Prime Minister Keir Starmer thinks that racism is returning to British society. He has accused Nigel Farage’s Reform UK of sowing “toxic division” with its “racist rhetoric”.

Starmer’s comments follow a trend that has seen senior Labour party officials portray their political opponents on the far-right as sowing division with racist rhetoric.

Recently, Wes Streeting, the Labour health secretary, warned that an “ugly” racism is on the rise again, pointing to worrying figures showing an increase of race-based abuse of NHS staff.

And in October, senior Labour officials attacked Farage’s plans to strip millions of legal migrants of their Indefinite Leave to Remain status as a racist policy. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said that Farage’s plans sounded like a “very loud dog whistle to every racist in the country”.

Labour officials portray the rise in racist incidents and rhetoric as the return of attitudes that had all but disappeared from British society. Streeting expressed his worry that “1970s, 1980s-style racism has apparently become permissible again in this country”. Starmer similarly stated that “frankly I thought we had dealt with” the problem of racist abuse “decades ago”.

This is an appealing story because it conveys a neat and simple message: racism was defeated decades ago and it is now being revived by racist agitators. But in truth, the history of post-war racism is much more complex.

In my new book, I investigate how ideas of race and racism have changed since the second world war. History shows that racism never disappeared from public life. Rather, it assumed different shapes, some of which are harder to discern than others.

The defeat of Nazism in 1945 marked a key moment in the history of racism. Prior to the second world war, ideas of racial difference and even racial hierarchy were firmly entrenched in elite society.

In Victorian Britain, for example, a belief in the racial superiority of Europeans was decisive to maintaining colonial rule across large parts of central and east Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. This sentiment was famously captured in Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem, The White Man’s Burden, which depicted colonial rule as the moral duty of white nations.

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Likewise, pseudosciences like eugenics and physical anthropology enjoyed significant prestige among British elites well into the 20th century. The British Eugenics Society, dedicated to improving the genetic stock of the British population, flourished in the interwar period. At this time the eugenics movement was an ideological broad church, appealing to progressive as much as conservative elites.

But the second world war irrevocably changed this landscape. The experience of fascism made it clear for all to see just how dangerous the concept of racial superiority was. Ideas of racial purity, racial hierarchy, and eugenics had driven the Nazis to commit genocide. It had led to a world war that many experienced as a straightforward conflict between good and evil.

At the same time, anti-colonial movements were gaining momentum all over the world. In south-east Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, there emerged powerful critiques of European colonialism and the racist views that supported it. Some of these critiques linked fascism to colonialism, arguing that Nazism represented the “boomerang effect” of colonial violence curving back onto the people of Europe.

The great sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois worded this view powerfully in 1947:

There was no Nazi atrocity – concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood – which Christian civilization or Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world [sic].

The cumulative effect of these experiences was that ideas of racial superiority came to be seen an unscientific relic of the past.

This was exemplified by the United Nations, which in November of 1945 established Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) with the explicit aim of battling racism. Unesco’s constitution, adopted on November 16 of that year, drew a direct connection between racism and the second world war:

The great and terrible war which has now ended was a war made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men........

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