This chapter explores the transition from the politics of identity to what we define as ’the unfinished politics of race’. It moves on from the substantive accounts of specific types of mobilisations to the broader transformations that characterise the current conjuncture, in which we see a continually shifting relationship between counter publics and alternative public spheres on the one hand and the mainstream institutions of society on the other. An important theme in the chapter is an account of the changing political debates on race and multiculturalism in both the Conservative and Labour Parties. This includes a critical analysis of the arguments put forward under the labels of Red Tory and Blue Labour. We argue that these arguments, although they cover a wide range of social and political issues, have been deeply inflected by continual preoccupations about the articulation of a new form of identity politics framed by concerns about race, immigration, and the positioning of whiteness in the current period.

In this chapter, we consider the ways in which these normative framings structure both policy interventions but also ways of thinking about the multicultural nature of contemporary Britain. The work of the Blair Government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion is considered where one of the authors served as a commissioner between 2006 and 2008. The notions of integration and cohesion are considered for the ways in which they, at times, fail to provide a particularly helpful frame for understanding the dynamics of social change, the diachronic rather than synchronic evolution of racialised politics in the United Kingdom, the highly localised restructuring of economy and society that structure the crucibles out of which new diversities emerge.

This chapter outlines the historical background to the present by analysing the transition from empire to multicultural democracy that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. It situates the post-1945 history of race and immigration within a broader frame that includes both the role of race in the wider context and deeper history of the British Empire as well as the national and local experiences of race within the ‘mother country’ over a much longer history. We argue in this chapter that it is simplistic to see the postcolonial period as one that saw the move from empire to multicultural democracy. Rather, we suggest that it is important to provide a conceptual and empirical frame that highlights the ways in which processes of racialisation and exclusion helped to fashion a particular politics around race in British society whose consequences remain with us today. And so, we also outline the conceptual frame that we use in the book to explore the changing spheres of political incorporation that have shaped the position of minorities in British society.

This chapter considers the growth of what we characterise as a transitional public sphere that bridged the private domains of individual struggles against racial attacks, racist practice, and far-right politics with the public domain of mainstream politics. Struggles against racism have often shared an ongoing ambivalence about the imperative to raise profile and move from the margins to the centre of political debate. The need for political autonomy and agency sits, at times, in tension, with the need to build broad alliances and political efficacy. Campaigns demand profile but are always liable to charges of co-optation. The struggle for unity over racial dilemmas sits alongside recognition of the pluralities of intersectional struggles in gender, class, sexuality, diverse ethnicities, and religious faith that at times cross over with linked considerations of legal status of migrants and refugees. In this context, the emergence of a transitional public sphere of antiracism in the 1980s and 1990s is considered through a detailed analysis of this sphere of political action.

This chapter concludes the book by shifting the analysis to three sets of interlinked conversations that seem to frame the current debates about race and migration. We begin by analysing the impact of the ongoing conversation about the position of the United Kingdom within the European Union that led to the decision in the 2016 Referendum to support a strategy of leaving the Union and taking back control of national borders. As several commentators have argued in recent years, the impact of the debates around Brexit is likely to be felt in the coming decade or so as their impact on influencing and shaping both current and future agendas about race and racism become more evident. We then move on to explore the implications of continual efforts to develop and maintain a hostile environment around questions of immigration and belonging to assert control over borders and create a social basis for integrated communities. The final part of this chapter allows us to engage critically with the attempt by some commentators to distinguish racism from those forms of identity that are defined in terms of national citizen preference and racial self-interest.

This chapter explores the growing significance of religious affiliation in shaping the identity politics of racialised minorities. Specifically, the chapter addresses the growing significance of Islam in shaping both the public reaction to religious diversity and how the identity politics of Islamic faith reshaped a very different alternative public sphere. The chapter addresses how intersectionalities of diaspora, race, faith, gender, and geopolitics land in place, in the specific history of the East End of London. The chapter describes how diasporic Bangladeshi politics emerges in a transactional relationship with the local state in the East End. But what it means to be British and Bangladeshi, or white and ‘East Ender’, is subject to significant change at the same time. Racialisation and religion combine to shape both white and British Bangladeshi collective identities in nuanced ways. The chapter argues that what was commonly represented as isolation or withdrawal from the mainstream of political participation by a certain fraction of some minority Bangladeshi demographics was nothing of the sort.

This chapter focuses on struggles to dwell in the city that characterised a strand of both racist practice and responses to it. From attempts to purchase collectively housing to the rarely told stories of organised squatting and the emergence of the black housing movement, the forces of racist exclusion produced a Newtonian response; collective endeavours to claim the right to find somewhere to live in the cities of post-war Britain. These social movements racialised both the claim to dwell in the city and the challenges to patterns of discrimination. But the struggles which emerged from the grassroots and grew over the 1970s and 1980s also in some ways ran their course over time for reasons that are also considered in this chapter.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the key issues that are addressed in the book as a whole. It addesses two key questions that are at the heart of the book. First, what is the current state of racial and ethnic politics in Britain today? Second, how can we locate the forms of racialised politics that have become entrenched in our everyday political institutions within a wider historical frame that traces their development up to the current conjuncture? Addressing these questions against the background of recent trends in British society allows us to explore both the processes that are helping to shape the current conjuncture as well as locating the present in the wider frame of the period from 1945 onwards and likely trends in the future.

This chapter analyses how the geographical scale of the local and the institutional forms of local government have become increasingly significant in understanding the politics of race and ethnicity in contemporary Britain. We suggest that the areas of settlement of migrant communities and minorities are key to understanding the evolution of the invariably unfinished politics of race. These localities, we argue, are characterised both by ongoing mainstream institutional responses to migration and community formation and the struggles, social movements and antiracist solidarities, exclusionary closure and boundary-crossing moments of dialogue, selective ethnic advance and systemic racial disadvantage, individual stories of success and failure. Through exploring these everyday expressions of racialised politics on the ground, we can begin to rethink the processes that have helped to frame the emergence of a new politics of race, shaping how new forms of political mobilisation, engagement, and disengagement are likely to emerge over the coming period.

This chapter addresses the role of culture in the making of political mobilisations around race and migration. Taking its cue from debates about convivial culture, it focuses in particular on how music has provided a medium of connections that network across community campaigns, popular culture, and specific moments in the cultural history of the United Kingdom in the 1990s and 2000s. We argue that as the strange becomes familiar, expressive cultures open new ways of making the politics of race visible, alternative cultures that can have longer-term impacts on how racial politics may cross boundaries and explore and address modes of intolerance.

In this chapter, we move on to describe and analyse the changing contours of race and the political in the second half of the twentieth century. We argue that rather than seeing the politics of race through the lens of the mainstream political sphere, we need to pay close attention to other spheres of politics, particularly in the alternative and transitional spheres that emerged over the past few decades to give voice to the mobilisations of black and minority communities. This in turn links up with the analysis in the substantive chapters of the book that are framed around the often messy and evolving connections between these spheres of political life and culture.