Vivienne Westwood and the messy, racist tensions in Punk

Was Punk Aware of Racism?

Westwood, who has just passed away, pioneered a counter-culture fashion and culture in the 1970s overwhelmingly centred on a young white English mainly working class community in the 1970s whose appetite and push for for rebellion was predicated on three things: 1, their alienation of a capitalist-colonial Britain in clear economic decline after the post-war boom, and an country and culture that was still very grey and traditional in that typically weird, awkward english manner; 2, the global space for rebellion opened-up primarily by the Vietnamese resistance and victories culminating in 1975, and 3, Black-rebellion especially but not solely in the USA which was also in considerable part radicalised by the Vietnamese communists. 

Westwood teamed-up with the opportunist businessman Malcolm Mclaren and opened up her clothes shop initially called SEX and then by the end of the 1970s was called World's End. Westwood wanted to further radicalise and contribute to this youth rebellion in culture through her art and fashion design, and she did so quite effectively. These attempts were encapsulated by her 'destroy' t-shirt which had a massive Nazi swastika on it with the word destroy and also a fainter upside down Christ on a cross and also a picture of Queen Elizabeth II. Clearly Westwood's design was arguing to destroy these things, as she explained her motivation more recently: "We hated the older generation and it wasn't young people, but old people we felt were responsible for the mismanagement and cruelty in the world still going on... To us, it was a way of saying to the older generation, 'We don't accept your values or your taboos.'" 

The problem with the t-shirt is that in the Punk scene and other related and overlapping cultural groups of Rock culture the symbol of Hitlerite Nazism were already evident: Peter Fonda in the 1966 film The Wild Angels wears an Nazi 'iron cross' around his neck; the Hell's Angel racist gang proudly display all kinds of nazi symbols. The Rolling Stones on 5th July 1969 at their Hyde Park concert had got the far-right Hell's Angels gang to be their 'security'. Into the 1970s, Punk culture in England proudly displayed symbols of Nazism. Did they do this to shock the conservative oldies that they blamed for their alienation? Yes. But let's look into this social context a little more, as London in the 1970s was not a city only of grey/white people. 

London had the largest concentrations of Black and Brown working class people in the country, areas like Southall, Peckham, Brixton, Whitechapel, Tottenham, Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill and other large swathes of the city had high and visible concentrations of Black and Asian communities. 1950s, '60s, '70s London going into the 1980s and even into the 1990s was a difficult place for our communities to live because of overt, vicious and intense racism on all levels. Racist street attacks and racist murders were frequent, open racist abuse by teachers, police and other people 'in authority' was just routine. Overt racism was the norm all the time on TV, too. 

Black and Brown people were largely excluded from access to cultural and musical activities that were open and welcoming to white people so we largely constructed our own in Reggae sound-system culture and dances, 'blues parties' which was when Black people organised their own dances often in residential homes; Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis etc organised their own 'welfare centres' where they also had their own concerts. Through all this we syncretised increasingly with each other and also more slowly with Rock and Punk etc. 

We were attacked a lot by racist white people from all the 'new' sub cultures of Teddy boys, Skinheads and Punks. These white sub-cultures however arguably only came about because they saw Black and Asian youth pioneer their own resistance including culturally which made a massive spectacle in the otherwise largely culturally-dead and boring white England. Our food was pungent, our dress and music was loud and proud and from time to time we would rise-up and smash-up our oppressors in the police and white civilian racists. WE opened up this space for rebellion globally and locally, and white people followed behind but failed to address the central issues of racism that existed for everyone to see everyday. 

In this context the emerging Punk movement just failed to give any understanding or respect to these social contexts and the experiences of their non-white neighbours. In their project to reject their parent's generation by use of the swastika, it should be reflected empathetically as to how Black and Brown communities may have felt about this. If we take the least-problematic cultural product of Westwood's 'destroy' t-shirt, from a few metres onwards the t-shirt looks like a massive emblazoned Nazi symbol. Our parents and grandparents and young people who have some understanding of the violent white supremacist racism that it represents were not made to feel more at ease by it, they would have felt at unease by it. And that's just unacceptable. The reality is that many other white punks would use racist iconography all over themselves. More recently a few months ago British rapper (a light-skinned Black brother) Slow-Thai, with the most anti-fascist of intentions, wore Westwood's 'destroy' t-shirt at a concert a few months back, but all anyone could see from the crowd was a big Nazi swastika leading Slow-Thai to apologise and reiterate it was meant to be an anti-fascist message. 

An on-going controversy which is instructive to these issues is the Oi/Punk concert on 3rd July 1981 in Southall. Southall through the 1960s like other parts of London became increasingly a town of racialised immigrants. The new mainly Indian Punjabi arrivals faced racism on all levels including by 1976 the racist murder of teenager Gurdip Chaggar. Then the Labour Government backed a meeting of the far-right National Front at Southall Town Hall and they instructed the police to conduct a vicious para-military operation on those resisting the racists by beating us and arresting hundreds and killing a local teacher Blair Peach. Indian children in the 1970s in Southall also faced a horrific 'bussing' abuse, whereby the authorities would bus children out of the area as white racists thought the sight of our children was sullying what their slowly disappearing middle class white Southall. After all this a bunch of Punk bands decided to have a concert at a pub at the Hayes-end of Southall high street in July 1981. Local Asian youth and their friends launch an attack on the pub where the white skinheads were having their event and burn the place down. July 1981 in Southall became a leading moment of Black resistance in Britain along with uprisings in Handsworth, Toxteth, St Pauls, Brixton, and other places.

To this day we have punks defending the concert and basically blaming the local Asian community and totally ignoring and erasing all the contexts of what was taking place for decades in that community.  This white racist arrogance and conceit reflects a large part (not the entire part!) of these white-dominated cultural scenes. Yes, there were a few Black and Asian skinheads in the venue as they were in that scene, but it was a scene that was totally and proactively ignorant of racism. It's like the odd Asian or Black person who joined Tommy Robinson's / Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's English Defence League, yes there are a few non-white people in that milieu, but that social group is a racist white space and gives no respect to actual racist experiences and societal realities. 

Even what might appear to be a less racist space like the 1990s British Indie scene or the usa-based Grunge scene tended to be a white culturally defined space although by this point many Black and Brown people are delivering the scene as in the case of Cornershop, Asian Dub Foundation, Fun>da>mental, State of Bengal (albeit the last three are fusions of Hip-Hop/Rap, Reggae and Rock and Punk with sounds from the Indian subcontinent), and also in the case of Grunge and related Punk / Hard Rock: The pioneers of Bad Brains (from 1974!), Kim Thayyil of Soundgarden, Fishbone, 24-7 Spyz, Chuck Mosely of Faith No More, Ray Ahn and Keish DaSilva of the Hard-Ons, and of course the trailblazing pioneer Zack De La Rocha of Rage Against the Machine amongst many others. 

The Clash did perhaps more than most in the Punk scene to explicitly address anti-racist challenges head-on, especially with songs like Guns of Brixton and White Riot. And then Grove-based dread, activist and cultural figure Don Letts forms Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones who was previously in The Clash. The Clash on their 1983 album cover feature an iconic scene of the Notting Hill Uprising with Don Letts walking across a line of police. Interesting to note that Letts encouraged Bob Marley to look into the London Punk scene which inspires Bob Marley to make his song Punky Reggae Party with the lyrics including the following:"It's a punky reggae party

And it's tonight

It's a Punky Reggae Party

And it's alright

What did you say?

Protected by society

Treated with impunity

Protected by my dignity

I search for reality

...

"New wave, new craze

New wave, new phrase

I'm saying

The Wailers will be there

The Damned, The Jam, The Clash

Maytails will be there

Dr. Feelgood too

Ooh

No boring old farts, no boring old farts, no boring old farts

Will be there, singin'

...

"A bubble, a bubble

Looking for no trouble

But if you trouble, trouble

We'll give it to you double

Let me tell you

It takes a joyful sound

To make the world go round..."

However, because the white-dominated (racist on an either conceited-level with Oi/Punk/ Skinheads or 'lazy-racist' in the case of Indie and Grunge) cultures were largely excluding Black and Brown youth, these youth just got-on and made their own cultural musical movements that came to dominate the country and then the world in the form of Jungle Drum n Bass, and other genres. In hindsight and with the all-important principle that these spaces *should* have been always open to ALL youth of all backgrounds, and as such things only become a bit more healthy in these dynamics if Black and Brown youth take the lead. Black and Brown youth historically have always welcomed the participation of their white counterparts in their cultural spaces, but this has not been a reciprocal relationship.

The roots of Punk and Rock are also in Black music in Jazz, Rhythm and Blues, Gospel and Folk. MC5 were one of the first hard rock primitive Punk bands who were closely associated with the Black Panther Party. Which makes all this racist conceit and ignorance all the more wrong and unethical. The instances of racism in alternative Rock genres through the 1980s and 1990s are frequent and sometimes shocking as in the example of Axl Rose's / Guns n Roses 1988 song One in A Million in which Roses mouths-off against 'faggots, immigrants, n****s' and Muslims. See here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/08/guns-n-roses-remove-song-homophobic-racist-language-one-million-reissue-album

In conclusion it's clear in the case of Westwood's attempts at radicalising the Punk scene through her 'destroy' t-shirt was definitely well-intentioned but in the absence of a concerted attempt at understanding and then navigating the leading-role of racism then mistakes will be made by even radical-minded people who try and attempt to contribute something to the struggle. Westwood herself went on a journey of becoming a celebrated figure of the establishment and collected her 'Order of the British Empire' from the Queen back in 1992. It's no surprise that she then said: "What I learnt from punk rock was that you don't change the establishment by attacking it." Clearly she thinks having become an establishment figure she can effect some 'change'. Whatever. Selling-out to the cause is nothing new, John Lydon from The Sex Pistols has turned, like many of his generation of the Punk scene, into a cliched gammon Brit nationalist. Mensi from the Angelic Upstarts, who even fronted a documentary for Anti-Fascist Action in the early 1990s, ends up an open sleazy racist in Thailand before his passing last year. None of this is to take away or distort Westwood's good intentions in the 1970s and her contributions to fashion and culture. That aside but connected: the bottom-line is that a community of people is either interested in understanding their place in society to fight oppressions from the system including racism, or they are not. It's just as simple as that. To be able to understand and traverse these complexities means pro-actively and appropriately keeping your doors wide open to anti-racist thinking, action and pro-active inclusivity to Black and Brown youth, and taking a lead from racialised communities amongst whom you will find those with understanding and experiences of the on-going fight against rising racism and fascism. 

On the White Racist Attack on Dover Immigration Processing Centre

Further Far-Right Tory Weaponisation of War on New Migrants

The toxicity borne out of the growing and deepening crises of global capitalism continue to play-out amongst the Tories in Brexit Britain. This level of toxicity sees the strange situation whereby Black and Brown leading Tories in government are the promoters of this new fascism but also its targets especially in the instance of Rishi Sunak. Indian East African heritage Suella Braverman as Home Secretary attempts to shore up her own flimsy position by whipping-up the worst of Brit racism and racists and its support to her weaponisation of newly arrived migrants supported by Brit Prime Minister and Indian heritage Rishi Sunak who himself is the target of growing Tory and right-wing grassroots attacks as being a 'globalist' and for 'blocking Boris' return'. The constantly deepening war on migrants in Britain took a massive jump forward with the victory of the Brexit vote that opened-up a higher intensity of constant far-right racist anti-migrant media propaganda that has inspired the racist attack on a immigration processing centre last Sunday October 30th in Dover and the inhumane conditions at Manston processing centre.

Braverman's position as Home Sec is constantly on the verge of total collapse following shortly after her messy demise as Home Sec for 41 days under the most farcical Prime Ministerial rule of Liz Truss. Braverman seems utterly desperate to use the far right-wing culture war of using the most oppressed people in our society - newly arrived immigrant families who have come via small boats across the Channel  - to agitate mass support from the Tory and general far-right to attempt to perpetuate her political position as Home Sec. Braverman seems utterly desperate in trying to hold-on to her position and seems to rely purely on whipping up fascist fervour against migrants to enable herself which involved claiming there is an 'invasion' of England's shores by migrants. Using the term 'invasion' on the beaches of England seeks to plug into the mass racist nationalism harking back to the British war with Germany which the latter tried unsuccessfully to invade Britain. 

The concept of 'invasion' of migrants also skews the reality of the fact that the problem is the vicious anti-working class system that attacks us all rather than still relatively small numbers of people entering into this country. A basic position of humanity informs us that the British state is involved in a collective neo-colonialism around the world that continues to loot the wealth of labour and land and in this devastation some people refuse to be subjected to super-exploitation in the global south and instead decide to follow the looters to their own base being the 'West'. Migration is perhaps the central political issue of our times which is in the context of the fact that the world is dominated by western imperialism and its partners. Anyone who isn't a basic racist scumbag stands with the oppressed and their right to enter the colonial centre in a safe and supported manner. Any position against migrants means tying oneself to the pole of imperialist oppression and looting in a period of growing global fascism.

The racist attacker against the immigration processing centre in Dover was a 66yr old white man from 100 miles away in man in High Wycombe and the attacker has reportedly been investigated for child sex offences and threatened to kill himself while being questioned by police. The attacker committed suicide in a nearby garage after his attack on the immigration processing centre. The actual act of racist firebombing of an immigration centre is inspired directly out of the growing racist atmosphere and hysteria that the Tory leadership are committed to continuing to scapegoat migrant communities and attempt to divide people and distract from the growing working class anger around the cost of living crisis. 

The Tories have an open racist policy of 'hostile environment' for migrants as official policy since 2010 which is a kind of preemptive racist terror to deter people trying to even come here. Of course this isn't going to work as nearly everyone coming here is not going to be put off by any of the Tory actions against migrants. The most vicious elements of these racist policies are the attack on the Windrush migrants from the Caribbean, the threat to permanently expel migrants to Rwanda and running down immigration detention centres like the Napier army barracks and the outbreak of disease and massive overcrowding at Manston, which even chief inspector of prisons in Britain says the conditions there are unacceptable. 

These are openly fascist policies being promoted proudly by the Tories, but they, like so many other growing oppressions in our society, are not being countered by movements of people in protest. The left is failing to mobilise people against this despite some positive grassroots spontaneous actions in Kenmure Street, Glasgow last year and a few incidents in London which all resist attempts by the Home Office to kidnap people they deem 'illegal'. The direct action movement of Just Stop Oil shows that there are people willing to take risks from the left against the state, it's just that we don't have what we should have in a similar waves of people willing to disrupt and confront growing Tory fascism on issues such as the attacks on migrants and racist police brutality. The Tory weaponsation of migrants is being used as fascism always does for the most rapacious elements of the rich to attack and control us further so they can amass more wealth and power. Although largely absent at present, resistance on all levels is needed urgently to scupper their oppressive plans. 

1919 Race Riots in Cardiff, Liverpool & East London (white racist mobs and resistance to them)

The first of the so-called race riots in British ports took place on Tyneside. Arab and Somali seamen are said to have settled in South Shields in the 1860s, and there were some West African and West Indian seamen in North Shields before the First World War. The war increased the area’s black population fourfold.4 In February 1919 some Arab seamen, all British subjects, having just paid £2 each to clear their union books, which had to be up to date before they could ship out, were then refused work. An official of the stewards’ and cooks’ union, J.B.Fye, incited a crowd of foreign white seamen against them; he was later convicted of using language likely to cause a breach of the peace. Fye hit one of the Arabs, who hit him back. The crowd chased the Arabs to Holborn, the district of South Shields where they lived. Here they were joined by some compatriots armed with revolvers, who fired warning shots over the heads of the at- tackers. The Arabs then turned the tables by chasing the crowd back to the shipping office, wrecking it pretty thoroughly, and beating up Fye and another union official. Army and navy patrols were called in and 12 Arabs were arrested. At Durham assizes, where the judge expressed some sympathy for them, three were acquitted, 12 were sentenced to three months’, and two to one month’s, hard labour. 

That was not however the feeling in south Wales, which was experiencing at the same time ‘one of the most vicious outbreaks of racial violence that has yet occurred in Britain’. During a week of anti-black rioting, three men were killed and dozens injured, and the damage caused to property cost Cardiff council over £3,000 to repair. The rioting ‘left a scar on the race relations of the city which took more than a generation to heal’.18The trouble began in Newport. On 6 June 1919 a crowd collected when a black man was alleged to have made an offensive remark to a white woman. One account said he put his arm round her and was attacked by a soldier. There was a fight in which many people were hurt, crowds started smashing the windows of black people’s homes, and the occupants defended themselves with pokers and staves and fired warning shots over their assailants’ heads. Two houses in George Street were wrecked and ransacked by a mob of several thousands that smashed every window, tore out the window-frames, threw bedding and furniture, including a ‘valuable piano’, into a nearby railway siding, and set fire to them. In Dolphin Street, Chinese laundries and a Greek-owned lodging house were wrecked, as were black people’s houses in Ruperra Street and a restaurant in Commercial Road owned by a black man named Delgrada. Twenty black and two white men were arrested. Plain-clothes and mounted police were drafted into the town, but it took a baton charge to disperse crowds making fresh attacks on George Street boarding-houses. ‘We are all one in Newport and mean to clear these niggers out’,one rioter told a reporter.The scene in Newport, said the South Wales Argus, looked like the aftermath of an air raid: ‘Windows are smashed, furniture in the front rooms has been wrecked, blood-stains are visible.’

On 11 June, at Cadoxton near Barry, a 30-year-old demobilized white soldier named Frederick Henry Longman, a dock labourer by trade, accosted a 45-year-old seaman from the French West Indies named Charles Emanuel with the words ‘Why don’t you go into your own street?’ then punched him on the forehead. Three other white men joined in, one of whom began hitting Emanuel on the back with a poker. Emanuel took out a clasp-knife and stabbed Longman, killing him instantly. Emanuel was chased by a large crowd and arrested with the knife still in his hand; he was later found guilty of manslaughter and sent to prison for five years. After his arrest crowds gathered outside the police station, smashed the windows of black people’s homes, and ‘paraded the streets of Cadoxton looking for coloured men’ until the early hours of the morning. Next day, though extra police had been drafted in, there were attempts to wreck black people’s homes. 

Cardiff ’s black population had increased from about 700 on the eve of the war to about 3,000 in April 1919. About 1,200 of these were unemployed seamen. There were at least as many demobilized white soldiers in the city, most of them unskilled. On 11 June a brake containing black men and their white wives, returning from an excursion, attracted a large and hostile crowd. Soon a crowd of whites and a crowd of blacks were lined up on opposite sides of Canal Parade bridge. A reporter saw ‘a howling mob of young fellows and girls facing the blacks at about 100 yards distance’. With shouts of ‘Come on and set about them!’ the whites made a rush from the north side throwing stones, whereupon revolver shots came from the black crowd and a white soldier was wounded in the thigh. The whites pressed forward in an attempt to reach Bute Town, the narrow cluster of streets between the Glamorganshire Canal and the Taff Vale Railway where a large number of Cardiff ’s black citizens had their homes, but police managed to stop most of them.The chief constable’s report, issued a month later, blamed whites for the original incident. ‘If the crowd had overpowered the police and got through’, he wrote, ‘the result would have been disastrous, as the black population would probably have fought with desperation and inflicted great loss of life.’Some attackers did get into Bute Street, where they smashed the doors and windows of Arab-owned lodging-houses with sticks – one shop front was ‘smashed to matchwood’ – and where a woman was arrested for flourishing a razor and ‘vowing vengeance on “niggers”’. A house in Homfray Street was set on fire and gutted, and in Caroline Street a white man died after his throat was cut – by a black man, it was alleged, though no eyewitness ever came forward, no black man was found in the vicinity, and no one was ever charged with the crime. A house owned by black people at the corner of Morgan Street and Adam Street was ransacked. Police broke into a house in Hope Street and dragged out a black man with blood streaming from his head: ‘He was greeted by a howl from the crowd, and several kicks and punches were aimed at him.’ A second soon appeared, ‘in much the same condition as his compatriot’. Last to be brought out was ‘a white girl, whose mouth was bleeding’. A black man called Norman Roberts was admitted to hospital with a severe knife wound in the abdomen. The disturbances went on until around midnight. 

This was only the prelude to a much more determined and organized attack on Cardiff’s black community over the next few days. The whole of the city’s police force was concentrated in the cordoned-off area that The Times called ‘nigger town’; a company of the Welsh Regiment was secretly drafted into Cardiff and held in readiness; and the stipendiary magistrate was preparing to read the Riot Act. Contemporary reports make it clear that ‘Colonial soldiers’ (i.e. Australians) armed with rifles placed themselves at the head of the lynch mobs. ‘The methods adopted by the soldiers’, said one report, ‘were those of active service, and the men, after firing from the prone position upon the blacks, crawled back to safety.’ Some of these riflemen were in khaki or blue uniforms, others in mufti with medal ribbons. The Western Mail gave a vivid account of an attack on the former Princess Royal hotel in Millicent Street:Several Colonial soldiers present constituted themselves the ringleaders of the besieging party, which was largely made up of discharged soldiers . . .The door of the house was attacked and it was quickly burst in. Men crowded into the narrow hall and began to ascend the stairs . . .A revolver shot rang out, and with it the exclamation, ‘My God, I am hit!’ Five other shots quickly followed.The attackers dropped flat on their faces, crawling back and telling those behind to do the same. They held up a table as a shield, and the defenders backed to the wall of the room. ‘Once at close quarters, each of the surviving attackers took his man, and soon desperate struggles were in progress around the room.’ Meanwhile ‘others of the raiding party were . . . busily engaged in ransacking the premises. Kit-bags containing clothing were hastily abstracted, and there were willing “receivers” outside.’ After it had been looted the house was set on fire. It was in Millicent Street that 40-year-old John Donovan, wearing his Mons ribbon, was shot through the heart by A cornered Arab. Ibrahim Ismaa’il, a Somali seaman and poet who was living in Cardiff at this time, refers to the Millicent Street fighting in his remarkable autobiography, completed in 1928 and recently discovered by Dr Richard Pankhurst. A Warsangeli, from the eastern part of what was then the British Somaliland protectorate, Ismaa’il was between 18 and 23 years old and worked as a ship’s fireman. He and some companions had only just come to Cardiff:Shortly after our arrival the black people in Cardiff were at- tacked by crowds of white people .

A Warsangeli named ‘Abdi Langara had a boarding house in Millicent Street, right in the European part of the town. It is there that I used to have my dinner every day. ‘Abdi acted as a sort of agent for the Warsangeli, who left their money with him when they went to sea, and also had their letters sent to his place. As soon as the fight started, all the Warsangeli who were in Cardiff went to Millicent Street to defend ‘Abdi’s house in case it was attacked. But to me and to my best friend – who has since died in Mecca – they said: ‘You are too young to come, and you have never faced difficulties of this kind.’ We insisted, for we could not bear to stay away when our brothers were in danger of being killed, but our plea was of no avail . . .So we went to the Somali boarding house of Haadzi ‘Aali and there we waited, ready for an attack, as we expected that a crowd of white people might break in at any moment.In Millicent Street, the fight started at about 7:30 p.m. and lasted a fairly long time. Seven or eight Warsangeli defended the house and most of them got badly wounded. Some of the white people also received wounds. In the end, the whites took possession of the first floor, soaked it with paraffin oil and set it alight. The Somalis managed to keep up the fight until the police arrived. One of them was left for dead in the front room and was later carried to the hospital where he recovered; some escaped through a neighbouring house and came to tell us the story of what had happened, the others gave themselves up to the police, and we did not see them for a long time. 

Crowds led by soldiers were surging from street to street wherever the cry of ‘blacks’ went up. One victim had a crowd of about 1,000 after him. The newspaper accounts are eloquent: ‘Always “the black man” was their quarry, and whenever one was rooted out by the police . . . the mob rushed upon him, and he got away with difficulty’ – amid cries of ‘Kill him!’ A black man spotted near the Wharf bridge was first insulted and then attacked by three whites, one of whom blew a whistle. This seemed to be an expected signal, because hundreds of persons rushed up from the neighbouring streets, including many women and girls, who had sticks and stones, and flung them at the unfortunate coloured man as they chased him along the street.Two men dragged out of their Bute Street house ‘fought desperately with frying pans and pokers’. A Somali priest, Hadji Mahomet, was prepared to face the mob, but his white wife pleaded with him to hide so he clambered up a drainpipe, hid on the roof, ‘and with true Eastern stoicism watched his residence being reduced to a skeleton’. A Malayan boarding-house in Bute Terrace was wrecked and the occupants, fleeing to the roof, were pelted with stones. In Homfray Street an Arab named Ali Abdul fired a revolver at his assailants; when he was arrested there were shouts of ‘Now we’ve got him!’ and ‘Lynch him!’ (Charged later with attempted murder, he ‘had some difficulty in walking into court owing to an injured leg, and he also bore evidence on his forehead of having received injuries’.) An Arab ‘caught and maltreated’ in Tredegar Street lay unconscious for a long time.One whom the lynch mob did succeed in killing, a young Arab named Mahommed Abdullah, died in hospital of a fractured skull after being savagely beaten in an attack on an Arab restaurant and boarding-house, used chiefly by Somalis, at 264 Bute Street. The mob charged down the street, threw stones into the building from both sides, and smashed the windows. Shots were fired from up- stairs. The mob surged in, and police arrived soon afterwards. 

The inquest on Abdullah could not decide whether he had been hit on the head with a chair leg or a police truncheon. Hundreds of black people attended his funeral. Murder charges against six white men were dropped for lack of evidence. Some former members of the British West Indies Regiment were daring enough to go about the streets with their uniforms on, which afforded them some protection. But not much. One black ex-serviceman, described in a local paper as ‘a well-set-up young fellow’, ‘proved to be a brave man, and in perfect English appealed to the crowd not to molest him, but this did not prevent him receiving several blows’ before police escorted him away. For the most part however, in the words of the Western Mail, ‘the efforts of the police were confined to keeping the white men from damaging property’. Property being more important than people, the community under siege had two choices. They could leave the city; or they could turn their ghetto into a fortress. A few did leave, on the afternoon of 13 June: a sad little procession of seamen with kit-bags on their backs and sticks in their hands, escorted by police and followed by jeering crowds. The majority chose to stay and, if need be, fight.As crowds gathered again that evening in St Mary Street, Custom House Street, The Hayes, and the top end of Bute Road, the black citizens of Loudoun Square, Maria Street, Sophia Street, and Angelina Street ‘established quietly determined means of self- protection’. They posted sentries, loaded their guns, and left no one in doubt of their mood, as a South Wales News reporter who got through the police cordon testified:The coloured men, while calm and collected, were well pre- pared for any attack, and had the mob from the city broken through the police cordon there would have been bloodshed on a big scale, and the attacking force would have suffered heavily . . . Hundreds of negroes were collected, but these were very peaceful, and were amicably discussing the situation among themselves. Nevertheless, they were in a determined mood, and ready to defend ‘our quarter of the city’ at all costs. They had posted sentries at each entrance to give notice of the approach of any hostile crowd . . . An old resident of Loudoun- square told me that he and his wife had watched the negroes loading revolvers. They made no secret of it . . . As my informant put it, ‘There is enough arms and ammunition among them to stock an arsenal.’ Long-term black residents said: ‘It will be hell let loose . . .if the mob comes into our streets . . . If we are unprotected from hooligan rioters who can blame us for trying to protect ourselves?’ An outstanding leader of Cardiff ’s black community had emerged in the shape of Dr Rufus Leicester Fennell. A West Indian medically trained in the United States, he had survived 314 days of trench warfare and had been wounded three times while serving in Mesopotamia, where he had attended thousands of British troops. Lacking British medical qualifications, he had been practising as a dentist in Pontypridd. When the rioting started in Cardiff he went there. 

Neil Evans, interviewing old people in Cardiff a few years ago, found that Fennell was remembered for his courage and intelligence: ‘During the riots he was said to have walked boldly into the centre of the town, despite warnings of the possible dire consequences of this action.’29 Aged 31, about six feet tall, well dressed and highly articulate, Fennell acted as the community’s spokesman in negotiations with the authorities; pressed the claims of those who wanted to be repatriated; told reporters ‘that it is absolutely necessary to grip the evil, and not to play with it’; and told one of several protest meetings held at the docks by West Indians, Somalis, Arabs, Egyptians, and ‘Portuguese subjects’ that it was their duty to stay within the law, but ‘if they did not protect their homes after remaining within the law they would be cowards, not men’.

By mid-September 600 black men had been repatriated. But not everyone involved wanted to be, and part of Cardiff ’s black population indignantly rejected the offer. What the chief constable, in a confidential report to Scotland Yard, called the ‘militant section’ insisted on their right as British subjects to get fair treatment and stay in the United Kingdom. And some of the militants, the chief constable added, ‘expressed their willingness to be repatriated but openly stated that it would only be for the object of creating racial feeling against members of the white race domiciled in their country’.32Two hundred of those who did want to be repatriated – Egyptians, Somalis, and Arabs – were sent to Plymouth by train, and Fennell went with them. It may have been Fennell who told the weekly paper John Bull how shamefully they were treated. They were penniless, but the tiny gratuity promised them was never paid. They were hungry, but were given nothing to eat on the journey. And when they went on board ship the staff were all off duty, the captain was asleep, and there was no food at all for them. ‘These coloured Britons had all done first-class war work’, commented John Bull, ‘yet they were treated worse than repatriated enemy aliens.’Soon afterwards Fennell was in London, complaining to MPs and the Home Office about the flaws in the repatriation process.

Some had been sent home before they were paid compensation for losses suffered in the riots; others, before receiving the back pay due to them. Fennell accused the Cardiff police of prejudice against black people and asked that police cease to supervise the departures. But the officials were unsympathetic. Soon after leaving the Home Office Fennell found himself under arrest on a trumped-up fraud charge. After being kept in custody in London for a while he came up in court in Cardiff on 22 July, accused of obtaining £2 by false pretences from Ahmed Ben Ahmed Demary, a boarding-house master. Fennell’s solicitor told the court that there was ‘a great deal at the back of the case’ and that ‘certain men were anxious to keep the accused in prison because of the way he had watched the interests of the coloured men’. The magistrate dismissed the charge. London was not spared sporadic outbreaks of anti-black – and anti-Chinese – rioting. On 16 April there was a ‘serious riot’ in Cable Street, Stepney. Shots were fired, a violent street fight took place, and several black seamen were injured. 

On 29 May a seaman named William Samuel, described by a Colonial Office civil servant as ‘a burly negro, with an aggressive manner’,wrote from the Sailors’Home in St Anne Street, Limehouse, to the colonial secretary, complaining of attacks on black men in the London streets: ‘a sargeant of police said to us last night, why; We want you niggers out of our country this is a white man’s country and not yours.’ That same evening large crowds gathered outside the Strangers’ Home in West India Dock Road, cat-calling and insulting every black person who appeared and trying to force their way in. There were similar scenes outside lodging-houses used by black seamen. Outside the St Anne Street sailors’ hostel 29-year-old John Martin, a Jamaican on four weeks’ leave from the Royal Navy, was seized by the head from behind, knocked down by men armed with sticks, and kicked in the mouth. Alleged to have fired a revolver towards the crowd, Martin was arrested with injuries to head and face, and charged with wounding a ship’s fireman. He was found not guilty. 

On 16 June a coffee-shop in Cable Street used by black people was stormed by a crowd that seized one of the customers and beat him. Next day there were disturbances in Poplar, where a gang attacked a house occupied by a Chinese family, cleared out the furniture, stacked it in the middle of the street, and set fire to it, causing a ‘huge blaze’ that gutted the house.40During that hot summer of 1919 black people in Britain were not only being attacked physically, in their homes and in the streets. They were attacked also with the pen by those who excused the aggressors by blaming their victims. The Manchester Guardian, for instance, blamed black people for daring to defend themselves against lynch mobs: ‘The quiet, apparently inoffensive, nigger becomes a demon when armed with revolver or razor.’ Above all, black men were blamed, as that Liverpool policeman had blamed them, for associating with white women. This explanation for the riots was advanced by a former British colonial administrator, Sir Ralph Williams, who had served in Bechuanaland and Barbados and had been governor of the Windward Islands in 1906–9. His recreation was ‘ceaseless travelling to far-away countries’, and when the riots reached their climax he wrote a letter to The Times summing up what he had learnt on his travels:To almost every white man and woman who has lived a life among coloured races, intimate association between black or coloured men and white women is a thing of horror . . . It is an instinctive certainty that sexual relations between white women and coloured men revolt our very nature . . . What blame . . . to those white men who, seeing these conditions and loathing them, resort to violence? . . .We cannot forcibly repatriate British subjects of good character, but we can take such steps as will prevent the employment of an unusually large number of men of colour in our great shipping centres.

- Quoted from Staying Power, History of Black People in Britain, by Peter Fryer

On South Asian Divisions in Leicester and Agendas of the Far-Right State and Orgs

For decades, Leicester built communal walls. Waves of immigrants made it more toxic

East Ham and Waltham Forest are Pakistani Punjabi, Luton is Kashmiri Muslim, Southall is Punjabi Sikh, and Tower Hamlet is Bangladeshi. Each walled off their neighbourhoods to other immigrants.

The first petrol bomb was lobbed through the windows of the Shri Pragati Mandir in Birmingham’s inner-city area Sparkbrook. Fire burned through the carpet at the Krishna Temple in Coventry, and the doors of the Veda Temple run by the Vishva Hindu Parishad were damaged in a blaze. The Shri Krishna Temple in West Bromwich, among the largest in the UK, was gutted in a similar attack. A Hindu priest in Derby had a narrow escape when his temple was firebombed.

Earlier that week in December 1993, the Babri Masjid had been demolished by Hindu karsevaks.  Iqbal Sacranie—among the key figures in the anti-Salman Rushdie movement that exploded across England in 1988—alleged some Hindus in Bradford had distributed sweets. The wave of fire-bombings across the Midlands and North of England—the first attacks on religious institutions in England since Luftwaffe bombs tore apart historic churches in 1942—was meant as revenge.

The still-simmering Hindu-Muslim violence in Leicester, mainly pitting young ethnic-Gujarati Hindus against young Gujarati Muslims, judging by details so far released by the police, should provoke introspection on why homeland hatred casts such a dark shadow overseas. Toxic competition between Islamism and Hindutva has sharpened communal battle lines in England, but the tensions aren’t new. Thirty years ago, Hindus and Muslims exchanged petrol bombs in Blackburn after a cricket match—exactly as they have now done in Leicester.

Allah-o-Akbar, Jai Shri Ram: The aggressive displays of religious identity by young men in Leicester is the product of the self-segregation of England’s South Asian diaspora into ethnic-religious ghettos. The ghettoisation has ended up reproducing the dysfunctional Hindu-Muslim relationship in the homeland.

Leicester’s communal walls

Fifty years ago, following what he claimed were instructions from God given to him in a dream, dictator Idi Amin Dada ordered the mass expulsion of Uganda’s mainly Gujarati Indians. Within three months, some 50,000 people were forced to leave their homeland for the UK and Canada. Even the 8,000 or so Indians Amin’s laws theoretically allowed to remain were threatened by being dispatched to dig shambas, or vegetable gardens, or with mass deportation to the waste-lands of Karamoj.

Ever since the completion of the colonial trans-Uganda railway in 1902, the Gujaratis had come to occupy a critical position in the economy, selling consumer goods in the country and shipping out cotton and coffee to ports. The Indians earned great wealth, historian Vali Jamal has written, but their fortunes earned them the hatred of Ugandan Africans.

Leicester, which had grown a small East African Gujarati population through the 1960s, seemed an attractive destination. But the Labour-led city council, conscious of the sentiments of its White working-class constituency, proved less than welcoming. “In your own interests and those of your family,” an advertisement by the council bluntly proclaimed, “[do] not come to Leicester.”

The arrival of the Ugandan Gujaratis had been preceded by a deepening of racial fractures across the United Kingdom.  Enoch Powell, a prominent Conservative politician, prophesied in an inflammatory 1968 speech of the coming race war. Edward Heath, who became prime minister in 1970, promised to control immigration, but the far-Right grew steadily through the decade, culminating in pitched battles with police in 1977.

South Asian self-segregation

Even though Leicester now celebrates itself as the UK’s most diverse city, the self-image is deeply problematic. Educated, relatively-affluent Hindus immigrants from East Asia soon began to move out of the Highfields neighbourhood into the White working-class Belgrave. Belgrave Road—site of the so-called Golden Mile, where the recent clashes took place—rapidly grew into a thriving business hub. Working-class Highfields remained mired in poverty, as industrial Leicester imploded in the 1980s.

Three decades ago, scholars Deborah Phillips and Valerie Karn observed “the spatial polarisation of Hindus and Muslims in Leicester.” Each urban ward had evolved clusters around markers of religious identity, like temples and mosques.  The new enclaves, research on Gujarati immigrants by anthropologist Kenneth Hahlo showed, sometimes mirrored homeland divisions right down to the level of village and caste.

East African Hindu estate agents and solicitors grouped together to block other immigrants from buying into their new enclaves, Phillips and Karn wrote. The discrimination wasn’t one-way. “Muslims,” they recorded, “have been have been known to refuse council house offers because of the proximity of Hindu tenants.”

The same segregation process, scholar Apurba Kundu has observed, was evident elsewhere in the UK. East Ham and Waltham Forest in London are Pakistani Punjabi, Luton is Kashmiri Muslim, Southall is Punjabi Sikh, and Tower Hamlet is Bangladeshi.  Each community grouped together as protection against White racism, but also walled-off its neighbourhoods to other immigrants.

Following 9/11, new conflicts emerged. Muslims registered consistently lower attainment in education and employment than other groups, official data showed. They blamed it on religious discrimination. Hindus and Sikhs complained that counter-terrorism programmes provided disproportionate funding for Muslim groups.

A toxic competition

Leicester’s complex demographics helped fuel communal competition. In 2001, some 15 per cent of the population was Hindu, and 11 per cent Muslim. In the 2011 census, the percentage of Hindus remained similar, and still does today. But the Muslim population share went up to 18.6 per cent, driven by the arrival of Somali and Kurdish immigrants. Immigrants of Indian origin remained the largest single block—28.3 per cent —and Gujarati the most-spoken language after English.  Islam and Hinduism, though, became competing categories for State patronage.

The competition, the work of scholar Sean McLoughlin shows, expressed itself in a surge in applications for the construction of religious sites in Leicester. Funding from the Leicester city council also ended up reinforcing particular constructions of identity—for example, Garba events—over trans-community projects, like youth football.

For the children of the diaspora, lacking the wider cultural context and linguistic affiliations of their parents, religious identity had become the principal marker of identity.

Large-scale proselytising activity by homeland fundamentalists tore through the diaspora in the coming decade. The now-internationally proscribed terrorist, Masood Azhar Alvi, visited the United Kingdom in 1993, lecturing at mosques on “jihad, its need, training and other related issues.” Large numbers young people from the UK travelled for training at jihad camps in Pakistan, up to the 7/7 bombings of London’s transport system.

The Hindu-nationalist movement also grew dramatically in the United Kingdom through this period, political scientist Chetan Bhatt has recorded.  Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) units—first founded overseas  by Jagdish Chandra Sharda in 1947, on a Kenya-bound ship—slowly grew across the United Kingdom. Long struggles to build Hindu temples, notably the Swaminarayan Mission in north London and Bhaktivedanta Manor at Letchmore Heath, helped mobilise a new generation of Hindu immigrants around faith.

Few of the leaders of South Asian communities understood the dangers of these divisions in the 1980s. Faced with race tensions in the 1970s, the British State had turned to multiculturalism—outsourcing its engagement with issues of identity to political contractors who gained their status from their communal constituency, not advocacy of the wider community. Instead of the political and social equality they were seeking, ethnic and religious minorities ended up getting institutional patronage to maintain their differences.

The violence in Leicester will empower no-one except White supremacists, who’ve long argued immigrants import their homeland conflicts. For decades, Leicester’s Gujarati immigrant families struggled to overcome their traumatic exodus from Uganda. Their children, blinded by hatreds they barely understand, seem determined to walk into the trap they’ve laid for themselves.

[source]

MXM Public event: STRIKE! Challenges of Trade Unionism in Brexit Britain

STRIKE! Challenges of Trade Unionism in Brexit Britain

Eventbrite event page

Facebook event page

*Fri 28th Oct 2022

630-830pm (Starting sharp at 630pm)

London Irish Centre, 

50-52 Camden Square, 

London NW1 9XB

£5 suggested entry

This event brings some of the most experienced speakers directly involved at the forefront of the class struggle exploring challenges of defending working class people under increasing attacks by the Tory state in the contexts of a growing far-right state, racism in the colonial capitalist global crises in general.

Speakers: 

Steve Hedley (former Assistant Gen Sec RMT Union)

Suresh Grover (The Monitoring Group, former Stephen Lawrence family campaign coordinator)

Glenroy Watson (Chair of RMT's 2023 Black & Ethnic Conference)

Arnie Hill (London Black Revs)

Chair: Malcolm X Movement

*This event will be audio-visually recorded for upload onto social media, please let the chair know if you do not wish to be recorded  

*We apologise that there are steps leading into the room

UK State Terrified Chris Kaba-related Black-led Uprising will Destroy its Hyper-Monarchist Narrative

 

UK State Terrified Chris Kaba-related Black-led Uprising will Destroy its Hyper-Monarchist Narrative

- State attempting to keep Chris Kaba campaign quiet and ineffective

- Importance of employing quick effective strategic grassroots direct-actions around #ChrisKaba justice campaign

- Grassroots Fenians led the way in political resistance to the Monarchy

- British left terrified of street-protest against Monarchy, instead hiding on (anti-)social media

The Queen died and immediately the Brit colonial-capitalist ruling classes sighed in profound relief that their labour lieutenants in the trade union leadership - CWU/Ward, RMT/Lynch/Gordon/Dempsey etc - actually turned out to be more loyal to the Monarchy than even the bourgeoisie! A historic sell-out in the working class trade union movement that exposed the Monarchist loyalty and leanings of those in the case of Lynch and Dempsey like to bandy around their apparent political affiliations with leading Irish republican socialist James Connolly. 

However, just as the sell-out was announced on the morning after Elizabeth Windsor's death the police shoot-to-kill of 24yr old Chris Kaba in Lambeth, South London set off again the pattern of state killing of a working class black youth and the resultant outpouring of grief, anger and determination of black and allied working class people seething with a sense of injustice and seeking to get that justice, many would like to in the words of Malcolm X to 'declare their/our right on this earth to for Chris Kaba and the Black community to be treated as a human being, to be respected as a human being, which we/they intend to bring into existence by any means necessary'. As soon as the colonial capitalist state removed one irritation: the strike wave, another wave of humanity asserted itself around the martyrdom of Chris Kaba.

The preparations for the death of Liz Windsor have been years in the making, a weaponisation of her death for the state to deepen its control over the great unwashed domestically and globally. In this context the possible uprising of the Black and poor youth at this time around Chris Kaba is something the state wants to avoid at all costs. The spectre of the 5-day national uprising after the shoot-to-kill of Mark Duggan on Aug 04 2011 haunts the ruling classes. 

The August 2011 Uprising haunts the state and lives-on as a glorious folk tale on the council estates across the country. Mark Duggan's 21yr old son Bandokay , a well-known rapper from the Broadwater Farm-based 'Original Farm Boys' crew/music group, often speaks about the uprisings on the many interviews on social media. These interviews and the music of OFB / Bandokay keeps the Uprising alive in the minds and imaginations of our youths beyond that which they hear in conversations amongst their older peers and family. Of course Broadwater Farm council estate itself is a militant symbol of Black working class-led resistance and victories against the British state especially due to the Uprising there on Oct 6 1984.

The state quickly announced a homicide investigation into the police officer who shot dead Chris Kaba. And then quickly announced that the officer was suspended (on full-pay, no doubt), angering his colleagues who threatened to hand in their weapons. Please do, thank you. Now it seems the family are imminently going to receive the body-cam footage. Labour Party MPs were quick to make statements pretending to be in synpathy with the Chris Kaba family while they daily collaborate with the state to deliver torture and death to our people on the council estates. Labour Party MP's were at the Chris Kaba protest in Whitehall where Diane Abbott was booed by Black youths for demanding everyone keeps everything peaceful. 

It is globally known that if your loved one is killed you go out with all your peoples and you make as much noise and destruction to show that the injustice will not go without resistance, hence the meaning of the slogan: no justice, no peace. The two-week Black-led uprising following the martyrdom of George Floyd is a case in point. There are alternatively many peaceful means by which the same aims can be met. 

The point of tactics is to achieve strategies of rallying further sections of the grassroots, building a broad united front, and to show the powers that be that we can apply direct pressure to ensure that they cannot oppress us without consequences to them. Such peaceful direction actions could be occupations and sit-ins of strategic institutions of the police, council etc; non-violent direct actions could be a on-going rolling hunger strike-tents at Brixton police station or New Scotland Yard; to peacefully block the transport system of the capital which is easily done with quite few people. With the imaginations of the grassroots many other things can be done. Ideally all tactics should be deployed all at once. 

The Chris Kaba justice campaign has grassroots backing to do so. The grassroots are ready for action but lack the leadership , determination themselves and organisations necessary for what we need to do for Chris Kaba and for everyone in defending them against further death and injury by the state, Realistically, it is probably unlikely that the grassroots will rise-up but we cannot but point to what decades, generations and centuries of our resistance informs us to do. We stand with our martyrs and ancestors whose sacrifices meant that we live today, there is no alternative to our advocacy.

The Sinn Fein leadership continue the political rationale of the British colonial 'good friday agreement' which means SF members have been strictly instructed to the nutty colonial monarchist sentiments of the unionist community in the occupied 6 counties. So heartbreaking and embarrassing to see SF leaders Alex Maskey and Michell O'Neil schmooze with king charles the turd and try to spin it as something positive for Irish people. 

This should not take away from the fact that the real opposition to the uk monarchy at the grassroots has been led by Irish Fenians / Irish Republicans. Be it the slogan against the king on Black Mountain by Belfast, the 'fuck your crown' banner drop by the Green Brigade in the stadium and the only street protest called against the monarchy in Belfast too. This current Brit monarchist hype is being used to further push away any chance of Scottish independence or Irish reunification. The monarchy doesn't just handover the break-up of its union and rule, it only does so when there is an escalating mass pressure from the colonised masses, of which currently there is an absence. 

While one might criticise the SF leadership, what SF have done in the past and still today are head and shoulders above the pathetic state of the British (colonial) left who have firmly stayed in their bedrooms looking nervously out of their windows into the real world while writing some posturing nonsense on social media. We say: fight by any means necessary for justice for Chris Kaba, against the racist anti-working class brutality of the brit state. As we go forward the global system of colonial-capitalism is going to deepen even further to terror which it is inflicting on workers and peasants the world over, this increasingly pressure on us including in Britain and Ireland will push all the oppressed to react. How and when, we don't know, but the science of repression and resistance is a universal and permanent one. 

Further watching:

What to do when the state kills one of us: 'Ultraviolence': https://vimeo.com/570908985

Leicester South Asian divisions: Old British colonial divide & rule and new far-right Brexit Tory State divide & rule proving successful

Leicester South Asian divisions: Old British colonial divide & rule and new far-right Brexit Tory State divide & rule proving successful

- Politics of Brit colonial partition of India alive and kicking in Leicester

- Brit state with people like Tommy Robinson/Yaxley Lennon see strategic successes in Leicester clashes

- Brit state employed and directed TR/Yaxley-Lennon/EDL etc to exactly achieve manipulation of far-right in Hindu community against all Muslims

- Brit state cultivated right-wing/far-right forces in ALL religious/national communities 

- Brit state has nurtured the divisions which we now see in the open in Leicester

- Divisions hide growing South Asian exploitative and parasitic landlords and employers

- Ideal optics for the racist & colonial Brit state to see brown youth fighting while Brit govt/NF/EDL etc all laugh at them/us

- Historic failure of secular-oriented radical grassroots communities to develop leadership amongst South Asian youth

[Pictured: Malcolm X talking to Bengalis in England / EDL racist provocations / Leicester police line and South Asian youth]

What a sorry state of affairs that some in the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities in Leicester are playing-out in September 2022 the old British colonial policy of encouraging their colonial victims to divide themselves around right-wing/even far-right frameworks of abusing religon to, not fight their common oppressor in the British colonial state, but against the 'other' who lives in the same conditions of poverty and racism. As we see the actual reach of the UK monarchy across the planet this is an that divisive forces in the Hindu and Muslim community are not acting independently of themselves as there is a much bigger and global power at play in all of this which are the ruling classes of the British state. 

The collapse into pathetic colonial divisions in the South Asian community is linked to the global balance of forces as manifest in the region with far-right religious movements developing in India with the BJP government and RSS, in Pakistan and other places in South Asia with the rise of the Pakistani Taliban, return of the Afghan Taliban and similar movements, in Sri Lanka and Myanmar of right-wing nationalist manipulation of Buddhism, and in the Sikh community of the supremacist right-wing movement of 'Khalistan'. 

The forces of unity and socialism have dwindled decade by decade in South Asia and also in their diasporic communities in the 'west' including in England. The need for secular and atheistic movements that respect all religious cultures and faiths and correctly interpret them as a force for unity and solidarity are desperately needed, and we must remind people that only a secular and united movement of all peoples based primarily as working class racialised human beings is the only framework to push-back on these colonially-imposed divisions. In South Asia it is only the secular socialist, anti-caste, pro-tribal peoples, communist and other similar forces who have provided unity in struggle in previous generations and continues to do so. Although including many political forces, the recent victory of Indian Punjabi farmers show the continued ability of communist and socialist forces leading successful social struggles that benefit ALL communities of peasants from all religious backgrounds.  

The British state has in recent decades achieved the cultivation of right-wing forces in all these religious communities. The connections between the right-wing sectarians who use and abuse Hinduism in the BJP have high-level relations with the Tories and the Labour Party. The Tories especially see an affinity with the BJP as both are part of a global fascist revolution that facilitates their exploitation of the working classes so as to achieve their pursuit of fascsit power and capitalist exploitation of the masses. Vicious racist and former Tory Home Office minister Priti Patel calls BJP leader Modi "our dear friend" and praises his "dynamic leadership", indicating a joint enterprise and relationship between the senior Brit tories and their junior helpers in the BJP to achieve their common goals of scapegoating oppressed communities in order to pursue power, money and sexual exploitation. October 2017 saw RSS-supporting Tapan Ghosh of the National Council of Hindu Temples (NCHT) UK and Tory MP Bob Blackman meet Tommy Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon and a former BNP leader. Ghosh argued excitedly at the global fascist revolution at an event at the time in Parliament that  Modi, Trump and Putin had been "raising hopes amongst people against Islamic aggression".

British authorities have through a long policy of 'collusion' developed a caricature of Islam and Muslims in its open support for Al-Qaeda and Daesh and other similar factions in its policy of recrtuiting and grooming thousands of Muslims to join its foreign policy agendas in fighting in death squads in Libya, Syria, Iraq etc openly exposed in the Arab Sting years. Majid Freeman who is interfering in Leicester at the moment was a well-known recruiter for British interests in encouraging Muslims to join death squads in Syria and today he continues his divide and rule role for the state by inciting religious hatred against "Hindu mobs" similarly to the other oppurtunist - Mohammed Hijab who has advocated along explicitly bigoted lines in Leicester recently: "If they (Hindus) believe in reincarnation, what a humiliation of them to be reincarnated into some pathetic, weak, cowardly people like that." Of course Roshan Salih Muhammad, a long-standing promoter of violent sectarian divisions within the Muslim community, decides to positively platform people like Freeman on his sectarian grifting racket which is the  '5 pillars' platform, with the Brit intel services no-doubt nodding in satisfaction at these antics. One might have wondered how the British intelligence services were going to again deploy their actors in their collusion racket after the Arab Sting horror, and here we can see the useful role these fools are playing for the British state.

The British state has facilitated and directed the work of Tommy Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon since June 2007 in the forming of the English Defence League (EDL)  to attempt to manipulate Black and Hindu communities against the Muslim community playing upon many colonially-imposed divisions and tensions between the respective communities. Britain First, UKIP, and many other factions of the far-right play a similar role. The events in Leicester recently with masked-up youth from South Asia allowing themselves to be divided and fighting not the white racists, richest employers, landlords, monarchy and ruling classes that oppress them all, but to engage in fighting each other. When we are going deeper into a cost of living crisis and inflation amongst other capitalist crises the British ruling classes love to see some of us diverting from the real problems and real culprits of our conditions and attacking our neighbours that we have lived amongst for centuries in the homeland. Now in recent years and decades we leave the homeland to come here because the Brit white man stole everything from us and made us poor so we have left our ancestral homes and live in deprived areas on a grey, cold, depressing and unfriendly island. Fighting your neighbour for the benefit of the richest white man is not what our ancestors and our faiths inform us to do, rather they inform us to protect the oppressed and exploited and unite together to fight common oppressors. The racist state and its minions like the EDL are exactly designed to keep us divided and easy pickings for further poverty. 

The real terror and oppression impacting BOTH Hindu, Muslim and Sikh working class communities is institutional racist poverty. In a population of 357,394 some 40,000 children in Leicester live in poverty. When you get into areas of high concentrations of Black and Brown people like in the area of Spinney Hill Park where the recent divisive tensions have flared-up child poverty rockets to around 50%. This is in a city which has the highest population of non-white people in the country with self-defined white people being just over half of the population. In a survey a few years ago of hundreds of children and young people in the city one in five said they worried about having enough to eat every single day. Leicester, like so many migrant working class areas, has massive potential in terms of what people could be doing if they were to unite and pool their creativity into grassroots socialist action for the community. 

The reason why the grassroots in our community don't get together and deliver unity and happiness to each other is exactly because of the agendas of the British state that through its racist overt and covert actions keep us divided and depressed. Sikh, Muslim and Hindu working classes are all terribly exploited in factories and warehouses in the city, a scandal that made headline news for the manner in which people were terrorised by the employers at work through the covid pandemic. Look to the deprived neglected streets where unemployed young people struggling with mental health and lack of cultural, sports, social facilities take to the streets to numb the pain and hang-out socially, there is nothing but superficial differences between working class youths nominally from different heritages and faith communities. 

A massive issue that very few people are talking about is how these abusers of faith and religion to cause division and conflict are a cover for the growing class conflicts within the South Asian community. While we have to keep very clear that the 'greater enemy' who has power in and guide these divisive trends are the British authorities, at the same time there is a growing parasitic exploitative class (of South Asian heritage) who are running slum housing, oppressive employment practices and other forms of exploitation that prey on the poor. There are millions of people in this country who are new migrants and who are 'illegal' being paid down to £1 an hour and who go home to live in squalid overcrowded conditions. Due to their relatively extreme precarious situation they have no political voice and no-one to advocate for them in terms of a joint class struggle to resist these oppressions. The rise of tensions in Leicester are in the interests of the bigger white ruling classes of this country but also the more localised parasitic capitalist class of landlords and employers. These parasites can deflect from their own oppressive role and unjustly and manipulatively point fingers at poor, often young working class members of another faith group.   

Look at this historic context of these tensions going back generations to the anti-colonial struggle in undivided India. These communities came from traumatised ones from a land that was recently partitioned in 1947 whose architects also designed and delivered how Punjabis killed, raped and abudcuted 1 million of each other for the agenda of the British, as well as people of Kashmir being partitioned both peoples partitions continue to play into the colonalists aims of divide and rule. Another horrific war conducted by major nato-ally Islamabad/ (west) Pakistan conducting a supremacist genocidal war against those who won the independence of Bangladesh (formerly 'east Pakistan'') in December 1971. 

These communities then came over here to England and many of their first and second generation children united with each other and other Black people to fight-back police brutality and poverty from the 1960s until the early 1990s. The Pakistani Workers Association, Kala Tara and Asian Youth Movements, Indian Workers Associations of many factions (especially important was the leadership of Jagmohan Joshi in the IWA), Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) in Brixton and many other grassroots political formations saw South Asian communities unite with other Black people against racism. The challenge remains to develop this unity again on the basis of socialism and secularism that remains supportive of religious faith stripped of the manipulation, use and abuse by right-wing oppressive misogynists who use their corrupted religious opportunism for their own petty pursuit of power, money and often sexual abuse of women, girls and boys. 

United grassroots working class self-organisation is desperately needed in poor neglected Black and Brown communities like in Leicester and across the country in the Lancs, Birmingham, Hayes and Southall, Luton, Ilford, Peckham, East Ham, Tower Hamlets, St Pauls & Easton and many other communities. There are always tensions between nefarious operators manipulating religion backed by the Brit government, media, intelligence services and the far-right movements under their direction. Although Pakistan was a major colonial victory of division nonetheless the people of South Asia only became independent by means of relative unity and struggle, of mobilising the masses of poor on the basis of solidarity and collective action and organising which remain the challenges today. 

We need to see groups bringing ALL the flags of South Asian nations to fraternise together and celebrate unity, also when there is a big cricket match, or street celebrations for Eid/Vaisakhi/Diwali and independence days of the respective South Asian countries. The amplification of those that conduct racist divide and rule should not mean that we forget that there are many if not more people in our communities who want to see a unifying movement of all working class people to address our common issues. We should remember that there are a lot of young and older grassroots-oriented people who want to see a working class community unity and not this ugly nonsense whereby we become a laughing-stock for the NF/EDL and Tory state.

We encourage young people from South Asia to reject the politics of colonial racist divide and rule, to instead take a socialist interpretation and inspiration from all faiths revolutionary movements and ideologies that unite the oppressed and serve the oppressed towards united resistance against colonial-capitalism and for unity and socialism. We know there are a lot of young people in all oppressed communities who want this. We encourage you to form your own grassroots organisations. We also apologise that the socialist forces able to do this are so small and so many elder activists have failed their historic duties in creating effective projects and initiatives on the ground. 

We in the Malcolm X Movement and our friends have tried since 2014/2015 and continue to contribute to fulfilling these urgent challenges and tasks. Probably there are young South Asians on both sides of the clashes in Leicester who might be involved in the trade union 'strike wave' which would show the direct interest in unity-in-struggle that we all have as working class youth. Back in the homeland we have increasingly have everything to unite around and especially on the issues of overcoming right-wing movements of all kinds, the devastating impact of climate change which is increasingly migrant flows internally and to the 'west' (and the pro-migrant challenges that these flows bring), unliveable hot temperatures, floods all in the context of capitalist crises that brings further poverty around the 'cost of living crisis'. Unite and fight our common challenges and oppression, reject those who are using and abusing religion for their own and the British state' narrow and manipulative agendas. Reject TR/Yaxley Lennon's agenda becoming successful in our communities!

 

Further reading/listening:

Malcolm X - Message to the Grassroots - http://www.csun.edu/~hcpas003/grassroots.html

Black Panther Party Serve the People programs - https://youtu.be/Yspaulg-tSM + https://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/hilliard-ed-the-black-panther-party-service-to-the-people-programs.pdf

Shaheed Bhagat Singh - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bhagat-singh/index.htm

British state collusion with death squads in the Muslim world - https://danglazebrook.com/2017/05/26/british-collusion-with-sectarian-violence-part-one-with-sukant-chandan-2/

Southall Asian Youth Movement - https://youtu.be/OGWX233kHPg

Bradford 12: https://youtu.be/iLZ6Lbz6C04

Injustice (police killing of Black people) - https://vimeo.com/34633260 

MXM public event: Carnival and Black & Brown Resistance

Carnival and Black & Brown Resistance

Facebook event page

630pm Fri 25 Aug
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

Speakers confirmed so far:

Sister Juni - East Oxford Carnival organiser
Arnie Hill - London Black Revs

As Black and Brown and migrant working class communities continue to feel the increasing squeeze of British colonial state oppression and exploitation, in the aftermath of the Grenfell state massacre, as Notting Hill Carnival itself sees pushes to basically annull it by removal out of the historic community of Ladbroke Grove: the Malcolm X Movement brings together this event and conversation exploring the histories of Carnival, its role as resistant cultural expressions of our experiences, and what is the outlook for the Carnival weekend in the and generally.

public event: Elections, Islamophobia & Terrorism - This Fri 630pm Housmans Bookshop, N1 9DY

Elections, Islamophobia and terrorism
630pm Fri 09 June 2017
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

The political situation in Britain continues to worsen as the British Tory government and state continues to ramp-up racism particularly focused around the fallout of Brexit, in addition to that the three terrorist attacks in the three months that has raised the spectre of British state collusion with terrorism has enabled the Tory government to now signal to the country that they can be nearly racist as possible with calls for mass deportations and arrests of Muslims becoming louder and louder. This is event is an invnitation to a conversation led by some of the leading grassroots activists and advocates for the Muslim community, ant-racism, anti-imperialism and for socialism to discuss the results of the general election.

Speakers:

Arzu Merali - Co-founder and Head of Research at the Islamic Human Rights Commission, IHRC is the leading organisation fighting Islamophobia in this country for decades

Glenroy Watson - President of the RMT trade union's London Region the Secretary of Global Afrikan Congress uk a Pan Afrikan Reparatory campaigning group

Nargess Moballeghi - Independent journalist and documentary film maker. Formally head of news at Press TV UK, and has been working as a journalist for 12 years

more speakers TBC shortly.



Please note: this is an event oriented towards migrant and Black and Brown communities, not to be dominated in any way by the white left. This event will be filmed for public viewing online and attending this event means you give permission to be filmed, however please let the organisers know if you don't want your face on camera.

IFTAR: We will be going to the local Turkish/Kurdish restaurant Best Mangal where comrades can have their Iftar with us (some of whom are fasting) if you so wish, you have to buy your own food and drinks, apologies we can not provide that.

Salman Abedi: How David Cameron and Theresa May brought their Libyan Revolution to Manchester

Salman Abedi: How David Cameron and Theresa May brought their Libyan Revolution to Manchester

By James Stuart, a Malcolm X Movement Coordinator

If the Labour leadership had any guts at all they would go all guns blazing on the developing Abedi collusion scandal. This tory government was central to unleashing hell on Libya, it sent scores of British Libyan terrorist exiles it had given aid and shelter to, back to Libya as its boots on the ground in their 2011 war on Libya.

British born Salman Abedi was one of them. His father had been a member, in the 1980s and 90s, of the (proto-al Qaeda) Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a fanatical sectarian murder gang that brought terrorism to Libya and was sheltered and funded by the UK.

This is as clear cut a case of collusion as you will ever see. Even more so than the murky, but long proven and exposed, connections between British intelligence and sectarian loyalist paramilitary murder gangs in the six counties, this time the Prime Minister openly announced it.

As Home Secretary and in regular contact with the UK's intelligence services through the Joint

Intelligence Committees, Theresa May would have been central to greenlighting the recruitment of terrorists and sending them to Libya and elsewhere. And, crucially, in her role as boss of the UK Border Agency, in giving them entry to live in the UK and the British passports that allowed them to travel across borders unhindered.

That one of those terrorists, taking the training and contacts he had been granted only by the collusion of the British government's work in Libya, has come home and used his skills to bring the Libyan "revolution" back to the UK, should be hammered home by the opposition.

That 22 innocent people, many of them children, died in Manchester is intrinsically linked to the many thousands more innocents that died in Libya, and are still dying today, often washing up on Europe's beaches. It is a scandal of monumental proportions and needs to be brought fully to public attention

(Of course, it is pertinent to remember that large sections of the English Left fully supported this "revolution" and the terror and destruction it wrought, and still do support it as it continues in Syria)

To imagine that Salman Abedi, who was sixteen years old and still at school when he was first sent to fight in Libya in 2011, and was a frequent traveller to what is left of that country to engage in further acts of terrorism at will, up until just a few weeks ago, could do so without the full knowledge of the British intelligence services is beyond credibility.

Indeed they admit Salman Abedi was "known" to them, in actual fact he has to have been in direct contact with them. We also know that British intelligence and special forces are on the ground even now in Libya continuing to sow chaos and destruction, just as Salman Abedi and his father and brother were.

From Ireland to Afghanistan, to Libya and Syria, collusion between British intelligence services and the most ideologically reactionary and sectarian terrorist death squads has been standard operating procedure for British counter insurgency policy against states and movements it wished to overthrow for at least half a century or more.

There are so many questions that absolutely must be raised and demanded to be answered. Jeremy Corbyn should be calling for a full inquiry into what was known and by who. Who greenlighted Abedi, as a child, being recruited to fight in Libya? In fact we know the buck stops with Cameron, Hague and Theresa May. Now is the time to bring them to account.

#Collusion

BBC's 'Real Housewives of Isis': Sanction, Invasion, Satirisation

Sanction, Invasion, Satirisation

Suicide bombings, beheadings, rape and terrorism are jokes when it’s in Muslim countries apparently 


[This is an exclusive piece written for the Malcolm X Movement, by brother Ali Muratović]




‘The Real Wives of ISIS’ makes ‘Muslims Like Us’ seem like a pro-Islam propaganda piece. It’s that bad. When I logged onto Facebook on Wednesday a friend had posted a link to, and a succinct analysis of, a sketch from the BBC’s appropriately named ‘Revolting’ to be broadcast this coming Tuesday, 10th January at10pm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgP5wEXqq3g

My friend’s post read: ‘From the same company who knew they were employing kiddy fiddlers and did nothing about it. All fun and games until you’re reporting about the horrors of it and how they are brain washing British people. Wouldn't see this about the holocaust would you?! Leave it bbc.’

And that’s the point. An institution prepared to cover for paedophilia and the rape of children is not going to have any problem demonising Muslims. The video has already been seen by 15 million internet users.

It should be no surprise that the British regime propaganda network, after more than 20 years of intensive anti-Islam propaganda needed to back up the Global War on/of Terror, produces a sketch deliberately mocking, demonising and minimising the suffering of Muslims in Iraq and Syria and more specifically the British Muslim families who have had their young daughters migrate there often without their knowledge.

A now global conflict which has torn regions, countries, tribes, communities, families and even individuals apart, is certainly NOT a joke. If the British find it funny to laugh at their own largely poor/working class WWII dead in Dad’s Army and similar comedy that’s one thing. It’s not any of their business to be laughing at other people. I’m sure if we found it funny we have more than enough Iraqi, Syrian and Muslim channels to do it ourselves. Perhaps, unlike the British, we Muslims take our civilization seriously.

The’ scary’ scarf

Central to the sketch is of course the presence of the headscarf, mentioned in the Qu’ran (24:30-31 and 33:58-59) and regarded wajib (compulsory) by almost every Muslim faqih (jurist). It’s worth mentioning here that women are not required to wear it in the home though to be fair that’s not easy to communicate in sketch format.

How often are visibly Muslim women given their own space on television in the UK? Aside from the impressive Nadiya Hussain, rarely if it isn’t a report or discussion about war, terrorism or ‘extremism’ (to be fair despite the deliberate instigation of intra-Muslim conflict this is something that Muslims Like Us did pretty well on).

On one occasion when a Hijabi was promoted to a position of serious prominence, Fatima Manji, a reporter and newsreader at Channel 4, received a vicious Islamophobic attack from The Sun’s Kelvin MacKenzie who questioned whether the sister should be reporting on news stories relating to terrorism. Why exactly would the sister have been singled out by MacKenzie? It was crystal clear in the headline ‘Why did Channel 4 have a presenter in a hijab fronting coverage of Muslim terror in Nice?’

A lady wearing a headscarf should stay in her lane according Britain’s best-selling newspaper, which is not all that different to the ideology propagated by ISIS.

In this context of rising Islamophobia, particularly directed towards sisters who publicly carry the flag of Islam on their heads and have borne the brunt of attacks for example here, here and here, within the past year, we should be looking to promote a true and naturally positive image of Muslim sisters.

What ‘The Real Wives of ISIS’ does instead is to reinforce the sort of propaganda that leads to these attacks in the first place and places the scarf in the strict and exclusive context of death squad terrorism.

Not only this, but the depth of the propaganda here extends to lies including that; Muslim women are happy with a lack of autonomy, would joke about literally being chained to a kitchen sink, hashtagging Jihadi Jane (I guess using her real name of Colleen LaRose would be inconvenient), mocking grooming (I doubt the white English grooming victims of Rotherham, Jimmy Saville, and elsewhere in the British establishment will be taunted as complicit very soon) and that the worst thing women in ISIS held areas have to deal with are ‘matching suicide vests’.

The serious issues of disappearance of women from public life, forced marriage, elimination of bodily autonomy in general and slavery are minimised when the Arab, the South Asian and the Muslim is the victim.

Iraq and Syria as Untermensch non-countries

Another case of outright racism, Islamophobia and double-standards is inherent in the context of Iraq and Syria as the setting. You won’t see the British mocking the 7/7 transport bombings or the beheading of Lee Rigby in their green and pleasant land. Where Iraq and Syria is involved, well of course, after decades of sanctions, demonisation, bombings and invasions, it’s fair game.

There are things that COULD be satirised about ISIS, if that’s your thing. I don’t think most people would have an issue with Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and his death squad operatives being mocked for the tyrants they are. Nor the criminal actions of Bush, Blair, Cameron, Clinton and Kerry that enabled the rise of ISIS in the first place ie. British/American/NATO sanctions, invasions and regime change operations in Iraq and Syria. Not to mention the deliberate pouring of billions of pounds worth of weapons and arms into both countries to stimulate war, division, sectarianism and general destruction and ruin. That SHOULD be mocked and called-out at every opportunity.

The Real Sisters of the Ummah

Let alone might we see the BBC provide empowering examples of pro-women pro-liberation Islam of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya which they dutifully helped destroy (shown in this excellent and moving documentary film), or the leadership of women in Iran personified by Vice-President Masoumeh Ebtekar, or the innumerable women of leadership and knowledge in Indonesia and Malaysia. Still yet the history of Zainab al Ghazali (1917-2005), member of the Egyptian Feminist’s Union and founder of Jama'at al-Sayyidat al-Muslimat (Muslim Women's Association) who lectured to thousands during the months of Ramadhan. Some of her writing is documented in Ayyām min ḥayātī (‘Days from my life) about her time in prison.

Instead we can be sure in the coming months and years that ‘The Real Wives of ISIS’ is just one more piece in the puzzle that depicts the hijab for the MacKenzie’s of this world as ISIS-like. That it makes us worried for our mothers, wives and sisters who will be viewed as terrorists like the actresses in the sketch.

Do the BBC expect the dark jokes about a deadly group ruining and taking the lives of human beings of every colour and creed in their thousands, with weapons from the West, to be found amusing by the families who have lost their dear loved ones?

And finally, a prediction: The British dedication to their ‘rich history of satire’ is unlikely to be in operation when the chickens come home for a long overdue roosting.

Ali Muratović