Cabbages & Kings: Brexit hangover - Overt racism

There is no mischief in this lie
This talk of love, of you and I
They say all’s fair in love
and war
That war is life and love’s a whore.

Forgiveness is love’s main retreat
So lover don’t fall at her feet
It’s a chequerboard of ups
and downs
White and black and smiles and frowns.
From Anna Padeyga
(The opera) by Bachchoo

On the ides of March (stop being pretentious — you mean the 15th! — Ed.) 1973, at about 4 am, while I slept on the second floor of my terraced-house flat in Brixton, south London, someone threw a fire bomb through the plate glass of the ground floor. The building was set ablaze and I woke up choking with smoke. The flames were coming through the floor. I stumbled about for a few seconds not being able to breathe and utterly disoriented. It took some time to realise the place was on fire. Had I left the gas on? There was no time to reason why. I dragged on a pair of shorts and jumped two relatively-shallow floors to the pavement below where the plate glass was fragmenting with loud explosions, scattering shards which went into my bare feet.

The firemen who came after several minutes and began pumping water into the building, told me it was a Molotov cocktail that had set the place on fire. The fire chief said he was not to be quoted as it was a matter for the police and he would have to submit a confidential report, but did I have any enemies. I said I must have but couldn’t recall owing anyone significant sums of money or anything that would induce such rage. Later on in the day, as I was being attended to in the accident and emergency unit of the local hospital, a fellow patient told me that five premises with Asian occupants had been fire-bombed in the early hours of the morning.

When I first came to Britain and went up to Cambridge, I wasn’t aware of any overtly racist attitudes. Amongst some of the other undergraduates there was certainly the idea that having come from public school and descended from the upper classes of British society they were in many senses superior to the “wogs”. It was a word I hadn’t heard in India but soon learned the meaning of. For the rest of it, I wasn’t aware of racial antagonisms until I came, during holidays and after graduating, to London. In those days, the end of the ’60s, landlords would refuse to rent rooms to blacks and Asians, hooligans would shout at you on the streets. Some pubs would refuse to serve you and used the stratagem of pretending you weren’t there and moving to white customers till you got fed up and left. One sometimes faced mild or severe assault in the streets when some thugs, usually in a cowardly gang or even out of a car would pass you, punch or slap you, spit at you and drive or run away. It was disconcerting, disgusting, unacceptable and made several of us resolve to fight it politically. We did, but that’s another story.

These overt forms of racism seemed to die out as legislation made some of them crimes and as the innate decency of the British majority began to articulate itself and force racism into purdah. My children’s generation didn’t face what mine had to. Then comes June 24, 2016 and the results of the all-UK referendum to gauge the country’s stance on whether to stay in or to leave the European Union, are declared. Seventeen million voted “Leave” and 16 million voted “Remain”. The turnout was 72 per cent of those eligible to vote. So, hardly an overwhelming decision but one that has to be democratically respected. In the days that followed it became clear that it was bigotry and a very destructive and ignorant sense of nationalism, rather than informed democratic opinion, that had won the day. I am aware of the dangers of making such a judgment — of calling your opponents in a balloted contest fools and propaganda-fodder. But examining the fallout from the result, all inhibition to say so disappears.

Did the “Leave” campaign really want Scotland and Northern Ireland to start thinking about and even initiate the process of seceding from the United Kingdom? Perhaps some Little Englanders did. Did they really want the pound to fall and stay at a level which will make all the essentials of existence — food, clothes, energy and transport more expensive? Perhaps they think it’s worth the sacrifice. Do they really want the flight of capital and employment from the UK which has already followed the result? Perhaps they didn’t think that far and believed the leaders of the campaign when they said an exit would bring increased investment and happiness all round.

Did they believe that winning the “Leave” vote would signal permission for an increase in overt racism? Yes, they did. The organised closet racists who are now demonstrating on the streets of British cities asking Eastern Europeans to “go home”, the individual racists who feel empowered to attack Indians born here, verbally and physically, telling them they are not welcome — and even those smug and rich politicians who may not resort to such depravity but who certainly knew that they were letting this evil genie out of a bottle by smashing it. The irony of the situation is that vast swathes of British Asians in Birmingham, Sheffield and 50 other cities, voted to “Leave” EU on the grounds that there were too many Eastern Europeans being allowed entry. Turkeys voting for Christmas? In the last few days, the reports of assaults have increased alarmingly. Did those who voted for the slogan “Leave” think perchance that it meant that it was an injunction for forcing immigrants who live and work here out of the country? I believe many of them did.