Tory policy chief Letwin sorry for 'racist' Broadwater Farm riot comments
Tory policy chief Letwin sorry for 'racist' Broadwater Farm riot comments
David Cameron's current policy chief, Oliver Letwin, has been criticised for "deeply racist" remarks he made following the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Files from the National Archives, which have just been released under the 30-year rule, show that Mr Letwin - then an adviser to Margaret Thatcher - said "bad moral attitudes" were responsible for major unrest in mainly black inner-city areas, rather than urban deprivation. He also dismissed ministers' proposals to encourage a new class of black entrepreneurs, because they would simply establish businesses in the "disco and drug trade". Mr Letwin issued a statement today apologising for a "badly-worded and wrong" document.
Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder.
In a document co-written with Hartley Booth, who also went on to be a Tory MP, Mr Letwin wrote: "The root of social malaise is not poor housing, or youth 'alienation', or the lack of a middle class. Lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale." David Lammy, a Labour MP who grew up alongside the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, north London, said: "It had nothing to do with moral bankruptcy and everything to do with social decay and the appalling relations between black youths and the police."
Letwin's statement is an indication of how the powerful can be so utterly, utterly out of touch with what's going on.
