DIALOGUE BOOKS

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Dialogue Books

Copyright © Preeti Dhillon 2023

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-349-70281-0

Dialogue Books

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London EC4Y 0DZ

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Dialogue Books, part of Little, Brown, Book Group Limited, an Hachette UK company.

To those who fought, and those who fight.

Contents

Introduction

1. So, What Happened?

2. Indian Workers’ Association

3. Bristol Bus Boycott

4. Black Power and the Mangrove Nine

5. The Fasimbas, the Oval Four and the Black Liberation Front

6. Black Education Movement

7. Brixton Black Women’s Group and OWAAD

8. Grunwick Strike

9. Altab Ali and the Battle of Brick Lane

10. Asian Youth Movements and the Bradford 12

11. 1981

Conclusion: So, What Happened Next?

Other movements, campaigns and organisations

Acknowledgements

Notes

Introduction

I grew up in Southall, near Heathrow Airport in west London. Dubbed ‘Little Punjab’ for the thousands of northern Indian families that live there, as you pull into the train station the ‘Southall’ sign greets you in both English and Gurmukhi.* I hated Southall growing up; the traffic, the catcalls, the noise. The pungent smell of cooking seeped into my hair, clothes and skin. I could never wash it off. Walking along the Broadway on my way to school (big up Dormers Wells!) I would groan a little and imagine leaving Southall. I fantasised about where else I would live and what it might smell like; ideally like fresh laundry, straight out of the dryer. I knew very little about Southall except where to get the tastiest samosas, the best value for money salwar kameezes, and which ethnicities and nationalities lived in which areas, and what that supposedly meant in terms of safety.

I vaguely knew that there had been racism ‘back in the day’. My dad told me about truanting from school to avoid racism in the classroom, and the casual racism he’d face walking on the streets or hanging out with his friends in the park. But I certainly didn’t know that Southall was the site of so much heartbreak from the 1960s to 1980s, with the menace of the National Front, racially motivated killings, police brutality and even death at the hands of the police. I didn’t know that Southall birthed crucial anti-racism campaigns and movements of the era, like the Southall Youth Movement that patrolled the streets to defend the community against fascists and police harassment. No one in my family talked about that history when I was growing up as the memories are painful, and besides, ‘good immigrants’ don’t complain.

Like many of us in childhood, I first learned what was going on in society from glimpses of the news. I remember hearing about Stephen Lawrence but didn’t really understand what it all meant. As I started to engage more with the world around me, in sauntered Tony Blair; his shiny smile and thick hair – luscious from all the promise it carried – beamed down at me from the TV. I grew up with the notion that ‘Britain is a multiracial and multicultural society’ and that there would be ‘prosperity for all’, as the 1997 Labour manifesto said.¹

I had no reason not to believe it. I hadn’t been on the receiving end of any open racial abuse, the government invested heavily in public services, and for the blink of an eye it was even cool to be Asian. We were on TV, and funny, in Goodness Gracious Me. We were good at sports other than cricket, at least in Bend It Like Beckham. Missy Elliott used bhangra beats in ‘Get Ur Freak On’. Madonna dressed in saris and wore a bindi. I didn’t know the word ‘appropriation’ then – I was just excited that one of the world’s biggest stars wanted to dress like me.

To my young, uninformed, impressionable mind, events like the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Iraq War were anomalies, remnants of a bygone era, nothing but small bumps on the smooth path of progress. I thought everything would be OK. Now, as a historian, I am embarrassed at how little I knew of the history of the UK and the society into which I was born.

I stumbled upon the rich history of Southall after I was inspired by the Black American political activist Angela Davis to do some digging around. Seeing her speak at the Southbank Centre for International Women’s Day in 2019 was the closest an ‘In conversation with’ can come to a stadium concert. The crowd was absolutely buzzing, Davis could barely get out a sentence without whooping and cheering drowning her out. As she mentioned groups and movements I had never heard of that were involved in US civil rights action, such as the Black female maids behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it got me thinking that there must have been movements in the UK too. Surely? A few internet searches and library-book reservations later and suddenly I learned about dozens of campaigns, strikes and movements led by Black and Brown people, men and women alike, all right here in the UK, including in Southall.*

I decided that I wanted to know everything. The hardship, the heartache and, more than that, the fight back. I wanted to know everything that happened in parts of London outside of Southall that we never visited as they were deemed ‘too dangerous’. And outside of London: how did Black and Brown people live in Bristol, in Bradford and beyond? Did they experience racism and in what forms? How did they fight back? Did they fight at all? These questions and many more evolved to make this book.

Spoiler alert: people did fight back, and in spectacular ways.

This book tells the stories of ten remarkable movements, campaigns and organisations led by Black and Brown people in the 1960s to 1980s, that fought against racism and capitalism, and impacted the way we live in the UK. It looks at the fight in all areas of life including education, work, healthcare, housing and on the streets, drawing on secondary literature, local history projects, archival material and oral history.

It focuses on the 1960s to 1980s as I wanted to understand the UK that my parents grew up in and that I was born into as a racialised person. We know about the miners’ strikes, deep recession and the rise of Margaret Thatcher. We know about the one and only England football World Cup victory, the Beatles and dodgy fashion choices. But there is so much more. Learning about that era helps us understand the society that we live in today, and inspires us to continue fighting for change where it’s needed.

And, oh boy, is it needed.

The 1960s to early 1980s were a tempestuous time in UK history. Neoliberalism hadn’t taken hold quite yet, though heady capitalism continued to whip Britain’s sails as it navigated the decline of the Empire. Black and Brown arrivals from the Commonwealth brought with them the experience and knowledge of imperialism and anti-imperialism and real, radical desire for a different existence; one which didn’t rely on the exploitation of people. They didn’t find the same desire for change among all the people of the UK, especially the middle and upper classes who benefitted from the status quo of exploitation. They were greeted with a hostile environment, overt racism in the streets, at school and at work, and a home was a hard place to find when it was still legal and socially acceptable to refuse to rent to someone Black or Brown. Some of the Black and Brown arrivals weren’t content with being ‘good immigrants’ and decided to do something about the racism they experienced.

Fundamentally, the movements all fought for the same thing: freedom from the multiple shackles of oppression for themselves and others. The fight was not just for themselves in the UK but for oppressed peoples the world over. For many, this wasn’t a fight for equality, an equal footing with white people, but for deep, systemic change. As Tariq Mehmood, an activist of the era, put it, they weren’t fighting for a piece of the pie, they didn’t even want the crumbs, they wanted the whole bakery.²

The struggle took different forms. There were protests and marches, armed with placards and slogans such as ‘come what may, we’re here to stay’. These heavily policed marches meant arrests, which meant fighting battles in a courtroom. You might also have ended up in court as a target of unwarranted police attention (read: racial profiling). In other situations, resistance meant withholding the one thing you had that white people wanted: your labour. The year 1981 saw the last-ditch form of resistance: an uprising. How people resisted differed depending on the exact circumstances they found themselves in but it was almost always accompanied by Black and Brown solidarity to an extent that seems almost unthinkable now in our divided society.

Today, our challenges look different and yet eerily similar to those of the 1960s to 1980s. Luckily it is no longer a national sport to beat up Brown people and we’re not likely to see a ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ sign in the window of an apartment building. Racial discrimination is actually illegal now. But after the Brexit vote, racial violence and hate speech made a comeback even stronger than all the recent thirst for nineties nostalgia.³ And now the bread and butter of racism is the systemic, institutional racism that permeates our lives through policy, legislation and cultural norms. It leads to tragedies like Grenfell, rampant Islamophobia, stripping British citizens of their citizenship, deaths in police custody and unequal treatment in the healthcare system, to name just a few manifestations.

Change in the 1960s to 1980s was not inevitable, and it did not occur through happenstance or divine intervention. It occurred through the collective action, the rugged determination and the sheer audacity of the communities that pushed for change.

As then, resistance today also takes many forms. There is not one ‘right’ way to resist, though a lot of public opinion (and laws) would beg to differ. Resistance includes signing petitions, writing to your MP, following and amplifying organisations doing the work, calling for public inquiries and taking to the streets. It includes using your voice, a pen, your fists. In many instances, mere existence is an act of resistance. And when people would see you suffer, joy and laughter are the most powerful forms of resistance.

Like many, however, I feel like individual action is often pointless. I do like signing petitions, and I enjoyed writing to my MP asking him to vote against Boris Johnson’s no-deal Brexit, to which he responded, ‘I need no persuading!’ which made me chuckle and then sigh. I had influenced nothing. Penning a pithy tweet can take a whole evening, but solitary actions all seem to reinforce one thing: it’s not enough. It’s easy to believe that resistance is futile, but we know that collective action is the one thing that works. That’s why I choose to focus on movements. I do, however, include the role of individuals within those movements – these are people whose names are rarely or never mentioned and they need to be put back into the story.

‘If this history is so important,’ I hear you say, ‘then why don’t we already know about it?’ Good question, dear reader. There are two reasons. The first is that Britain likes to pretend it is not a racist country. We look to the era of fascist groups such as the National Front and the time when it was legal to refuse to serve someone to say, ‘Look, we don’t have racism like that any more, ergo, we’re not racist.’ And no matter how racist we are, there is always someone ‘more racist’ than we are. We compare ourselves to the USA to justify our actions, and without the manifestations of white supremacy similar to our transatlantic cousins – like a mob storming the Houses of Parliament – we are sold the lie that Britain is fine and therefore what is the point of discussing the sordid past? But Britain is in fact so racist that it doesn’t think it’s racist. Just see what’s in the news on any given day, such as 2021’s propaganda-esque Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities’ report (the Sewell Report), or the police officers who took selfies with the bodies of murdered Black sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, and how ‘(almost) straight outta Compton’ Meghan Markle is discussed.⁴ Or look at the UN report that says that Black people in the UK are subject to the use of excessive force by the police, which leads to deaths in custody.⁵ Britain’s motto should be ‘I’m not racist, but . . . ’

The second reason we don’t know this history ties into the first: this is history that has been deliberately kept from us. The study of history is central to creating the type of society we want, and the type of people we want in that society, to ensure we toe the party line and play nice. In the UK, that means that we mostly discuss victories in the World Wars and how the slave trade was abolished by a solitary, white, British man. Only 11 per cent of GCSE students learn anything about the contribution of Black people in Britain, and in 2020 the government turned down a request to review the curriculum in England to include more Black and Brown history.⁶ The version of history we learn also helpfully assists the promotion of capitalism with its focus on individualism rather than communities.

If we were to learn about Black and Brown people in the UK then we’d need to have uncomfortable conversations about what life was like and why, and learning about those who fought against injustice and disrupted the status quo might just give us ideas above our station. It’s the same reason why we don’t learn about the Haitian Revolution, the uprising of enslaved people in 1791 who freed themselves from French colonial rule, or the Indian Uprising of 1857. And how can all the stories fit in the one month a year that we’re allowed to discuss ‘Black’ history? And the first South Asian Heritage Month in the UK was only in 2020.

What would happen if we knew about the epic, two-year long strike at the Grunwick factory, led by Brown women, that rallied the nation’s working class? Or the classification of Black children as ‘educationally subnormal’ and the tireless fight of the Black Education Movement against it? For starters, it would be a lot harder to convince us that the current policies and practices we see aren’t racist, classist and misogynistic.

I selected the ten movements, campaigns and organisations in this book because they are the ones that impacted me the most when I learned about them. They are the ones that made me stop what I was reading and text a friend to ask, ‘Did you know about this?!’ They are the movements that brought tears to my eyes, made me feel powerful, and helped me the most to understand the UK I was born into and as it is today.

This book starts by setting the scene of UK life in the 1960s, 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. It sweeps through the highs and lows of the decades to show what directly provoked the social movements. The rest of the book is dedicated to those movements, and tells the stories of their emergence, what they did, and the impact they had. It ends by taking stock of where we are now, how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.

This book unapologetically (and sometimes apologetically, I am British after all) centres movements formed and led by Black and Brown people. ‘Brown’ here refers to people of South Asian descent. The movements they led were pioneering and it is time for them to become common knowledge. They also provide important lessons for us today, though this is not intended to be a ‘how-to’ guide.

Some of what you read here will shock you. Some of it will upset you. If you’re anything like me, it might even give you nightmares. Be warned that what you learn cannot be unlearned. I will never see Britain in the same way but I sure am glad I know. I understand Britain more now: learning what happened makes me facepalm and say, ‘Ohhhh! That’s why we left the EU!’ or ‘Ohhhh! Now I get why the police have a race problem.’ Nothing happens in a vacuum, especially with a political system like ours that replicates itself generation after generation.

Despite the shock and upset, absorbing these stories has made me feel stronger than I ever thought possible. It’s akin to the tingly feeling I get when I see kickass women in books or films, and how I imagine many white, cis, hetero, able-bodied men feel every day. Seeing people just like me represented in history helps me believe that I can create change too.

It is not always an easy read – racism and state-supported violence are rarely light material – but it is ultimately a book of hope. Hope that together we can make a difference, that together we are powerful, and that we don’t have to tackle this alone. There is a long and deep history of activism by people who look like us, and they can inspire us to make a difference, just like they did. We are in the midst of a racial reckoning, and this book aims to show us that change is possible. It will stoke the fire of hope, and show us that together we are the architects of the future.

I now have a new appreciation for Southall. I moved out of Southall long ago (disappointingly not to a place that smells like fresh laundry), but when I visit the Broadway it is no longer such a nuisance. Its continued existence is a symbol of determination, the noise an act of defiance against those who wanted to silence us.

Before we go on, please know that there is a trigger warning on this entire book. It records the use of racial slurs and there is frequent reference to physical and mental harm. I have not censored what happened and have therefore not edited use of the N word or the P word, or other imagery or phrases.

___________

* Punjabi script.

* In this book I am capitalising Black and Brown. This is to emphasise that there is community among Black and Brown people through a shared history of oppression, and a solidarity through movements such as those detailed in this book. There is an ongoing debate about capitalisation and whether to also capitalise white. Language is imperfect and subjective and it may be that in a few years I would not make the same decision, but, for now, the capitalisation I have chosen seems appropriate given the subject matter.

Chapter One

So, What Happened?

‘We are here because you were there.’¹

AMBALAVANER SIVANANDAN,

Director of the Institute of Race

Relations 1973–2013

Fires had blazed for hours. An inferno of shops, offices and houses had blurred the skyline. Flames had licked overturned cars, both police and private. Chunks of brick and pavement, shards of glass and abandoned riot gear littered the streets. Hundreds of people had been arrested. Hundreds had been injured, possibly thousands if you counted the protestors, though no one did. Millions of pounds worth of damage had been done. Residents staggered among the ruins, the stench of petrol filling their nostrils, looking for something recognisable amid the wreckage, and wondered, ‘What now?’

This scene was repeated to varying degrees across Britain in the spring and summer of 1981. In twenty-nine towns and cities nationwide, Black, Brown and white people, mostly young men, rose up against police brutality, high unemployment and the spectre of fascism. All symptoms of the endemic disease of racism. Protestors were met by walls of police and tear gas. It was the first time tear gas had ever been used on the mainland, and it was the first time police were offered armoured vehicles and water cannons.² New methods of control for a new perceived threat to public order.

The uprisings were met with surprise from the British public and politicians alike, but they shouldn’t have been a surprise. For decades, Black and Brown people had been defending themselves against the effects of racism on the streets, at work, in schools and in the courtroom. Nineteen eighty-one was simply an extension of that resistance.

Uprisings of the kind seen in 1981 are the last resort of people who haven’t been listened to, who have been deliberately marginalised and are left with few other options. After all, no one destroys their own home unless they have to, right? Especially if they have nowhere else to go. So how did it come to this in 1981? Where did it all begin? How did Black and Brown people end up in the UK anyway, in a country where it seemed the white majority did not want them? To understand this, we must go back centuries, to how Black and Brown people came to be on the isles and what happened afterwards, to see why by 1981 they had finally had enough.

The people of the UK have never been homogenous, not in skin colour, language or religion. Black and Brown people have been in the UK for centuries – the earliest records of Black people in the UK date back to Roman times. Later, the seemingly never-ending colonial period and industrial age ushered in the first large increase in Black people on the isles, mostly in positions that quite literally served white people. People from Africa and the Caribbean were brought or came to the UK during the transatlantic slave trade. It is estimated that at any given time, around 10,000 Black people lived in the UK in the 1700s, out of a total population of over 10 million by the end of the century.³

As long as there has been racism, or oppression of any kind, there has been resistance to it. London in the 1760s has been described by scholar Peter Fryer as ‘a centre of black resistance’, and in a show of solidarity that may seem unusual today, white, working-class people joined with the Black working class against a common enemy: the rich ruling class. They joined together to protect the liberty of Black people in the UK and protest for the freedom of Black people in the USA.⁴ Racism was a supporting pillar of the Empire, and resistance to it started to tremble the foundations of Empire Headquarters.

Records for South Asians in the UK date back as early as the 1600s. The East India Company hired men from the Indian subcontinent as lascars (sailors) on their voyages. They did not have many opportunities to travel back after their work was done and often settled in Britain’s port cities.⁵ British families also brought over women as ayahs (nannies) and servants for the summer holidays, or as cheap help when their stint in the colony ended.

These early settlers made their mark on the cultural landscape of Britain. In 1810, a former soldier called Sake Dean Mahomed opened the Hindoostane Coffee House in George Street in London, the country’s first Indian restaurant, thus pioneering the trend that for many has become the most appreciated cultural contribution of South Asians to the UK.⁶

Fast forward to the 1900s and despite the horrors unleashed in the name of Empire – no, the railway still does not justify colonisation – many people from South Asia and the Caribbean believed in the UK’s expansionist project and the ‘mother country’.⁷ One and a half million South Asians and at least 15,000 West Indians contributed to the First World War, both in supporting roles as well as on the front lines.⁸ Unlike in Europe, this was without conscription, though it was not always by choice either.

Predictably, Black and Brown people were not always warmly welcomed. The War Office did not want to arm Black people to fight against white.⁹ And there were disputes about where to station Indian troops in the war. Should they be in Egypt, where they would be among people who looked like them, or on the Western Front? After the war ended, the UK’s Black and Brown population increased to around 20,000, many of whom had been part of the war effort and decided to stay in the UK, or else were stranded after being demobilised and not given options for onward travel.¹⁰

The interwar period was not peaceful in the UK, proving the old adage that the absence of war is not the same as peace. Job scarcity, the increase in interracial relationships and just good ol’ fashioned white supremacy led to clashes that often ended in displacement, injuries or death.¹¹ That the white folks had won the war thanks to Black and Brown support didn’t stop them turning on that support, like winning a game of dodgeball then throwing the balls at your own team members.

Unlike a game of dodgeball, this had life-or-death consequences. Charles Wootton, a twenty-four-year-old Black Bermudan sailor who had served Britain in the war, was chased down the streets of Liverpool by a group of white people as he fled a police raid on his house. He ended up in the Queen’s Dock, eventually drowning as up to 2,000 people, including the police, looked on.¹² No arrests were made. The year 1919 saw attacks on Black, Chinese and Arab communities as many of the discontents towards post-war Britain were taken out on Black and Brown people. There were clashes across the nations, including in Cardiff, Glasgow and Hull.¹³

Antisemitism was also rife. It wasn’t a particularly new phenomenon in the UK: the 1905 Aliens Act intended to limit the number of Jewish people entering the country.¹⁴ This continued in the interwar period, with the 1932 establishment of the British Union of Fascists by Oswald Mosley – sorry, Sir Oswald Mosley – and these ‘Blackshirts’ regularly attacked Jewish people. This led to one of the biggest anti-fascist events in British history, the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, where 20,000 anti-fascists, Jews, socialists and more clashed with the Blackshirts and police.

Another 2.5 million South Asians and 10,000 West Indians were involved in the war effort for the Second World War.¹⁵ This included Noor Inayat Khan, a spy who became the first woman of South Asian descent to be recognised with a historical blue plaque in 2020. Unlike the First World War, the Second World War decimated the national supply of labour in the UK and soon there were more jobs than workers. The number of workers fell by a further 1.4 million after the war as married women and older people chose, or were coerced, to leave work for domestic duties or retirement.¹⁶ At the same time, white Brits emigrated to New Zealand, Australia and Canada as those countries also needed labour. In short, the UK was desperate for workers; the National Health Service needed doctors and nurses after its creation in 1948, factories and foundries needed manual labourers, and cities needed to be literally rebuilt as they lay devastated from bombings.

Britain tried to fill these vacancies with Brits and other white citizens by creating the 1948 British Nationality Act. It codified what was already the reality: British subjects/Commonwealth citizens could come and go as they pleased on a par with subjects living in Britain itself.* It was expected that the British Nationality Act would lure white immigrants from Australasia and Canada, but this didn’t work as there was also a labour shortage in those areas. White Europeans were also encouraged to live and work in the UK, and thousands were allowed entry as refugees. By the end of the 1950s, more than 250,000 Eastern Europeans had migrated to the UK, and there were 680,000 Irish migrants in the UK by 1961.¹⁷

The British government had, however, not foreseen that the British Nationality Act would encourage migration of Black and Brown people from the colonies. In the same year as the Act was passed in 1948, the now infamous HMT Empire Windrush carried 1,027 passengers to the UK, around half of whom were from Jamaica and wanted to find work in the ‘motherland’. This event for many people marks the beginning of the post-war immigration period. Black and Brown people from the West Indies, South Asia and West, East and Southern Africa moved to the UK to contribute to the flailing economy and in the search of better opportunities. Better than those that could be found at home, where the damage wrought by colonisation and the aftermath of independence, or natural disasters, made for a hard life. Despite the labour shortage, the new arrivals weren’t always warmly welcomed; Liverpool witnessed three days of racist attacks in 1948, the same year that the Windrush landed, echoing the violence that had taken place there in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War.

By the mid-1950s, as recruitment drives in the UK had proven unsuccessful, London Transport, British Rail, the British Hotel and Restaurant Association and the NHS actively recruited in the Caribbean, even paying transatlantic travel costs for some new recruits. In his role as health minister, Enoch Powell actively recruited West Indian nurses (if the irony of that is not obvious yet, wait until later in the chapter when Powell will come up again).¹⁸ Migrants found work across the country, from factories in west London to the textile mills of Yorkshire. They found jobs in transport, health, hospitality, construction and manufacturing.

Many migrants came alone, leaving their families behind as they didn’t plan to stay in the UK. The plan was to save money to take back home. ‘My idea – and the other fellows’ as well,’ said Carl Hoyte, a bus driver born in Barbados, ‘was to come here for five years, get as much money as you can and go back . . . I’m still here after 44 years and I still ain’t got the money!’¹⁹ The inflated hopes of making it big were soon popped when it became clear that Black and Brown workers did not have access to the same opportunities as the white ones. Black female nurses in the NHS were hired as State Enrolled Nurses rather than State Registered Nurses, which was a lower position with a qualification not even recognised by countries in the Caribbean.²⁰ And without money to save, or even enough money for the return journey, the temporary migrants became permanent settlers.

Harold Macmillan, the Conservative Party Prime Minister, said in 1957, ‘most of our people have never had it so good’, but this wasn’t true for all of Britain’s people. Long-term settlement of Black and Brown people did not always go down well with the white population. The 1950s ended with acts of racial violence that foreshadowed the violence that was to become a prominent feature of life in the 1960s to 1980s.

In 1958, a week after racist attacks had shaken Nottingham, a riot broke out in Notting Hill in London after a white woman was seen arguing with her Black husband in public, playing on one of the biggest bugbears of white supremacy: interracial relationships. This prompted five days of attacks on the West Indian population in the neighbourhood by Teddy boys armed with iron bars and butcher’s knives, many of whom supported Mosley and his new Union Movement, or the White Defence League, or one of the other extreme, right-wing groups.

Safety couldn’t be guaranteed inside either, as petrol bombs were thrown into houses and businesses frequented by the Caribbean community. A first group of Teddy boys would pass by and mark the houses where Black people lived, so the following group knew which houses to attack.²¹ A police officer reported at the time that he saw a mob of a few hundred white people shouting, ‘We will kill all black bastards. Why don’t you send them home?’²² One of the Black men arrested for possession of weapons, George Lawrence, said in his defence that ‘they will kill us if we do not help ourselves’.²³ This proved prescient.

Not to be scared into submission, journalist and activist Claudia Jones and others organised a Caribbean carnival in early 1959 to bring the community together in an expression of joy. This was the first event in what was to later become the world-famous Notting Hill Carnival.

A few months later, Teddy boys murdered Antiguan-born Kelso Cochrane in Notting Hill. No one was charged with his murder. Cochrane was the Stephen Lawrence of his day.

Nineteen sixty. What would become fondly known as the ‘Swinging Sixties’ had just begun, and life in the UK was on the up and up. The fog of the Second World War had lifted and the whiff of prosperity was in the air. The economy grew by a whopping 6 per cent, a figure I’ve never seen in my lifetime.²⁴ British rock and roll was in its infancy, and Cliff Richard dominated the charts that year with three number-one hits (in case you don’t know, he’s the guy who sings ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ at you on a loop every December). Strides were made in television entertainment as the Grand National horse race was broadcast for the first time, and Coronation Street premiered to the joy of 7.7 million viewers. The UK was still clinging on to numerous colonies, with territories and influence stretching from Australia to Jamaica.

As the 1960s went on, things seemingly got better and better for people in the UK. The death penalty was abolished (for murder at least), homosexuality was legalised (in two of the four nations of the UK), the contraceptive pill was launched and abortion legalised (under certain conditions). The miniskirt took over the fashion world and liberated young women from dressing like their mothers. ‘Beatlemania’ spread like wildfire around the world and the Rolling Stones sang about their lack of satisfaction.

Technological advances saw a huge rise in affordable consumer electronics. In just ten years, the proportion of UK households with a television rose from 58 per cent to over 90 per cent.²⁵ The UK developed the supersonic Concorde with France.

And no discussion of 1960s UK would be complete without mentioning England’s football World Cup victory in 1966. What is perhaps most impressive by today’s standards, however, is that even by the end of the decade you could buy a house for just £5,000 with change to spare, the equivalent of around £63,000 today.²⁶ There is widespread nostalgia for the 1960s. In 2016, Brits chose the 1960s as the decade in which Britain was at its ‘greatest’.²⁷

Despite being the ‘greatest’ decade, as skirts got shorter so did the patience of many white Brits as the perceived threat to their ‘British’ way of life grew. For the 415,000 Black, Brown and otherwise ‘non-white’ people in the UK in 1961, the 1960s was a tumultuous decade.²⁸ It became harder for Black and Brown British citizens to even enter the country, then finding work was difficult and then on top of that there was the constant police harassment with which to deal.

The fears of white Brits were stoked by the government as much as renegade figures such as Oswald Mosley. The Conservative government started to close the door that had been wedged open by the British Nationality Act, with the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act that ended free movement for Commonwealth citizens. Now, citizens who wanted to live and work in the UK had to apply for a voucher based on their skills. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act fully unleashed the racism that had been clawing at the gate throughout the 1950s. The state had declared that people in the Commonwealth were different to people on the British Isles, in what was essentially state-sanctioned racism.

This racism could be seen in all areas of life, from housing to work to school. Going a day without open racism was unusual, and ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ signs were as de rigueur as the miniskirt. And there was little legal recourse to be had: racial discrimination was not illegal in the early 1960s. To rephrase: racial discrimination was legal in the early 1960s.

Trying to find housing was particularly difficult.

To let: decent single bed-sitting room with facilities to cook in basement kitchen. Suit a working gentleman or woman. Only respectable people need apply. No coloured please.²⁹

Adverts such as the one above were common, though perhaps some didn’t say ‘please’. Councils imposed residency requirements for council housing to exclude newly arrived migrants from eligibility. Meanwhile, private landlords that offered them accommodation weren’t necessarily progressive, and many charged extortionate amounts for overcrowded housing. One of these slum landlords was Peter Rachman, who became so notorious that ‘Rachmanism’ is in the dictionary as a term synonymous with exploitative landlord practices. Really, it is, look it up. I’ll wait.

Black and Brown people did not passively accept this discrimination. They actively fought against it. In response to Rachmanism and otherwise discriminatory housing practices, communities started informal savings and lending groups to help one another buy property. Mutual aid groups and welfare organisations sprang up. One such group was the Indian Workers’ Association, discussed in Chapter Two. It was originally formed in the interwar period to campaign for Indian independence. It was revived in multiple cities and towns initially as a welfare organisation to help migrants navigate the tricky bureaucracy of life in the UK and soon became involved in anti-racist campaigns.

In the workplace, Black and Brown people were often faced with a ‘colour bar’, meaning they wouldn’t be hired, or there were strict race-based quotas to limit the proportion of non-white workers in a company, usually to no more than 5 per cent. Companies were often supported in this by the white-dominated trade unions.³⁰ It even happened in industries, such as transport, that had solicited Black and Brown workers after the war. The second movement discussed, in Chapter Three, is the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963, which exposed the use of the colour bar in the UK beyond a shadow of a doubt. The eight other movements discussed are from the 1970s onwards, but first let’s look at what happened in the rest of the 1960s that led to the need for even more organising.

‘I have come here,’ said Malcolm X, ‘because I am disturbed by reports that coloured people in Smethwick are being badly treated. I have heard they are being treated as the Jews under Hitler. I would not wait for the fascist element in Smethwick to erect gas ovens.’³¹ On the invitation of the Indian Workers’ Association, Malcolm X was speaking from Smethwick, a town west of Birmingham. That is, Birmingham, West Midlands, not Birmingham, Alabama.

By the 1964 general election, immigration was a hot-button issue, with 85 per cent of white Brits agreeing that too many immigrants had been let into the country.³² A group of young white people launched a branch of the Ku Klux Klan. Known as ‘Britain’s racist election’, it saw fierce competition as Labour sought to claw its way back into power after a thirteen-year hiatus.³³ The industrial town of Smethwick had been firmly held by Labour ever since 1945. But following the end of the war there had been factory closures and housing shortages, combined with an increase in immigration, and people were concerned for their way of life.

White constituents were angry and unconvinced by Labour’s manifesto, which discussed the importance of peaceful race relations at the same time as reducing immigration. Conservative hopeful Peter Griffiths stoked and exploited this anger with the unofficial slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’.³⁴ It worked. Peter Griffiths won, booting out the incumbent Labour MP and shadow foreign secretary. Labour won the election nationwide with a slim majority, but it would soon become indistinguishable from the Conservatives in terms of immigration policy.

A glimmer of hope seemed to come the year after the tense election, with the passage of the Race Relations Act of 1965. For the first time, discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity, colour, race or nationality was illegal and incitement to racial hatred was now an offence. It also created the Race Relations Board to promote racial harmony and to oversee violations of the Act.

The Race Relations Act, though a piece of landmark legislation, did very little to help Black and Brown people. Key areas were noticeably absent from the legislation – employment, housing, shops, education and the police. So, nearly every major area of life. The ‘incitement to racial hatred’ provision of the Race Relations Act was even used to prosecute Black people, the very people it was created to protect, like Michael X who was jailed for a year for stoking racial hatred towards white people.³⁵ And the Race Relations Board was a lame duck from the outset; its remit was so specific that of the 327 complaints received in its first year of existence, 238 fell outside of its responsibilities, that’s 73 per cent.³⁶

In the same year as the Race Relations Act, the Labour government tightened immigration by reducing the number of vouchers available from 20,800 to 8,500 a year.³⁷ The state would give you crumbs with one hand as it slapped you with the other.

Omitting the police from the Race Relations Act was significant as the police themselves were often the instigators of racial violence. The first community review of police racism in 1966 stated: ‘It has been confirmed from reliable sources that sergeants and constables do leave stations with the express purpose of going “nigger hunting”, that is to say, they do not get orders from superiors to act in this way, but among themselves they decide to bring in a coloured person at all cost.’³⁸ While shocking, the report confirmed what Black people already knew and regularly experienced.

It is little surprise then that despite the Race Relations Act, the public felt they had free rein to express their racism. The UK edition of the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses and threatened death as they would ‘never allow this place to become a dumping ground of Afro–Asian filth’.³⁹ Hitherto disparate anti-immigration and fascist organisations joined forces to create the National Front political party in 1967. Just two decades on from the Second World War, fascism was still very much alive; the leaders were self-proclaimed fans of Hitler and the Nazis. One of them, Martin Webster, was caught on tape calling the National Front a ‘well-oiled Nazi machine’.⁴⁰ If it’s not obvious, they stood on a racist and xenophobic manifesto. The National Front was not the first of its kind, nor the last.

In 1968 the government tightened immigration again, prompted by the increase in British Asian migrants arriving in the UK from countries such as Kenya, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania following ‘Africanisation’ policies. The Labour government responded with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968. Now only Commonwealth citizens with a parent or grandparent born, naturalised, adopted or registered as a citizen of Britain could live in the UK. Up to 200,000 Asians, as well as other Black and Brown people from the ex-colonies, were now stranded, but it handily meant that many white people in Australia, New Zealand and Canada could still settle in the UK as their parents or grandparents had usually been born there.⁴¹ Seventy-two per cent of the public supported the new Commonwealth Immigrants Act.⁴²

The thin veil hiding the racist motives of immigration legislation had been dropped entirely. Where the previous Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 had not been openly racist, instead discussing ‘skills’, the 1968 Act was now openly racially motivated. Even so, for some it didn’t go far enough, as dependents of migrants already in the UK continued to arrive and the voucher system from 1962 was still in place. The government was under fire from all angles, facing opposition to the Immigrants Act because it didn’t go far enough, and opposition because it went too far and stripped citizens of their rights.

Due to this immense pressure, the government was considering a second Race Relations Act. In the run-up to a reading of the Race Relations Bill, Conservative MP and member of the shadow cabinet, Enoch Powell, gave a speech:

It almost passes belief that at this moment twenty or thirty additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week – and that means fifteen or twenty additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants . . . It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.⁴³

It didn’t stop there. Quoting a constituent, he said ‘in this country in fifteen or twenty years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’. This anti-immigration tirade is now infamously known as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Powell believed the Race Relations Act was a mistake and that non-white migrants would dominate the UK and its white citizens, with dire consequences. He wanted an end to immigration, and preferably a Ministry for Repatriation.⁴⁴ Bit of a change from just a few years prior when he was minister for health and actively recruited workers from the Caribbean. Powell was fired from his position in the shadow cabinet the day after the speech, the Race Relations Act 1968 became law, and discrimination in employment and housing (but notably still not the police) was officially made illegal. But the damage was done.

Never mind the impact of migration, the speech itself had dire consequences. It fanned the flames of racism and gave legitimacy to fascist groups such as the National Front. After Powell’s speech, the National Front, Union Movement and other right-wing extremist groups joined with dockers and porters on the streets of east London, brandishing signs that read ‘Back Britain, not Black Britain’, ‘Powell speaks for us’, ‘Forever white England’ and ‘Jobs and housing – Britons first’. The secretary of the Immigrants Control Association said, ‘we are worried about the amount of double marriage and overbreeding among coloured immigrants which is leading to overcrowding’.⁴⁵ A new national sport of ‘Paki-bashing’ emerged, though it was not limited to people of Pakistani origin. Anyone who was a shade of brown could be ‘Paki-bashed’.

The decade ended with the death of David Oluwale, a Nigerian-born Leeds resident who had been in and out of mental health institutions with issues possibly brought on by blows to the head in one of his frequent encounters with the police.⁴⁶ He died by drowning in 1969 while escaping the police.*

In the same year, the UK ratified the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which states that ‘any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous’.⁴⁷ It was dangerous indeed.

Nineteen seventy. A new decade. The headiness of the 1960s would soon dissipate as Paul McCartney left the Beatles, the first topless ‘page three’ model appeared in the newspapers, and the Conservative Party won a shock victory in the general election. The UK ended the sixties and started the new decade bopping to a Rolf Harris cover of a US Civil War song about helping others called ‘Two Little Boys’. Incidentally, Margaret Thatcher counted this song among her favourites.⁴⁸ It wasn’t all doom and gloom – the Gay Liberation Front had its first march, and the Equal Pay Act was signed. But the reputation of the 1970s as a distinctively less glamorous decade than the sixties or the eighties is well-earned.

The ‘dark ages’ of post-war Britain, the 1970s saw unemployment reach over a million for the first time since the 1930s, the peak of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, and rubbish piled up so high in the streets you could barely walk; not even the dawn of space hoppers and rise of flares could help Britain navigate them.⁴⁹ The Labour Party said that Britain faced ‘the most dangerous crisis since the war’.⁵⁰ The sun was well and truly setting on the British Empire, finally forcing Britain to reconsider and reformulate its relationships with much of the world, and within its own borders.

As the early migrants realised they weren’t going back anytime soon and immigration laws had made entering the UK more difficult, they had started to bring over family members. Other migrants were also still coming in smaller numbers to the UK and by 1971 there were an estimated 1.3 million Black and Brown people in the UK, more than double the number in 1961, and that number would reach over 2 million by the end of the decade.⁵¹ In a now-familiar story, as the quality of life for the population of the UK declined and numbers of Black and Brown people increased, racism got worse.

In April 1970, Tosir Ali was walking home from work a little past midnight when he was attacked by two men with a knife, dying from stab wounds to his throat. His wallet was found with his body, including cash – he hadn’t been robbed. Ali’s murder was part of a growing trend; according to a survey by the Pakistani Student Federation in 1970, more than 25 per cent of its members had been physically assaulted in the previous year.⁵² Despite the worrying pattern of racist attacks, the media often engaged in victim-blaming, with an Observer article noting ‘any Asian careless enough to be walking the streets alone at night is a fool’.⁵³ Paki-bashing was the victims’ fault.

A few months later, the Conservative government under Edward Heath came to power in a surprise victory. The attack on Black and Brown communities continued under his government. The 1971 Immigration Act formalised what the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act had started, by getting rid of the idea of a ‘Commonwealth citizen’ and introducing the terms ‘patrial’ and ‘non-patrial’ instead. ‘Patrials’ were people with a parent or grandparent born or naturalised in the UK who therefore had the right to live and work, and ‘non-patrials’ were subject to work permits with time limits on how long they could stay. They weren’t to settle. The 1971 Act also expanded the powers of the police, Home Office and immigration authorities. Although Powell’s dream of a Ministry for Repatriation didn’t come true, any migrant who wanted to be repatriated would be assisted by the government.⁵⁴

The 1971 Immigration Act was put to the test in the summer of 1972. The Ugandan leader Idi Amin, who was in power thanks to support from the UK government, gave the country’s Asian community ninety days to leave the country. Approximately 50,000 of the 80,000 Asians now looking for a place to go were British passport holders, which meant there was a decision to make: would the Brits accept the British citizens, as was their obligation under international law so they would not become stateless, or would they refuse entry using the patrial requirements under the 1971 Immigration Act?⁵⁵ The UK eventually admitted around 30,000 Asians, on the proviso that this was an exceptional case.⁵⁶ This proviso wasn’t enough to assuage some people and local councils. Leicester City Council took it upon itself to deter potential Asian settlers with an advert in a Ugandan newspaper warning people that ‘in your own interests and that of your family you should . . . not come to Leicester’.⁵⁷

Was restricted immigration really just about racism? There were two main arguments used for restricting the entry of Black and Brown people, not just in 1972 but throughout these decades. One was the idea of acting in the ‘best interest’ of both the settled and potential migrants. The Conservatives, the Guardian reported, ‘were only thinking about the Uganda Asians’ best interests, British passports or no British passports, they just wouldn’t be happy here if they came in greater numbers’.⁵⁸ The impact on Asians already settled in the UK was also used as an argument for limiting numbers, as ‘immigrants already settled here stand to suffer more than anyone else from a rate of new immigration greater than the social body of the host country can digest or than its prejudices can tolerate’. ⁵⁹

The second argument was that the island nation was too crowded, and controlling the number of (non-white) people entering would help to improve the quality of life for everyone, and assist racial harmony. In 1976 Labour Prime Minister (spoiler alert: Labour won the general election in 1974) James Callaghan said to his party, ‘I have never wavered from the view that in a small and highly populated country there is a limit to the number of immigrants we can absorb. Therefore strict control over immigration is necessary.’⁶⁰ The Conservatives had the same stance. ‘It is true,’ said party leader Margaret Thatcher, ‘that Conservatives are going to cut the number of new immigrants coming into this country, and cut it substantially, because racial harmony is inseparable from control of the numbers coming in.’⁶¹

‘Too many immigrants’ was a lie. From 1964 to 1983, there were more people emigrating from the UK than immigrating to it except in 1979.⁶² In fact, this was the case overall for the twentieth century.⁶³ So, yes, restricted immigration was about racism. It was, and still is, state-led racism.

This was all happening under a tense economic climate for the whole country. The economic glory days of the 1960s screeched to a halt in the 1970s. A coal-miner strike in 1972 led to a three-day working week as businesses couldn’t operate without their regular coal-powered electricity, and more than a million people lost their jobs.⁶⁴ A year later, the issues still largely unresolved, the three-day week was imposed again, unemployment skyrocketed, inflation was over 10 per cent and rising, and Britain plunged into a recession. The post-war economic boom was well and truly over.

The police continued to disproportionately target Black and Brown people, and especially young Black people. The so-called ‘sus’ law allowed police to stop and search anyone for simply looking ‘suspicious’ by drawing on the 1824 Vagrancy Act. In London in 1977, young Black people made up just 3 per cent of the population but they constituted 44 per cent of the arrests made under the ‘sus’ laws.⁶⁵ The police force was almost exclusively white; for obvious reasons, police officer wasn’t regarded as a desirable job for Black and Brown people, and the informal colour bar meant that there were fewer than twenty-four Black officers across the whole country in the mid-1970s.⁶⁶

The children of the first Black and Brown migrants were coming of age in the 1970s and didn’t like what they saw. By the mid-1970s, 40 per cent of the Black population in Britain were British born and raised, and they wouldn’t accept the same treatment as their migrant parents.⁶⁷

The increase in state and street racism led to a proportionate increase in resistance. Inspired by their American cousins and drawing on liberation politics from around the world, Black people created Black Power groups in the UK, such as the British Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Front and the Fasimbas. Brown people also joined some of these groups. The rise of Black Power organisations was of concern to the government and police, who often cracked down harshly on any inkling of Black Power activity. One such crackdown of a small protest against police harassment in Notting Hill led to the epic trial of the Mangrove Nine in 1971, discussed in Chapter Four.

Soon after, the Fasimbas were embroiled in a legal case of their own. Four members of the Fasimbas were arrested outside Oval Underground Station in London on their way back from a meeting to discuss how they could support recently arrested Black Liberation Front leader, Tony Soares. The ‘Oval Four’ had the misfortune of running into Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell, notorious for frequent confrontations with Black men and his heavy-handed methods. ‘Nigger-hunting’ was still alive and thriving. The 1972 trial of the Oval Four is discussed in Chapter Five.

As we’ve seen, immigration control was closely accompanied by attempts to promote ‘racial harmony’. Integration of migrants and buying into the ‘British’ way of life were a key part of this. Education has always been central to integration in society and civic participation, and this became even more important for policymakers in the 1970s as the number of Black and Brown children increased. The problem was, they didn’t know how to do this so, instead, schools declared many children, especially Black children, to be ‘educationally subnormal’ and dumped them in special schools. Chapter Six looks at the umbrella Black Education Movement, as migrant parents and communities took matters into their own hands to campaign against these policies, and Black communities provided their own education programmes.

Black and Brown women had specific experiences of racism to which others weren’t subjected. For instance, the Home Office carried out ‘virginity tests’ on Brown women at Heathrow Airport as they entered the country to join their fiancés. Where anti-racist movements were dominated by men, which was most of them, the particular experience of being a Black or Brown woman was often overlooked. This was despite the fact that Black and Brown women were front and centre of campaigns in all areas of life, responsible as they were for carrying so many of the daily burdens. And the general Women’s Liberation Movement was dominated by white women who didn’t yet have ‘intersectionality’ in their vocabulary. Chapter Seven discusses the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD), movements that centred issues affecting Black and Brown women as Black and Brown women.

Black and Brown women were particularly at risk of exploitation in the workplace. Asian women have even been called ‘the worst off of all British workers’.⁶⁸ The unemployment rate among young Black people increased twice as quickly as the general population between 1973 and 1976.⁶⁹ Employers took advantage of the economic climate and stereotyping of women in particular and exploited workers with low pay and poor working conditions. This didn’t stop Black and Brown workers from fighting back; strikes were frequent and often impactful – after all, factories needed their labour. In contrast to their reputation as submissive and docile, Brown women repeatedly resisted the low standards of working conditions, as happened in the strike at Grunwick, which we will see in Chapter Eight.

The government didn’t deny the inequality for Black and Brown people, nor did it deny it could do something to solve that inequality. The Racial Discrimination White Paper of 1975 stated:

Racial discrimination, and the remedial disadvantages experienced by sections of the community because of their colour or ethnic origins are not only morally unacceptable, not only individual injustices for which there must be remedies, but also a form of economic and social waste which we as a society cannot afford . . . it is inconceivable that Britain, in the last quarter of the 20th Century, should confess herself unable to secure for a small minority of around a million and a half coloured citizens their full and equal rights as individual men and women.⁷⁰

Yet the solution once again did not go far enough. The Race Relations Act was expanded in 1976, this time to include indirect discrimination. The new Race Relations Act went further than any legislation before it, but it still didn’t include the police or the prison system in its scope.⁷¹

And despite the Race Relations Act, or maybe because of it, the second half of the seventies was fraught with social tension and brutal racist violence.

Much of the violence of the era involved the National Front (and other white supremacist groups), their supporters and the police. While membership remained relatively low, for a time the National Front was Britain’s fourth biggest party, and it impacted the daily public life of Black and Brown people in the UK.⁷² Its members held meetings in areas with high numbers of Black and Brown people, like at the Southall Town Hall, and they sold their newspaper on the streets of east London, but not without protest. The National Front is synonymous with 1970s UK, in much the same way as the miners’ strikes.

Racially motivated murders became more commonplace, and continued to be dismissed by police who insisted on downplaying the racial aspects. Altab Ali was one such victim, who was stabbed to death in an alleyway near Brick Lane. Police foot-dragging led the Bengali community to unite like never before to march on Downing Street and take back control of the streets. The ‘Battle of Brick Lane’ is discussed in Chapter Nine.

Racial violence wasn’t limited to London; Mohan Dev Gautam died after being set alight outside her home in Leamington Spa. The police were unwilling and/or unable to protect Black and Brown people and white allies, so they had to take their safety into their own hands. The Asian Youth Movements were at the forefront of community protection, with the cry of ‘self-defence is no offence’. Resistance spread and Asian Youth Movements appeared across the country like antibodies to the disease of racism. This inevitably led to arrests, and more than one court case. One such trial was that of the Bradford 12, which echoed the Mangrove Nine trial, and also set a ground-breaking precedent in UK legal history. The trial of the Bradford 12 and the Asian Youth Movements more widely are discussed in Chapter Ten.

By the end of the decade, the UK was in turmoil. The 1970s ended with the ‘Winter of Discontent’, the biggest strike action since 1926, which coincided with the coldest winter in sixteen years. In total, nearly 30 million working days were lost in 1979 due to strike action.⁷³ Workers from both the private and public sectors were not happy with the government’s attempt to limit wage increases, and as refuse collectors and gravediggers went on strike, piles of rubbish lined the streets and bodies were stacked on top of each other in factories in heat-sealed plastic bags.⁷⁴

The impact of this showed at the polling booths in May 1979. The Labour government lost its tenuous hold on power to the Conservative Party, under the leadership of one Margaret Thatcher. In the run-up to the election, Thatcher appeared on the popular ITV show World in Action to discuss the Conservatives’ policies. When asked about immigration, Thatcher said, ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’.⁷⁵ She went on to advocate zero immigration of Black and Brown people, apart from compassionate cases, and stated that, ‘In my view, that is one thing that is driving some people to the National Front. They do not agree with the objectives of the National Front, but they say that at least they are talking about some of the problems. Now, we are a big political party. If we do not want people to go to extremes, and I do not, we ourselves must talk about this problem and we must show that we are prepared to deal with it.’

Thatcher advocated for the Conservatives to try and take the wind out of the National Front’s sails by adopting even more extreme immigration policies. It wouldn’t be the last time this argument was made. The public clearly agreed: the Conservatives won with a majority of forty-three seats. The Christmas number one in 1979 was Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)’.

Nineteen eighty. The UK chugged, sputtered and creaked its way through the year. In good news, five gold medals were won at the controversial Moscow Olympics, and Alton Towers theme park opened its doors. In not so good news, John Lennon was shot and killed, and Thatcher’s infamous economic policies began. The economy dropped into recession again and inflation reached over 20 per cent. Unemployment reached over 2 million, the highest figure since 1935, with young people bearing the brunt as over half of those affected were under twenty-four years old.⁷⁶ Thatcher dismissed claims her government was responsible for the current situation, calling the administration ‘one of the truly radical ministries of post-war Britain’.⁷⁷ The rising income equality seen since the end of the war was about to be reversed.⁷⁸ The age of neoliberalism, which favours free trade, deregulation and reducing government spending, had begun.

Life was continually trying for many of the 2.1 million Black and Brown people living in the UK.⁷⁹ The Bristol police raided a café in St Pauls in Bristol, which led to a seven-hour violent clash between police and the local Black community.⁸⁰ Between 1976 and 1981, at least thirty-one Black and Brown people were murdered across Britain; they were stabbed, burned and bombed to death.⁸¹

It is no wonder then that in 1981 the rising tension came to a head, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter. January 1981 set the tone for the year with a house-party fire in New Cross, London that led to the deaths of thirteen Black teenagers and young adults. This was followed by a botched police investigation in which the families and communities of the dead suspected racially motivated arson and didn’t believe the police were taking them seriously. After the racism that had built up over the 1970s and before, and the disproportionate impact of the tanking economy, enough was enough. Brixton rose up and soon, spurred by the discrimination and racism in their own hometowns, Black and Brown people across the country fought back, from Liverpool to Leeds, and Bristol to Bolton. The uprisings of 1981 are the last movement discussed, in Chapter Eleven.

Nineteen eighty-one was a turning point in race relations in the UK. Not a 180-degree turn from ‘racist’ to ‘not-racist’, but rather a small curve, from ‘crudely and openly racist’ to ‘more subtly racist . . . for the most part’. Signs saying ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ faded, overt violence was less frequent, but prejudice and discrimination were rife. Racism morphed and assumed a new form to become the beast we know as ‘institutionalised racism’. Reflections on the 1980s to the present day are included in the Conclusion.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back and start at the beginning with one of the first organisations founded by and for Brown people, the Indian Workers’ Association.

___________

* Everyone who lived within the realm of the British Empire had always been considered ‘British subjects’, but some countries, such as Canada, were now introducing their own citizenship, so the new title of ‘Commonwealth citizen’ was introduced to indicate the ongoing equality of everyone within the Commonwealth, regardless of whether the country was independent or not. Confused? Yeah, immigration legislation has never exactly been logical or user-friendly.

* In April 2022 the organisation Remember Oluwale mounted a blue plaque on the Leeds Bridge in his honour – it was almost immediately stolen.