thinking in the specific institutional setting of the British Labour Party. My research project involved the collection and analysis of Labour Party documentation dating back to the 1950s; the systematic monitoring of a range of newspapers and journals published in the 1980s and the 1990s; the attendance at various Labour Party and antiracist conferences that took place between 1995 and 1997; and the monitoring of Labour's 1997 general election campaign. It also involved the study of historical and theoretical literature on the issues of antisemitism, imperialism, nationalism, racism and antiracism.

In the first chapter of this report, I set out how I came to do a research project on racial thinking in the British Labour Party and how I went about it. There follows a theoretical and historical chapter, in which I explain my understanding of concepts such as 'racial classification', 'racial category', 'racial thinking', 'racism', and 'ethnicity'. I also describe how I think racial thinking in contemporary British society relates to the historical developments of Christianism, European imperialism, nationalism and antiracism.

The following chapters address the issues of Labour's entanglement in racial thinking in the era of nationalism and in the name of antiracism respectively. In these chapters, I suggest that the British Labour Party is not only rather nationalistic, but that their brand of British nationalism is also racialised in a number of ways; that Labour propagates flawed theories of racism; that their antiracist policies are patchy; and that, nevertheless, there are a number of ways in which the Labour Party as a whole as well as individual Labour Party MPs and MEPs have made valuable contributions to the antiracist movement in British society.

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