Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  The canteen reference is revealing, for food was of course one of the most visible signs of difference in multicultural Britain. In 1977 the Union of Muslim Organizations wrote to the home secretary requesting that there be a statutory requirement to provide halal food in schools and works canteens where there was a significant number of Muslims. Other demands included prayer time for employees and the adoption of elements of Islamic law for the million Muslims then resident in the country, particularly where it concerned inheritance of property.

  More widely, the issue of eating in company was central to Britain’s gradual readjustment to its new multi-ethnic nature. By the start of the decade there were reckoned to be some two thousand Indian restaurants in Britain and twice that number of Chinese restaurants (the latter seen by Alf Garnett as being a communist front: ‘hotbeds of fifth-column activity, they are’), and for millions of white Britons, this was their first encounter with an alien culture. Elements even began to creep into home cooking, so that in the late ’60s Heinz introduced a new range of baked beans in a curried sauce with added sultanas, a product which proved sufficiently popular that by 1971 Hilda Ogden was seen serving it to her husband Stan in Coronation Street (‘bit of a funny colour’, he notes), while in P.D. James’s novel Death of an Expert Witness a couple dine on ‘curry made with tinned beef, together with rice and tinned peas’. It was a development ridiculed by comedian Jeremy Hardy some years later in his description of his mother’s attempts at making curry: ‘a great amount of fruit seems to creep into the scenario: apples, sultanas and bananas; hundreds and thousands on the top; sponge fingers on the bottom’. There were, though, limits; in an early episode of Love Thy Neighbour the two wives decide to swap traditional vegetables for their husbands’ dinners, leading to the plaintive cry from Eddie Booth: ‘I don’t want yams, I want King Edwards!’ Next door, Bill Reynolds is trying to come to terms with ‘a typical English vegetable’, which turns out to be Smash instant potato.

  Behind the mockery, there was a multiculturalism of sorts at work here, the seeds of a more open-minded future. As the decade wore on, however, the very concept of multiculturalism itself came under attack on two fronts. From the right there was the entrenched complaint, articulated by Enoch Powell in 1968, that the Race Relations Acts in fact discriminated against the white majority, a position which extended into a belief that basic freedoms were being denied. The Race Relations Board became the butt of bitter jokes and the source of some resentment, though the statistics showed that its power was hardly draconian. Between its inception in 1966 and 1972, the Board investigated 2,967 complaints, of which just seven resulted in court cases, and of the five where verdicts had then been reached, two had been lost; a conviction rate of 0.1 per cent did not suggest that too many civil liberties had been lost for ever. Of those cases which never reached the courts, there were both anomalies – Abdul Goni of Smethwick was told his advert for an English lodger was illegal, even though his intention was to find someone to help his five children improve their English – and instances that revealed distressing levels of hardcore racism: three women won a case against a Coventry pub that had barred them ‘because they spoke to a group of West Indian men’.

  At the same time there were some on the left who were also beginning to challenge the multicultural approach, arguing that the mere celebration of differences was not a sufficiently radical position. Previously multiculturalism had been seen as a progressive development, replacing the old assimilationist model of immigration with a frank acknowledgement that the country had been irrevocably changed by the migration from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent. Now this was considered to be inadequate, particularly in educational circles where multiculturalism was scorned as having added little to schools beyond what became derisively known as the Three Ss: saris, samosas and steel bands. A more direct tackling of the issues of racism was urged, locating the problem within the white culture and seeking a common front of the dispossessed. From this emerged the anti-racist approach of the 1980s, though its first and finest flowering came at the end of the ’70s, when rock & roll began to address racism.

  The radicalization of race as a political issue in Britain was primarily the result of the growing strength of the National Front and the increasing levels of street violence; in the five years from 1976, there were some thirty-one racist murders of non-whites, primarily in East London and the Midlands. Chief amongst the responses to this horrific situation was the Anti-Nazi League, launched at a press conference in the Commons hosted by Neil Kinnock, and with a list of celebrity supporters that included Brian Clough, Warren Mitchell and Arnold Wesker, though the driving force was – and remained – the Socialist Workers Party. Over the next two years, it was claimed, some 9 million leaflets were distributed by the ANL and three-quarters of a million badges sold. Its work in continually staging counter-demonstrations every time the NF tried to mobilize did much to bring that party into disrepute.

  Even more influential was the ANL’s sister organization, Rock Against Racism, launched in response to two incidents in 1976. The first was David Bowie’s increasingly wayward behaviour, fuelled by a cocaine addiction that exaggerated his long-standing interest in the occult and in Nietzschean theories of the superman. ‘I’d be an excellent dictator,’ he told Rolling Stone that year, adding in a subsequent interview with Playboy: ‘I believe very strongly in fascism.’ When asked to explain these remarks, he did little to improve the situation: ‘As I see it, I am the only alternative for the premier in England. I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader.’ The fact that he then came to Britain for a series of gigs whose staging owed a great deal to Albert Speer – and was photographed arriving at Victoria Station wearing a black shirt, standing in an open-top Mercedes-Benz and giving what certainly looked like a Nazi salute – didn’t help either. What was strikingly absent from the episode, however, though the point was lost in the furore that followed, was any hint of racism. Nor did Bowie’s flirtation with fascism have any point of contact with the far right as it then existed in Britain; it is hard to imagine that a single person from his legions of fans decided to enlist in the National Front as a result of his comments, or that he would have wished them so to do. None of which stopped RAR producing a photomontage of him in profile with Powell and Adolf Hitler.

  The second incident, and the one that was directly responsible for the launch of RAR, was an Eric Clapton concert in Birmingham later that year. Since the gig was not recorded, accounts vary of the exact words used, but during the performance a clearly drunk Clapton began rambling about foreigners and immigration, and suggested that the audience should support Enoch Powell. His attempts to explain himself afterwards were unambiguous: ‘I think Enoch is a prophet,’ he declared. And he added, seemingly unaware of the irony: ‘His diplomacy is wrong and he’s got no idea how to present things.’ Nearly a decade later, he filled in some of the background to his outburst, explaining that in the Churchill Hotel in London his partner, Pattie Boyd, had been insulted by an Arab: ‘I was incensed when I looked round and saw all these Arabs and all the signs in Arabic. I began thinking: what the hell is happening to this country?’ It was not the most savoury episode in Clapton’s career and his endorsement of Powell, delivered in Powell’s own heartland, had an immediacy and a political context that went far beyond Bowie’s fantasies of the Homo superior.

  Clapton was neither the first nor the last musician to reference Powell. In the aftermath of the ‘rivers of blood’ speech, the Beatles had toyed with the idea of a satirical piece, ‘The Commonwealth Song’, elements of which found their way into the early incarnations of ‘Get Back’ with its lyrics: ‘Meanwhile back at home there’s nineteen Pakistanis living in a council flat.’ The Jamaican-born singer Millie Small, best known for her hit version of ‘My Boy Lollipop’, released a single called simply ‘Enoch Powell’, and Manfred Mann included an instrumental track on their Chapter Three, Vol. 1 album with a title intended to be read backwards
: ‘Konekuf’. The continuing potency of the man’s myth was evidenced in later years by artists as diverse as Mensi, singer with punk band the Angelic Upstarts, and Genesis star Phil Collins. ‘He was probably the most underestimated politician of all time,’ said the former. ‘I think he should have been prime minister.’ Collins added: ‘You could sense that there was a bit of magic there, that here was a great man.’

  By the time of Clapton’s drunken rant, Powell was, by any conventional standards of politics, a strictly peripheral figure, an MP for a minor regional party, the Ulster Unionists, who could never hope to occupy high office again, particularly now that the Tories had a leader cast in his own image. No one, wrote Margaret Thatcher’s first biographer in 1975, ‘could regard Enoch Powell even as a remote rival to her, while under Edward Heath he remained a very definite possible contender’. Meanwhile, the press was claiming that ‘his hot-eyed supporters have already disappeared in the direction of the National Front’. And yet he remained a hugely influential, populist presence, still capable of generating front-page stories and leader columns in a way that other politicians could only envy. ‘Whether you detest him or admire him,’ pointed out the Daily Express, just a few days before Clapton’s gig, ‘you have to accept that Mr Powell is still a very powerful political figure.’ And the launch of Rock Against Racism confirmed this analysis – Clapton’s approbation of such a controversial symbol was too incendiary to be ignored.

  Powell thus inspired, albeit indirectly, the movement that did more than anything else to ensure racism was to become unacceptable in Britain. Over the next couple of years RAR staged a series of gigs and one-day festivals that had a more direct and immediate effect on the political culture of the country than music had ever previously achieved.

  The arrival of punk, with its refusal to address the traditional pop subject matter of teen love, had politicized rock to an unprecedented degree, whether it was Chelsea demanding that they had a ‘Right to Work’, Menace denouncing the ‘GLC’ (‘You’re full of shit!’) or the Clash querying the very existence of MPs:

  Who needs the Parliament sitting making laws all day?

  They’re all fat and old, queuing up for the House of Lords.

  Such sloganeering attracted some ridicule for its simplicity, but even at this level there was some truth in their analysis: the cabinet at the time was headed by the future Baron Callaghan and included the future Barons Hattersley, Healey, Lever, Merlyn-Rees, Mason, Morris, Mulley, Orme, Rodgers, Shore and Baroness Williams; also members were the already ennobled Baron Elwyn-Jones and Baron Peart and, of course, the former 2nd Viscount Stansgate.

  Elsewhere punk brought the issue of Northern Ireland back into play with songs like ‘Ulster’ by Sham 69 and ‘Suspect Device’, the debut record by Belfast band Stiff Little Fingers. (Though the most successful single of the period to address the troubles was actually ‘Belfast’, which gave the German-based disco band Boney M a top 10 hit in 1977.) The broadening of the lyrical lexicon also opened up space for more sophisticated artists, including Tom Robinson, Linton Kwesi Johnson and, particularly, Elvis Costello, whose 1977 debut, ‘Less Than Zero’, spoke of Oswald Mosley, and whose first top 10 single was ‘Oliver’s Army’ (1979), attacking the effects of the armed forces on British society.

  RAR drew on this new element in rock & roll, promoting the more politically engaged punk and new wave acts, as well as the newly emerging British reggae bands such as Steel Pulse, Aswad and Misty in Roots, and putting them on a much larger stage than they would otherwise have commanded. By 1979 there was nothing more unfashionable among the nation’s youth than racism and fascism. ‘There were tens of thousands of young people,’ enthused Tony Benn after attending a Hyde Park rally organized by the ANL and RAR. ‘The average age was about twenty to twenty-five, and there were banners and badges and punk rockers, just a tremendous gathering. It was certainly the biggest meeting that I had ever attended in this country. Multiracial rock music has given the movement leadership and it is a tragedy that the Labour Party can’t give a firmer lead, but it has never done so.’

  The worthiness of RAR was sometimes ridiculed – Terry Hall, of the multiracial ska band the Specials, used to mock that ‘Tonight we’re rocking against bacon and eggs’, while Wolfie in Citizen Smith once staged a Snooker Against Racism tournament in his local pub – but its intervention was crucial in ensuring that the National Front failed to make the breakthrough that it had been threatening. At a time of growing youth unemployment and with a sense of alienation in the air, the NF had lowered its minimum age of membership from sixteen to fourteen in 1977, and begun targeting schoolchildren with a campaign against ‘red teachers’. The RAR counter-offensive staunched the potential flow of recruits to the Front, and grounded the next generation of opinion-formers in the basics of anti-discrimination, rendering obsolete at least the worst excrescences of the casual racism so evident in earlier popular culture. And at the heart of its campaigning was a simple but devastatingly effective slogan: ‘The National Front is a Nazi Front.’

  Had Dennis Potter’s 1976 play Brimstone and Treacle been screened by the BBC as scheduled, the same message would have been heard earlier. Here Denholm Elliott played Tom Bates, a middle-aged, slightly bewildered member of the lower middle class who has recently joined the National Front. ‘Drugs, violence, indiscipline,’ he laments, ‘strikes, subversion, pornography . . . If you ask me, what this country needs is a new sense of direction and a clearer sense of values.’ And he goes on to articulate the fatigue felt by many at the endless changes in society: ‘All I want is the England I used to know, the England I remembered as a younger man. I don’t want anybody to be hurt, but so many things seem to have gone wrong. I just want things to be like they used to be when there were no bombs and not so much sniggering, and you knew where you were, and old ladies could feel safe in the street and, well yes, I do want the blacks to go.’ His young house guest Martin (Michael Kitchen), who may or may not be the Devil incarnate, excitedly develops his call for repatriation into an imagined panoply of cattle trucks, concentration camps and all the associated images of Nazism, at which point Bates recoils in horror and abandons his support for the Front. The invocation of the war against fascism, with memories still so strong in the ’70s, was sufficient to brand the NF as being inherently unBritish and therefore unacceptable.

  The other crucial factor in the marginalization of the National Front as the decade came to its end was a single television interview given by Margaret Thatcher to World in Action in January 1978. ‘We are a British nation with British characteristics,’ she argued. ‘Every country can take some small minorities and in many ways they add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened.’ And, in the most significant statement uttered on immigration since the ‘rivers of blood’, she added: ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’ The effects of the interview, and particularly of that one word ‘swamped’, were instantaneous. She received five thousand letters in a week (way above her average of fifty a day), surveys showed increased support for the proposition that there were too many immigrants, up from 9 to 21 per cent, and the Tories enjoyed a surge in popularity. In Thatcher’s own words: ‘Before my interview, the opinion polls showed us level-pegging with Labour. Afterwards they showed the Conservatives with an eleven-point lead.’

  The remark didn’t quite sit with previous unscripted comments. A year earlier she had been asked at the Young Conservatives’ annual conference what should be done about Conservative clubs that operated a colour bar, and had been booed when she suggested that such practices should be discontinued. ‘Look, what are you trying to do?’ she snapped. ‘I think we are trying to get rid of discrimination wherever it occurs.’ That remark received far less coverage than the ‘swamped’ reference, however, and although Thatcher didn’t develop the anti-immigration theme in the way tha
t Powell had, the World in Action interview was to linger long in the public memory. It was reinforced two months later when Sir Keith Joseph spoke during the by-election campaign in Ilford North, a Labour-held seat that was expected to see a substantial showing by the National Front. ‘There is a limit to the number of people from different cultures that this country can digest,’ he said. And in an unusually direct appeal to the Jewish vote (he was himself Jewish), he added: ‘Therefore I say that the electors of Ilford North, including the Jews – who are just like everyone else, as the saying goes, only more so – have good reason for supporting Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party on immigration.’ The Tory candidate was successful, defeating Labour’s Tessa Jowell, and the Front was contained in fourth place, but the whole incident left a nasty taste in some mouths: ‘The party is depressed at the apparent success of Thatcher’s exploitation of the race issue,’ noted Benn glumly.

  Race and immigration were not overtly at the centre of the Conservative Party’s subsequent campaigns leading up to the 1979 general election, but the message had by then been sent and clearly understood. The National Front fielded over three hundred candidates in that election, but faced a substantial reduction in their average vote per constituency and lost their deposits in every case, virtually bankrupting the party. They had passed their moment of potential breakthrough and were never again serious players even on the fringes of British politics. The image of Thatcher, however, remained associated with a right-wing anti-immigration stance. During the conference season that followed her victory at the polls, Rowan Atkinson appeared in a sketch on Not The Nine O’Clock News as a speaker at the Tory gathering: ‘A lot of immigrants are Indians and Pakistanis, and I like curry, I do,’ he explained, an eminently rational man, slightly pained by his conclusions. ‘But, now that we’ve got the recipe . . .’