The double rise of institutional racism in Britain, once from the late 1960s and then in the late 1990s – is an extraordinary example of an idea moving from a radical or revolutionary movement into social science (Chapter Four), and then from the margins into the mainstream, becoming part of public policy initiatives that focused on institutions rather than on individuals and on structures as well as processes (Chapter Five). In spite of its prominence following the publication of the Macpherson report (1999), in the years after that, successive Labour governments are thought to have lost their early focus on racism, due to a number of events. One was the 2001 riots in towns and cities in northern England (Cantle 2001), which promulgated the idea that people of Muslim backgrounds were leading ‘parallel lives’, where they rarely mixed with white communities. Particularly under David Blunkett as Home Secretary this led to policies to develop community cohesion – a theme that persisted 15 years on in the name of ‘integration’ (Bassel 2016, Casey 2016). Another reason was the ‘9/11’ terrorist attack on the US that heralded a long ‘war on terror’, overseas and ‘at home’, in which Islam has often been portrayed as an ‘enemy within’ the West, as well as a battleground of ideas about reason, progress, western and British values, and the limits of liberalism. An additional element was the rise of intersectional and diversity politics which, intentionally or otherwise, was seen as ‘diluting’ the politics of race equality, as Stephen Lawrence's mother implies (see the Foreword in Hall et al 2009).

At an organisational level, as I showed in Chapter Five, a shift away from race may have started earlier than any of these, as the response to attempted bombings by a far-right extremist in multiracial areas of London led the Metropolitan Police into targeting hate crimes. Thus, although a policy thrust behind institutional racism was nominally in place for many years, ‘the end of institutional racism’ began almost as soon as it was in its heyday in a period from 1999 to 2000. Yet it is part of the paradox of the politics of institutional racism that, for all the difficulties in the term (see Chapters Four and Five), it persists into the current day.