National Review Online, April 23, 2001

"We walked into an almighty ambush," sighed a senior Tory aide to the London Daily Telegraph, "it was a stitch-up that came right out of the blue." Well, he was half-right, at least. The latest blow to hit Britain's embattled Conservative opposition was indeed the result of an ambush, but to suggest that it came "out of the blue" shows a disturbing level of naïveté in a party that will likely have to contest a general election within the next few weeks (the current speculation is that the vote will be held on June 7th). The origins of this new crisis lie in a pre-election "compact" signed in March by all Britain's party leaders, including William Hague of the Conservatives. The compact had been drawn up by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), a publicly funded and, allegedly, non-partisan body that has the task of supervising race relations in Britain. As Mr. Hague would have done well to remember, three out of the CRE's 14 commissioners are members of the Labour Party (one sits on the party's executive committee), and another six have quasi-official jobs that depend on the Labour government's powers of patronage. The CRE's well-paid chairman, a former chief executive of a left-wing London borough, was himself appointed by Labour's interior minister.

The wording of the compact is largely anodyne, and therein lies the trap. The signatories committed themselves (and their parties) to reject "all forms of racial violence, racial harassment and unlawful racial discrimination." Fair enough, you might think, except that these activities are already illegal, and best left to the police to handle. Asking politicians to "reject" such behavior ought, therefore, to be as meaningless as requesting them to disavow murder, theft, and kidnapping. By producing a document that singles out these "racial" offenses, the CRE is implying that there is something, potentially, in the behavior of Britain's mainstream political parties that could give rise to just such criminal conduct. That's a ridiculous contention, yet, by signing the compact, William Hague seemed to agree with its fraudulent premise.

In so doing, he paved the way for his current difficulties. To make the situation worse, Mr. Hague's signature was never, by itself, going to be enough to satisfy a race-relations lobby always ready to tar the Tories as racist. It is no surprise, therefore, except, it would seem, to the Conservative leadership, that the CRE promptly moved the goal posts.

The commission is now calling on all MPs and parliamentary candidates to sign the document. Its website is naming (and, it hopes, shaming) those who refuse. The first names featured on the website were all Conservatives.

Is Mr. Hague now expected to discipline the rebels for refusing to subscribe to a document that is now, apparently, party policy?

It would be an embarrassing predicament at the best of times, and for a party lagging in the polls by twenty points, now is not the best of times. The CRE is claiming that it is only a coincidence that it decided to publicize this list at the same time that the Labour foreign minister came out with a major speech linking the Tory party to racism.

One appalled former commissioner, Raj Chandran, a Conservative, appears to be not so sure. He has now accused the organization of acting as "a political arm of the Labour party." Meanwhile, more Conservatives are saying that they will not add their names to what one MP has called this "loathsome and offensive" compact. Others, however, have been happy to sign.

The result has been a disaster for the Tories as a party, and for Mr. Hague personally. Those who wish to portray the Conservatives as incurably racist will have been given more ammunition. Others will see the spectacle of a divided party, an image that is, traditionally, electoral poison in the UK. William Hague himself cannot win. He either signed a document in which he did not believe, in which case he is unprincipled, or he has signed a document which he cannot persuade his party to support, in which case he is weak. Ominously, perhaps, one of the Conservatives who has said that he will not sign is Michael Portillo, the Tory finance spokesman and a likely challenger for the leadership if the election goes badly.

It would have been far better for the Conservative leader to have rejected the compact in the first place, while, of course, reiterating his condemnation of racist politics. There would, to be sure, have been some controversy, but it would have been a controversy where Mr. Hague could have set the terms of the debate in a way in which he was more likely to prevail.

He could have begun with the wording of the document itself, which did not confine itself to the clear-cut, if implicitly insulting, text mentioned above. Amongst other things, the agreement goes on to call on parties not to publish any materials, which might "reasonably be expected" to lead to racial conflict. Reasonably be expected by whom? As U.S. Attorney-General John Ashcroft has discovered, when it comes to the finding of racist intent, the notion of "reasonable" is a highly elusive concept, and one that is never defined in a manner favorable to those outside the PC establishment.

In dealings with the public, the compact obliges signatories to do nothing that could "stir up" racial hatred. Again, "stir up" in the opinion of whom? Taken to its extreme, that could be analogous to requiring the GOP to do nothing that would "stir up" Al Sharpton.

This vague wording, and the opportunity that its subjective criteria give for abuse, should have been denounced at the time for what it was, a crude piece of political theater designed to interfere with the electoral process and, specifically, a partisan attempt to squash debate on what is potentially a very damaging issue for Labour, its failure to handle the issue of bogus asylum seekers into the UK. There were 100,000 applicants for asylum into the UK last year alone of which, many, perhaps the majority, were fraudulent. For various reasons, not the least of which is the need of the Labour party to preserve its appeal to ethnic minority voters, these applications are being dealt with in a lax, slovenly, and disorganized manner, an approach that only guarantees that there will be yet more such bogus "refugees" in future.

Labour has tried to distract attention from the substance of Tory attacks on this shambles, by claiming, in essence, that such criticism is inherently racist. It is a clever, if dishonest, strategy, and it is not difficult to see how the CRE, given a mandate to police election-time propaganda lest it "stir up" racism, could provide useful assistance. It is also a strategy that reveals a profound contempt for the intelligence of the British electorate, a contempt that the CRE appears to share.

For the CRE is effectively arguing that, despite a long tradition of ignoring demagogues, racist or otherwise, Britain's voters need protecting from themselves. Claiming to be shocked--shocked!--by the current uproar, CRE's director of policy and communications has said that all the organization was trying to do was to "broker" an agreement between the parties and to "set a standard for the debate about race and race relations in the election." What he seems to have forgotten is that in a democracy there is no need for an unelected mediator to set the agenda for what may or not be included in the dialogue between politicians and their electorate.

What a shame that Mr. Hague did not choose to point this out back in March.