|
| |
News & Letters, July 2001
Asian youths fight racism in Britain
London--The pretensions of the main political parties to keep
race out of the general election campaign last month were blown
apart in Oldham by the forced entry onto the agenda of the day
by those on the receiving end of the racist reality. For three
nights in early June, Oldham, in Lancashire, Northern England
was rocked by a spontaneous act of rebellion in which Asian
youth fought running battles first with neo-Nazis, then with the
Greater Manchester Police. The reverberations of the youth
uprising continued with major confrontations in the city of
Leeds days later and in the neighboring town of Burnley on June
23 and 24.
The action was sparked by gangs of far right thugs attacking
houses and people on the street. A pregnant woman was kicked in
the stomach. As the police were nowhere to be seen, "when
it came to our doorstep people defended themselves" as one
youth put it.
Ashid Ali, of the Oldham Bangladeshi Youth Association,
declared, "We had a community here that had been boiling up
and this was the spark that started the fire." When the
police did arrive in force they began arresting the Asian youth,
who then turned their rage against the police.
Ateeq Siddique, an anti-racist activist in Bradford, Yorkshire
added, "What's happening in Oldham isn't about so-called
'racial tensions.' It's about naked, violent racism: the racism
of the far Right and the racism institutionalised within the
police force."
The Commission for Racial Equality, in a 1994 study of unlawful
segregation in housing by Oldham Borough Council, found that 71%
of tenants on one rundown estate were Asian, while on a nearby
modern estate only one resident was Asian.
The high vote for the British National Party across Oldham
represents, to quote one bourgeois paper, a "carnival of
regression." Despite this, the aspiration to working class
unity remains a core principle of socialism; but the problem in
Oldham, and elsewhere, does not simply, as most of the Left
argues, arise from the bosses' traditional tactic of divide and
conquer; our class is already conquered and at present we are
not even within striking distance of the bourgeoisie.
Another problem is that narrowing the fight against racism to
the question of violence alone abandons the problem of a racist
capitalist society itself. Instead, removed from the context of
a racist society, racist attacks are portrayed as a problem of
individual psychology. Racial violence can become a blanket term
for any violence between people of different races--so that
Blacks are seen to be as capable as whites of racist attacks.
Racist violence loses its specific meaning, as violence caused
by racial oppression, and becomes just another crime.
The prevailing misconception is that the cause is of something
outside, alien to this society, in particular the presence of
the fascists. There is no doubt that the activity of the tiny
fascist groups with three election candidates in Oldham has been
a major contribution to the racism. Furthermore BNP candidates
in two Oldham constituencies polled 11% and 16% of the vote from
local whites and that percentage is several times more than
anyone in the Socialist Alliance got anywhere in England and
Wales.
Whilst that is disturbing enough, the fact cannot be ignored
that the SA did not see themselves as capable of meeting the
racist challenge in the Oldham except by ANL deliveries of
"Don't Vote Nazi" leaflets. In fact, the phenomenon of
a fascist revival in the election is rooted in the decomposition
of old-Labourist class politics and its replacement by Blairism.
Because New Labour has expunged the idea of class struggle in
its ranks, it tries to explain away the problems of the working
class as an "attitude problem"; resistance and
struggle rather than "upward mobility" as an option
for working class communities is not on the agenda. (Oldham has,
after all, stood by the Labour Party for years.)
Nor evidently is it on the agenda of the Trotskyist Left who, in
the Oldham elections, decided not to field a candidate and thus
effectively tail-ended New Labour in the cause of
"anti-fascist unity."
In reality New Labour acts as if the white working class was
born racist and as such should be demonised, attacked and
excluded from the Third Way vision of England. Thus Blair and
company claim that Oldham is an exception, and they have one
solution: police repression, which is in any case racially
biased. That's reflected in the prison population in the UK
which is now 20% non-white.
It should not be forgotten that 19th century Oldham and
Lancashire as a whole were bastions of radical Chartism and
working class solidarity with the anti-slavery Abolitionist
cause in the USA. Remnants of this tradition have been expressed
by the postal workers' union who challenged the legal mass
distribution of racist literature during the election campaign.
And Paul Hargreaves of the Fire Brigades Union, addressing the
urgency to "stamp out racism and the fascists,"
rightly noted, "The police aren't going to stop them. It's
up to us."
--London Corresponding Committee
|
|