The Immigration Question (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Migration is described in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as “an outstanding feature of human life”. That spells misfortune for it, for there are no features of human life that are not exploited and mangled under capitalism. In mid-1974 there were 1,673,000, or 3.2 per cent, of the population, in Britain who were “of New Commonwealth and Pakistani ethnic origin” — that is, black. The figure for 1967 was 1,016,000, or 2.1 per cent, (figures from Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, quoted in The Times, 27th May 1976). An estimate for 1954, given in The Colour Problem by Anthony H. Richmond (Pelican 1955) was 100,000.

Not all immigrants to Britain are black, of course. Approximately 4 million people left Ireland for various countries, including Britain, between 1850 and 1900. and nearly half a million again between 1951 and 1961. In 1931-38, 150,000 people entered Britain from Eire together with 350,000 from European countries. However, in contemporary usage “immigrant” means black. The freshly-coined official term “New Commonwealth” means this, and excludes immigrants from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In that frame of mind Indians, Pakistanis and Africans are made to appear as menacing invaders.

The latest phases in this alleged problem are claims that every Asian has a tribe of probably-bogus relatives claiming entitlement to join him, and unrest which has included four apparently indiscriminate racial murders. There is now widespread agreement that something must be done to control immigration. The secretary of the Punjabee Society of the British Isles wrote to The Times on 29th May: “Enough is enough.” Bob Mellish MP, former Labour Chief Whip, in the News of the World on 30th May: “Controls must be stricter. Numbers must get fewer and fewer until we arrive at a complete stop.” And there are the National Front and Enoch Powell, neither of them funny. The former deal in fear and ignorance, as did the Nazis whom they admire; the latter has talked repeatedly of racial carnage in a manner which, to quote Bernard Levin, “is making it more likely that his predictions will come true”.

The Myths

The argument put by Mellish and others is that the number of immigrants is too great for resources inside Britain.

Is there anything that can be done to control the number of newcomers in any one year to take account of the problems of employment, housing, schools and social services?

(C. Legum and A. Raphael, The Observer, 30th May)

Mature and sober as this sounds, it is only a nicely-stated confirmation of what largely underlies racial tension: “If I blacked my face I might get a council house . . . The teacher’s too busy looking after the black kids who can’t speak English . . . They get endless Social Security, but if we went we wouldn’t . . . etc.” Either it is true that black immigrants rob the natives of jobs, houses and services, or it is not. Some recent facts are as follows.

The 1971 General Household Survey showed that 35.5 per cent, of the black population in Britain are skilled manual workers, and 30 per cent, semiskilled or unskilled; 17 per cent, have non-manual jobs, and 10.5 per cent, are “managerial and professional’.’ In The Economic Impact of Commonwealth Immigration by Jones and Smith (Cambridge 1970) the average benefits received per black head from Social Security totalled £16.30 a year, as against £28.30 for the “home” population; for Health and Welfare £18.30 as against £18.60; in Local Authority housing £0.90 as against £3.00. The General Household Survey showed also that 23 per cent. of black households were overcrowded (insufficient bedrooms) as against 6.2 per cent. white ones, and 33 per cent. lacked the use of a bath as against 12 per cent.

If it is argued that the presence of immigrants nevertheless exacerbates existing problems, that simply is not true. The housing problem has been acute throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, yet at all times sufficient houses have existed. A report in The Times on 22nd April 1976 said: : "There is a surplus of about 850,000 houses in the United Kingdom, according to the Nationwide Building Society, which yesterday published its latest survey on housing trends.” At the same time, in 1972 there were 13,000 homeless persons in London (Shelter, Paper 4) and in 1966 60-70,000 overcrowded households in London (Census). The “shortage”, as always, is because housing is beyond the reach of those who need it, not because of any absolute scarcity. What on earth has that to do with immigration or alleged differences between black and white?

The Truths

The provision and extent of welfare services and education is a matter of government policy at any given time. However, if the concern really were about population pressures on “a tiny nation of over 50 million” (Mellish) the official figures for both-ways migration should allay it. For several years the numbers entering Britain have been substantially fewer than those leaving. In 1974 the net “loss” was 85,300; from 1969 to June 1975 it was 368,100. This has practically always been the case; the sole exception was the 1931-38 period, when the world depression at the beginning caused a fall in emigration and an inward balance of 23,821. It is stated also, in the annual report On the State of the Public Health published by the DOHSS on 28th March, that in 1974 Britain had “an unprecedented low birth rate of 13 a thousand” and “The population rose by only 55,173, the smallest increase ever recorded in peacetime”.

Were immigrants to respond to declarations of the capacities and needs of “host” nations, they would be scurrying about the world everlastingly. In 1948 the Royal Commission on Population recommended a policy of “combining encouragement of emigration with with a policy of selective immigration to make good any shortage that might arise in Great Britain”. During the 1939-45 war a number of West Indians were imported to work in factories in the north of England, while the United States repealed its sixty-one-year-old policy against Chinese immigration. On 2nd June 1976 the Australian Minister for Immigration announced that workers from anywhere were wanted, mentioning "East Timor, Indochina, Chile and many other places” (The Times, 3rd June).

Since the “bread-and-butter” argument against immigration is false from beginning to end, what we are left with is racial prejudice. Moreover, it is racism of a particularly dishonest kind which knows that in the open it has not a leg to stand on, and so hides behind plausible-sounding theories of population pressure and injustice to the home population. Over twenty years ago Dr. Roger Pilkington, the geneticist and anthropologist, wrote in the British Medical Association’s magazine Family Doctor:

Leading experts had declared that available scientific knowledge provided no basis for believing that the groups of mankind differed in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development. “Given the same opportunities of education and environment the performance and ability of individuals does not differ appreciably from one race to another.”

(The Guardian 28th April 1955)

Profit and Prejudice

The capitalist class are too well aware of their interests to practise racism. They may have individual private sentiments, and they are pleased to see it dividing the working class. But while Enoch Powell sees immigration “foaming with much blood” (April 1968) and producing “firearms and explosives” (May 1976), the capitalist’s vision of it is a lather of surplus-value and fizzing with interest-rates and profit. The Times on 9th June carried a report on Southall, the London industrial suburb where 20-30,000 of a population of 70,000 are immigrants, mostly Indian, and where disturbances have taken place recently.

According to the report, Indians first went to Southall in the early nineteen-fifties to work in a rubber factory. It continued: “Today there is still plenty of work, mainly unskilled, available in the district. Heathrow [London airport], especially after dark, seems to be entirely serviced by Punjabis in their bright turbans and saris. There is a fair amount of light engineering and there are some food-processing plants. The engineers in the local coach-works are Indian, and many of their coaches are on hire to the town hall to take Indian children out of Southall to integrate them and to improve their English.”

Therein is the whole position. Immigrants are wage-workers, or peasants who think they will improve their condition by becoming wage-earners. Coming to Britain or any other country, they are not instituting a separate fraternity; on the contrary, they are joining one massive group in a common situation — the industrial working class. Don’t be mistaken about this. The working class are all those who own nothing but their ability to work and so have to sell that, week by week or month by month, for a price called a wage. The resultant problems of being hard-up, badly housed, uncertain of employment and generally short of the essentials for a decent life, are universal in that situation. Real or fancied differences are unimportant beside it: this is what everyone in Southall, and nine-tenths of the population of the capitalist world, has in common.

The idea of a national identity which becomes a personal one and makes the others “foreigners” is a direct product of the nation-state which is the political unit of capitalism. Thus, each nation has its own history studded with its own partisan myths, and each represents its traditions and customs as the acme of civilization. The legends about immigrants all reflect this, which is why they repeat themselves indiscriminately. Everything said about Indians and Africans now was said about Jews, Irish, Poles, Italians, Chinese etc. in the past (the contemporary story that black people eat tinned cat-food was preceded by one, in the nineteen-thirties, that Italian immigrants ate cats). Its counterparts the world over are the same: for example, in France all murder, rape and offensive conduct is attributed to Arabs. This nonsense is easily disposed of; what is more important is to see whence and why it arises.

What to Do !

“Liberal attitudes” and anti-discrimination laws are no answer. Are we really to believe that having black policemen and magistrates and enabling Indians to join golf clubs is the road to social harmony? The obvious outcome of these policies will be divisions and rancour among the immigrants themselves, and that is already happening. On 30th May The Observer reported an interview with a Mrs. Singh, who is a young BSC from Calcutta and lives in “a pretty suburban house in Hounslow”. Her opinions were that illiterate Indians should not be allowed in, and It was regrettable that “lower class, illiterate Indians collect together in places like Southall and Bradford”. Liberal legislation may be handy for Mrs. Singh and her like, but whose interests are served by trying to persuade people to live contentedly together in districts from which they would like to escape but can’t?

The solution to the problem is not “integration” or fresh restrictions, but recognition by all workers that they are in the same boat. The working class have no country: only their class identity. Those who enter Britain and those who emigrate from it — and the position is the same for other countries — are on the whole leaving adverse economic or political conditions, hoping for something better and influenced by a possibility for reaching it. Inevitably, in huge numbers they are disappointed and made the objects of the frustration of people already on the other side of the fence where the grass is not greener after all. For all of them there is a practical alternative, the establishment of a classless society without frontiers. Stop listening to the rabble-rousers and the liberalizers, and find out about Socialism.

Robert Barltrop

Sharing our rising prosperity (1962)

From the December 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent issue of the West Middlesex Gazette front-paged the story of the plight of Indian immigrants in Southall, West London. Unable on arrival in this country to compete with the native-born workers for housing, the Indians are forced to spend a sardine-like existence in houses owned by their fellow countrymen.

These landlords are determined to make something out of their investment and by living themselves in one or two rooms they can let off the rest, with complete disregard for comfort or sanitation. The small exploiter is often the more ruthless, for his field of operation and expansion is so much more limited. The wretched tenants are charged sums ranging from £4 for one room with little or no furniture. In some cases 15 persons are using a kitchen or 20 using one W.C. Housing laws are disregarded, no rent books are issued and attempts to protest are met by threats, or expulsion. The tenants often unorganised and being coloured and poor have only a remote chance of obtaining accommodation elsewhere. For this reason, the newspaper concerned was careful to suppress the names and addresses of the lodgers they had interviewed.

Local officials, councillors and M.P’s. all express concern and promise to look into the matter. When immigrants flock into areas already suffering from inadequate housing for the working class, one would have thought that local dignitaries must at least have some idea about where they are going to live and under what conditions.

Industries and transport then needed certain types of labour (generally for the lower paid jobs) and politicians will seldom seriously interfere with the urgent needs of the capitalist class. After all, the working class elected them to office to run capitalism, whether they call themselves Tory or Labour.

Local councils will run into a problem if they force coloured landlords to unload their over crowded tenants. Where can they go? A strong prejudice prevents most white landlords from having them, and so does their low wage earning capacity. It would be a brave council unconcerned about the threat of not being re-elected, that placed coloured persons at the head of an ever-lengthening housing list. While such sores of human tragedies can be eased somewhat, there is a very real danger that coloured groups will remain in their plight. Capitalism pulls down and rebuilds the Gorbals and recreates at the same time a 20th century brown skinned Seven Dials in Southall and elsewhere.

Statements made by George Pargiter, Labour M.P. for Southall, reflect the mental floundering of our left wing planners. "We must deport the landlords," he says. But what if the landlords are native or have become naturalised? Property ownership has inflicted some shocking human misery on the needy, and nationality has little or nothing to do with it. Mr. Pargiter condemned the Tory government's Immigration Act; he now advocates that everyone, black or white, should be discouraged from settling in Southall. He need have no worry about keeping out one group in society; the capitalist class, irrespective of their colour, by virtue of their wealth have a strong objection to eating with a dustbin under the dining table or having their penthouse overshadowed by a gas works.

"The new towns must take more people” points out Southall’s M.P. Alas for our Labour planners, the mills of capitalism are now throwing up the evil of unemployment in such new towns as Stevenage and newcomers are not likely to be very welcome there.

People live in bad surroundings because their wages do not enable them to get anything better. Being without property, most people have to sell their energies to an employer in order to live. The wage we receive for that is basically determined by the social cost of producing our skill and knowledge. No matter how hard people may work, their wages remain low because it costs little to reproduce their labour power.

The working class as a whole are poor, especially when their incomes are compared with the amount of wealth they as a class produce. Within the wages system some sections of the working class are forced down to the point of degradation. We have the technical means to produce fine homes for everyone, but capitalist society will not readily do so unless a profit can be made from them. The higher the prospective profit the greater the incentive to production.

The threat of unemployment is always with us and with it can come more serious clashes between black and white, British and foreigners, over precious jobs. The maniacal theories of Hitler, despised and crushed only yesterday, can be revived again in certain conditions; and those conditions are always latent in capitalism. It is not yet too late for workers to start to overthrow the false conceptions that crowd into their minds.

T. Law

This Superiority Notion (1963)

From the June 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

It should be obvious, really. Whenever they test another H bomb, or run into another economic crisis, or whenever a politician opens his mouth and puts his foot in it, or whenever we think about the strain and ugliness which are the modern substitute for living, it should be obvious. Capitalism, is not a desirable or a sensible method of running human affairs.

But instead of being obvious it is infuriating. There are the facts, there is the mass of evidence, all screaming for attention. Yet the message gets through, if at all, only slowly. For one reason or another the working class still like capitalism. This is not to say that they like war, or any other problem that capitalism brings with it. They think of these things almost as elements outside human control, like the weather. But capitalism they do like, they support the system which leaves the ownership of the means of life to a very few of the world’s people. They support the system of rich and poor, of palaces and prefabs, of ripe pheasant and Spam.

If at any time the workers have to think about why they like capitalism they may say that it gives everyone his chance and that it is our own fault if we are not all like Paul Getty or King Saud. Or perhaps they will offer some equally inane reason. But mostly the working class do not think about why they support capitalism. They absorb the ideas of the system effortlessly. As if by instinct they build up a wall of ignorant, indefensible ideas which all play their part in sustaining1 the social system of destruction and insecurity. And that can be very infuriating.

It would take up many issues of the Socialist Standard to enumerate every one of these ideas. In any case, they have all been dealt with at some time in the past. Let us now take a look at just one of the strange notions with which capitalism is supported on its pedestal of ignorance. This idea is a popular one among the working class. It is also, in some ways, a surprising idea. Let us call it the Superiority Notion. It is, simply, the conviction which many workers hold that they are in some way better than anybody who comes from another working class group.

In one of its most easily identifiable forms, the Superiority Notion is. race prejudice. White workers think that they are better than coloured workers; even if they do not want to discriminate against Negroes they often feel sorry for them, just as they would for someone who had cancer. Colour prejudice is so widespread partly because its victims are most easily recognised. Race prejudice itself extends beyond mere white-against-black antipathy, reaching out to embrace anyone who is “foreign” It is almost a tradition among English workers, for example, to distrust some types of foreign workers. (Some, on the other hand, they may trust; many English workers think that Chinese people are naturally honest.) They are content at one time to blame the troubles of the world onto French temperament, at another onto German belligerence, at another onto American irresponsibility. (Although we should notice that this particular fallacy has its fashions. Young workers nowadays think it glamorous to be Italian, but that is not what their fathers, in 1941, thought.) In England, in other words, many workers think that the only person who can be trusted, the only person who makes a desirable neighbour or workmate, is English, while and gentile. In other countries they have their own version of this particular prejudice. A popular idea on the Continent is that everyone in England is a horsey fop.

The Superiority Notion does not end at race prejudice. It is common for workers in one part of a country to think that they are better than those in another part. In Southern England they think of the North as an endless slag heap, with flat-capped dinosaur-brained inhabitants to match. In the North they think the South a cissy lot, a pretentious bunch who sound their aitches alright but are strangers to a good day’s work. This feeling can even extend to different parts of the same town. There is at least one dilapidated area in London, dissected by a dirty canal, in which the slum-dwellers on one bank think themselves better than those on the other. These examples could go on for a long time.

The basic ingredient of the Superiority Notion is that, no matter how depressed a worker may be, he can always look down upon somebody else. Even those who are themselves the victims of widespread prejudice have their own Notion. Some Negroes look down upon other coloured people: some Jewish workers regard Negroes as inferior, and so on. And if we ask why the Notion is so popular, is the answer that the working class occupy such an inferior situation in society, and eke out such restricted lives, that it is practically essential to their peace of mind to be able to console themselves with the idea that somebody, somewhere, is lower than they are?

The Superiority Notion is booming, for example, in Southall in Middlesex. Southall has a rubber factory, a massive lorry works, a cereal factory, a canal, a gas works and a ten pin bowling alley. It also has a large Indian and Pakistani population, who have taken some of the jobs at the rubber factory and the gas works for which it is now difficult to get white workers. So Southall also has a race ignorance problem because, apart from any personal objections there may be to the immigrants, there is also the usual deep-rooted opposition to strange men whose skin is a different colour and who speak a language which sounds incomprehensible.

So the Southall workers feel superior. Yet a walk around the place quickly puts their Notion into perspective. Street' upon street, the dingy houses stretch away. Sometimes they are houses which were built in the 18th. Century; sometimes those which were built since 1900. Some are even post-war. But the drab sameness, the cheapness and the restrictions, are all there. These houses, standing in the richly combining vapours of the molten rubber, the exhaling gas works, the oozing canal and the roasting cereals, each day feed the local industry with its supply of human ability. To be blunt, Southall is one of the dreariest imaginable working class areas. It is a problem to appreciate how anybody who lives there could keep up the pretence that he is better than anyone else. But the Southall workers manage it.

There is only one way to deal with this ridiculous situation and that is to cut right through the middle of it with the facts. Socially, there are only two types of people living under capitalism. One type is the capitalist who can live without going to work because he owns places like the gas works and the canal and he gets the profits from them. The other type is the worker who does not own any factories or anything like them and who can only live by working for a wage. For the worker, capitalism is an unpleasant system. It brings him problems like war and insecurity and the ever present strain of balancing his budget. It puts him to live in places like Southall.

But capitalism does something else. It separates and illuminates the fact that all workers all over the world, whatever language they speak and whatever the colour of their skin, are suffering the same sort of problems. The capitalist world has innumerable Southalls—and many worse places besides. Thus capitalism makes it plain that the interests of workers everywhere are the same; to get rid of their problems, to get rid of capitalism. To do this, they must get rid of their Superiority Notion, in all its forms, and of the other baseless, ignorant ideas which keep capitalism going. Capitalism itself, day by day, piles up the evidence in favour of its own abolition. It stares the working class in the face.

It should be obvious really . . . But this is where we came in.

Ivan.

Greasy Pole: High Noon In Southall (2001)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ealing was once known, by those who were adept at ignoring the large chunks of serious impoverishment there, as the Queen of the Suburbs. As might be expected of a place with so impressive a name, it regularly returned Conservative MPs to the Commons. It’s all changed now though; other bits of west London have been tacked on to the original area and all three of the recast constituencies elect Labour MPs. The safest of them is Ealing Southall, at the western end of the area, where the sitting MP is Piara Khabra.

Southall was a railway town and there is very little left from how it was before Brunel pushed through the line to the west. The railway brought immigrants from Wales and Ireland, to work in the factories which sprang up along the line. It was not the railways which brought the Asians, in the 1950s; the first of them were recruited by a rubber factory which had difficulty in persuading the locals to work in its sulphurous confines. Few of the Asians who came then thought they were making a lifetime commitment; they imagined making enough quick money to set themselves up to go back to the place they called home. It didn’t happen like that and the population of Southall is now about 50 per cent of Asian origin – the second largest in the country.

Piara Khabra has been the local MP since 1992. Before that it was Sydney Bidwell, who had emigrated from the Revolutionary Communist Party when they disbanded and advised their members to infiltrate the Labour Party. Towards the end of his time in the Commons Bidwell seemed to be not entirely in touch with reality, although that was not what caused him to be de-selected. Khabra had long been prominent and influential locally, through being chair of the Indian Workers’ Association (Southall is teeming with community support organisations), a local councillor and so on. There was a flood of new members into the local Labour Party, which simply washed Bidwell away. Miserably, hopelessly, he stood against Khabra as “True Labour” – there were rumours that he did this only to qualify for his ex-MP’s pension – but got only 4,665 votes against Khabra’s 23,476.

Swing

In 1997, in tune with the rest of the country, Khabra tightened his grip on the seat. By then there was no Bidwell, who had retired with his revolutionary delusions and his pension and Khabra benefitted from a 15.1 per cent swing against the Tories, racking up an astonishing 32,791votes and, at 21,423, the country’s second largest Labour majority. In some ways this was surprising because the constituency boundaries had been extended eastwards to include older, posher parts of Ealing more accustomed to voting Conservative. But of course that was an exceptional time, with widespread anger against the sleaze and complacency of the Tories, their in-fighting and arrogance. A lot of voters really thought that things could only get better. But in Southall that was not the whole story for there was disquiet, not about Khabra holding the seat but about him being the Labour candidate in the first place.

For some time Southall has claimed to be the largest constituency Labour Party in the country. Of course this could mean that it is populated by people who have carefully examined the party’s policies and decided that these are in tune with their own principles. If that were true the place would surely be unique. Before Khabra ousted Bidwell there was some restlessness in the party – and outside it – about all those new members and about how genuine many of them were – or even whether some of them actually existed. At one stage Khabra faced a legal challenge from Valerie Vaz, sister of the embattled ex-minister Keith Vaz (who was rumoured to have tried to help rig the selection procedure against Khabra) but this came to nothing. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that Valerie Vaz – who, as a forceful, articulate lawyer and media presenter could be expected to be picked out for a plum Labour seat – has only ever been nominated for more hopeless prospects such as Twickenham. Recently, for example, she was considered to be the front runner for the by-election in Betty Boothroyd’s old constituency of West Bromwich West but Labour headquarters had other ideas.

Ineffective

So far Khabra has shrugged off all the opposition to him; “I have been misrepresented in the press,” he said just before the election “but that doesn’t bother me, nothing does”. But with the approach of this year’s election the opposition against him has gathered strength as an electable rival came on the scene with the resources to air popular criticisms about him. Khabra has an established reputation as one of the most inactive and ineffective MPs, who is reliably evident only when he sits behind Tony Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions, which gives him some valuable TV coverage. Occasionally he stirs into action, as he did in 1993 when he tabled a Ten Minute Bill to legalise voluntary euthenasia only to withdraw it at the last minute. In February this year he asked a question which conveniently enabled Paul Boateng, who was then a minister in the Home Office, to give some detail about the planned enquiry into the coroner system. In December 2000 he wrote to Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in support of the Hinduja brothers’ resistance to being extradited for investigation in India over an arms-sale scandal. In the light of recent events, this was not entirely wise of him. (Cook promised “full consular support” for the Hindujas).

Meanwhile there has been a burgeoning discontent in the constituency about local problems – traffic congestion, crime, decay and a massive heroin problem among young people. In face of this Khhabra has been hard put to detail any intervention on his part which has been to any degree effective. The local Socialist Labour Party (of course, hardly an objective observer) calls him “congenitally demented” and rages at his “self-seeking careerism…his inability to be even an effective bourgeoise politician…” One constituent old the AsianXpress newspaper : I’ve never seen Mr. Khabra but I know of him and all the scams he’s done over the years”. And on 15 February this year the Daily Telegraph put the boot in:

“Piara Khabra…confirmed himself as surely this Parliament’s weakest performer…His question was near inaudible and his delivery laughably weak. Perhaps because he is Indian, or perhaps because he is old, the House listened to him with a straight face. How patronising. Mr Khabra deserved a loud and long raspberry. If he cannot lift his game he should make way for someone better.”

Stranglehold

And when it came to the elecetion there was someone who claimed to be better. Avtar Lit is a Labour supporter, the multi-millionnaire owner of Sunrise Radio whose personal fortune is put at £60 million. “Money,” he said recently, “to me isn’t everything “. . . and then again “I am known as a man of the people”. Lit complained about Khabra’s “strangelehold” on the local selection process and the MP’s “dismal record . . . an insult to the people who elected him”. On the basis of a rather dubious opinion poll, which may not have been any more valid that all those Khabra recruits, Lit claimed that he was about to be elected, after which he would join the Labour Party.

But on the day he managed only a little less than 6,000 votes, to Khabra’s 22,239 which gave a comfortable majority of 13,683. As the evening wore on the bundles of votes for each candidate were in lines on the central table, with Khabra’s stretching far beyond all the others. There was little perceptible difference between Lit’s votes and those for the Tory, whose startlingly young face settled into a bewildered despondency as he contemplated the humiliation facing him. Towards the end a group of Khabra supporters filtered into the room. They were large, groomed men wearing immaculate turbans, exuding influence and privilege and the expectation of always getting their own way. They cheered dutifully – but restrainedly – when Khabra was announced as the winner but it was a fair bet that at the same time they were calculating how best they could do to him what he did to Bidwell – and what advantage they would get from it. These are probably the men Lit will have to best if he is to get the seat.

So Piara Khabra, who says he is 76 years old but who may be 80 or more, is back in the Commons for another spell – four years or maybe five – to hang on to his position and to “represent” the people of Ealing Southall. This is the very essence of capitalism’s politics—the politicians denying the truth of their impotence while they cynically manoeuvre to keep themselves in power and so the system in being.

Ivan

Smoulderings in Southall (1965)

From the June 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

“I used to drink at the Eight Bells but I gave it up when the Wogs started going there.” The sentiments were depressingly popular, the accent pure County Limerick—two facts which in Southall tell their own story.

For a long time, immigrants of one sort or another have trekked to this drab wedge of suburbia on the far west limb of London. Now established, their accents often flattened out, some of them speak bitterly of the Indians and Pakistanis who have travelled to Southall for the same reasons as they did.

A lot of people here came up from the West Country and Wales between the wars, driven by the slump to seek work in the factories which were attaching themselves to the Great Western Railway line like genes to a chromosome. The Irish too have come, in a slow, persistent stream.

There were few, if any, coloured immigrants until the middle fifties. Then some came to work in a rubber factory, whose hard and unpleasant work made it difficult to compete for labour with other firms. Vacancies in local industry increased the first brown trickle into a flood. Now the Indians and Pakistanis almost monopolise some districts in Southall.

So far there have been no open clashes— nothing to put Southall into the headlines. The local Teds did manage a feeble demonstration outside the rubber factory at the time of Notting Hill but this was easily dispersed. A Sikh temple has been defaced more than once. But on the whole the Southall population has settled into a brooding resentment. Only occasionally are there small eruptions.

There was one of these over education, when parents protested that their children’s schooling was being held up by the presence of immigrant children who could not speak English. Sir Edward Boyle, who was then Minister of Education, came down and smoothed the incident over.

There are continual complaints about the immigrants’ behaviour. Some of these seem to be justified; some are due to a misunderstanding of different social habits and some to downright malice. There are the usual grisly rumours—the Asians make a curry of the local cats, they throw all their rubbish into the garden next door.

Southall’s housing problem is no worse than any of its neighbours. It has no abject slums like Notting Hill or the Black Country. Perhaps the worst it offers are seedy Victorian terraces and tawdry, featureless council estates. The immigrants have therefore moved into, for them, comparatively genteel areas, some of which are inhabited by owner occupiers who worry about a “fall in the value of property” when coloured people move into their street.

Some of these owner-occupiers, not tied to the district by being a council tenant, have moved out of Southall into the similar wastelands of nearby Greenford or Hounslow. Some have gone farther afield, to the new estates which have sprung up in places like Reading and Camberley. Others have gone farther still, emigrating to Australia, whose official bar on coloured immigration they regard as sensible and progressive. It was one of these who explained on his application to emigrate that he wanted to go to Australia “because there are too many niggers in my street ”.

Beneath Southalls’ surface calm, then, potential violence smoulders on. The local branch of the British National Party blows hard on the embers; their propaganda is exceedingly crude but they got nearly three and a half thousand votes in the general election. Last October the Tories played the immigration issue comparatively cool; Labour hung on for dear life and George Pargiter came out with a reduced, now marginal, majority. That may be a clue to a grim future. If the Conservatives decide to plug a Smethwick line in Southall, they could start something which they do not know how to stop.

Some local organisations are doing their best to keep the fires damped down. There is the Indian Workers’ Association which, now that the Labour Government has announced its new tough line on immigration, may be questioning the wisdom of its support for Pargiter last October. There are other organisations which run well intentioned multi-racial outings, meant to prove that we are all brothers under our skins. These organisations are touching only the fringes of the problem; if racial trouble ever became really hot in Southall they would be consumed in the flames with the rest.

Southall is not a pleasant place. It has an ugly industrial sprawl, acres of cramped houses, cheapjack shops and supermarkets. It is near enough to London Airport to have the big jets often screaming over the rooftops. In many ways life here is hard, and it has bred hard working class attitudes, stifling restrictions and anomalies, formidable prejudices. This is an inflammable place and next time, perhaps, there will be the fire.

Ivan (Southall).

Death of Blair Peach and the Special Patrol Group (1980)

From the July 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

“For me, it was a perfectly standard operation . . .  It was all over in about two minutes” was how Alan Murray, the Inspector who was in command of Unit One Special Patrol Group at Southall on 23 April 1979, and who is clearly a man with unusual standards of normality, described the events which led to the death of Blair Peach. Well what would you expect him to say? — “We rushed down this street clubbing anyone we came across — a right tasty one it was. There was this geezer with a beard who got one on the side of the head and he went down. I’m sorry he died but he was one of the looney left and if he was looking for trouble he can’t complain, can he.”

Since that riotous day, Blair Peach has been canonised into the divine ranks of the left wing martyrs. He was so likely a character for that role that the most maudlin script writer would not have dared to create him. Peach came from New Zealand to teach in the East End of London, which is not renowned for its compliant, attentive, easily controllable school kids. Even more—Peach chose to teach backward, delicate children and the evidence is that he made a skilful, caring job of it. Even his looks were those of a born martyr with his sensitive, bearded face topped by unruly hair—a face which later stared out from the protest posters over the caption “He Fought the Nazis—the Police Murdered Him”.

Although nobody has been—or is likely to be—charged with causing his death, the available evidence is heavily suggestive that Peach was killed by a blow from a radio or some other weapon wielded by someone in that SPG unit commanded by Alan Murray. (One of the apparent mysteries of the matter, which gives much food for cynical thought, is that although the streets were swarming with policemen at the time, Peach’s killer cannot be found.) By the time of the Southall riot, the SPG already had a fearsome reputation, built up by their crowd smashing tactics at Grunwick, Lewisham (1975) and Lambeth (1978). In particular, Murray’s Unit One considered themselves a cut above the rest and tended to irritate the other units with infantile provocations like humming the Dam Musters' March as they arrived at the scene of the action.

The SPG was first formed in London in 1965, when Wilson’s Labour government had won power on the promise of an abundant, caring society through the technological revolution although they did not mention that speedier, more ruthless policemen would be part of it. Nobody with any experience of left wing doublethink will be surprised that many of the people who are now demanding abolition of the SPG are members or supporters of the Labour Party or—like the Socialist Workers Party—advise workers to vote Labour. The SPG was originally intended as a mobile force which would give help at short notice to local police who were having difficulty in coping with particular problems like an upsurge in street crime. All members of the SPG were volunteers but they got no extra pay; presumably they found their rewards in the extra excitement and the mystique attached to being members of an elite. Inevitably, the SPG developed into a semi-autonomous force, something between the police and the Army, with its own, unpleasant, aura. “We’re the Special Patrol Group”, they announced on arriving to search (fruitlessly) one suburban home, “and we can do anything.”

From the beginning, Southall seemed made to measure for the SPG. It began when the National Front hired the old Town Hall for a meeting in support of their candidate in the general election. The NF did not publicise their meeting — they didn’t need to — and the local Indian Workers Association heard about it by chance from the police. At first it was IWA policy to ignore the meeting apart from asking local shops to close as a mark of protest. But a meeting to co-ordinate plans with other community groups preferred a “peaceful” sit-down outside the Town Hall, in which the demonstrators would accept arrest without resistance.

Apart from those strictly local bodies, there were others which were taking a predictable interest in what was happening in Southall. There were small but ominous differences in their attitude towards the affair: the Anti-Nazi League demanded “Stop the Nazi Meeting”; the SWP aimed to “Shut Down Southall”. Neither of them — and this also applied to Socialist Unity, whose candidate was Tariq Ali— used the word “peaceful” when talking about the demonstration which was planned. As the meeting drew near, the excitement became almost tangible; Southall was set for a battle.

And that, it seems, was how the police also viewed it. In the event the sit-down was not possible because the police cordoned off the area in front of the Town Hall. A running battle developed, over a large area of the town, with numerous examples of sickening violence, most of it from the police. The Daily Telegraph (24.4.79) described one incident:

“Within three minutes police had cornered about 50 demonstrators against the walls of Holy Trinity Churchyard . . .  several dozen, crying, screaming, coloured demonstrators were dragged . . .  to the police station and waiting coaches. Nearly every demonstrator we saw had blood flowing from some sort of injury; some were doubled up in pain.”

Perhaps all of this was enjoyable to the Special Patrol Group and to the hotter headed demonstrators. It was what they had come for and could be added to their other battle honours. Hundreds of people were injured, some of them seriously; over three hundred were arrested; a community was left in a state of high tension and fear. The NF held their meeting, speaking to 40 of their own supporters, 15 journalists and five members of “the public”. An hour or so after it was all over, Blair Peach died in hospital. Ten days later, the NF candidate totted up his votes; 1545 Southall workers had supported that squalid mess of racism and repression. It was a victory for someone but nobody was sure who.

The killing of Peach gave the left wing a propaganda weapon which they immediately seized. The protest meetings, marches, statements, began at once. “Avenge Blair Peach . . . Get These Murderous Brutes Off The Streets . . .  Smash the National Front . . ." screeched the Socialist Worker of 28 April 1979, in words clearly not designed to reduce the tension. The canonisation of Blair Peach, in the cause of left wing hypocrisy, has been a long drawn out affair and promises to last for some time yet. It has received regular stimulus from the anger caused by events like the discovery of the “unauthorised” weapons in SPG lockers, the trials of those who were arrested and the inquest, which inferred that Peach was killed accidentally by a policeman, using reasonable force to quell a riot. Yes, this one will obviously run and run.

Except that this is no stage play. Police violence is a serious matter, with dismal implications for working class liberty. But so is left wing hypocrisy and the hysterical nonsense which is being spouted from them about Peach, the SPG and the National Front does nothing but obscure some essential facts of reality. To look at just three of the issues:

Ban the Special Patrol Group? No left winger ever seems properly to grasp the fact that the police are inseparable from capitalism, are part of its coercive state machine which exists to protect the rights and privileges of the ruling class. As the tensions of capitalism build up, the police are not likely to become less repressive but more so. Increasingly, the British police are being armed as a matter of course and the SPG are not their only specialist elite; there are others like C10, who are expert marksmen. And it should not be forgotten that policemen are themselves members of the working class, even if they have specially anti-working class ideas; a 1975 survey  (The Public and the Police, William A. Belson) on the relationship between the London police and the public, requested by the Metropolitan Police, found 90 per cent of policemen claiming that demonstrators produced problems for them and 51 per cent accepting that society is constantly threatened by a minority dedicated to its overthrow. Such workers are ready to assert their ideas on the heads of fellow members of their class and are not particular about which uniform they wear while doing so. To demand the disbandment of the SPG is an exercise in futility, since the needs of capitalism would ensure that it was quickly replaced with another, similar elite.

Ban Police Secrecy? Capitalism cannot operate on the principle of open administration; imagine a firm telling its competitors about its plans to corner a market, or a government letting its rivals see its latest secret weapons. This also applies to other organs of repression like the police; they are not supposed to let the criminals know when they are coming to capture them. Unless they operate in secrecy, the police would lose their character as part of the coercive state machine-and would be useless to capitalism.

Ban the National Front? Southall exposed the naïveté — and worse — of the theory that political ideas can be beaten out of workers' heads. How many of the demonstrators have changed their ideas after being beaten up by the police, or because of the death of Blair Peach? Without the protest, the police, the violence, the NF meeting would probably have passed with hardly a mention. As it was, the NF got a lot of just the sort of publicity they are looking for. Workers who are impressed by racism are confused about capitalism, to the point of desperation; they are not likely to be persuaded out of their confusion by violence or repressive laws. An essential part of democracy is freedom of speech; only the left wing are capable of the argument that free speech can be defended by denying it to someone they disagree with. And if the NF is banned, where will it stop? Will the ideas of socialism be next? Free discussion, and openly available information, provide the best conditions for workers to lose their confusion and to learn about socialism. Any attempt to suppress any idea is harmful to this.

Southall was another shameful episode in the history of capitalist repression and of the left wing. On both sides of the police cordon there were those who think that workers have something to gain in such violence as occurred that day; as anti-working class and anti-socialist, there is nothing to choose between them. There was a special irony in the death of Blair Peach and the response to it; as a member of the SWP he must himself have approved the use of martyrs as propaganda weapons, without dreaming that one day he would himself be so used.

There was that day a tragedy greater than Peach's death and the injuries which were suffered. Everyone there was a worker who was misguided as to where his class interests lie; the tragedy is the contribution Southall made to the political mythology of the working class, which obscures the task before us to bring about regardless of sex or race, our own emancipation.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Brand Obama (2009)

The Greasy Pole column from the March 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is there – can there be – a connection between Barack Obama and two West London Labour MPs?

Obama has just moved into the White House at the head of the most powerful nation, controlling a military, diplomatic and economic force so huge as to be able to invade, distort and destroy the lives of the majority of the world’s people. Against that the two MPs – Andrew Slaughter and Virendra Sharma – are notably low-key. Their constituencies – Ealing Acton Shepherds Bush and Ealing Southall – are unremarkable for their grime, chaos and disorder. The MPs held minor posts as Parliamentary Private Secretaries – Slaughter at the Foreign Office and Sharma at the Home Office – but their resignation from these provoked hardly a murmur of interest. The reason they jumped off the lowest levels of the Greasy Pole was their objection to the government’s plans, in betrayal of a succession of pledges, to further develop Heathrow Airport, specifically by laying down a third runway. In Sharma’s case this was something of an aberration, for he was not an active MP – apart from slavishly voting for the government line. If they had not already done so, Slaughter and Sharma might have learned something from this experience about the essential ruthlessness of politics, in the heat of which all promises and “principles” are devoured.

Glamour
That is something of which Obama is fully aware, which explains why his drive to the Presidency, from its inception through its planning to its execution was, for its single-minded cynicism, such an historically prime example of it. He and his team touted for votes on the single word Change, which was compliantly accepted as an intention to simply get rid of George Bush and as much as possible of his policies, his supporters, his command style. It was made to sound so easy. But it was hardly enough to stimulate the kind of response – the blind devotion to the concept that one man could by himself wipe out the tragedies which had plagued so many lives for all those years. Such was the degree of hysteria that it obscured the fact that in 2004 a similarly psychotic process had ensured George Bush’s triumphant return to the White House. But there was more to Obama than a promise for he is the kind of politician who trades on a spurious glamour. On that score, in terms of their respective political chicanery, McCain was shrunken and exhausted, with nothing to offer in combat. Obama’s lissom confidence and the support acting of his wife and children composed a portrait of the ideal American family. And in a Presidential election there are few things more seductive: “It was like a scene from a Hollywood movie” blabbered the Observer describing Obama and his wife dancing at one of the inaugural balls “(which) created images of fashion and celebrity to rival anything that emerged from JFK’s vaunted ‘Camelot’”. And in case we have not seen enough of them for a while, an invitingly smiling Mrs. Obama appeared all over the cover of the next issue of US Vogue.

Heathrow
But the passion which greeted the emergence of the brand Obama should have had more than a tinge of fear – which brings us back to our two London Labour MPs. At the last general election Slaughter had a majority halfway between five and six thousand, after a swing of 7.54 percent to the Tories. To complicate matters for him his predecessor in the seat was Clive Soley, once a probation officer notable as an assertive lefty in the union and, from 1997 to 2001, chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He left the Commons at the 2005 election, allowing himself to be created Baron Soley of Hammersmith and, to the dismay and anger of many of his admirers, become Campaign Director of Future Heathrow, which pushes unremittingly for the airport’s future to be one of expansion. Living in Acton under the flight path, Soley admits that “..when I’m in my garden I have to raise my voice” but he thinks all who suffer in this way should bear it gladly for the greater profitability of British capitalism. Any embarrassment this causes Slaughter with his contrary views on Heathrow expansion are not to be dwelled upon.

Virendra Sharma won a by-election in Ealing Southall in July 2007, after the death of the sitting MP Piara Khabra (who also had an unenviable record as an inactive representative of his electorate) with a majority of 5070. Southall has a reputation as a strong Labour seat (in 1997 with a majority for Khabra of over 21,000). But since the last election the boundaries of both Sharma’s and Slaughter’s Ealing seats have been redrawn, the effect of which is uncertain. After ten years in power Labour is seen as outworn and sterile; many of their MPs must dream of a leader to inject some of the Obama appeal which, shallow and spurious though it is, promises to bring in the votes. But there is nobody in the Labour Party to compare in that way to the new US President. If leaders like Brown, Darling, Straw and Harman have any appeal to desperate, bewildered voters it is unlikely to be as seductive as Obama’s. So Labour – including the likes of Slaughter and Sharma – are in trouble, being forced to face the reality that their time of deceiving enough voters to put them into power is probably coming to an end.

Obama’s War
It did not take long for the true Obama style of government, behind the media drivel, to assert itself. Only days after he had taken office, two American drone craft killed 22 people in Pakistan and it was announced that Obama had approved the transfer of 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan – later raised to 60,000. The war there will go on and many people will die in the interests of the minority owning class. So if Obama’s election does have an effect on British politics, influencing the manner in which the parties here present their pleas to be allowed to run British capitalism, we can be sure that it will have nothing to do with human interests, with bettering our lives. That would be taking glamour too far.

Ivan