Cabbages & Kings: Britain and the racial mix

“The first mirror was still water
And from hazy bronze
to glass
Reflection is the false
assurance
That the moment will
not pass”
From Bhida Parida
(the Opera) by Bachchoo

The strength of the pack is the wolf”, wrote Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book, “the strength of the wolf is the pack”. The allegory, an exhortation to the British colonials in a foreign land to stick together for survival was, by and large, heeded. The Raj lived in their cantonments and relaxed in their clubs. East was East and West stayed West only dealing with their servants and subordinates. In 1962, my very aged grandaunt, who lived in our Pune household, confronted my sister who was dressing up in a festive sari. “A wedding this time of the morning?” “It’s not a wedding Maasiji, I am speaking on the college stage for Independence Day,” my sister replied. “What’s Independence Day?” asked my grandaunt. “You know, the day when the British left India,” my sister replied. “What? The British have gone? No one told me!” was my grandaunt’s alarmed rejoinder. And she’d lived in the heart of Mumbai all her life.

The isolation of the rulers from the ruled kept the distinctions and functions of Empire alive. Then when it ended and the Brits left the subcontinent, a counter-movement began. Indians and Pakistanis emigrated to Britain and for the most part earned a living through working in the sectors which British workers, stimulated to a sense of entitlement after having fought and sacrificed for king and country through the Second World War, were abandoning. They left the shift work in mills, the driving and conducting of buses and underground trains and the dirty work of cleaning streets and hospitals to the newcomers. Through the 60 or so years of subcontinental, West Indian and African migration, the cities of Britain have witnessed a transformation. In the 1960s and 1970s, there developed in the East End of London a largely east Pakistani/Bangladeshi community working in the rag and leather trades. They were housed in the large Edwardian blocks of flats owned and rented out cheaply by the London municipal government. These estates had been built through programmes of municipal socialism for working-class families and were still largely inhabited by the fast-dwindling “native” inhabitants of the borough.

The sprinkling of Bangladeshi families assigned to these estates suffered the brunt of the racist resentment of the local whites. They would be subjected to random assaults on the streets and in the estates where they lived; have threats painted over their doors and filth and improvised firebombs thrown through their letter boxes. The random assaults became a game for “skinhead” gangs of white louts who would come into the area in vans, spot a Bangladeshi man or woman minding their own business on the street, get out of the van and indulge in what came to be cruelly known as “Paki bashing”. The game resulted in very many injuries, hospitalisations and eventually the murder of one Altaf Ali. The camel’s back was broken. The Bangladeshi youth, under the guidance of sympathetic left-wing immigrant organisations, determined to fight back. They organised vigilante patrols on the estates and in the streets, doing what the police wouldn’t or couldn’t do. They petitioned the municipal authority to assign housing to Asian families in estates where they could form a majority of the residents. This led to a further flight of white families from these estates.

A form of ghettoisation began. This East London experience was being replicated in Oldham, outside Manchester and in areas of Birmingham, Bradford, Dewsbury, Blackburn, Huddersfield and 50 other areas of towns and cities of the midlands and of Yorkshire and Lancashire. What I’ve described as a council-estate phenomenon was repeated in larger part in the working-class residential streets of these towns. An Asian worker’s family would buy or rent a house in the cheapest streets of the town, soon to be joined by others. The whites, largely unemployed would move out, because “the area isn’t what it was”. This week a landmark report on this urban transformation was published by Prof. Ted Cantle of Birkbeck College of the University of London. It pointed to the obvious. The “immigrant” communities, now in their third generation in Britain, are largely isolated. The cities and areas where they live, go to school, shop, worship and maybe work are uniformly “ethnic”. Perhaps out of a sense of political correctness the good professor didn’t say that the Mill towns of the 20th century had become the mosque towns of the 21st.

To those unfamiliar with these towns the statistics may seem startling. In 1991, the white population of Blackburn was 42.3 per cent. Today it’s 7.8 per cent. The rest is largely Mirpuri, from Pakistan. The pattern is repeated in a table of towns and areas that Prof. Cantle researched. He concludes that the trend is isolating and socially unhealthy, which echoes a stable door being shut after all the horses have bolted. Of course, the concentration of ethnic communities gives them a sense of security but it can and has in a hundred proven cases bred narrow ideological allegiances and terrorism. The concentration has also allowed these communities to exercise democratic power through the force of numbers.

Unfortunately, this empowerment has proved a mixed blessing. In very many of these communities, an election hangs on a candidate’s negative statements about Jews or about Israel, about calls to prove their allegiance to Islam. Naz Shah, elected from Bradford was suspended from the Labour Party when she wrote on social media that “Hitler didn’t do anything that was illegal” and that Israel should be disbanded and relocated in the US. Furthermore in several proven cases, and in the East End of London in Tower Hamlets, it has allowed, for instance, Bangladeshi village politics with threats about “Islamic allegiance”, the buying of votes and consequent corruption to dominate and distort what should and could be a community’s democratic opportunity.