Distant Voices (6 page)

Michael Heseltine's theatrical promises of support for the inner cities following the Toxteth uprising in 1982 were little more than a hoax. No one likes ‘yobs'; and the young who exercise briefly, as Melanie Phillips wrote in the
Guardian
, ‘the feeling they could do anything, a feeling of power', are the perfect scapegoats.
¹²
The hope is in the volatility their actions, at the very least, represent: that there are many others who do not ‘ram raid' or burn down the chippie but who, like those who fought the poll tax, will refuse to be educated once more to know their place, and will resist.

September 20, 1991

FOR MOST WHITE
people racism is an abstraction that does not touch their lives. Drive past a group of white policemen standing around a black driver at the kerbside and you glimpse it, though you cannot be sure. Walk past an Asian estate on these dark afternoons and watch how carefully the children are shepherded, then talk to the brothers and uncles who guard them. You will hear described attacks even on infants, and excrement pushed through letter boxes and fire-bombing as a matter of routine. To gain their confidence, you will have to establish first that you are not in authority; policemen ask for passports.

This may not be universally true, but it is the unerring experience of the Asian families I have known and who have been attacked. I think I first understood the real meaning of racism in Britain when, huddled inside a house in an East End cul-de-sac, I listened to bricks crashing against the door and heard bellowed abuse that was not interrupted by the arrival of the police, even though they had been called. So certain were the attackers of their own authority that they ambled away only when they grew tired, each booting the door as he went.

The teenage daughter of the Asian family whose home that was kept a diary, often written by candle-light because she dared not turn on the light. This was a typical entry: ‘When the trouble started, we phoned the police, but they never came. Then my father went to the police station to get the police . . . we had a witness. The police said they didn't need a witness.' She wrote to her Labour MP, then Arthur Lewis:
‘Dear Mr Lewis, We are an Asian family under attack . . . My mother has not slept for two months and has had to go to hospital for several days. We cannot furnish or decorate our home because we are too busy looking out through the window day and night, ensuring nobody attacks our house . . .'

Arthur Lewis quoted the letter during question time in the House of Commons and was told by Margaret Thatcher that the matter would be ‘taken up'.
¹³
It wasn't. So the girl wrote to Thatcher: ‘Dear Margaret, I am sorry to tell you you do not understand our problem. You don't care if we get beaten up, do you? . . . We are asking for your help, not your money . . .' She received a reply not from Thatcher but from a Home Office official, C. D. Inge. ‘I am sorry I am not able to give you a more helpful reply,' wrote Inge, ‘but let me take this opportunity to assure you that the Government is committed to a multi-racial society . . .'

This ‘commitment' has yet to take effect, which is not surprising. Those who generate, collude with and ultimately run racism in Britain are the moral heirs of the Christian gentlemen who carried it in their bags to all points of the Empire. Many, like Enoch Powell, who never forgave India for turfing out the Raj, brought it back home again. Until Thatcher, extravagant ‘mavericks' like Powell were kept at a safe distance and were disavowed. When Thatcher said on national television in 1978 that ‘the people are really rather afraid of being swamped by an alien culture', the sum of her message was that racism was safe with her.
¹⁴
Her omissions were just as effective. She had nothing good to say about these ‘aliens'. They were, well, aliens, and frightening. They did not enrich society. The multiculturalism they represented was not something to be proud of, rather a disease like rabies, from which the nation had a duty to protect itself.

Two years later, a study concluded that Asian people were fifty times more likely to be attacked than any other racial group.
¹⁵
When the Home Office published this, I tried and failed to find a single case of an attacker being convicted. The police called them ‘delinquents' and did not recognise
‘racially motivated' crimes. Thatcher, of course, would never condone fire-bombings, stabbings and the like or even negligent and indifferent policemen. What she and her acolytes gave them, to borrow from her, was the ‘oxygen' of her own public position, which amounted to silent approval. When those on the extreme right point out that Britain has no neo-fascist party on the scale of Le Pen's National Front in France, because it has had Thatcher, they appear to do so with straight faces. According to the Thatcherite weathervane, Paul Johnson, it was enough for Thatcher to make ‘the right noises'.
¹⁶
In Britain, the ‘right noises' make fascist parties redundant; the Tories offer quite enough to the fascists, who are apparently not bothered by the code and euphemisms in which respectable racism speaks.

The Asylum Bill offers these ‘right noises'. It will give the government the power to get rid of people on a ‘fast track' procedure; to send desperate people back unless they claim asylum in the first country they reach; to refuse legal aid; to fingerprint refugees; to penalise refugees if anyone mounts a campaign on their behalf; and to discriminate against students who criticise the very government from whom they are taking refuge. For refugees read black/brown people. The issue is race.

The way the press has been used to prepare the ground for this legislation is virtually affirmation of its real meaning. Since the summer, Home Office briefings and tip-offs to selected journalists have produced a harvest of scare stories. The
Daily Telegraph
‘examined Home Office records for one sample week' and found a ‘flood of asylum pleas'.
¹⁷
‘Bogus refugee crackdown' was the
Daily Mail
's headline over a story about the ‘flood of immigrants'. This was accompanied by a leader headlined ‘How to stop them tricking Britain', which spoke of ‘tidal waves of refugees'.
¹⁸
Following a series in the
Daily Star
, Home Secretary Kenneth Baker was quoted as being deeply concerned about the paper's revelations and reported that he had ordered the recruitment of 350 extra immigration officers.
¹⁹

As the Tory Party conference approached, the campaign
intensified. On October 3, the
Daily Mail
published, under the headline ‘Labour's migrant masses', Baker's proposals for the new bill, which was essential, said the
Mail
, because ‘Britain is besieged by bogus asylum seekers'.
²⁰
The
Sun
did similar work, but went further. ‘Figures obtained by the
Sun
', it said, ‘show that two thirds of our immigrants come from Africa and Asia.'
²¹

When Baker made his speech to the Tory conference the press response was a crescendo of indignation. The
Mail
published a three-part series called ‘The invasion of Britain' in which, yet again, a ‘flood' was conjured up, this time of people who claimed ‘utterly fraudulently that they are political refugees'. The writer was careful to counter-balance ‘the influx of phoney third world refugees' with ‘the invasion from eastern Europe' – a precaution that was neatly negated by a headline on 7 October: ‘Out of Africa and on to our doorsteps'.

Using the press to play ‘the race card' is an old tactic. In an important essay, ‘Unleashing an Uncritical Press', published in the
Guardian
in 1982, the solicitor Gareth Pierce demonstrated how the police were able to use the press in order to distort figures about ‘black crime' and so pave the way for legislation giving the police greater powers.
²²

When Baker was convicted of contempt of court recently, he and his bill were largely protected by the press. The disgrace of a home secretary having been found guilty of breaking a law he was meant to uphold was softened by those whose first allegiance always seems to be to politicians, rather than to journalism. Baker was ‘unlucky'; it had been a ‘rough year' for him. He had ‘all that business with vicious dogs', then the Brixton break-out: a bad year, indeed, though not as bad as that suffered by the Zairean refugee who was sent back on Baker's personal order and may have been lucky to escape with his life. He was hardly mentioned.
²³

The United Nations has condemned Baker's bill as ‘in conflict' with internationally accepted principles. The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said that one of the bill's main provisions – to deport refugees back to
countries where they faced persecution – was illegal under the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, to which Britain is a signatory. And it was illogical, said the UNHCR, not to regard someone as a refugee merely because they fail to say straight away that they are seeking asylum. An asylum seeker may well be traumatised and the last person he or she wishes to confide in is an official. As for the ‘liars', whom the press have made much of, the UNHCR pointed out that inconsistent and muddled statements are inevitable, given language difficulties, fear of officialdom and stress.
²⁴

Newspaper readers are almost never reminded that all primary immigration to Britain has stopped; that as many leave the country as enter it; that in 1990, the last full year for which figures are available, some 25,000 people sought refugee status or asylum and of these, by the end of the year, 5,524 had been allowed to stay on – most of them only temporarily.

During the election campaign the press returned to its racist theme with renewed heart, reminding its readers that the Tories were the ones that would ‘stand firm' on immigration. Only the Tories would enact an Asylum Bill, so necessary to ‘stem the tide' of immigrants who were out to ‘defraud Europe's generous social and welfare system'.
²⁵
Labour was given the full treatment on race, such as ‘Kinnock won't curb flood of bogus refugees' (
Evening Standard
) and ‘Labour's madness on migrants' (
Daily Mail
).
²⁶
Here mendacity was ironic; shortly before the election campaign got under way, Roy Hattersley, the shadow home secretary, offered to do a deal with Baker to see the Asylum Bill through the last session of Parliament.

John Major could be telling the truth and putting the ‘problem' in its true perspective, but he has clearly chosen not to. There is too much to be gained by making the ‘right noises'. Or so he and his advisers may think. He wants it both ways. He wants to be Mr Ordinary who grew up in Brixton and knows what it's like to be out of work. Major has done well to have cultivated this highly dubious image of himself, for he is, above all, both a Thatcherite and Thatcher's
choice; and he is not at all ‘grey' in his own political choices, which, if you examine his record, are old-fashioned reactionary. Witness his view that the neo-Nazi attacks across Europe could be countered only by stricter immigration controls and the reduction of asylum rights. By keeping out or kicking out the victims of fascist violence, you stop the fascists. This message has become something of a new orthodoxy, recycling old racist arguments in pseudo anti-fascist language.

Two days before the election Kenneth Baker refined this tactic even further. Because fascists had made gains in the European elections, he argued, the case against proportional representation was made. ‘Nazi riots will hit Britain – PR aids Fascists, claims Baker', warned that bastion of anti-Nazism, the
Sun
.
²⁷

It's an unhappy fact that, on race, politicians, spurred on by the press, seldom appeal to the better side of the British: to people's innate sense of decency and natural justice. Even in reply to one of those loaded questionnaires in the
Sun
, 49 per cent said they did not want the government ‘to turn its back on our tradition of giving a haven to refugees'.
²⁸
But these are hard times, and dangerous times. Scapegoats are required.

I have heard it argued that racism and fascism are not necessarily complementary. Mussolini is given as an example. And while it is true that Mussolini represented no threat to Italian Jews and other minorities, his racism was expressed ferociously in his slaughter of the peoples of the Horn of Africa. Everything in my experience tells me that fascism and racism are indivisible: that one grows out of the other and feeds off the other. There is usually a relatively mild, even mundane, initiation; and the promoters may regard themselves as men of the sensible middle ground, of ‘moderation' and right-thinking. They will not wear brown or black shirts. Pinstripes will do.

December 20, 1991 to April 1992

THERE IS A
grainy, almost Gothic atmosphere in the casualty department of King's College Hospital, south London. The people sitting waiting, lying, waiting, occasionally screaming and dying without dignity, are from an album of working-class life that was meant to have closed. Perhaps it is generally true that poverty has been modernised, its icons superseded by shapeless, mostly internalised despair; but not here. This is the 1940s, when the word ‘Dickensian' still applied.

This is not to say that medical science and nursing care are wanting. Indeed, King's College is a microcosm of the National Health Service. On the one hand, it is one of Britain's finest teaching hospitals, whose speciality of haematology is world-renowned, and whose standard of general care is remarkable in the circumstances. The circumstances, however, are notorious. Ed Glucksman, an American inner-city doctor who runs casualty, told me, ‘We often have no choice but to Dunkirk it here.'