Nationalist discourse and exclusionary tolerance

1. Nationalist discourse and exclusionary tolerance Dr Georgie Wemyss g.wemyss@surrey.ac.uk

2. Britishness and Belonging • Wider study investigating politics of belonging in contemporary Britain. • Exploring cultural processes whereby a dominant notion of Britishness is asserted and reasserted. • ‘British culture’ is analysed as a flexible dominant discourse, able to shift to accommodate challenges over time and space. • Focus on how a keyword, ‘tolerance’ works in combination with other discursive elements to give what I define as ‘the dominant white liberal discourse’ the flexibility necessary to maintain dominance when challenged by competing discourses associated with subordinate groups.

3. Toleration as a Practice? • ‘Toleration’ and ‘tolerance’ have a vast literature, especially in political theory. • Political theorists tend to focus on ‘toleration’ as a ‘practice’. For example Walzer and predecessors focused on the different possible institutional and legal arrangements of ‘toleration’. • Michael Walzer 1997 On Toleration focused on 5 regimes of toleration.

4. Rainer Forst (political theorist) views toleration as a contested concept: • The permission concept: The authority gives qualified permission to members of minority to live according to their beliefs so long as minority accept their subordinate position eg 1629 Toleration Act • The respect concept: Tolerating parties recognise each other in reciprocal ”horizontal” way. eg ”mutual toleration”

5. Political theory tended to approach toleration from above. How a ‘liberal state’ should institutionalise ‘toleration’. From the perspective of the ‘tolerators’ This approach has sometimes homogenized minority groups, reified ‘cultures’ and ignored struggles within minority groups. My approach closer to: Wendy Brown’s (Regulating Aversion) far reaching analysis of tolerance as a mode of national and transnational governmentality.

6. Locating dominant white liberal discourse. • Theoretical framework constructed out of the distinct analyses of power developed by Foucault and Gramsci. • Combine Foucault's theories on discourse with Gramsci's writing on hegemony in order to locate and identify white liberal discourse and explore how it works. • How do members of different social groups accept, manipulate or contest dominant discourse of ‘British culture?

7. ‘Tolerance’ as contested keyword in dominant discourse I explore ‘tolerance’, as keyword, central to white liberal discourse and the maintenance of cultural hegemony in Britain. I map its shifting meanings in the context of microprocesses of power embodied in the day-to-day discourses and practices of people in east London and Britain. ‘tolerance’ and ‘intolerance’ work in white liberal discourse, not as antonyms, but as mobilising metaphors, constituents of a semantic cluster in the dominant white liberal discourse.

8. 4 elements of dominant white liberal discourse. 1.Privileges and naturalises ‘white’ experience, making ‘white’ subject invisible by normalising it. 2. Asserts particular historical narratives and suppresses alternative histories, including of violence of European colonialism. 3. Constructs ‘white’ as a category (or subcategory eg ‘East Ender) which ‘others’ may ‘aspire’ to. 4.Global, with internally differentiated discursive formations. ‘Tolerance’ central to all 4.

9. How tolerance works? • How ‘tolerance’ is understood as a positive value • Who has the power to grant or remove ‘tolerance’ • Who are the shifting categories of ‘tolerators’ and ‘tolerated’? • How it works flexibly to both include and exclude different categories of people • How is ‘tolerance’ contested by the ‘tolerated’?

10. As a keyword central to the marketing strategy of the ‘East End’ • Leadership attempt to add more inclusive meanings to 'The East End' and 'East Enders' in the dominant discourse. • Cluster of words that included 'diversity',' rich culture' 'friendly‘, 'multiculture‘, cosmopolitan and 'tolerance' to describe 'The East End' and 'East Enders'. • All the words appear to have positive meanings associated with including people from different backgrounds.

11. The dominant discourse appeared to shift to include more diverse categories of people as 'East Enders‘. • But the detail used to picture or describe who the essential 'East Enders' were, remained the same and continued to exclude non-white residents. • In these contexts, tolerance works within its semantic cluster to include ‘white east enders’ as the ‘tolerators’ and the ‘multicultural’ subjects as the ‘tolerated’ in the new, rebranded East End.

12. Opinion polls • Opinion poll in Sunday Express concerned the ‘reality of racism’ in a country with ‘a good reputation for race tolerance’. A continuum constructed with tolerance at the positive end and racism at the opposite, negative extreme. • Interviewees’ responses were used demonstrate that different categories of people are either more 'tolerant' or more 'racist'. • Self categorisation of ‘tolerators’ (‘we’ are tolerant, they are ‘racist’. ‘We’ tolerate’ ‘them’)

13. Letters to the press • Letter to the local paper ELA re BNP councillor elected because: • ‘ the 'tolerance' of the ‘people of East London had been undermined’ • . The letter did not directly say what east Londoners were 'tolerant' of, nor who or what they were 'undermined' by. meaning was that the people of 'East London' were the established white population who were being undermined by the Bengali population and their supporters. One example of many where the dominant discourse to assert the 'tolerance' of East End- British people in the face of those who test that 'tolerance'.

14. Challenges to ‘tolerance’ • Tolerance of what? Crime? Black people? • I don’t know if that is a good word to use … ‘We accept Black people. We accept Asian people. Do you f***! This country is not tolerant. Listen, if this country was tolerant we wouldn’t get this harassment. (Samir). • I don’t think the tolerance is going to work unless you put in positive action. You can’t just talk about it. You can’t just let people say what they like, it doesn’t mean tolerance. Tolerance doesn’t mean that you can deny somebody else’s right , you can kill somebody, you can abuse somebody. This is not tolerance. It should be fair and everybody should have a fair right to do the things they want to do. They shouldn’t be victimised by other people for the sake of tolerance. You know, we are tolerating all the racism (Monir). • The normative cultural processes of the dominant white discourse are visible most clearly to those it dominates or does violence to. Having experienced verbal racism and violent racist attacks, both Samir and Monir clearly challenge the dominant construction of a ‘tolerant Britain’. The subject of Asian tolerance was racism. • The shifting subjects of tolerance evident in their discourses expose the meaning of 'tolerance' as putting up with something unpleasant: Racism, crime and black people. However neither question the dominant discourse of tolerance of ethnic minorities being a positive national aspiration.

15. Shifting categories of tolerators and tolerated • Winston Churchill MP made three speeches about immigration within the space of 4 months in 1993. • In each speech the groups included as ‘tolerators’ and excluded as ‘tolerated’ shifted in response to challenges and audience.

16. To Bolton Conservative Association28.5.93 • We must call a halt to the relentless flow of immigrants into the country, especially from the Indian sub-continent. The population of many areas of our northern cities is now well over 50% immigrant and Moslems claim that there are now more than 2 million of their co-religionists in Britain. Mr Major seeks to reassure us with the old refrain: “ There’ll always be an England …” and promises us that, 50 years on, spinsters will still be cycling to Communion of Sunday mornings – more likely the Muezzin will be calling Allah’s faithful to the High Street mosque! …a halt must be called – and urgently if the British way of life is to be preserved

17. To Association of Jewish ex-Servicemen 19.7.93 We must ask ourselves why such attacks are increasing in number and what steps can be taken to minimise them. In this regard we must not ignore, or sweep under the carpet, the impact on our society and the British way of life of the arrival in our midst over the past 40 years of 3 to 4 million immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. The unhappiness – indeed bitterness – of the indigenous population runs very deep in those areas of the inner cities where the native English find that they have become the ‘ethnic minority’ in their own land and where their children have to attend schools which, not infrequently, are made up 80% or more of ethnic minorities. • The toleration shown by the overwhelming majority of British people to the establishment of a sizeable ethnic minority in their midst has been nothing short of remarkable. But the relentless flow of tens of thousands of immigrants – both legal and illegal - to this country each year risks breaching the limits of toleration…

18. Breakfast with Frost 19.9.93 • One has to have regard particularly to the very large scale of illegal immigration, which according to senior immigration officers exceeds by a large measure those allowed in legally. This adds to the pressure in these communities and provokes reactions … No-one is seeking to justify these reactions, far from it, but they are inevitable, so it’s very important we stop adding to the pressures in our society and have a much stronger policy in dealing with illegal immigration

19. ‘Tolerance’ central to 4 elements in white liberal discourse: • 1. Tolerance works to normalize ‘white’ category. ‘Tolerators’ invisible to themselves, natural occupiers of top of the hierarchy of belonging. • 2. Tolerance works to assert particular historical narratives and suppress alternative histories including the histories of colonial violence and violence against minorities. • 3. Tolerance shifts to include different categories of people as the ‘tolerators’ and ‘tolerated’. Whilst the notion of tolerance remains the same, its subjects (the tolerated), and those who have the power to tolerate, change. It works to exclude and include different categories of people into distinct levels of the hierarchy of belonging. • 4. Tolerance is global. Its roots in 17th century liberal philosophy, central to the dominant nationalist discourses of the ex-English settler colonies. White liberal discourse is global, with internally differentiated discursive formations. The contextual mobilisation of tolerance is integral to those discursive formations. .

20. Tolerance and Power mobilisation of tolerance raises points for understanding how the dominant white liberal discourse works: • 1.Tolerance constructs minority groups as undesirable subjects whilst working as a common sense positive national quality in the dominant discourse. • 2. Tolerance obscures the violence of racism from those who have no experience of it. • 3.Flexibility of ‘tolerance’ contributes towards the white liberal discourse sustaining its dominance. Neither the category of those who have the power to tolerate nor the subjects of their’ tolerance’ are fixed. Each are sites of struggle between competing groups . • Understanding which groups have the power to be tolerant or intolerant is central to understanding how the white liberal discourse retains its dominance.