ABSTRACT
This chapter details how the ideological forces were brought into play against three initiatives concerning racism. First by 'loony left' councils in the 1980s; Second by the newly elected Labour government in 1997; and the third, by Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain at the turn of the millennium. During the 1980s, Conservative politicians and newspapers routinely argued that black unrest was stirred up by 'agitation', rather than fuelled by justified grievances. Chief amongst the sources of this alleged 'agitation' was the 'race relations industry', and, in particular, the philosophy of anti-racism. What emerged from their writings, as Paul Gordon has argued, was 'not just a campaign against anti-racism, but a campaign which used as its means a fertile mixture of intellectual dishonesty, fabrication, smear, innuendo, half-truth and selection'. Indeed, at its most extreme, anti-anti-racism did not simply imply that racism did not matter, but, rather, that it did not actually exist.
