Of course, in 2001, Bradford had the worst race riots in the UK in twenty years. Up to a thousand youths took to the streets over a three-day period. The uprisings were triggered by riots earlier that summer in Oldham and Burnley, and specifically by clashes between the Anti-Nazi league and the National Front. Two hundred and ninety-seven arrests were made and two hundred sentences handed out.
Bradford has one of the highest levels of Muslim inhabitants, particularly Pakistanis, in the UK. It also has high levels of Hindus, Sikhs and non-conformist Christian groups, and it has the Bradford Mela – a celebration of Asian culture, the largest such festival outside Asia. Then again, in 1989, The Satanic Verses was publicly burned here.
So, it might seem natural to raise at this point England’s attitude towards race and integration. Let me describe one more stop on the tour first, though – somewhere that might put that discussion into a different context.
Wolverhampton Civic Hall
1 fireman
1 journalist
1 Honda salesman
1 man who sells computer qualifications
1 man who markets hospices and baths, although not at the same time
I reached the Civic Hall after two nights of violence and bloodshed. Two days before I arrived, the venue had hosted an event listed as ‘The Unmasking of Kendo Nagasaki – Live Wrestling!’, which, according to the website, ‘features the unmasking of Kendo Nagasaki’, so, frankly, if Kendo Nagasaki didn’t get that mask off, you could probably ask for your money back.
The Civic Hall has been in the grappling business all the way back to when it was the main venue for the legendary live television broadcasts of the seventies. The era of Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks and a front row of bloodthirsty grannies baying; it was among the most bewildering things to watch from Ireland. Did you all believe it? You certainly elevated the participants to the status of proper sportsmen. The Queen and Margaret Thatcher were rumoured to be Big Daddy fans. At one stage he was even offered his own kids TV show.
Daddy’s Union Jack hat and trunks probably limited his support in Ireland, and the one we could get behind, Mick McManus (real name Michael Matthews, from London), was one of the bad guys, famed for his black trunks and his catchphrase, ‘Not the ears, not the ears.’ Irish playgrounds were not filled with kids screaming, ‘Not the ears, not the ears.’ But McManus let the side down by twice being beaten by another wrestler who tickled him to submission while he had him pinned.
Kendo has endured longer than all of them, and this is despite a series of unmaskings. In 1975, Big Daddy exposed him in a televised bout and, on 20 December 1977, Kendo held a ‘ceremonial unmasking’ for ITV in the Wolverhampton Civic Hall. His most embarrassing unveiling was much more mundane. A plumber working at his house recognized his manager and put two and two together; and taking Kendo’s real name off the invoice, he started to hand out leaflets outside bouts that said ‘Kendo Nagasaki’s real name is Peter Thornley, and he lives at this address…’
Peter Thornley continued to fight, though, later becoming a close friend of the artist Sir Peter Blake, who painted him for a BBC series called Masters of the Canvas, which must have been invented in a panicked moment during the meeting:
‘I don’t like any of your ideas. What else have you got?’
‘Well, artists use canvas… And you know who else uses canvas?’
‘Wrestlers! Of course, that’s brilliant. Give me six one-hour documentaries right away!’
‘Great! I was going to say tent-makers, but your idea is much better…’
So, the same week I was on, Kendo hit the floor one last time at an event where, this being wrestling, no real injuries occurred. The following night was less successful, however. Michael McIntyre was enjoying his encore after a successful show when gravity struck during a routine about skipping and he was left crumpled on the stage.
This initially got a big laugh, until it became obvious that Michael wasn’t getting up, having dislocated his shoulder. The theatre manager had to finish off the show, thank Michael and tell the audience to leave. However, the Civic Hall isn’t one of those theatres with a proscenium arch at the front, nor with a big red curtain that can fall to cover the stage. The crowd left with Michael in full view and a gathering of staff in attendance. Needless to say, comedians are a tiny and gossipy community, so I made sure to interview everyone who had been in the audience that night, located the exact spot onstage where he had lain and had to be restrained from drawing a chalk outline around the body. I did re-create the ending of the show for my crowd and generally got a good couple of minutes’ laughs out of the whole event.
Later that month, I met Michael on the set of Live at the Apollo, and felt I should come clean.
‘I was on in Wolverhampton the night after your accident. I did a couple of jokes about you, I just thought you should know.’
‘I already know. In fact, five different people have told me.’
Great crowd in Wolverhampton, but can’t keep a secret to save their lives.
Not a very forgiving town either. We dug out a copy of the local paper, the Express and Star, and found, thrillingly, an editorial calling for witches not to be pardoned. This is particularly ironic in a town whose coal and iron industries caused so much local pollution that it is generally thought that J. R. R. Tolkien used it as the model for Mordor in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Orcs, yes; witches no, in the Black Country.
Rock stars get a thumbs-up here too, locals including Robert Plant, Slade, Goldie and Edward Elgar. In fact, the Civic Hall had the most ‘rock and roll’ dressing room of the tour, with a built-in sauna. I have no need for a sauna before or after a gig, particularly if I think that it’s still moist from the sweat of Michael McIntyre. Or Kendo Nagasaki. Or Edward Elgar.
I could just wait a couple of weeks and share the sauna with bloody Ken Dodd, posters for whose upcoming show greet me on the way into the theatre. At this stage, I’m almost too scared to ask the stage hands about him, for fear of being treated to even more awestruck reminiscences of nine-hour-long shows. It’s beginning to eat away at my confidence this, knowing that, as I perform the longest and most comprehensive tour of my life, a man in his eighties is matching me stride for stride.
So, we have some Saturday-afternoon wrestling, the Doddster in a Union Jack coat and Edward Elgar. Wolverhampton is shaping up to be the most English town in history. And why did I hold off discussing multiculturalism in Bradford until I told you about my time in Wolverhampton? Enoch Powell, of course.
In 1968, Powell was the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South-west when he made his famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech detailing the dangers of mass non-white immigration into the UK. Polarizing public opinion at the time and finishing off his cabinet career, it was a performance filled with apocalyptic language:
‘We are watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.’
As an immigrant myself, this kind of rhetoric always excites me enormously. To have been even a small part in this foreign tide, well, it’s always nice to belong, isn’t it?
The fact is that the United Kingdom is still overwhelmingly white, with 54.2 million white people in the total population of 58.8 million in the last census in 2001. Asians make up easily the largest ethnic sub-group in the United Kingdom, but in 2001 only about one in every twenty-five people was Asian. Even more surprisingly, in 2001, only about one in fifty British people was black – just 1.1 million people. That number was split pretty evenly between Black African people and Black Caribbean people. Including people of mixed black/white origins and increased immigration from African countries since 2001, the number is now probably close to 1.8 million, but that is still only one in every thirty-three people in the UK. There are a quarter of a million Chinese people and a quarter of a million people from other ethnic groups, and that’s it.
This does make the United Kingdom the most multicultural of the major European states but, at most, about one in ten Briti
sh people today are non-white, compared to about half of all Brazilians, one in four Americans, one in six Canadians and one in eight Dutch people. None of those countries has reported rivers turning red.
As for the oft-repeated assertion that ‘the island is full’, well, in my mind the evidence is mixed. Population density is fairly high in the UK, at 246 people per square kilometre and, although that’s lower than Holland, Belgium and Japan, it’s true that there is more room to breathe in France, Germany, Spain and just about everywhere else all the way down to the US (31 people per square kilometre) and to Australia, where isolation reaches heartbreaking levels, with 2.84 people per square kilometre (not much more than 1 per cent of the population density here).
Here’s my non-scientific, anecdotal counter-argument.
I once blagged a lift on a helicopter from Manchester to London with Barry Humphries. The presence of Dame Edna isn’t vital to the story, but I still thought you’d like to know. Anyway, this is England as seen from the window of a Sikorsky: Manchester – outskirts of Manchester – fields – fields – village – fields – motorway – fields – something that looked like Alton Towers – fields – the odd small town – yet more fields – outskirts of London – London.
This island is a long way from full.
Back to Enoch. He also said:
‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’
An easy explanation for the rivers running red is that it’s probably blood from all those swans the immigrants keep eating.
This story is a perennial favourite among certain sections of the press. It plays on the English love of animals, fear of foreigners, and the fact that all the swans in Britain are, for no well-explained reason, owned by the Queen. Somebody should explain this to the immigrants. Don’t touch the swans; but the Canada Geese are fair game – unless the Mounties spot you.
Of course, there are no witnesses to this widescale swan-feasting. There is no footage, or proof. But, apparently, there are campsites surrounded by ‘thousands of feathers’ (the Sun, April 2008) and carcasses.
The average Mute Swan weighs between 20 and 30lb (unplucked). Even allowing for the weight of its legendarily powerful neck (although I get confused: can a swan break your arm with its neck, or break your neck with its beak?), that’s twice the size of the average family turkey. Now try cooking your giant super-turkey on a campsite:
‘I have brought home swan!’ the cartoon Eastern European immigrant tells his wife.
‘But Wladyslaw! We have only one-ring fire. You are bad husband. Next time, steal pigeon.’
‘The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.’
In the coverage of the 2001 census, much was made of the fact that there are now areas in the UK, mainly in London, that have majority non-white populations. It’s also been suggested that, in Leicester and Birmingham, white people will be in a minority within a couple of years. The ‘are we celebrating this or are we worrying about it?’ way in which these stories are reported in the media illustrates a real ambiguity about multiculturalism in the UK today. The continued immigration since the 2001 census, allied with the increased suspicion of many ethnic groups since the attacks of September 11 and 7/7, have created an unpleasant note of xenophobia.
This is of some concern, because, apart from some obvious exceptions, there is still a real sense that the English have done a better job of getting past the race issue than many other countries. If you asked British people to say the first thing that came into their heads about Lenny Henry, Naseem Hamed and Naomi Campbell, I think you’d get more people who said ‘Comedian’, ‘Boxer’ and ‘Supermodel’ – or, possibly, ‘Black Country’, ‘Sheffield’ and ‘Tetchy’ – than said ‘Black’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Black’, or even ‘Black comedian’, ‘Arab boxer’ and ‘Black supermodel’. I’m not sure you’d get the same if you said Chris Rock, Bernard Hopkins and Tyra Banks to a group of Americans. Americans are simply more aware of race.
Jeremy Paxman, in his book The English, makes the good point that British regional accents have probably helped integration. It’s very hard to listen to a Scouser or Geordie of any race and not simply think of them as a Scouser or Geordie.
Bringing it back to Wolverhampton, thousands of Sikhs came here after the Second World War, and the Sikh population is now about twenty thousand strong (this is roughly one in every twelve Wulfrunians). In 1965, Wolverhampton had the first major row about the wearing of turbans by Sikhs at work, which ended with Sikhs at the bus company being allowed to wear them in 1967. By now, though, this massive Sikh population speak like the rest of the Yam Yams, in a dialect that even Brummies don’t always understand, a dialect that has many throwbacks to Middle English. And if that scholastic fact doesn’t convince you, they also all sound like Noddy Holder. And who’s afraid of Noddy Holder?
Maybe it’s a very English characteristic to focus on the fact that there may be some people out there who have racist views instead of noting with pride that there are tens of millions who don’t. Similarly, the British National Party won just 0.7 per cent of the national vote in the 2005 Westminster election and got a hundred local councillors of various kinds elected in the 2008 local elections, but this was still only 1 per cent of the total available. The cheering thing is that, instead of dismissing this as inconsequential, the English agonize over what these minor peaks in support for the BNP mean for the future of their country.
Even the BNP’s winning of seats in the European parliament has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Ireland is quite pro-Europe, and quite moved by the European election. By contrast, the English couldn’t care less. What was the turn-out? About 33 per cent? It was an election that only the extremists voted in and, hey presto!, some extremists got elected.
The truth is that, after the initial shock and scare of each new wave of arrivals, England has generally moved on. The Windrush panic has given way to a general acceptance of Black Caribbean culture. The Eastern European or asylum-seeker panics will go the same way. If the English have demonstrated one thing in their history, it’s an ability to steal the best bits from each newly arrived culture. Balti, anyone?
The fact is, multiculturalism is a lark if you engage with it. In the last year, I have attended an Indian child’s first birthday (along with three hundred friends and family, and a day-long binge of food and music) and a Jewish bat mitzvah (slap-up meal, loads of dancing and funny, funny speeches). The last ‘English’ children’s party I went to, by contrast, consisted of a lot of middle-class parents making nervous small talk while their toddlers stared blankly at each other.
I’ve done living in a monoculture. It’s a lot less fun and it warps your head. Take it from me, there’s something wrong when you regard Protestants as being a bit ‘exotic’.
‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation.’
Norman Tebbit once said that the real test of whether integration was working was the ‘cricket test’, i.e. whether immigrants cheered for England when they played the old homeland – India, Pakistan, or the West Indies – in cricket. The fact is, most immigrants very quickly come to see Britain as their homeland. In the 2001 census, the vast majority of people in almost all ethnic groups described their national identity as being British. This included almost nine in ten people from a Mixed or Black Caribbean group, around eight out of ten from the Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Other Black groups, and three-quarters of the Indian group. Just as you would expect in a successfully integrated society, second-generation immigrants were particularly likely to describe their national identity as British.
Interestingly, members of ethnic minorities were much more likely to describe themselves as British rather than English, Welsh or Scottish. This must surely be the perfect result for the isolationist Little Englanders. Immigran
ts with a loyalty to the island, but who aren’t interested in diluting the golf club. No need to change those lists of membership requirements, then.
Predictably enough, the group with the lowest rate of describing their national identity as being British were the Irish, at just 13 per cent.
The Irish have, you see, found a way of failing the cricket test twice – not only neglecting to support England when she plays Ireland, but also cheering against England when she plays anyone else. Indeed, it is a notable day for any Irishman living over here when he realizes that cheering against England at all possible opportunities is probably a bit childish and unfair on his many English friends and family. So he cheers inwardly instead.
In the 2001 census, there were almost 691,000 Irish people in Great Britain in 2001, accounting for 1 per cent of the total population. In terms of ethnic groups, only the Indians and Pakistanis were larger. We look like you, we speak the language and we’re everywhere. We’re on your trains and in your offices. We’re marrying your sons and daughters and raising your children. Look around you. There might be one of us right here, sitting in the room with you. Fear us, Britain. Fear us!
Enoch Powell certainly did, spending the latter years of his political career as an Ulster Unionist MEP.
He died in 1998. Sadly, he never got to see how modern Britain looked when, as he put it himself, ‘the black man had the whip hand over the white man’. Of course he didn’t; none of us have. But he wasn’t forgotten. In a BBC poll in 2002 he was voted fifty-fifth on the list of 100 Greatest Britons. He was one place ahead of Cliff Richard.
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