"The endemic paradox of revolutionary philosophies," he said, "is that they are based on demands for rights, with no acknowledgement of duties."Or as Dr Raj Chandran, of the Commission for Racial Equality, put it: "We shall not bring black, Asian and white youths to respect and live with one another if people like Darcus Howe continue with their attitude that the white man owes them a living."But Howe has continued to make one TV series after another locked into his anachronistic world view. The most recent - Who You Callin' a Nigger? - looked at tensions between different ethnic minority communities in Britain. The new violence is between black and Asian youths in the inner cities. It took no account of the importance of self-discipline which the new generation of young blacks now lack, he said, and induced a "something for nothing" mentality. He celebrates West Indian cricket, but looks back on the Seventies and Eighties as a golden era in which "we" - Howe fails the Norman Tebbit cricket test - "conquered all that stood in our way", through a combination of black consciousness and the discipline inculcated by the colonial education system. Farrukh Dhondy, another Black Panther, recently repudiated their old idea that school was a machine to grade the labour force, and set low expectations for immigrants so they would do the most menial jobs. He lauds black music, but stops at Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Bob Marley, condemning hip-hop singers for lacking "artistic intensity" and having voices that lack range and phrasing and are weak.Others moved on.
It saw the unemployed not as workshy but as the vanguard of social change. He printed a short story by the IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands (which he later said had little literary merit) as an act of revolutionary consciousness.Around the same time, he organised a 20,000-strong Black People's March in protest against the lack of progress in a police investigation of a fire at New Cross in which 14 black teenagers died; the police said it was an accident; the protesters felt it was a neo-Nazi attack against a black celebration. Howe has always leant towards a conspiracy view of the world. When the Government weapons inspector Dr David Kelly died, Howe's New Statesman column was the first publicly to suggest that it was not suicide, but a CIA/MI5 plot.Somewhere along the way, Darcus Howe got stuck in a timewarp. He chaired the Notting Hill Carnival in the 1980s, but then in 1998 declared it to be "crap".
But where the US separatists carried guns, their British counterparts just talked big. Being a British Black Panther, one wag later said, was about as hard as being a Welsh Sandinista.Even so, in 1971 Howe was charged with riot, conspiracy and affray after an anti-police demonstration. He and the other "Mangrove Nine" were all cleared after a huge media hoo-ha involving Vanessa Redgrave and Black Power demonstrators outside the Old Bailey But in 1977, he spent six weeks in jail. "I got three months for beating the shit out of [a policeman]," Howe told his son recently.But he was a romantic rather than a rationalist. In 1981, he was elected editor of a magazine called Race Today in a workers' coup.
