by Andy McSmith
The US and British governments, however, concluded that the atrocity was committed by Libyans. More than ten years after the bombing, when Libya was seeking to break out of diplomatic isolation, its government handed over two men for trial at an international court in the Netherlands. One was acquitted; the other, a former officer named Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, was convicted in January 2001 of 270 murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was held in Greenock Prison. The numerous people who believe he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice include Jim Swire, Flora’s father, the best-known campaigner on behalf of the bereaved families. The official position of the British government is that Megrahi was properly convicted, but the devolved Scottish administration released him on compassionate grounds on 20 August 2009, after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and doctors warned that he might have only three months to live.
None of these incidents arose from the religion-driven fanaticism that would soon make its mark in the West, and none involved British citizens as perpetrators. What roused Britain’s Muslims to take to the streets for the first time as a religious community was, in fact, a work of fiction.
Salman Rushdie, whose parents were Indian Muslims, moved in circles far removed from Brixton or Handsworth. He was brought to England at the age of thirteen, in 1961, to be put through one of the country’s more expensive public schools, Rugby, where he learnt that boys from privileged backgrounds can be incredibly racist. He left Cambridge University hoping to be an actor, gave that up and went into advertising, and is alleged to have been responsible for telling the public that Aero bars were ‘irresistabubble’ and cream cakes ‘naughty but nice’. His second magical realist novel, Midnight’s Children, published in 1981, won several awards, including the Booker Prize, and on the twenty-fifth anniversary of that prize, in 1993, it was judged to have been the best of all the Bookers.
His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in September 1988. Trouble began when the first copies reached India, the land of Rushdie’s birth. It sold out immediately, to the disgust of Syed Shahabuddin, an MP from the opposition Janata Party and a vociferous advocate of Muslim religious rights. He had not read the novel, but had heard about the chapter that retold in fictional form an episode from the life of Mohammed, which he denounced as ‘indecent vilification of the Holy Prophet’.39 As a precaution against the possibility of riots, the Indian government banned the book. Several countries with large Muslim populations followed India’s example. Ironically, one of the first countries to ban The Satanic Verses months before the Ayatollah’s fatwa, was South Africa, the land of apartheid. In January 1989, after 1,000 Muslims had taken to Bradford’s streets and burnt copies of the book, WH Smith withdrew it from the shelves. The next month, after a peaceful demonstration by 3,000 people in Birmingham, a violent one outside the American Cultural Centre in Islamabad and a riot in Kashmir, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had now ruled Iran for ten years, issued his infamous fatwa to Muslims worldwide to kill Rushdie and everyone involved in publishing the novel. The death sentence forced Rushdie to go into hiding for almost ten years, with armed bodyguards watching over him each time he ventured out. He was not harmed, but others were. In July 1991, Ettore Capriolo, the book’s sixty-one-year-old Italian translator, was stabbed in his apartment in Milan. He survived, with superficial wounds, but a little over a week later, Hitoshi Igarashi, aged forty-four, an assistant professor of comparative culture who had translated the novel into Japanese, was found stabbed to death in a hallway in Tsukuba University in Ibaraki, Japan.40
In Britain, Salman Rushdie stirred up a mixed pot of reactions. As a well-established member of the country’s liberal, literary elite, he drew hostility from people who would normally be expected to be militantly supporting anyone who was under attack from radical Muslims. One of the most vitriolic pieces written about the author, when he was in hiding in fear of his life, was by Norman Tebbit, former chairman of the Conservative Party, who called him ‘an outstanding villain’, whose ‘public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality’.41 And yet, it was the Conservative government that unhesitatingly broke off diplomatic relations with Iran and provided Rushdie with round-the-clock protection, while one of the biggest anti-Rushdie demonstrations, by thousands of Muslims who marched through Leicester in March 1989, was led by the recently elected Labour MP, Keith Vaz, who called for the novel to be banned.
The Rushdie case was the first example of a dilemma that the British Left has still not satisfactorily resolved, twenty years later. Late in 1989, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Policy Studies Institute, a liberal think tank, organized a series of seminars to discuss the Rushdie affair. They did not invite the feminist writer Fay Weldon, whose publicly declared view was that burning and banning books was intolerable, whoever was doing it; but they did invite Shabir Akhtar, a Cambridge graduate in philosophy, who called for a ‘negotiated compromise’ that would ‘protect Muslim sensibilities against gratuitous provocation’. The correspondent from the Independent wrote: ‘We are witnessing, I fear, the birth of a new and dangerously illiberal “liberal” orthodoxy designed to accommodate Dr Akhtar and his fundamentalist friends.’42 Rushdie’s friend, the journalist Christopher Hitchens, later remarked:
Most bizarre of all, though, was the noise by a number of eminent writers and authors. John le Carré, John Berger, Roald Dahl, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and others began a sort of auction of defamation in which they accused Rushdie variously of insulting Islam, practising Western-style cultural colonialism and condescension, and damaging race relations.43
At the start of the 1980s, it was common to hear speakers within the left-dominated sections of the Labour Party, and other left-wing elements, group together women, blacks and gays as common victims of discrimination by a society controlled by white heterosexual males. If there was, for instance, a Jamaican male at the meeting, he might object, but his objection would be politely overruled. The same people who campaigned against discrimination were also keen defenders of free speech until, in the anti-Rushdie demonstrations, the Left was faced by a movement that was anti-western, anti-capitalist, self-organized, rooted in the ethnic minorities, and yet illiberal, intolerant and male-dominated. The ‘rainbow coalition’ of downtrodden minorities that politicians such as Ken Livingstone hoped to assemble as a force for change became a chimera. The Left was left not knowing whether to defend free speech and cultural differences.
At the end of the 1980s, voices from left and right could be heard implying that race relations were no better than they had been ten years earlier. ‘It is a common fallacy among Americans to believe Europeans are nicer than Americans and more liberal than Americans,’ Diane Abbott told a conference of the National Council for Black Studies in Philadelphia in April 1989. ‘Far from Britain being a nicer and more liberal society, the British invented racism. They built an empire on which racism was the organizing principle. I believe Britain is one of the most fundamentally racist nations on earth.’
At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Christopher Gill, newly elected Conservative MP for Ludlow, complained in July 1988 that whites ‘resent the fact that they are almost exiles in their own country because of the way in which the characters of our towns and cities have been altered by successive government policies on immigration’.44 As Norman Tebbit surveyed the mixed crowds at cricket matches, cheering England, India, Pakistan or the West Indies according to choice, he formulated his famous cricket test. ‘Which side do they cheer for?’, he asked the Los Angeles Times in April 1990. ‘It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from, or where you are? And I think we’ve got real problems in that regard.’45
However, immigration was not the issue it had once been, even on the right wing of the Conservative Party, where they were now more concerned about the threat they believed that the EU posed to British sovereignty. The Monday Club had not changed, but its in
fluence was now minimal. During the Conservative annual conference in October 1989, the Monday Club put round a leaflet with a drawing showing immigrants pouring out of a dustbin, only to be denounced by the local government minister, David Hunt, for spreading ‘poisonous passions’.46 The political classes had turned against such overt expressions of hostility towards the ethnic minorities. Within weeks of John Major becoming prime minister, the new party chairman, Chris Patten, set his sights on ensuring that at least one black Tory MP would be elected next time. When the apparently safe Tory seat of Cheltenham became vacant in December 1990, the local association was presented with a shortlist containing only one name, that of John Taylor, a black lawyer from Birmingham. Sadly, Patten had misjudged the temper of the local party. There was a public revolt by association members who objected to having an outsider imposed on them. One of them, Bill Galbraith, a well-known figure in Cheltenham, was expelled from the Conservative Party for calling the new candidate ‘a bloody nigger’.47 The damage caused the Tories to lose the seat to a Liberal Democrat.
John Taylor was by no means the only black or Asian to break into a white-dominated profession only to find that he was not universally welcome there. The Metropolitan Police spent over £1m in the 1980s advertising for black and Asian recruits, with the result their number rose from 110 in 1980 to 467, or fewer than 2 per cent of the total, in 1990. In November 1990, noting that the speed at which black recruits dropped out was three times higher than whites, Scotland Yard sent out a memo to all its officers warning them that racist jokes and other ‘insensitive’ behaviour was making these rare black officers feel isolated and demotivated.48 There was a similar problem in the armed forces, highlighted in a report published in January 1990 by the consultancy Peat Marwick McLintock, which stated that ‘racially offensive views and language exist in all ranks of the services’.49 In 1989, the Commission for Racial Equality issued a similar warning about the rarity of non-white teachers in state schools. They feared that young blacks were put off teaching as a profession while still at school, by hearing fellow pupils directing racist taunts at black teachers. One of the most visible advances made by Afro-Caribbeans during the 1980s was in professional football. In 1975, twelve out of fourteen managers of First Division clubs responded to a survey by saying they would never sign up a black player; by 1990, there were 175 blacks among the top 2,000 professional footballers.50 However, they routinely endured racist abuse from the supporters of opposing clubs, symbolized by a famous photograph of John Barnes in full Liverpool kit back-heeling a banana that had been thrown at him by an Everton fan.
Yet, for all these problems, the glass ceilings were beginning to crack. There were signs that positions previously occupied only by whites were starting to come within reach. The first Asian judge, Mota Singh, was appointed in 1982. In 1988, John Roberts, from Sierra Leone, became Britain’s first Afro-Caribbean QC. He had been a part-time Crown Court judge since 1983. In 1989, Gurbux Singh, from Wolverhampton, became chief executive of Haringey Council. As the decade drew to a close, officialdom agonized over whether or not to risk including a question on ethnic background in the census they were preparing, which would be held in 1991. The Home Office tried some focus group tests and discovered that only 1 per cent of those from ethnic minorities refused to fill in a questionnaire that asked them their racial background. The vast majority wanted accurate statistics about Britain’s racial mix made available because, far from fearing that it would be used by racists, they believed it would be a tool for combating discrimination. It was a sign, according to specialists in the field, that ‘the minority groups are better integrated and more prepared to fight for the elimination of discrimination’.51
CHAPTER 6
ISLANDS IN THE FOG
Amid the mountainous waves and freezing fogs of the South Atlantic, 8,000 miles from Great Britain, is a cluster of about 100 small islands known to European sailors since the sixteenth century, but avoided because of their treacherous shallows and jutting rocks. ‘The islands are empty, bleak, desolate, inhospitable. I never saw a single tree,’1 a visiting soldier recalled. It was no-man’s-land until 1833, when English settlers made their permanent home on the main island, which they called East Falkland.
In 1980, the total human population of all the islands was 1,813, more than half of whom lived in Port Stanley on the eastern tip of East Falkland. The other 800 or so lived on scattered farms where they raised about half a million sheep. Sheep-rearing was the only profitable activity on the islands, and the only market for Falklands wool and hides was Britain. In 1980, exports came to £2.8m; the budget of the Falkland Islands government that year was just under £2.3m.2 Most of the inhabitants had been born on the islands, with little prospect that they would ever leave, even for a holiday. A boat left Port Stanley for Tilbury Docks in London once every three months, and there were occasional flights by light aircraft to Buenos Aires. Otherwise, contact with the outside world was by radio, which worked when the weather was good. Girls born on the islands looked to the small British garrison for husbands who could take them away, although the islands could not afford to lose anyone. The population fell by at least a hundred in 1980 alone.3 At that rate, the islands would have been emptied of their human inhabitants before the end of the century. Almost every adult on the islands was employed either by the Falklands administration or by the Falkland Islands Company (FIC), which owned most of the arable land. The FIC was itself an asset on the books of one multinational company after another. In 1982, it was a subsidiary of the coal company, Charringtons. The farms that were not owned by FIC belonged to nine other absentee landlords, all residing in Britain. This left no scope for enterprise or self-advancement for the islanders, with predictable effect on their morale. In 1978, Major Ewen Southby-Taylor, the officer commanding the small marine detachment on the islands, thought that the majority of the islanders were ‘a drunken, decadent, immoral and indolent collection of dropouts’.4
Indolent they may have been, but they were defiantly British. Unlike the English and Welsh settlers on mainland Argentina, the Falkland islanders acknowledged no affinity with the South American continent. They wanted only to speak English and to be ruled by a governor appointed from London. However, the British claim to the islands, which were classed as a ‘dependency’, had never been sanctioned in any international agreement. The Treaty of Utrecht, of 1713, assigned them to Spain. When Argentina obtained independence from Spain, its government considered that they had also inherited ‘Las Malvinas’. They appointed a governor, but he became embroiled in a violent conflict with American seal hunters. The Argentine government sent a warship to restore order, but it was intercepted by two warships from London. Having arrived in January 1833, the British never left , while the Argentinians never ceased to claim that the islands were theirs.
The Foreign Office maintained a sneaking suspicion that the Argentine claim was, to quote an internal memo written in 1910, ‘not altogether unjustified’ and that the British occupation in 1833 had been, to quote another memo dated 1946, an ‘act of unjustified aggression’.5 In the 1930s, thought was given to recognizing Argentine’s sovereignty in return for a ‘lease-back’ deal that would keep the islanders under British rule. Negotiations began when Argentina raised the issue with the United Nations in 1965, and dragged on inconclusively. In 1977, when it appeared that Argentina had lost patience and might resort to force, the Labour government quietly dispatched a nuclear submarine and two frigates to deter them.
Negotiations resumed, but had got nowhere when, in 1979, responsibility passed to a newly appointed minister of state at the Foreign Office, Nicholas Ridley. He was not interested in foreign affairs. Mrs Thatcher had placed him there as a counterweight to Lord Carrington, the foreign secretary, and his deputy, Ian Gilmour, who were both in the aristocratic One Nation Tory tradition she so distrusted. Ridley, too, was an old Etonian and the brother of an earl, but unusually for someone of that background, he was also a Thatcherite, who
se loyalty to her never wavered. He was also the last British minister to attempt to resolve the Falklands issue. He twice made the 16,000-mile round trip to Port Stanley, hoping to persuade the islanders of the merits of a lease-back deal. They were not persuaded, and neither was Margaret Thatcher, who had already had enough grief from the Tory right over allowing Rhodesia to become Zimbabwe, but Ridley bravely insisted on putting the idea to the Commons in December 1980. The result was a display of the Commons at its self-righteous worst. MPs from the Labour Party, the Liberals and the Tory right, fired up by an efficient lobbying campaign paid for by the Falkland Islands Company, combined to give Ridley the kind of parliamentary roasting that could have destroyed a minister’s career. To one Tory MP, Sir Bernard Braine, the very idea of conceding sovereignty was ‘an insult to the Falkland islanders’; another, Julian Amery, called it ‘profoundly disturbing’; and it caused ‘grave disquiet’ in the breast of the aristocratic Viscount Cranborne. Another Tory, John Farr, experienced such ‘intense dissatisfaction’ that he announced that he was going to force a second debate a few days later. Opposition MPs were every bit as indignant. ‘Why can’t you leave the matter alone?’, the former Labour cabinet member Douglas Jay demanded, instead of concocting what a Liberal, Russell Johnson, described as ‘shameful schemes for getting rid of these islands’.6