Trevor Phillips talked about the things that you are not allowed to say about race on national television last night. He had revealed ten things you are not allowed to say about race in those two samizdat underground publications, the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail.

It was a way of boosting the viewing figures to nearly two million, to hear the conversation that Phillips really wanted to engage us in. It was an unusual thing, a nuanced polemic about the progress made and the gaps, with a range of interviews, from a jovial but perhaps overly frank Nigel Farage to a blander Tony Blair.

‘Never reinforce the conspiracy frame’ is a good starting point for difficult public conversations. Trevor is often right to say many of the things he has been saying, for over a decade now, about some of the difficulties we can have in engaging with the tough end of debates about identity and integration.

The tactic of getting a hearing by claiming a subject is taboo is problematic. Phillips’ things we cannot say were slightly dull wonkish statistical correlations about income, education and crime, taken from official reports. Much of this data would not exist in France. There are endless debates about white working class boys in school. You can, of course, say that Jewish people have above average household incomes. But you will lose public reputation if you went for ‘the Jews control the media and the banks’.

Can anybody seriously identify something which you should be able to say about race which our newspapers would not print?

That shows that Britain has pretty sensible and solid anti-prejudice norms. The average member of the public, white and black, is actually a pretty good judge of where the line is between offensive language which we do not want in the public domain, and the risk of closing down debates about real problems ­– whether it is kids going off to Syria or felt segregation in some towns and cities.

Still, Phillips is right about his central point. We are ambivalent about talking about race. It is not, as liberals often think, because most people are still pretty strongly prejudiced and are trying to hide it. It is that most of us have internalised decent anti-racist norms, but we are not sure we have found the vocabulary to discuss what unites and divides us in a multi-ethnic and multi-faith society. In British Future’s deliberative discussions, it is striking how often white participants wait for ethnic minority fellow citizens to raise these issues, and are then struck by how much common ground there often is about what makes a shared society work.

So perhaps Britain’s real secret about race is this: we agree on it more than we think. Ukip leader Nigel Farage told Phillips that he did think Trevor and his race relations ilk were part of the problem. Farage proposed scrapping the laws against racial discrimination, partly because business owners should make their own choices, and partly because they may have been needed forty years ago but were pointless in a more colour-blind Britain.

This is an odd proposal – the laws have worked, so let’s scrap them. By the following morning, Nigel did not agree with Nigel anymore, and was complaining about some media and political conspiracy to pretend he had given the answer he had given.

There was nothing to stop Farage saying what he said. He just did not want to carry on saying it – because it could cost Ukip votes, and perhaps a referendum too.

Can we talk more about how race affects how we feel about opportunity and identity in Britain today while keeping the prejudices out? Its what the British people want. Even without the shock tactics, we should keep giving it a try.

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Sunder Katwala is director of British Future

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Photo: byronv2