Never Again
Page 9
The IS-sponsored Right to Work campaign, which was launched in October 1975, was an expression of this new politics. Various Labour MPs gave their backing to Right to Work marches, including Eric Heffer, Harry Selby and Brian Sedgemore. Several dozen trade union branches also gave their backing, as did Ernie Roberts of the engineering workers’ union and Harry McShane, who had led the unemployed struggles of the 1920s. The first Right to Work demonstration took place in March 1976. It was called to protest against wage freezes, social services cuts and unemployment figures of over a million.32 Six hundred marchers participated, walking more than three hundred miles from Manchester to London.33
Ruth Gregory had been the graphic organiser for the Communist Party in Australia in Sydney before returning to London in 1976. She lived in Brixton and met IS members campaigning around unemployment and against racist policing:
We had a Right to Work office, people would come in and we’d give them advice about how to fight back. We occupied Brixton dole office. It was a Victorian building in the middle of a tarmac playground. The queues were so long they went down the whole street. We went in, kidnapped the manager and hung placards out of the windows.
Over the next year, Gregory would take up employment at the SWP printshop and meet the writer Dave Widgery and the photographer Red Saunders.
Meanwhile, the reorientation away from the shop stewards confused many of Cliff’s allies and in December 1975 around one hundred and fifty members left IS, including the former editor of Socialist Worker Roger Protz and IS’s National Secretary Jim Higgins.34
A year later, as IS set out about changing its name to the SWP, the group was still in a state of turmoil, torn between two different models of organising – one based on the shop stewards or another based on disaffected urban youth. The International Socialists provided a training for many of the future anti-fascists of the late 1970s. The best of them were able to wear this education lightly, seeing their own group not as ‘the leadership’, but as one part of a possible revival of the left.35
The second generation
Another key source of support for anti-fascism came from a generation of young black British people, many of them the children of migrants. The National Front’s defining policy was its threat to repatriate every black person. But where was this second generation supposed to go? In the words of Chris Mullard:
We are different from our parents in many ways. The only home we know is Britain. We are more difficult to understand than the black immigrant. A black immigrant often speaks another language. He may wear different clothes, he may eat different foods. All in all he will most definitely have a different life pattern from the white Briton. But a black Briton . . . .36
Jamaican writer Rodney James lived in Leeds and London:
Most of my generation of Afro-Caribbeans in Britain was in one way or another profoundly affected by the Rastafarian movement that swept across the Atlantic to Britain. Besieged as we and our parents were by British racism, we welcomed its attack upon white supremacy and its attempts to decolonize our minds. From the United States, Black Power also came to Britain and we became familiar with the writings and struggles of George Jackson, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis and Stokeley Carmichael.
James met other young campaigners from the Caribbean and from Africa:
My closest friends . . . were from Grenada, Guyana and South Africa . . . I also developed friendship with Asian comrades from the Indian subcontinent and East Africa, many of whom had been radicalised by the insurgent and murderous fascism of the far-right National Front.37
Tariq Mehmood’s novel, Hand on the Sun, describes a cycle of official racism through the 1970s, in which every state authority worked to humble black people and Asians. Instinctively, they resisted. In his novel, the possibility of struggle is represented by Jalib, who fights with racists even before he has left primary school:
When he first arrived in Britain, he had imagined that these goras were not real human beings but some sort of supermen . . . But one day a white kid had hit him and without thinking much, except that he had had enough, Jalib had struck back in anger. His punch had landed on the nose of the white boy. On seeing a small stream of blood, Jalib had been filled with both fear and wonder: fear, because he was scared that this all-powerful white boy would release his implacable wrath . . . wonder, because he had never imagined that the blood of white people was the same colour as his own.38
At the start of the decade, black and especially Asian people were perceived as easy targets for racist violence. As the decade wore on, hundreds of thousands of people found themselves having no choice but to meet this violence with force of their own. Many Asian and African-Caribbean radicals from the 1970s have memories of the first time they stood up to racist or fascist violence. Saeed Hussain of the United Black Youth League (a split from the Asian Youth Movement in Bradford) recalls suffering beatings at school in the 1970s, until he and friends confronted the culprit:
there was about four of us who went to the local shop and there was this bully, he was on his own actually walking towards the shop . . . And we stopped. And he did say, you know, ‘Get out of my way you fucking Pakis.’ And we looked at each other and said, ‘We’re not going anywhere. If you want you can walk either through us or you can walk round us. It’s your choice today.’ And then after about a minute’s stare, he did walk around us . . . head down and just walked off. That was the most liberating experience.39
By the end of the decade, resistance had ceased to be an individual task, as Balraj Purewal of the Southall Youth Movement recalls:
We went round kind of giving support . . . to make Southall a no-go zone for racists . . . We had a white colleague who we recruited to the National Front and he would get the leaflets and we would know which pubs they’re meeting in. I remember going to one in Isleworth. They used to meet there and plan which estate to attack. There used to be 80–90 of us.40
Two especially important examples of black-led militant campaigns were the Asian Youth Movements, which had branches in Bradford, Southall and Birmingham, and the London-based Race Today Collective.
The Asian Youth Movements emerged from an existing campaign, the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA), a social organisation of working-class Sikhs and Muslims. First founded in Coventry in 1937,41 the association had revived in the 1950s, with the support of exiled members of the Communist Party of India, in part as a response to anti-immigration laws.42 By 1976, there were three main IWAs: one in Southall, led by Vishnu Sharma;43 a second, around Prem Singh, linked to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and a third, led by Avtar Jouhl, influenced by Maoism, which had strong support among foundry workers in the West Midlands.44
On 4 June 1976, a 16-year-old youth, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, was stabbed and killed in Southall by two white men, Jody Hill and Robert Hackman.45 The day after Chaggar’s death, 22-year-old Suresh Grover was walking with a friend Denis Almeida, when they saw blood on the pavement outside the Dominion Theatre. Grover asked a police officer, ‘Whose blood is it?’ and was told, ‘it was just an Asian’. Grover and Almeida took the initiative, covering the pool of blood with red cloth and painting a message on the pavement: ‘This racist murder will be avenged.’ A dozen watched as they painted the message. On the Saturday evening, some five hundred people gathered outside the theatre, only to face confrontations with the police and arrests. The Indian Workers’ Association had a meeting planned at the Dominion Theatre the next day – on fascism – where the old and young residents of Southall argued about what needed to be done.46 Young anti-racists went to the meeting, seeing the IWA as the only credible organisation capable of expressing the desire to confront the state and the racists. Disheartened by the timidity of the older generation, they left determined to found something new.
Within days, a Southall Youth Movement was launched. ‘It was the first time young people,’ Grover recalls
mainly Asians but with a sprinkling of African-Caribbean peopl
e from Southall, took to the streets and organised themselves as a youth movement against racial violence and police harassment in Southall. The older generation were totally bewildered and fearful of what we were capable of. They were really frightened of what the police would do to us.47
In Bradford, the process was similar. In May 1977, the local branch of the Indian Workers’ Association created a young members’ organisation, the Indian Progressive Youth Organisation. Arguments developed between the younger group and its more cautious parent. At its first AGM a year later, the members renamed it the Asian Youth Movement, breaking the link with the IWA.48
The formation of the Race Today Collective goes back to the appointment in November 1973 of Darcus Howe as editor of Race Today, then the magazine of the Institute of Race Relations. Howe was the nephew of the Trinidadian Marxist CLR. James and brought to Race Today the distinctive theme of Jamesian socialism, self-activity and participatory democracy, albeit combined with an insistence on the different histories of black and white workers in Britain. The first issue of his editorship was titled, significantly, ‘From Victim to Protagonist’, and proposed to chart a course not merely for the magazine but for Howe’s generation of Caribbean and Asian people in Britain: ‘Our task is to record and recognise the struggles of the emerging forces as manifestations of the revolutionary potential of the black population.’ Race Today became an independent publication, with key contributors including Leila Hassan, Farrukh Dhondy and Linton Kwesi Johnson.49
According to Leila Hassan:
Darcus educated us. Selma James came to speak to us on women’s liberation. We had study classes on CLR James’s pamphlets on Nkrumah and Every Cook can Govern. We read Karl Marx and we studied the idea of a workers’ enquiry . . . We also believed in working class power, when white workers went on strike we supported them but our major thrust was to get a black independent movement going with a black magazine.
In the build-up to the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, white residents campaigned to have the carnival banned. On the day, Stafford Scott recalls:
the police decided that they would ignore the stewards and manage the crowds themselves . . . At some point there was a confrontation and a woman was allegedly hit in the stomach by a police officer wielding a truncheon. Whether it was true or not it was enough to turn an already tense situation into a roaring street battle.50
Over the next four hours, sixty arrests were made. Afterwards, Darcus Howe was elected chair of the Notting Hill Carnival Development Committee. Black Britain, Howe wrote, was ‘no longer willing to live in the room, traipse after the police, do the employer’s bidding so that they can create their wealth. We are no longer that defeated, demoralised working-class.’51
Darcus Howe and Linton Kwesi Johnson were to play a part in the events of the late 1970s in support of the squatters’ movement in Tower Hamlets, as a benign older brother to the AYM in Southall,52 and as allies of Rock Against Racism.
Notes
1 Dave Hann begins his history of anti-fascism in Britain with the People’s Defence League and the National Union for Combating Fascism, both launched in 1924: D. Hann, Physical Resistance. Or, a Hundred Years of Anti-Fascism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2013), p. 12. Nigel Copsey begins the story one year earlier, with protests against British Fascisti meetings in Hammersmith: N. Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), p. 1.
2 The reluctance of the national leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain to be drawn into a conflict with fascists in 1936–1939 and in 1945–1948 is set out in J. Jacobs, Out of the Ghetto: My Youth in the East End, Communism and Fascism 1913–1939 (London: Janet Simon, 1978), pp. 235–269, and in D. Renton, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s (London: Macmillan, 1999).
3 M. Beckman, The Forty Three Group (London: Centreprise, 1993 edn); Renton, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s.
4 M. Walker, The National Front (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 85.
5 ‘Cyril Paskin’, Jewish Chronicle, 25 November 2011; S. Silver, ‘The fighting sixties’, Searchlight, July 2002, pp. 11–26.
6 Copsey, Anti-Fascism, pp. 111–112. Examples of similar treatment of Jordan’s BM appear in P. Jackson, Colin Jordan and Britain’s Neo-Nazi Movement (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 154–155.
7 Walker, National Front, p. 148.
8 W. Asher, ‘Fascism in Leicester’, International Socialism 93 (March 1976), pp. 16–19.
9 ‘Attack on South Shields anti-fascist’, Red Flag, 7 November 1974.
10 DPP v Luft [1976] UKHL 4, 26 May 1976.
11 D. Renton, Colour Blind: Race and Migration in North East England since 1945 (Sunderland: University of Sunderland Press, 2007), pp. 162–167.
12 Hann, Physical Resistance, pp. 244–245; Copsey, Anti-Fascism, p. 117; ‘Stop the Nazi Front’, Oxford Anti-Fascist Committee leaflet, 1975, copy in Searchlight Archive, University of Northampton, BRI/02/035.
13 A. Skinner, Cowley Street (Oxford: Signal Books, 2005), p. 85.
14 N. Fielding, The National Front (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 165; Oxford Strumpet 96 (15 May 1975), p. 1; ‘The battle for the streets’, Searchlight, June 1975.
15 M. Testa, Militant Anti-Fascism: A Hundred Years of Resistance (London: AK Press, 2015), p. 329; ‘The National Front: an assessment of what is happening’, Searchlight, November–December 1975.
16 The local police and the Director of Public Prosecutions declined to press charges; however, the UMIST students’ union brought a private prosecution. Four of the people who had attacked the room were convicted of threatening behaviour, and a fifth of affray, disorderly conduct and damage to property, resulting in a total sentence of six months: P. Hain, Political Trials in Britain (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 71.
17 C. Hitchens, ‘White socialism’, New Statesman, 31 May 1974.
18 The Front’s politics of Holocaust denial are set out in M. Hobbs, ‘“The men who rewrite history”: Holocaust denial and the British far right since 1967’, in N. Copsey and M. Worley (eds), ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Us’: The British Far Right since 1967 (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 9–27, 12–17.
19 Fielding, The National Front, p. 52. NF Birmingham Branch, meeting at the Shakespeare [pub], 20 June 1975; H. Redman to J, Tyndall, ‘Report of North-East National Front’, 9 February 1978, reproduced by Sunderland Anti-Fascist Committee, bulletin, 21 June 1978, Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/29.
20 D. Widgery, Beating Time: Riot ’n’ Race ’n’ Rock ’n’ Roll (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), p. 27.
21 Labour Party, Statement by the National Executive Council: Response to the National Front (London: Labour Party, 1978).
22 E. Smith, British Communism and the Politics of Race (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 134–137.
23 Hann, Physical Resistance, p. 251.
24 A. Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movement (London: Pluto, 2013), pp. 23, 25; ‘A tale of three cities’, Searchlight, June 1976.
25 Ramamurthy, Black Star, p. 38.
26 Socialist Worker, 22 May 1976; M. Cottram, ‘Keeping in front of the Front: a few ideas on tactics’, IS Bulletin, September 1976.
27 Hann, Physical Resistance, p. 253; Walker, The National Front, p. 197; Anon., The National Front: From the Inside (London: Union of Jewish Students, 1976), p. 3.
28 J. Fenton, ‘An evening with Robert Relf’, New Statesman, 9 July 1976.
29 ‘They shall not pass!’, Socialist Worker, 24 July 1976; P. Alexander, Racism, Resistance and Revolution (London: Bookmarks, 1987), p. 154.
30 The text of the leaflet is in D. Widgery, The Left in Britain 1956–1968 (London: Penguin, 1976) pp. 411–412. Barker’s recollections of this period have been published online as C. Barker, ‘IS in the ’60s: May ’68 and after’, https://rs21.org.uk, 6 August 2015.
31 I. Birchall, Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time (London: Bookmarks, 2011), p. 363.
32 ‘New year horrors list’, Socialist Worker, 3 January 1976.
&nbs
p; 33 ‘The right to work under attack’, Socialist Worker, 27 March 1976.
34 J. Higgins, More Years of the Locust (London: IS Group, 1997).
35 D. Hallas, ‘Towards a revolutionary socialist party’, in T. Cliff (ed.), Party and Class (London: Pluto Press, 1971), pp. 18–35.
36 C. Mullard, Black Britain (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), p. 145.
37 W. James, ‘Reflections on radical history’, Radical History Review 79 (2001), pp. 99–102.
38 T. Mehmood, Hand on the Sun (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 25.
39 Ramamurthy, Black Star, p. 21.
40 Ramamurthy, Black Star, p. 27.
41 The IWA’s early history is set out in R. Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002), pp. 269–273.
42 Ramamurthy, Black Star, p. 11.
43 V. Sharma, ‘The need for unity’, in S. Grover and J. Patel (eds), Coming of Age: 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism (London: The Monitoring Group, 2017), pp. 103–111.
44 P. Alexander and A. Jouhl, ‘Organising Asian workers’, Socialist Worker Review, April–May 1981.
45 Midweek Gazette, 3 May 1977.
46 S. Grover, ‘Eyes burning in our long eyes’, in S. Grover and J. Patel (eds), Coming of Age: 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism (London: The Monitoring Group, 2017), pp. 121–126.
47 K. Puri, ‘The pool of blood that changed my life’, BBC News Magazine, 5 August 2015.
48 Ramamurthy, Black Star, p. 36.
49 R. Bunce and P. Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 149–151; James’s influence on Howe and the Race Today Collective is apparent in Howe’s Preface to M. Busby and D. Howe, C. L. R. James’s 80th Birthday Lectures (London: RT Publications, 1981), pp. 5–8.