Swraj Paul breaks ranks, criticises anti-race pledge

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, APRIL 22. As the slanging match over race worsened over the weekend generating more bad temper across the political divide, the Tories got support from an unexpected quarter as for the first time an important Asian and pro-Labour voice echoed their criticism of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE).

Lord Swraj Paul, India-born industrialist and a Labour peer, broke ranks with the party to ridicule the Commission's anti-race pledge, which requires all parties and MPs to promise not to play the race card in the coming general election.

He called it a ``farce'', arguing that forcing people to sign pledges was no way to promote multi-culturalism - an argument used by several Tories to justify their refusal to put their name on the pledge.

``This whole business of signing, not signing; naming, shaming, it is a farce,'' he told The Sunday Times, criticising the Commission for putting on its website the names of MPs who had not signed the pledge.

``It is something that if you want to do, fine, if you don't want to, stuff it,'' he added.

This is exactly the line which the shadow chancellor, Mr. Michael Portillo, took on Friday when he refused to sign the pledge, saying that his outspoken commitment to multi-culturalism ``speaks much more than signing bits of paper''.

The Tories have accused the Commission of ``blackmailing'' MPs into endorsing the pledge, pointing out that there was no need for individual MPs to sign it once their party leaders had signed it.

Commentators said that the remarks of Lord Paul, whom The Sunday Times described as an ``unofficial government envoy to the Indian subcontinent'', were likely to intensify the debate over race, already turning into a major election issue.

The Commission also drew flak from a former commissioner, Dr. Raj Chandran, who was quoted in The Sunday Telegraph as saying that it had become a political arm of the Labour Party.

``Labour members dominate the organisation and have close connections with inner sanctum of the

government... It cannot be a coincidence that (the Foreign Secretary) Robin Cook made his silly chicken tikka masala speech and two days later the CRE releases the names of Tories refusing to sign the race pledge,'' he said.

Mr. Cook's speech, attacking the Tories for stoking racism, has not gone down well even with Labour supporters and his celebration of the chicken tikka masala as a symbol of Britain's multi-culturalism has struck them as trivialising an important issue.

Sir Herman Ouseley, a former CRE chairman and currently a member of a Home Office panel, thought his speech was ``demeaning some of the issues in the way in which he addressed them.''

It was also criticised by the mother of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager whose murder by racists has become a reference point for the anti-racist campaign by Labour.

``It (the popularity of chicken tikka masala) doesn't really mean anything. A racist can sit down and have a pint and a curry and go outside and start slagging off and calling people `Paki'.

They don't seem to see the link between what they are eating and their behaviour... They enjoy a curry but they do not relate the two together,'' Mrs. Doreen Lawrence said in arguably the most incisive comment on Mr. Cook's tinted view of chicken tikka's multi-cultural magic.

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