Election Night Special

It’s been a good couple of weeks for the press to take umbrage. First there was Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’ prank calls to actor Andrew Sachs: a scandal positively stinking of synthetic outrage spewed forth by people who had never listened to Brand’s program in their lives, and who after this will certainly never listen to it again. This week the window of potential scandal was truncated by the American elections, but the chattering classes still managed to strike gold with not one but two race rows in the same week.

The first was Jeremy Paxman’s truly surreal interview with rapper Dizzee Rascal on a spectacularly vapid special election edition of Newsnight that aired on Wednesday. During the interview, Paxman, inexplicably addressing his guest as “Mr. Rascal,” asked the rapper at one point if he felt British. The very fact that such a question was posed to a Black Briton was latched onto as racist and patronizing. Forget the fact that the subject had been broached by Paxman’s co-interviewee, Baroness Amos, not incidentally Britain’s most successful Black politician. Never mind too that she was actually making a relevant point about the exclusion of ethnic minorities from any British sense of national identity and the potential for problems this can cause.

The second race row of the week was chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor Phillips’ comment that in Britain, a politician like Barack Obama would face “institutional resistance” and “systemic bias” that might inhibit his chances of success. Phillips was promptly misquoted in the press as having referred to “institutional racism” and as a consequence was rhetorically hanged, drawn and quartered in a Labor Party press statement. Again, no attention was paid to the fact that he was making what is actually quite a relevant point, that the more centralized nature of the British constitution means that it is harder for an outsider like Obama to advance to a position of leadership, for reasons of politics as well as of race.

To my mind, the media's reaction to both of these incidents is a shame because they represent a missed opportunity. For two years now the media in the UK have been slavishly following every aspect of the American elections with at least as much enthusiasm as the American press itself, the underlying assumption being, presumably, that whatever happens in America is by its very nature interesting and relevant in Britain today. I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks that this is slightly silly.

As an American I have long found the fixation on my country evinced by the British press to be both bizarre and slightly discomforting. But this failure to find a British angle on the American election is a particularly unfortunate oversight when, as Amos and Phillips have pointed out, Obama's election raises interesting, relevant and even troubling questions about Britain today (even beyond the question, frequently posed, of why British politics is so comparatively boring). Yes, America has made a huge leap forward this week. But not only is it okay to ask whether something like that could happen in Britain – it is absolutely essential.

The press’ fixation on America and its problems, especially as regards race issues, often serves to gloss over problems of race relations here in the UK. American journalist and long-time foreign correspondent Keith Richburg writes in The Observer today that Europe’s concentration on America’s race problems allows Europeans to pretend that their own race problems do not exist. We do not have America’s race problems, the argument essentially goes, therefore we do not have race problems. This is galling not only because it is finger-wagging and hypocritical, but because Europe’s race problems so desperately need addressing.

A much more worthwhile use of Jeremy Paxman’s hour-long Newsnight special might have been a look at the question that, I think, is at the back of many people’s minds on this side of the pond – in today’s hyper-diverse, multicultural, progressive Britain, why hasn’t what happened in the United States on Tuesday happened yet here? And, perhaps much more importantly, why do we have the odd, nagging feeling that it won’t happen here for a very long time?