The years hunched around 1990 were a tumultuous epoch for British political and cultural life. A decade dominated by Thatcherism and the monetarisation of social values was brought into disgraceful decline by Hillsborough, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, a fatwa, the iron lady's ignominious shuffle off centre stage and a Bradford headmaster's unexpected emergence as the champion of Middle England.

It is the last event that I want to seize on as the defining moment in the convergent crisis of mainstream anti-racism and British socialism. This crisis had been given voice in Paul Gilroy's landmark obituary ‘The End of Anti-Racism’ (1990) which argues that sequestering anti-racist energies in the stifling confines of local government has divested it of the dynamism, genuine radicalism and grass-roots involvement that had made it a political imperative in the first place. It was important both as a riposte and a preemptive strike against a resurgent centre-Right critique of multiculturalism and anti-racism.

Municipal anti-racism's dictatorial edicts on best practice were easily seized on as ‘moralistic excesses’ on what constituted best behaviour. The backlash from the conservative heartlands, though ostensibly an assault on the ‘absurdities of antiracist orthodoxy’, jeopardised the legitimacy of anti-racism as a worthwhile political project – especially in the absence of other models of how its objectives could be met.

Gilroy identified anti-racism's crisis in the confluence of a simplistic rendering of its objectives, its isolation from the larger scope of anti-racist movements, and its organisational reliance on the Labour party and local authorities. Anti-racism had become abstracted from other political antagonisms and, using Gilroy's words, had become largely perceived to be ‘epiphenomenal’.