When did cruelty stop being embarrassing?

Racism in Britain isn’t a relic of the past - it’s been given permission to return, subtle, routine, and often polite.

They were born here. Raised here. They go to private school, speak with an accent, and wave the flag when Scotland plays. They are, by every metric this country sets, ‘ours.’ And still, they get slurs thrown at them on the street. Children who are as Scottish as anyone else, but treated as visitors in their own country because they are Black.

It's the kind of story that you wish were shocking, but it isn’t anymore. The surprise isn’t that it happened – it’s that no one seems surprised.

C. G. Jung once wrote, “Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.” He was talking about individuals, but it fits nations too. Condemnation has become our national ritual – the moral theatre we perform so that nothing has to change. We condemn racism the way we light candles after a tragedy: as an act of self-absolution. It keeps our hands clean while the rot spreads. 

Condemnation is easy. It’s applause for our own awareness, a standing ovation for still knowing – somewhere deep down – that racism is bad. But applause is not courage. And courage is what’s gone missing.

Because the truth is this: we don’t live in an age of hatred. We live in an age of permission. Hatred is old. Permission is new.

Racism didn’t creep back out of the shadows – it was invited. It’s been given a new language, new manners, new justifications. It no longer needs to hide under hoods or behind dog whistles. It wears the face of ‘free speech,’ of ‘saying the unsayable,’ of ‘telling it like it is.’

You hear it in pubs, at sports matches, and around dinner tables – the weary sigh of someone about to be brave enough to say something cruel. “I’m not racist, but...” They’re always “just being honest.” Honesty has become the polite face of hate.

This is the new racism – not ignorance, but indulgence. It doesn’t shout, it shrugs. It doesn’t justify itself through ideology, but through boredom. The old taboos have expired, and cruelty is back in fashion.

We used to think racism was a failure of education, of exposure, or of empathy. But what if it’s a failure of shame? What if the real question isn’t when did we become hateful again, but when did we stop being embarrassed to be?

Hannah Arendt once wrote about the ‘banality of evil’ – how horror is often committed not by monsters, but by ordinary people who’ve stopped thinking for themselves. That idea still applies, but today it’s not bureaucrats committing genocide – it’s voters, viewers, posters, tweeters.

The new evil isn’t radical, it’s routine. It’s the man who won’t hire a Muslim because “the clients might not like it.” It’s the journalist who calls migrants a “wave” or a “flood.” It’s the politician who nods along, knowing better, but scared to lose votes. And sometimes, and unfortunately more so, it’s the idiot patriot saying it to someone in the street. None of them thinks they’re doing harm. They’re just following the current, and the current runs on cowardice.

Arendt wrote about superfluous people – those society decides don’t matter. We’ve built our own version of that: the dispensable neighbour, the conditional citizen. You belong here until you don’t. You’re welcome, but not too welcome. You’re tolerated, but not trusted.

Racism doesn’t begin with hatred – it begins with the quiet belief that some people’s dignity is negotiable. Once you’ve decided that, the rest follows easily.

Jung’s warning echoes here, too. Condemnation can become another way of creating distance – a hierarchy of virtue. We condemn to separate ourselves from the condemned, not to stand beside those harmed. We mistake scolding for solidarity.

We used to police racism with shame. Now we outsource it with statements. When there’s a racist attack, an organisation somewhere drafts a tweet: “We condemn this behaviour.” Condemnation has become a corporate reflex, a PR shield against consequence.

But racism doesn’t thrive because people fail to condemn it. It thrives because too many people think condemning it is the same as confronting it. The moral work ends where the statement begins.

We’ve created a moral economy where decency is performative and cruelty is efficient. Politicians can cut welfare, privatise housing, and deport children – then remind us that “hate has no place here.” Hate doesn’t need a place; it’s already home.

And that’s the real banality of evil now: the quiet coexistence of moral outrage and moral apathy.  

Gramsci wrote that power doesn’t rule through force – it rules through common sense. The ruling ideas of an age don’t feel imposed; they feel natural. And in Britain today, cruelty feels natural. It’s been normalised as honesty, repackaged as realism.

“Of course we can’t take everyone in.”

“Of course some people just don’t integrate.”

“Of course you have to prioritise your own.”

“we don’t live in an age of hatred. We live in an age of permission. ”

Every “of course” is an act of moral surrender. And every surrender makes the next act of cruelty easier.

The right understood this years ago. They turned prejudice into pragmatism, xenophobia into policy, racism into ‘border control.’ They made cruelty sound responsible – and the left, fearful of sounding naïve, stopped challenging the premise.

The result? A political culture where dehumanisation is bureaucratic, where cruelty feels inevitable, where shame has been rebranded as weakness.

Racism, at its core, has always been about hierarchy – deciding who counts. But the modern version is subtler: it’s not about exclusion, it’s about conditional inclusion. The ‘acceptable immigrant,’ the ‘model minority,’ the ‘good one.’

We praise diversity, but only when it looks like assimilation. We celebrate difference, but only when it doesn’t challenge power. Even anti-racism has been domesticated – something you can put in a brand campaign or an HR workshop.

These children – polite, middle-class, privately educated – are exactly what Britain claims to reward. And yet even they were made foreign again in an instant. Because racism doesn’t care about respectability. It isn’t waiting for better manners. It’s waiting for permission.

And permission has been granted.

You can trace it easily. A decade of austerity. Austerity breeds scarcity. Scarcity breeds resentment. Resentment breeds blame. The government fans the blame to keep itself warm.

When people can’t afford homes or get a GP appointment, it’s convenient to tell them it’s because of the boats. When wages stagnate, it’s easier to point at migrants than billionaires. When the NHS collapses, you blame the ‘culture’ instead of capitalism. And how do you differentiate between who’s a migrant and who’s not? Skin colour. Racism becomes the emotional infrastructure of neoliberalism – the story that explains why misery feels personal rather than political.

That’s why condemnation alone never works: racism isn’t an aberration; it’s a management tool. It disciplines the poor while distracting them. It’s not a bug in the system; it’s one of the system’s more elegant features.

So, no, we don’t need more condemnation. We need reconstruction – moral as well as material.

Because the opposite of racism isn’t diversity training. It’s solidarity. It’s building a society where people have enough not to see one another as competition. Where decency isn’t an act of charity but a condition of citizenship.  

Racism doesn’t survive where empathy feels affordable. But we’ve built a society where everyone’s told they’re one crisis away from falling through the cracks. In that world, cruelty feels like self-defence.  

The answer isn’t to shame people for falling for the story. It’s to write a better one – one that makes belonging a collective project, not a prize.

We should be embarrassed – not just by the racism itself, but by how unsurprising it has become. That’s the rot. Not just the hate, but numbness. The shrug, the scroll, the sense that this is just what Britain is now.

But it doesn’t have to be. The same capacity that normalises cruelty can normalise care. The same culture that teaches permission can teach protection. The same media that sells division can sell decency – if we demand it loud enough.

So yes, condemn the racism. But then ask what comes next. What do we build in its place? How do we make cruelty costly again?

Until we do, the story will repeat.

Children will grow up fluent in a country that still calls them foreign. Politicians will keep selling shame as strength. And we’ll keep confusing condemnation for courage.

We don’t need more condemnation. We need reconstruction – of empathy, of courage, of the idea that belonging isn’t something anyone gets to revoke because of the colour of your skin.

Because when a nation stops being embarrassed by its cruelty, it stops being a nation at all.