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This paper develops a critique of the politics of race and multiculturalism under New Labour. It argues that as a political formation New Labour is fraught with incommensurable impulses and commitment with regard to issues of multiculturalism, nationalism, racial justice and racism. While there have been palpable shifts and important new legislative initiatives, one of the consequences is that the project of assimilation has been reinvigorated under New Labour. This in turn leaves the normative whiteness that colonises British institutions and political life intact.

The manner in which academic protocols fraudulently prohibit certain textual strategies whilst celebrating others is addressed. In particular it is suggested that, in focusing on aesthetics, reflexive anthropologists evade rather than resolve questions both of ethics and of epistemology. This contention can be understood in terms of the responsibility of the author/scriptor with reference to the presence of anger in academic prose and to The Satanic Verses controversy. This paper questions the manner in which anger routinely disqualifies writing from academic status. In talking theoretically about presentational style, I want to address substantively issues of research ethics. What angers me about ethnographic work generally is that a sustained vogue for reflexivity so commonly casts a crisis of representation in terms of the relation between subject matter and narrative to the cost of consideration of the relation between representation and audience. The smugness of the academy sits comfortably beside ostentatious angst over the academic method. Reflexivity decays into narcissism. What angers me specifically about ethnography in geography is that in the identity crises of everyday rites of credentialism geographers cast themselves as an ‘Other’, pursuing an elusive vogue in social theory, sociology, or, perhaps this week, anthropology. Yet ethnography is neither a passport to a ringside view of the exotic nor a form of methodological avant gardeism. Such issues are discussed here in the context of my own participant observation work with the police; research that was arguably deceitful, unrepresentative, undemocratic, and perhaps indefensible. Reflexively so.

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The relationship between race, social cohesion and citizenship has become an important issue in recent political and policy debates. In this paper these questions are explored in the context of the changing forms of ethnic minority political engagement and participation that have evolved in the past two decades. We suggest that there are growing tensions in policy debates about the boundaries and limits of multicultural policies, particularly focused around the issue of social cohesion.