‘Here to Stay, Here to Fight’
When Enoch Powell delivered his ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968, he unleashed a torrent of racist violence, persecution, and abuse. In response to this provocation, 1,000 London dockers went on strike in protest at Powell’s sacking by Edward Heath and marched from the East End to the Houses of Parliament, carrying placards with sayings such as “We want Enoch Powell!” and “Back Britain, not Black Britain”. A hundred dockers lobbied the MP for Stepney, Peter Shore, and 200 lobbied the MP for Poplar, Ian Mikardo. Shore and Mikardo were shouted down, and some dockers even kicked Mikardo. On another occasion, 600 dockers at St Katharine Docks voted to strike, and numerous smaller factories across the country followed suit. Six hundred Smithfield meat porters struck and marched to Westminster, handing Powell a 92-page petition supporting him. Agreement with Powell’s views among the general public had reached a staggering 75%. Clearly, the trade unions and the labour movement were willing to tolerate, if not encourage, racism against Asian workers—a sure result of economism and the lack of any understanding of solidarity issues beyond workplace ‘bread and butter’ struggles, important though they were.
“The trade unions and the labour movement were willing to tolerate, if not encourage, racism against Asian workers.”
The ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech led to violent attacks against British Pakistanis and other British South Asians, and ‘Paki bashing’ became frequent. Powell became popular among activists of the fascist National Front, boosting membership of its local branches. Up until the time of his speech, the organisation had been fairly moribund, with little effect. This set the tone for subsequent racist violence against native-born Black and Asian people, especially against immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers—a violence that persists well into the 21st century.
Against the backdrop of far-right extremism and racist violence in the UK, @Channel4 will once again air critically-acclaimed & award-winning series, #Defiance: Fighting the Far Right, at 10pm Mon 12 — Wed 14 August. Full press release here: https://t.co/kRPh2PXLjO @rizwanahmed pic.twitter.com/HcAUG1tdIF
— Rogan Productions (@RoganProduction) August 8, 2024
Channel Four’s three-part documentary ‘Defiance: Fighting the Far Right‘ delves into the struggle of mostly British Asian people against racism from 1976 to 1981. Chiefly through personal testimonies of Asian men and women, police, and firemen, both of the time and looking back from today, it charts the effects that Powellism encouraged, with relentlessly disturbing accounts of racist violence, murder, police indifference to crimes, and their complicity in protecting the far right. This led to a heroic fightback against racist oppression.
The first episode begins in 1976, when 18-year-old Sikh Gurdip Singh Chaggar was stabbed to death by a gang of white youths in Southall, West London. The racist police greeted his murder with callous indifference—he was ‘just some Indian’, as onlookers pointed out the bloodstains on the street where the young man was killed. Both the judge and the police denied that it was a racially motivated murder, and the perpetrators of this crime were let off lightly with a charge of manslaughter and a four-year sentence. After a period of mourning, this prompted the formation of the anti-racist and anti-fascist Southall Youth Movement (SYM), composed of both Asian and Black Britons with near insurrectionary zeal. Given Ealing Council’s complete neglect of social facilities for children in the area, the SYM set up a youth centre in an abandoned building to teach people different skills and to give the youth greater self-respect and confidence. In 1979, the group organised a demonstration against the National Front meeting at Southall Town Hall, which was heavily protected by the police. The demonstrators were brutally attacked by the Special Patrol Group (SPG), and a teacher, Blair Peach, was killed by them. No one has been charged with his murder. More on this incident later.
“The documentary charts the effects that Powellism encouraged, with relentlessly disturbing accounts of racist violence, murder, and police indifference.”
Throughout this episode, the documentary shows how ghettoised the Asian community had become, with a near self-contained area of retail outlets, cinemas, entertainment centres, garment and clothing sweatshops, and outdoor markets. Despite this ‘comfort zone’, both young and old, though women were scarcely present and mostly confined to the home, and those in later years recalling their past experiences, told of the ever-present fear of violence and humiliation, both beyond and sometimes within the ghetto. Parents became protective of their children and instructed them to stay at home as much as possible. Children were humiliated by teachers and pupils and made to feel small and insignificant in class. They were also physically attacked on their way to and from school. In one part, the interviewer, in the presence of white children that had been taunting him, asked an Asian schoolboy what he would like to do. He replied wearily that he just wanted to go home, implying that he feared and was worn out by the racist abuse he had been receiving. The criticism by young men in the Asian Youth Movement against the older generation, whose community leaders were seen to collaborate with the police, is also mentioned in this section. The promotion of conservative ‘quietism’ by their elders was rejected in the full knowledge that the police were as racist as the fascist organisations.
The National Front and other fascist and far-right organisations were openly and unashamedly racist and did not shy away from their antisemitism, including Holocaust denial. Unlike present-day far-right political parties, they did not hide behind a facade of respectability and had well-trained and disciplined thugs who would carry out assaults and intimidation against Black and Asian people and the left with near-military precision. There are shots of John Kingsley Read, chair of the National Front who later founded the National Party, pronouncing ‘One down, one million to go’ after the murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar. Martin Webster, Activities Organiser of the National Front, spewed out racist venom against ‘khaki-coloured people’ taking over the country. Other voices were heard of white residents complaining about ‘coloureds’ taking over the neighbourhood and the usual alarm bells blaming the housing, health, and welfare crisis on Black and Asian people instead of politicians and cuts in jobs and public services. Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement about fears of being ‘swamped by alien cultures’ poured fuel on the fire of racism. It is notable, in passing, that Webster condemned gay men and lesbians and threatened to force the gay liberation movement ‘firmly back into the closet.’ Ironically, as a closet homosexual, he was eventually expelled from the National Front.
“The promotion of conservative ‘quietism’ by their elders was rejected in the full knowledge that the police were as racist as the fascist organisations.”
The terrain shifts from Southall to the East End of London. Here, the experience of British Asian people is similar to those in Southall, though with some important differences. In the London borough of Tower Hamlets, the focus is mainly on Brick Lane. Nowadays, through gentrification, the Lane’s original cultural identity has been almost completely erased, with funky street art and graffiti, vintage fashion shops, gastro pubs, and art shops predominating. In the 1970s, it had become a thriving industrial area of mostly Asian textile businesses, restaurants, cash-and-carry stores, and retail outlets. Adjacent roads were lined with market stalls, flea markets, and pavements filled with clothing and bric-a-brac. The whole area was alive with the shouts of sellers of goods and crowds eagerly looking for bargains. Again, as with Southall, the unfounded fear that jobs and housing were being taken away and that a way of life was being eroded by white residents was ever-present.
The National Front took advantage of people’s fears and established a stall on the Lane where their paper was on sale, and they continually hurled racist abuse at passers-by for almost two years. The NF had recently shifted its HQ to Spitalfields as a deliberate act of provocation in a sensitive immigrant area. A gang of over 200 skinheads rioted along the Lane, smashing shop windows and beating people up. This intolerable situation had to be countered. Shopkeepers closed their premises and went on strike, and the Bangladesh Youth Movement was formed. Mass demonstrations were held against the NF and police inaction against racist violence. The Spitalfields Bengali Action Group was formed after the murder of Altab Ali, and his funeral, though held in respectful silence, sparked off an even greater resistance movement. The NF were eventually driven off the Lane and never returned.
“We need to build a strong national and international coalition of groups in a movement that will challenge the far-right/fascists.”
Episode two, ‘The Right to Fight’, deals with racist violence and murder in Bradford and Walthamstow, East London.
“We will not be kicked to death,” commented one of the participants in the film as he looked back at the events of 1981 in Bradford. There had been an ‘epidemic’ of racist attacks by white youths, and skinheads had run riot in the Manningham district of the city. It was rumoured that the NF were about to stage a meeting and rally there to provoke fear. The United Black Youth League opposed the fascists and organised demonstrations against them and their police protectors, who were kept at bay with stones and petrol bombs. The police discovered a cache of petrol bombs in a park and, weeks later, arrested twelve young Asian men on trumped-up charges of ‘conspiracy to cause explosions’, a charge usually made against the Irish Republican Army (IRA). At the police station, the defendants were not allowed bail or a solicitor. They were subjected to threats and racist abuse, and the police tried to ‘put words into our mouths.’ The media ran lurid headlines about criminal gangs running riot, presuming their guilt and suggesting some kind of conspiracy to attack the police. When the police interviewed members of the National Front and the British National Party, they simply took at face value their denials of any involvement in racist attacks.
To lessen the possibility of demonstrations in support of the Bradford Twelve, the trial was moved to Leeds Crown Court, but this failed to deter solidarity with the accused. After a very skilful defence of ‘self-defence is no offence’, the jury, carefully selected to weed out potential racists, found in favour of the lads, and after a trial lasting two months, all of the Bradford Twelve were acquitted. The demonstrators who had remained outside (and inside) the court for the duration of the trial were jubilant and carried some of the defendants shoulder high in celebration of the victory. This victory was very important in establishing ‘self-defence’ as a legitimate plea under which to fight future cases, galvanising the Asian community and its allies into a collective fightback against racism and fascism. One important point was made: for the first time, the lived experience of the Asian community—of being beaten, stabbed, murdered, spat on, verbally abused, and so on—was brought into a court of law and clearly engaged the sympathy of the jurors. The press bear-baited the defendants with loaded questions after their acquittal, such as “Do you now have a licence to make petrol bombs?” and “What are you going to do with the petrol bombs?” The answer came out loud and clear: there were no regrets about self-defence by any means necessary in the wake of police racism and the failure to protect Asian communities from the National Front. They were fighting not just for themselves but for future generations. In the background is heard the song ‘Under Pressure’ by David Bowie, which summed up the conditions under which the Asian community was forced to live.
In this section, there was a reference to the authorities challenging a black woman’s entitlement to stay in Britain. She was accused of lying about the identity of her children to game the system. It was completely untrue, but this illustrated how oppressive and racist their approach was, with more than just a willingness to lay false accusations against those they considered undesirable. Thankfully, the woman won her case.
A very moving account is given of the racist murder of a family in Walthamstow. Petrol was poured through the letterbox, and the house was engulfed in flames. A woman and her three children died, and the father/husband made a desperate escape by diving headlong out of a window despite having serious burns to his body. A woman who visited him in hospital stated that his body was there but his soul had gone, though he did recover and survive. The police insisted that there was no evidence the incident was racially motivated, despite the testimony of a fireman that an ‘accelerant’ was used and the house was clearly targeted. One police officer implied that the man may have deliberately started the fire to get rid of his family, hinting that it might have been an honour killing. This once again exposed the total callousness and indifference towards these murders and the racist assumptions about Asian lifestyles. A peaceful funeral and silent march for the murdered family turned to protest and fury after an attack by the police, who drove horses straight into the crowd. This prompted shouts of ‘We want skinheads’ and further reinforced the mass fightback against racist violence.
“The police insisted that there was no evidence the incident was racially motivated.”
In this section, it was revealed how police routinely used the terms ‘Paki’ and ‘Nigger’ to describe Asian and Black people. Racist graffiti was everywhere to be seen. One person feared being burned alive and moved mattresses downstairs for ease of escape in case of an arson attack. Things became so bad that the Pakistan Welfare Society was prompted to write an article on the ‘Unsolved Murders of Walthamstow’. Around this time (1981), Margaret Thatcher introduced the British Nationality Act, introducing stricter conditions for immigrants to gain entry to the country. It helped to pour fuel on an already volatile situation.
Episode 3 ‘A Killer in the Ranks’, a return to southall
The final film, ‘A Killer in the Ranks’, returns once again to Southall and is mostly about the events that led up to the SPG murder of Blair Peach in 1979. This section begins with an exposé of how Asian people were portrayed on television, often in a mocking way, with racist assumptions about their behaviour, speech, and ‘mannerisms’. One commentator pointed out that the subtext to all of this was ‘you are not welcome here.’ As with the present day, the media and politicians were falling over themselves to attack immigrants and alien ways of life. We have already noted Thatcher’s comments on this.
The NF had grown in strength, fielding candidates in practically every constituency throughout Britain. With this in mind, they organised a mass meeting and election campaign in Southall, with the usual inflammatory speech about repatriating immigrants and denying them the vote. In protest at this, a St. George’s Day shutdown of shops and factories was organised, as was a picket of the town hall where the NF was meeting. While some of the demonstrators favoured a Gandhi-style sit-down protest, the Southall Youth Movement wanted a direct confrontation with the fascists but were prevented from occupying the town hall early to prevent the NF from meeting. The ‘rioting’ was described as violent mobs attacking the police.
The SPG were drafted into the area to enforce law and order and maintain peace. They moved in heavily, blocking all access to the town hall and occupying surrounding streets. They began arresting people prior to the meeting and targeted those who were deemed to be leaders. It wasn’t long before they attacked the demonstrators with extreme brutality, beating them with truncheons accompanied by racist insults. Despite this, the demonstrators were determined to break through police cordons, some of which prevented people from returning home. A bus was commandeered to try and drive through the police and reach the town hall. People who were penned in on the Broadway, including Blair Peach, who was a member of the Anti-Nazi League, sat down in protest. This provoked a mounted police charge, with officers hitting people hard with truncheons drawn. One Asian police officer, who later became filled with shame, witnessed police dragging an elderly woman along the street. When he intervened, he was ordered back to his unit. It was at this point that he felt he was on the other side and regretted protecting the NF.
The People’s United Front was a black Afro-Caribbean run music venue in a private house, with the purpose of promoting social cohesion and providing a place of safety during the conflagration. The SPG stormed into the place, and when challenged, the owner was told ‘get back, you black bastard’ and knocked unconscious. He recovered from a coma and regretfully discovered that Thatcher had just been elected.
342 people were arrested during the uprising, and the Southall Defence Fund was set up to cover legal expenses. They were charged with everything from obstruction to grievous bodily harm.
Thatcher urged people to ignore the ‘rioters’, and at the State Opening of Parliament, the Queen gave full support to the police force and their respect for law and order. After the killing of Blair Peach, the police denied it was the SPG, and David McNee, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, stated that if people stayed off the streets, they wouldn’t get any grief.
A teacher friend of Blair Peach gives an account of the run-up to his eventual murder. They had moved away from the Broadway and the demonstration into a quiet residential street. A van arrived full of SPG officers, and they ran straight towards the protesters. In the panic that ensued, people scattered, and Blair’s body was later found in a front garden. He was taken into the house, still conscious but unable to speak. He was taken to hospital, where he died of his injuries. It was discovered that he had serious head injuries and a fractured pelvis.
There was a huge demonstration outside the local police station against his killing, and people touchingly paid their respects as his coffin lay in a room in someone’s house. It is estimated that over 10,000 people attended his funeral, at which the Internationale was sung—a fitting tribute to a warrior for peace and social justice.
Despite 14 witnesses having seen the SPG beating Blair Peach and the police openly lying in court, the judge delivered a verdict of misadventure, and some of the defendants were given long prison sentences. In 1981, two years after the Southall uprising, the fascists returned to Southall. Skinheads went on the rampage and even had their own ‘punk’ band playing at a local pub, the Hambrough Tavern. 500 Asians faced off against 200 skinheads with a big difference: Asian youth had grown in confidence and were well-prepared to take them and the police on. One policeman said his experience of resistance was even worse than in 1979. The Hambrough Tavern was firebombed and burned to the ground.
To be clear, the terms Black and Asian (notice the absence of Muslim/Islam) were not labels denoting someone’s ‘difference’, identity, or specific affiliation. They were self-consciously adopted as political titles used as a weapon in a common struggle with allies against racism, state oppression, and the repressive apparatus of the police, courts, and racist media that cultivated wider social oppression. The postmodernist turn, unfortunately, has encouraged the abandonment of solidarity struggles in favour of a kind of protective, inward-looking ‘safe haven’ of identity politics that militates against class struggle and poses little challenge to capitalism and the status quo. Celebrate difference and be aware of intersectionality by all means, but what does it mean if it curtails solidarity with other oppressed groups and the majority working class as a whole, which alone has the interest and capacity to overthrow capitalism? Does identity politics really challenge the sources of social power and oppression in the capitalist state? In the absence of any overarching anti-capitalist ‘grand narrative’, we are left with minor skirmishes and the right to beg for petty concessions.
“The final episode is mostly about the events that led up to the SPG murder of Blair Peach in 1979.”
Have things changed nowadays? The police were judged to be institutionally racist by the Macpherson report after the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1996. We can also add that they are institutionally transphobic, homophobic, and misogynistic. The Windrush scandal, as part of the ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants, has disgracefully still not been resolved. Boat people drown in the English Channel because of closed borders. To solve the problem of crime, the ‘suss’ laws and racial profiling have been reintroduced, disproportionately targeting Black people. The anti-immigrant laws are inherently racist and seek to lay the blame for the crises of capitalism at the feet of those fleeing poverty, civil war, famine, and persecution. The Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill discriminates against travellers and Roma people. The Public Order Act is designed to render social protest movements, such as Black Lives Matter, ineffective, and the anti-trade union laws speak for themselves. In many respects, though the far right are still active, this right-wing Tory government has pulled their teeth by doing the dirty work for them. The present war against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank pogroms, despite pleas to the contrary, not only expose the callousness and indifference of world leaders to the genocide but also demonstrate a racist element in not challenging the Zionist description of Palestinians as subhuman animals.
The SPG was disbanded because of its violent conduct and replaced by the Territorial Support Group and other organs of state repression. They are used to police pickets and demonstrations, supposedly with ‘less violence’1 than their predecessors. It remains to be seen how long their restraint will last, given the ongoing, ceaseless capitalist crisis and the struggles for the liberation of oppressed people. The success of those struggles depends on how organised and combative working-class organisations and social protest movements become in the anti-capitalist fight for emancipation.
In November 2022, Calvin Robinson, a deacon for the Free Church of England, praised Enoch Powell’s speech in an article for his blog. He is also known more recently for his attacks on trans people and drag queen readings for children. He has his own programme on GB News, as does Nigel Farage, the one-time leader of UKIP, who also agreed with Powell’s basic stance. Norman Tebbit, in a Daily Telegraph article, railed against the Trojan Horse effect: “We have imported far too many immigrants who have come here not to live in our society, but to replicate here the society of their homelands…It is precisely what I was talking about over 20 years ago and Enoch Powell was warning against long before that.” Conservative MP Gerald Howarth said on the same issue, “Clearly, the arrival of so many people of non-Christian faith has presented a challenge, as so many of us, including the late Enoch Powell, warned decades ago.” The leader of UKIP in Wales, Neil Hamilton, said that Powell had been “proved right by events.” Douglas Murray has written a whole book attacking immigrants and regularly rants against them and the left about the decline of the West. The ‘free speech’ GB News and Talk TV are regular outlets for right-wing ‘anti-woke’ propaganda designed to silence left-wing voices. The Labour Party has done little to challenge all of this and is complicit in attacks on immigrants and Muslim ‘terrorists’ and sympathisers under the false flag of antisemitism. When we put this together with the shocking drift to the far right both here, in the USA, Russia, continental Europe, the subcontinent of India, and the decline of the left, we are confronted by creeping fascism and the morbid state Gramsci warned us against: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Under those circumstances, can we still maintain “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will?”
A final note on the fightback against creeping fascism and the drift to the right. The new Labour government is trying to play it both ways. The closure of the Rwanda Project and the Bibby Stockholm prison ship was decided upon not on the grounds of the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers but because of the costs involved. The DWP has been ordered to concentrate on ‘work not welfare’, with continuing sanctions against those who do not comply with a work search on the drive to cut welfare benefits. Seven Labour MPs have had the whip withdrawn for six months for voting for the withdrawal of benefit caps that would have lifted thousands of families out of poverty. Yvette Cooper has ordered the deportation of Vietnamese asylum seekers and raids by the police and immigration officials on workplaces that employ migrant workers, alongside aggressive policing of borders. Starmer wants to stop immigration by providing apprenticeships to encourage British jobs for British workers. Rachel Reeves stated that if the government fails to ‘deliver’ (whatever that means), then the far right and the far left would benefit at the next general election. It is clear from all these measures, pushing a ‘centrist’ position of ‘fiscal responsibility’ and anti-immigrant deportations, that the Labour government is pursuing measures straight out of the playbook of the right-wing Tory Party and Farage’s Reform Party. The Labour Party may rule, but the real governors of the realm are the corporations, banks, financial institutions, and the City of London. Starmer’s appeal to the right-wing media cements his full capitulation to the project of restoring capitalism to profitability at the expense of the working class.
Our task is to defend all who are exploited and oppressed by the capitalist system and to defeat the drift towards creeping fascism. That means exposing the far right as anti-working class through racist ‘divide and rule’ tactics, anti-woke/conspiracy theory posturing, and revealing the truth that right-wing millionaire shysters can never speak for workers. We must defend the rights of women, asylum seekers, BME, LGBTQ+ and all oppressed minority groups. To strengthen the fightback, we need to build a strong national and international coalition of groups in a movement that will challenge the far right/fascists and put an end to the neoliberal counter-revolution against all that is progressive.
Defiance: Fighting the Far Right can be viewed online and is showing on Channel 4 over the next three nights (12 August – 14 August 2024)
Footnotes
- Ian Tomlinson was unlawfully killed by a TSG Metropolitan Police officer during the G20 protests in 2009 ↩︎
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