The recent report on ‘Colour and Citizenship’ was greeted by the press with mild bewilderment and a sigh of relief. Britain apparently is not, after all the fuss, on the edge of racial violence. Three-quarters of the population are demonstrated to be ‘tolerant’ or ‘tolerant-inclined’, and it is precisely in those areas where coloured immigrants actually live that there is most tolerance.
In this respect Colour and Citizenship, like the laborious P.E.P. report on discrimination, is useful. But more than volumes of sheer fact are needed if we are to come to grips with the race problem. We would be mistaken to point out too enthusiastically that the majority of people in this country have been shewn to be tolerant. ‘Tolerance’ is a pretty word and one that is heavily overvalued by the prevailing ideology. In effect it means ‘indifference’. It makes little difference to the established economic system whether people have purple or green wallpaper, whether they worship in Anglican churches or synagogues, whether they sleep with members of the same sex or not. These are matters of indifference to capital organization and only a paranoid will be really intolerant of the options that people make. In other circumstances those choices could become significant. Only a minority of the population (10 per cent) are prejudiced in the strictly defined sense of Colour and Citizenship and for many of those it is apparently a symbolic issue (like the members of the Conservative Party in Surbiton—where there are some hundred black people out of a population of over 60,000—who wish to replace their liberally minded M.P. with a supporter of Enoch Powell).