Lessons from Bengali Brick Lane for Post-Brexit Anti-Racist Movements

‘we can’t dance racism away’ (Ramamurthy, 2013: 47)

At times of crisis it is always good to look back to the past for inspiration and attempt to avoid the same mistakes. History — with all the distortions of its retelling — should not be a blueprint. However, to plunge into the future without considering what already was will leave us flailing and failing in the same ways.

Here in the UK and all over Europe we are in a critical period, post-Brexit. The outcome of the June 23rd referendum has rocked this country to its core, divided families, and revealed schisms in the national zeitgeist. The metropolitan left has been caught off-guard by how many people — many of them in areas effected most by the decline of the UK’s industrial sector and left disenfranchised by New Labour’s complacency — not only voted leave, but cited immigration and the non-British “Other” as key motivators in their decision. Now we find ourselves in a situation with the far right feeling legitimised and reports of racist attacks flooding in with each day that passes. At the time of writing, volunteers and workers at a Romanian shop in Norwich are clearing up the debris from an arson attack, presumed to be racially motivated. We find ourselves in truly terrifying times. The comparisons between the rise of the National Front, Oswald Mosley, etc, draw themselves. Non-White Britons are being abused on their own streets. I have lost track of how many times I have had EU friends of mine resident in the UK saying how scared they now are. Many have toyed with the idea of leaving the UK.

Rightly and admirably so, many residents of Norwich — most of them presumably non-Romanian — have come out to lend a hand and express solidarity. I have seen many white Britons expressing their solidarity and disgust at this surge in racist activity and any effective anti-racist movement (of which we are surely in more need of than ever) will need the force and action of such people. But here is where we should take a few lessons of the past, from the shortcomings and failures of past anti-racist movements. I give way here to Amandi Ramamurthy and an excerpt from her book on the British Asian Youth Movements (AYM) of the 70s and 80s, Black Star (48–51).

The glamour events of the carnivals [such as Rock Against Racism (RAR)] were to lead to a deflection which enabled the National Front, the very organisation that the ANL [Anti-Nazi League; anti-facist group linked with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)] were trying to combat to march almost unopposed on 30 April 1978 in the East End of London, a month before Altab Ali [a young Bengali factory worker stabbed by fascists] was killed. 80,000 anti-fascists gathered in Trafalgar Square and marched to Victoria Part in the East End of London. A day later the NF marched from the West End to Hoxton in the East End. The organisers had been aware of the planned National Front demonstration, since the International Marxist Group and the All London Coordinating Committee Against Racism and Facism had informed AWP, ANL and Searchlight on Wednesday 26 April. Searchlight confirmed through other sources that the NF were planning a march on the Friday. Members of the Hackney Committee Against Racialism (HCAR) tried to get the organisations participating in the carnival to produce a leaflet for circulation at the march calling for a mass mobilisation on the May Day against the NF march:

“We were met with virtually a blank wall. When we made approaches to get an announcement made from the platform at the Carnival the organisers refused to do so, on the grounds that there wasn’t time to organise a counter-demonstration that they could effectively control.” (HCAR 1978)

According to Graham Lock any calls that were made to the carnival elicited little response. ‘People preferred to lie in the sun and listen to music’ (Kalra et al. 1996: 143). Opposition to fascist meetings and rallies in fact declined in 1978 according to HCAR. ‘At the Ilford by-election the picket was about 2,500, at Bristol the opposition was less than 1,000, on May Day the opposition was nil’ (HCAR 1978).

In the summer of 1978 the attacks reached a climax, as John Newbigin, a youth and community worker in the East End, recalls:

“There was a good deal of open intimidation on the street — women and children being shouted out, people having bricks put through their windows, shit put through their letter boxes, clothes drying on the line would be cut with razors, cars would be damaged. An incredible level of violence and the repose of the police was absolutely pathetic. The police did virtually nothing.” (In Eade et al. 2006: 80)

The criticism of ANL was to prove well-founded when they organised the second carnival in London in September 1978. Once the carnival had been announced, the National Front publicised a march through Brick Lane on the same day. While some members of the ANL argued that more attention needed to be given to preventing the fascists from marching, the attitude of the carnical organisers was focused on their own activities. One of the organisers, Jerry Fitzpatrick argues, ‘Even if we had sent more numbers to Brick Lane, it couldn’t have been enough. The police always had it covered. The Front were contained. … We had to keep out eyes on the prize which was the carnival’ (in Renton 2006: 133). It is ironic that he used a phrase that was so iconic for the civil rights movement to limit the dream to a carnival.

The ANL position was not possible for the youth of Brick Lane who were not trying to make a political gesture but had no choice but to defend their community. The police clearly did not always ‘have it covered’. Altab Ali had been killed in May and Ishaq Ali a few weeks later. When the police did come they were known to often arrest the victims, as the case of the Virk brothers in 1977 had proved. Attacked by racists when they were trying to fix their car, the Virk brothers called the police to find that the attackers were freed and they were placed under arrest. Their conviction for GBH [grevious bodily harm] in 1978 gave further proof of the need for self-organisation. The attitude of carnival organisers left a bitter taste in the mouth of the youth, as Tariq Mehmood recalls:

“We found out that the fascists had planned to attack Brick Lane. … They used to have paper sellers at the bottom of Brick Lane and they wanted to consolidate that area… They were going to gather around there and we felt that they would charge up the road and attack people in the streets. It was really terrible because it was also the same day as the ANL organised this Rock Against Racism concert. … Really the Carnival should have diverted as a historic gesture and wiped out the fascists from the street but SWP didn’t seem to work like that. The Carnival wasn’t interested and they refused to let people go and we heard that they were saying that there was more than enough people already in Brick Lane. In fact, on Brick Lane we were worried in case we were overtaken by fascists. We had youths at different points of Brick Lane constantly keeping in touch with the telephone hub and we had runners as well, somebody would physically run and say they are not at the top they are coming down from the bottom… We did keep the fascists from attacking Brick Lane, but the terrible thing was that there were hundreds of people dancing against racism. It was a ridiculous state of affairs. I believed they endangered the black community of Brick Lane and did a terrible disservice to the struggle against racism, but it was a harbinger of what was yet to come because they did that over and over again.”

For the ANL to suggest that the police could be left to contain the fascists in the face of such a history of racism was absurd. Like the youth of Bradford and Southall in 1976, and the African Caribbean youth of Lewisham in 1977, the Bengali youth from the East End confronted the fascists themselves, with support from groups such as AYM (Bradford), SYN [Southall Youth Movement], Haringey Asian Action Group, CARF [Campaign Against Racism and Fascism], HCAR, and Institute of Race Relations. As HCAR noted, incidents such as ‘Lewisham may not get positive publicity that the Carnival has received, but that in itself is a good reason for asking who benefits from diverting protest off the streets, into the parks and away from direct confrontation with racists and fascists?’ (HCAR 1978)

Many of us are expecting to see inheritors of the legacy of the National Front to begin organising more earnestly in the wake of Brexit. Already we have seen the return of NF-like groups with visible and vocal presences in recent years, most notably in the street protests of the English Defence League and its various splinter groups. Therefore, more than ever we need to mount an effective opposition lest we bear witness to more Altab Alis.

The UK anarchist left, with all its inadequacies and problems, has an admirable legacy of opposing fascists in the streets, very often hilariously outnumbering fascists at their own rallies. And more mainstream movements, like the aforementioned Rock Against Racism, have their place in changing the national zeitgeist against far-right extremism. Groups like Unite Against Fascism have an energy and intention that is admirable.

But in our age of “share this if you agree” and token petition politics we have to be wary going forward and learn important lessons from Brick Lane and beyond. In the wake of Brexit my Facebook timeline has been awash with disgust at the spike in racist attacks. From my own social circles, I would be hard pressed to find a person who was sympathetic to the far-right. But perhaps the same could have been said of those dancing along at the Carnival whilst the National Front were goose-stepping down Brick Lane.

The fight against racism and xenophobia no doubt has a large ideological, zeitgeistal component. If we are to move towards a more loving world then we need to show racist and fascist discourses that they are not welcome. But racism also has a very material reality in the lives of those who experience it — the Bengali residents of Brick Lane; the Romanian shopkeepers of Norwich. In our efforts to eradicate racism we should not forget these voices and the actions they motivate.

In short, the point I wish to make off the back of Ramamurthy’s account is: We cannot ignore the voices, movements, and material realities of those on the sharp end of racism. Brexit has revealed schisms between the left-wing metropolitan intelligencia and the everyday realities of British people today. This is as true as it is for the white working class communities left behind by New Labour and the Tories as it is for ethnic minorities (and, of course, the two blur). When those communities organise, as they no doubt will be forced to in the wake of the surge in far-right activity that we are bracing for, we must not sweep aside their activities because we might think we know better. We must not patronise those whose daily, material reality is the pain of racism. We may be very rightly disgusted by reports of racist attacks circling around social media, but our token disgust is not enough. Racism is not merely a malicious force out there which we must abstractly eradicate, it is a reality operating mundanely in people’s lives. And when those people organise we must let them guide our movements.

We must never repeat the condescension of the ANL activist quoted in the extract above. We must listen to the voices on the streets as best we can and allow their experiences to guide the way we collectively move forward through this historical moment. There is no doubt a place for the activist activities of RAR and comparable initiatives, but we must not sit around congratulating ourselves whilst immigrant communities experience the material reality of racism on their doorsteps, left unopposed by the wider movement.

Racism is a virus throughout the UK. We must work hard to shift the national zeitgeist in different directions by showing vocal opposition at all opportunities and presenting alternative narratives to explain the poverty and disenfranchisement of white working class communities, lest those communities fall deeper into the narrative of UKIP and the EDL and the virus gets even more firmly rooted. But racism also has a face, and names, and physical presences beyond its grander ideological component that will need to be fought, opposed, and stopped. Not only do we need to change the tone of debate in this country, but we also need to physically oppose that tone when it manifests on the streets, in our communities, and in our politics.

Class activism and anti-racist activism need to have their basis in the communities they are seeking to emancipate and protect. Don’t try to dance racism away whilst fascists march almost unopposed. Don’t retreat to “Like”ing racism away. Get out there and show the fash they are unwanted, standing side by side with the people who stand to lose the most if the far-right makes gains.