Don’t play Tommy’s game

Last week saw a vibrant and united anti-racist and anti-fascist march through London. It was cross-generational and multicultural. It had a big turnout from several trade unions and a bigger Labour Party representation than I can remember over many years. It was built through blocs representing different sections, interests, identities, each of whom gave their segment of the march its own character. And it was internationalist -– personified by the large bloc of Brazilians (which included  a separate women’s section) and supporters of the Brazilian left in the wake of Bolsonaro’s frightening victory.

What we witnessed last week were signs of a renewed confidence within a movement that any honest participant or observer would recognise has gone through difficult times in the last year, in the wake of global developments, but has begun to wake up to the urgent need to broaden its reach. Unfortunately, it has been the far-right in Britain, boosted by the advances it has made in America, and in Western and Eastern  Europe, that has had a spring in its step. Although individual, centralist, far-right UK organisations remain small, their ability to mobilise huge numbers of atomised cross-class forces around common racist and nationalist themes, and around a figurehead, has shown their strength and potential.

That figurehead – Tommy Robinson – has been ridiculed as a “poundshop Enoch Powell”. From a platform at one of our recent anti-fascist mobilisations I called him “the lummox from Luton” and a “two-bob Oswald Mosley”. Intellectually, that is probably true, but he is dangerous. And the people especially in the USA and Canada, that have been pouring money into his account are banking on him becoming a lot more dangerous.

This week, though, he has been given a huge boost by the actions of two seemingly diametrically opposed movements. One is UKIP, which has been taken step by step on a journey to the very far right under the caretaker-leadership of Gerard Batten. The other is a movement which ostensibly includes people from the centre-left to the far left – Another Europe is Possible.

Robinson is not just some populist pub-brawler, but is a convinced racist and fascist. He is a former BNP member and EDL leader, who poses as a martyr to free speech, as a representative of the left behind (white) working-class, and a bulwark against a mythical Muslim takeover of British society. From his EDL days he was seeking to create division between Muslims and Jews by handing out Israeli flags on their demonstrations, while at the same time hob-nobbing with convinced Nazi antisemites with swastikas tattooed on their chest, and with anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists.

UKIP’s “temporary” leader, meanwhile, has kept very close to Robinson, and has been converting UKIP from a sanctuary mainly for disgruntled, hyper-nationalist but traditional, imperialist, Tories, which operates as a particular kind of protest vote at the ballot box, into a more openly cross-class movement. And most significantly, he has taken it on the streets to blend with largely working class far-right street protesters, many supplied by Islamophobic football firms.

Of course Brexit has been a major driver of that movement, but what drives their attachment to Brexit has been less a concern to maintain British independence from Brussels bureaucrats than an increasingly open racism, mainly expressed through Islamophobia but also a hardening of vicious anti-refugee sentiment, and under Batten’s leadership a sentiment against those he calls the “globalists” and “elites” who he believes are fostering multiculturalism and undermining the nation. More longstanding anti-fascists don’t need help decoding these antisemitic tropes.

Batten has met resistance within UKIP from more traditional Tories to his desire to bring Tommy Robinson into the fold, as a fully-fledged UKIP member, so he has by-passed that section of the membership this week by employing Robinson as an advisor (on grooming gangs and prison reform). Batten has pledged to work with him in a street mobilisation called for 9th December opportunistically railing against what they call the “Brexit Betrayal” represented by the chaotic “deal” being put together by Theresa May and her shrinking band of loyal followers. Brexit will be the slogan but the themes for this Robinson and Batten-led march and rally that will assert themselves will be open and blatant Islamophobia, coded antisemitism, vicious anti-left rhetoric and selective anti-establishment posturing.

The same forces that organised last week’s successful and positive march have called a counter-protest to Robinson and Batten’s plans. We will need as many people as possible who turned out on last week’s anti-racist and anti-fascist unity march to provide a solid opposition to them that will prevent them taking over the streets as they did in June and July.

The strength of that mobilisation last week was its ability to unite left wing Leave and Remain voters in a common cause. But Another Europe is Possible have called a separate protest which ties their opposition to the Far Right explicitly with anti-Brexit politics and a people’s vote, simultaneously splitting the anti-Robinson forces into Remainers and Leavers, while crowning Robinson the King of the Leave cause.

There is no doubt that, at the time of the referendum, those pushing the left’s scepticism about the capitalist club that comprises the EU barely got a look in. Hard right racists seized the initiative in gathering the Leave vote, and there was certainly a spike in racist attacks after the Leave victory in the referendum, by emboldened racists. But the reality was always more complicated and has become more so.

Leave also picked up a lot of votes for reasons other than racism. There are not 17 million hard-right racists in Britain, but there is a growth in far right racist forces right now. There are many trade unionists who are fighting for a more equal society, and who are anti-racist, but are thoroughly unimpressed with the EU, and voted Leave. Last week they turned out in big numbers on our march and were united with Remainers in their unions and in wider society. They can see the danger signs of a renewed far right. It would be disastrous if we let our forces be split on this basis, and if we gave people the impression that the natural leaders of the Leave movement are the likes of Tommy Robinson.

In the face of immense pressure from the right wing of the Labour Party and the pro-Remain establishment media, Jeremy Corbyn has steered a difficult path to keep on board those Labour members and voters who voted in either direction. He has sought to prioritise discussions of housing and homelessness, foodbanks, poverty, education cuts, trade union rights, the need for greater public ownership, and the threat from the growing far right in Britain and across Europe. Corbyn has been assiduously maintaining close connections with socialists in Europe, and pushing for an early General Election here as the means for social transformation.

I was a reluctant Remain voter, who, like others, saw what the EU did to Greece. I have witnessed the far-right and right-wing populist forces getting stronger across Europe and fear that the next European Elections will strengthen the most reactionary, authoritarian and racist forces within the EU. I also fear the potential for the far right to become much bigger here. This is not at all the time to split our forces on the question of racism and fascism, so I appeal to Another Europe is Possible to join a united effort to stop Batten and Robinson’s street movement in its tracks.

Whether there can be any coordination on the day with the forces around Antifa including the Feminist Anti-Fascist bloc and Plan C, who held a successful, separate mobilisation against the Democratic Football Lads Alliance, remains to be seen but they will surely turn out in numbers and won’t allow themselves to be divided on questions of Leave/Remain.

On 7 December, it will be the 80th anniversary of the return of the British Battalion that fought against Franco’s fascists in Spain. They docked at Newhaven, then came by train to Victoria Station where they were welcomed by huge numbers of anti-fascists and and were greeted by prominent political personalities including Clement Atlee.

They then went by bus to a dinner at the Cooperative Society in London’s East End, where the fight against fascism in Britain had been at its sharpest through the 1930s. Let’s honour the memory of those who fought in Spain with a united mobilisation against racism and fascism on 9 December. And let’s turn the popular slogan in the Spanish Civil War, “No Pasaran”, into a reality on the streets of London!

 

Speech: at Arise Festival workshop on uniting against racism and fascism 28.7.18

Last November I helped to lead an educational visit to Krakow for 50 anti-racists and trade unionists, through Unite Against Fascism, which included a day at Auschwitz. We were trying to understand what happened in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s to bring that awareness into the present.

Just days before we landed, 60,000 ultra nationalists had a riotous Independence Day march through Warsaw. Marchers on this day have largely been right wing conservatives but more recently the fascist presence has grown substantially. Last November fascist groups were the most active mobilisers, with flags, banners, flares, chanting slogans. One banner said “Pray for Islamic Holocaust”.  Groups were chanting “Jew-free Poland”. The fascists welcomed  overseas visitors including Tommy Robinson.

A taste of things to come here, in Britain, where fascist groups have risen then fallen, beaten back by strong anti-fascists resistance, aided by the incompetence of the fascists groups themselves. For several years now they have mustered little more than a few hundred on the streets, but last month that changed.

15,000 marched and rioted through central London in support of Tommy Robinson, vastly outnumbering less than 300 anti-fascists. Remnants of every small deeply ideological Nazi group from the last 30 years were there, joined by large groups of Islamophobic football thugs,  Polish fascists and UKIP. UKIP’s temporary leader Gerard Batten makes speeches indistinguishable from the BNP – weaving together crude Islamophobia, anti-refugee sentiment with more subtle antisemitism.

They had hi-tech equipment – flash screens, powerful PA systems. Among the bonehead thugs were sharply-dressed, educated young men from the European-based Generation Identity movement and the American Alt-Right who were bankrolling it. Far right politicians were there from Holland and Belgium and a speech from American white supremacist Steve Bannon conveyed on screen.

A real step change – a new, threatening coming together of the far right in bigger numbers than anything we faced in the NF marches in the 1970s.

What has changed to help bring this about? The election of Donald Trump and the ascendancy of populist far-right movements and parties in several central and East European countries. Events in Britain are ripples from that wider international movement plus austerity and neglect.

Such movements normally arise during an economic crisis, although in Hungary, Czech Republic, and Poland there is no economic crisis; quite the opposite. Those movements have considerable working class support. There is something more deeply ideological happening. Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-Roma racism are rife. So are homophobia, attacks on women’s rights, and defence of the Christian family. Fascists are increasingly versatile. They can switching their main targets, or attack several targets at once. We have to be just as versatile in the forces we bring in and unite together

We need to improve our our analysis and rethink our strategies.

Back in the 1980s I worked in the East End with Revd Ken Leech an Anglo-Catholic priest on the Marxist/anarchist spectrum and a great anti-racist activist. He wrote:

Ken Leech

“The battle against racism and fascism cannot be won by outsiders who march into an area, chant slogans, and then march out again; it can only be won by the most dedicated, rooted and persistent commitment to undermine and destroy the injustice and neglect on which such movements thrive.”

Which is where Labour comes in. Only Labour is organised in every locality, can change people’s lives around, and combat injustice and neglect. It is not enough to moralise and say racism is evil. We need to embed the fight against racism in our struggles for better housing, health, employment, education for all. We also need to mix politics and culture. The most successful anti-fascist initiatives of the 1970s and ’80s mixed politics with culture.

We were taken by surprise in June partly because of another situation that emerged in April/May this year around the scandalously treated Windrush generation, victims of Theresa May’s deliberately hostile environment. They had also been neglected by the anti-racist movement who took more notice of the frequent attacks on Muslim communities. We have to be sensitive to how each group experiences racism but always keep the big picture in mind. Alongside Islamophobia, deep racism against communities of Caribbean heritage continues.

As we organised with, and in support of the Windrush generation, we found enormous sympathy across society. Minorities instinctively support each other but suddenly it felt like the majority were on our side.

So the opposite movement around Tommy Robinson was a serious reality check.

Another reality check for anti-racists: problems we thought had disappeared but haven’t: I became active in the mid-1970s, animated by slogans such as “black and white unite and fight”, “self-defence is no offence”, “here to stay here to fight”, but one slogan bothered me then: “Yesterday the Jews today the Blacks’, because I instinctively knew then what I am much surer about today– that antisemitism is a very light sleeper. Every so often it awakes with a real jolt. The idea of world Jewish conspiracy that explains the economic system and politics remains crucial to the ideology of fascist groups today.

All the ridiculous mainstream media headlines about antisemitism try bizarrely to pin it on the left and Jeremy Corbyn. Make no mistake, antisemitism is alive and kicking – on the far right of politics. The far right have flooded the internet with Jewish conspiracy material (some of it thinly disguised as opposition to bankers, some of it thinly disguised as pro-Palestine). Unfortunately some on the left are sharing it. We cannot allow any space for antisemitism, we cannot allow antisemites to taint the Palestinians’ cause

When the Tories goad Corbyn about antisemitism in the Labour Party and paint themselves as friends of the Jews, we need to hit back hard and show how the Tory Party is directly linked through the Conservative and Reformists groups in the European Parliament to openly antisemitic, Islamophobic, anti-Roma, anti-refugee , homophobic parties in Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria, Denmark and others.

Jacob Rees Mogg at a TBG dinner

We need to expose Tory-led groups here like the Traditional Britain Group – thoroughly racist, friendly to Holocaust deniers, and recommending Mosley’s books.

I want to finish where I started – with the group of anti-racists and trade unionists visiting Poland. In those few days we uncovered the processes through which the situation of minorities worsened until anything could be done to them: labelling, scapegoating, discriminating, dehumanising, isolating… and so on. We can recognise aspects of these in our society today against different minorities.

But these stages are not inevitable. They can be challenged and interrupted. In the 1930s many people enthusiastically joined the oppressors, others just went along with it –  as by-standers. Too few resisted. Don’t be a by-stander, be an up-stander!

 

So who are those Tories cosying up to?

If you were feeling a bit overpowered by the whiff of hypocrisy coming off the large number of Tory MPs, and their DUP friends, including Norman Tebbit and Ian Paisley Jr, who joined the “anti-racist” protest against Jeremy Corbyn in Parliament Square last Monday, to say “enough is enough” about alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party, then I would strongly advise you to be very careful where you travel in Europe.

In particular, I would recommend that you avoid Strasbourg and Brussels where you might find yourself inadvertently hanging out with Tory MEPs, and their close friends, who certainly have a whiff of something unpleasant about them.

At David Cameron’s behest in 2009, Tory MEPs left the centre-right grouping they had formerly been part of to form a new, more right-wing alliance. The Tories are the largest group in that 72-member alliance, the next biggest faction being the Polish  Law and Justice Party (PiS). Yes,you have heard of them. They made headlines lately with their new law which is attempting to rewrite Holocaust history. They are making it illegal to suggest any complicity by Poles in the genocide of Jews during the war.

As the ruling party in Poland they are also trying to rehabilitate the honour of the ultra-nationalist, antisemitic, right-wing Polish parties active before the war. Hot on the heels of the controversial Holocaust history bill, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki lit a candle and laid a wreath at the Munich grave site of the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade, a Polish

Polish ultra-nationalists

underground military unit who collaborated with Nazi Germany against communists during the Second World War. These kinds of actions are giving increased confidence to Poland’s neo-Nazis who were the leading forces among a 60,000 strong ultra-nationalist march through Warsaw last November.

The alliance’s junior partners include the  Danish People’s Party (DF) described by some commentators as “right-wing populist” by others simply as “Far right”. Islamophobia is the DF’s main racism of choice, one of their spokespersons opining “Muslims should live in a Muslim country – not here”. I doubt, though, if that would put off Jonathan Arkush, the Tory-supporting-Trump-supporting, President of the Jewish Board of Deputies, fronting Monday’s rally in the Square, since the DF are very enthusiastic supporters of Israel under its leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

I wonder how Arkush and his counterpart at the rally, Jonathan Goldstein, of the Jewish Leadership  Council, feel about other members of this Tory/Law and Justice-led alliance, such as the Latvian National Alliance  made up of “All for Latvia”, which  describes “international globalism” and “multiculturalism” as its chief enemies, and its partners, “For Fatherland and Freedom”. This National Alliance takes part in an annual event commemorating the Latvian Waffen-SS, and some years back reprinted a book seeking to justify the crimes committed by the Latvian Waffen-SS against Jews and Russians.

Marching to remember Hristo Lukov

Another member of this right-wing European grouping who, also, it seems, enjoy a good march, are the Bulgarian National Movement (IMRO). In February, for the 16th consecutive year, they held a march through the centre of Sofia to honour Hristo Lukov, an army general who led the pro-Nazi Union of National Legions during the war. The march ended by the house where Lukov was assassinated by communist partisans. Neo-nazis from several other parts of Europe flew in to take part in the march. IMRO also express racist sentiments against Bulgarian Turks and Roma communities.

While it is true that a number of anti-Corbyn Labour MPs were present last Monday, and Luciana Berger spoke for them at the rally in Parliament Square, the collusion between the Tory Party, the Tory supporting press, and the right-wing self-proclaimed leaders of the Jewish community, this week, has been plain to see. No doubt a number of protesters came there in good faith to protest against antisemitism, having been conditioned by constant right-wing press stories, including those by the Jewish Chronicle, to believe that instances of antisemitism only occur in the ranks of Labour (and, of course, there have been real instances), but others would have taken part knowing the damage this could inflict not just on Labour’s leader, but on the Labour Party in general in the forthcoming local elections. One Tory activist, David Thomas, a former Conservative parish councillor was honest enough to tweet “It’s an actual stroke of genius we’ve been able to pull this off, perfect timing heading into the elections too” (My emphasis). He has since deleted the tweet.

It appears that those Jewish “leaders” who are cosying up to the Tories for mutual benefits can only look in one direction as they seek to uncover antisemitism. Have we heard any of them speak out against, let alone even question, the highly dubious alliance the Tories have built and are sustaining with Islamophobes and antisemites in the Tory-led Group in the European Parliament? Why ever not?

Theresa May now plans to take advantage of the febrile atmosphere around the question of antisemitism by earmarking April 17th for a parliamentary debate about it. All racism is serious. It is surely one of the main failures of May’s Government, and Cameron’s before her, that antisemitism has been rising as have other forms of racism and bigotry against African-Caribbeans, Muslims, Roma, refugees, and members of the LGBT community on their watch. This has multiplied further  since the Brexit Referendum. Minorities who face much more frequent instances of abuse and attack by racists than Jews do, and encounter institutional racism on a daily basis, might be angry that the Tories sudden desire to spend an afternoon discussing racism is limited to only one kind. They surely have a point. Nevertheless, Labour should absolutely welcome this debate.

Not only will it give parliamentarians the chance to explore the issue in depth and share their understandings, it will also provide Labour with the opportunity to put the Government on the spot about their institutional links to antisemites and other racists in Europe. For all their bluster when confronting Labour, the Tory-supporting leaders of the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council seem much too coy to do that to their own side. I hope Jeremy Corbyn and other members of the Labour Party can show them how it is done!

 

 

 

 

 

Shout-out to Warsaw anti-racists

My speech Whitehall at the March Against Racism, London 17th March 2018, as part of the UN Day Against Racism

Greetings to anti-racist London and a special shout-out to our comrades marching in

David Rosenberg speaking. Photo: Julia Bard

Warsaw today. Next month is the 75^th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising when 220 Jewish fighters, the youngest just 13 years old, resisted the armed might of Nazi occupiers for three weeks.

But any commemorations in Poland this year are overshadowed by the current Polish government’s disgraceful attempt to rewrite Holocaust history and deny any Polish involvement. These actions give more confidence to Poland’s ultra nationalists and neo-Nazis, who don’t need any encouragement.

Protesters on the march from the Polish organisation KOD

When the Polish Far right held a 60,000 strong march through Warsaw Last November, they shouted for a “Jew-free Poland”. Their banners said “Pray for Islamic Holocaust”. In Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, racists are targeting Muslims, Roma and Refugees as well as Jews.

The last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Marek Edelman, said: “to be a Jew means always being with the oppressed never with the oppressors”. The Jewish Socialists Group completely agree. Wherever people face oppression, live under violent occupation, suffer racial, sexual or homophobic discrimination and violence, their struggle is our struggle. As Jews, we stand unconditionally with our sisters and brothers in Muslim, Roma and Refugee communities.

In early May, there is another anniversary that is very meaningful for us. The 40^th anniversary of the racist murder of Altab Ali, a young Bengali immigrant clothing worker in the East End, who lived and worked in the same streets where our families lived in the 1930s, when they were fighting poverty and Mosley’s fascists.

Altab Ali was stabbed to death in 1978, as he walked home from work. Killed by three teenagers whose minds had been poisoned by racism. Those teenagers were not born racists. They learnt it from National Front propagandists, from mainstream newspaper editors who constantly wrote anti-immigrant, anti-refugee headlines, from police who ignored racial violence, and from overnments who treated immigrants as a problem, as an irritant, to be controlled or removed.

And those teenagers bought into the idea of nationalism, that spuriously divides people, that thinks majorities are superior and should have more rights than minorities, that offers the poor and exploited “White pride” Instead of jobs, houses, and social services.

As anti-racists we fight for a true multiculturalism that supports our languages, our identities our cultures, but also unites all our communities against poverty and exploitation. Nationalism can never be our friend. Nationalism can never be the answer.

Separate and unequal

In 2015 I took early retirement from primary school teaching after 22 years working at the same inner-London school.  Moments, incidents and conversations with particular children remain hard-wired in my head. Like the one that involved Olima, a serious and determined Bangladeshi girl I taught when she was seven years old. I had taught one of her brothers earlier and later would teach other siblings. There were ten children in the family. Her parents dressed quite traditionally but none of the girls wore hijabs. They were absent on Eid but seemed relatively secular. One Friday afternoon, heading out to the playground, I noticed Olima  on her own, frowning, and generally looking fed up. I asked her what the matter was, and she said:
“I wish I was a boy.”
“Why is that?” I asked?
Quick as a flash she said: “Cos it’s crap being a girl!”
We talked about it more, and she described situations at home, out and about, and at school, where she felt boys were advantaged or treated themselves and others as though they were superior. Now I was drawn to teaching, above all, to fight for equal opportunities. Before I trained as a teacher, in my early 30s, I worked in the voluntary sector for around 8 years, more than half of them at the Runnymede Trust – a research and information body challenging racism and discrimination. As their Publications Officer I saw through and promoted dozens of reports, resource materials, books and pamphlets. As more an more of these highlighted racism in schools and education I became convinced that the real fight for equality needed to be done face-to-face rather than mediated through the written word.

I taught Olima in my first few years of teaching, when I used much of my mental and physical energy working to establish a classroom that all  children, of whichever gender, cultural group, or socio-economic background, felt that it completely belonged to them; where all felt valued, and everyone felt they could participate on equal terms. I paid special attention to those who were quiet, and seemed to lack confidence, to girls and those from visible minorities who knew that, out there, society doesn’t value or treat them equally.

There was absolutely nothing that I asked boys to do that was not open to girls too. I was committed also to the children’s voices, recognising that they often know better than their parents what they really feel and want. To the extent that it was possible I tried to make it a democratic classroom. And I made discussion of all manner of equalities part of my teaching regardless of whether it was “in the curriculum” or not.

That is the lens that I look through at the appeal court case which has just found against the Al-Hijrah school in Birmingham, who had a policy of educational apartheid – segregating boys and girls within this voluntary-aided co-educational state school when they reached year 5 (9-10 year olds). Girls and boys were taught in different classrooms, they had to use separate corridors and play areas, and attend different school clubs and go on different school trips.

The school’s spokespersons defended their practice as “separate but equal”. Take a moment to think of the different contexts where you have heard that phrase before, and you know it is invariably “separate and unequal”.

There was only one time we segregated pupils when I was teaching:  during one of our series of sex education sessions where we provided a girls-only session with a female teacher, and a boys-only session with a male teacher, where particularly sensitive matters could be more freely discussed. We felt it really important that in other sex education sessions boys and girls were actually together learning about each other and what happens as they each go through puberty and through their adolescence.

Many anti racists will be tempted to see this case purely through the lens of Islamophobia and disregard or push to the far margins other equality issues it raises. I think they are wrong.

In the period of the mid-1990s when I was taught Olima, there were certainly racist attacks in the neighbourhood – her family suffered one. One reason there were few Bangladeshis at our school at that time was that they were chased off the nearest estates by racist gangs, and made extremely unwelcome by residents associations dominated by white racists. It took a while for the Bangladeshi community to establish itself in numbers. But the word “Islamophobia” did not figure then.

The right wing newspapers at the time, in time-honored divide and rule manner played  minorities off against each other. They claimed to “admire” the moral values of Asian communities, especially Muslims. They concentrated more on attacking and undermining the Caribbean community. The Mail and the Express  wrote nausea-inducing features urging Black youth to be more like their “hardworking” Asian counterparts who lived quiet “family and community oriented” lives.

That’s was then, this is now. The oppression and discrimination suffered by Caribbean youth has not receded, but a specific anti-Muslim racism has come obsessively to the fore on the mainstream right. The far right groups, though, have not forgotten the others they hate and despise, though sometimes it seems the anti-racist movement does.

Islamophobia and the colonial mindset was certainly present in an earlier instance where al-Hijrah school hit the headlines, condemned by OFSTED for not teaching “British Values”, which the last time I looked were more rooted in empire, slavery and racial superiority. The values of democracy and equality were born more in the communities around the world that resisted this oppression. Defending Muslim schools from that kind of attack does not mean endorsing their practices, especially when it is to the detriment of significant numbers of Muslims who happen to be female and children. if we are principled in our stand for equality for Muslim communities in the face of anti-Muslim racism (Islamophobia), then we will also stand with those oppressed within their own communities and fighting for equality. The fight against educational apartheid is right  whether it occurs in Muslim, Jewish, Christian or any other schools and the judgement made it absolutely clear that schools from each community were now obliged to end educational apartheid.

And before anyone holds up the straw-person of “but there are other single sex schools in Britain”, I don’t approve of them either, but here we have one school, one institution, not single-sex, treating half of its school population differently.

I don’t know what Olima is doing now but I hope we are fighting for a world where we don’t let down the young Olimas of today by saying “yes, but the main thing is Islamophobia.” We can and must challenge racist oppression and sexist oppression together, and simultaneously, for the benefit of all who need equality in every aspect of their lives.

10 years after Powell predicted rivers of blood

People remember Enoch Powell’s chilling “Rivers of Blood” speech delivered in Birmingham on 20th April 1968, which happened to be on Hitler’s birthday. At that time Powell was a Conservative politician, and through that speech he deliberately set out to embolden already growing racist and anti-immigrant forces and spread fear through ethnic minority communities working all hours to eke out a living and provide better opportunities for their children. Intimidation and violence against those minorities inevitably followed in the weeks and months after that hair-raising speech. People, though, are far less familiar with Powell’s speech at a public event in Billericay, Essex, a decade later, on 10th June 1978. By then, of course, he was outside the ranks of the Conservatives and was representing Ulster Unionists in South Down. What happened the very next day may have just been a coincidence but on that occasion he talked explicitly about violence: “Violence,” he said, “does not break (out)… because it is willed, or contrived… but because it lies in the inevitable course of events.” He predicted that, within 20 years, “one third of the inner metropolis of key cities will have passed to the control of a population which by reason of the strongest impulses  and interests of human nature, neither can, nor will identify itself or be identified with the rest.”

He continued menacingly: “…those who foresaw and feared they would be swamped will be driven by equally strong impulses and interests to resist and prevent it.”

Local NF leader Derrick Day and some of their followers at the corner of Brick Lane

For several months during 1978, there had been a regular National Front (NF) presence on Sunday mornings on the corner of Bethnal Green Road and Brick Lane, right outside a shop selling camping equipment, which was owned by a middle-aged Jewish couple. The NF sold papers – usually National Front News and sometimes Holocaust News. They set up a bookstall with choice titles such as Did 6 Million Really Die? and shouted abusive racist slogans. All within a stone’s throw of two Jewish-run beigel shops and the groceries and cafes that the newly-settled Bengali population had established in this section of Tower Hamlets in London’s East End.

Many of the fascists who gathered on that corner were relatively local, from Hoxton and Shoreditch. And their threatening mob included more and more young skinheads as the numbers grew generally and as their own influence among skinheads increased. But fascist supporters were also coming there from out of the area – from Hackney, Tottenham, and into Essex.

On 11th June, 1978, just 24 hours after Powell’s incendiary Billericay speech, the NF concluded their gathering that day with a terrifying rampage down Brick Lane. Some 150 skinheads, grabbing  bottles, bricks and rubble as they went, smashed windows, threw bottles and lumps of concrete, and chanted hate slogans while attacking people in their way. In a manner reminiscent of the response to the outrage against worshippers near two Finsbury Park mosques very recently, some of the attackers in June ’78 were kettled and held by the community until the police arrived. The police made a tiny number of token arrests.

Altab ali

This was just five weeks after Altab Ali, a 24-year-old Bengali clothing worker had been stabbed to death on his way home from work by a teenage gang whose minds had been poisoned by the NF’s racism. After Ali’s death, protesters held a huge march to Downing Street behind his coffin. A range of Bengali and anti-racist organisations were created especially among the youth, and they challenged both the fascists and the wider racist atmosphere the fascists were benefiting from.

Just two days after the rampage, anger was expressed not just on the streets, but in a public hall – the Montefiore Centre on Hanbury Street off Brick Lane. The anger was directed that night not principally at the NF but at a harebrained scheme to make Bengalis safer from racist attacks, dreamed up quite a distance from the East End  in County Hall by the Conservative controlled Greater London Council (GLC). They proposed to create Bengali-only estates. Bengali organisations and spokespersons had certainly demanded better, safer housing and had expressed a wish to live near each other, but no Bengali organisation had asked for segregated or ghettoised housing. They wanted to live on multi-racial estates building good and lasting relations with their neighbours.

These explosive situations occurred in a tumultuous decade of East End history. During that decade, as around 15,000 new Bengalis immigrants supplemented the 3,000 or so who had already settled by the end of the 1960s, the overall population of the borough of Tower Hamlets plummeted to its 20th century low – just 139,000 people. The boroughs of Bethnal Green, Poplar and Stepney, which were amalgamated into Tower Hamlets in 1965, were home to nearly 500,000 people in the late 19th century, when the wealthy Victorian businessman-cum-social researcher Charles Booth was tramping the streets gathering demographic data.

From the 1980s that population grew again, not least as the fairly recently settled Bengali population had children, and more families were reunited. But the social, economic and cultural dislocation of that decade – white flight to Essex and Kent as the Bengali population grew substantially; the loss of half the remaining jobs on the London docks; the closure of longstanding local firms – created an environment in which groups like the NF with their scapegoating methods could flourish, and malevolent politicians within the mainstream, such as Powell added to the incitement.

Brick Lane late 1970s through the eyes of the artist and activist Dan Jones

Fast forward to today and the very recent penchant for acid attacks which has included those in East London, some of which have been carried out for reasons of Islamophobic race hate. And the police, for all their experience of race attacks, still remain so slow to acknowledge that element when it is obviously there. Though, it is true that the majority of attacks are not on Muslims specifically but on a wider category, the poor and economically marginalised of all communities black, brown and white, including for example Latin American migrant workers most likely raised as Catholics, who are compelled to take risky precarious work as moped-riding delivery drivers. Other victims have been white middle-class moped riders using them as a lifestyle choice. Many attacks are being used to steal mopeds which are favoured vehicles by drugs gangs for quick sales and quick getaways.

And, Tower Hamlets residents continue to face housing problems. Bangladeshi Muslims in East London make up a significant proportion of those who face a housing crisis today, but it is  one that is less concerned with physical safety from racists than a crisis fuelled by increasing gentrification of the area’s prime sites, with its knock-on effects on the prices of everything and the reduction of public housing stock.

Demonstration 1978: youth in the forefront

However, as we face our current troubles, we still have so much to learn from the experiences of those populating the streets in and around Brick Lane in the 1970s, not least about the spirit of resistance, solidarity and determination to bring about change that was so much in evidence then and ultimately pushed the fascists away.

The story of this dramatic decade is the subject of my newest walk, which will be having  its third outing on the morning of Sunday 30th July. Further details and booking information are here:

Battleground Brick Lane 1970s is a 2.5 hour guided walk through a dramatic decade in the life of the East End and London as a whole, taking place next on 30th July. Fee £8 (£5 unwaged). Book online at: http://www.eastendwalks.com/?page_id=82

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just saying racism is bad or wrong is not good enough

This is the text of a platform speech I made in Parliament Square at the UN Anti-Racism Day march and rally, organised by Stand Up to Racism on Saturday 18th March 2017

A great anti-fascist, Marek Edelman, said “to be a Jew means always being with the oppressed never with the oppressors”. His words echoed for me two days ago when I took two American “Black Lives Matter” activists to Cable Street, scene of the victory over Mosley’s fascists in 1936. They wanted to learn what happened to Jews then. And I learnt about their struggles against another filthy rich, populist, racist, demagogue – Donald Trump

I told them that a grassroots movement – the Jewish People’s Council – understood that you defeat antisemitism and fascism by building an anti-fascist majority. By turning by-standers into up-standers. By convincing even those starting to fall for racist ideas.

We need to take our ideas into every arena – work, college, our neighbours,– to build that anti-racist majority today.

On the day that Paul Nuttall became leader of UKIP he said: “We are now the patriotic party of the working class”. If Mosley was alive he could have done him for copyright. He said the exact same words in 1936.

Labour crushed UKIP in Stoke. But UKIP are not finished yet. They still win protest votes among people, struggling economically, clutching at racist explanations. Saying to them racism is bad, or wrong, is not good enough. We have to show how a multicultural society and immigration benefit us all, and make the fight against racism a fight for proper jobs, better housing, better education, for all communities

Antisemitism is rising again alongside daily Islamophobic attacks. It has been decades since Britain’s Far Right publicly displayed banners saying “Hitler was Right”. That happened here last year.

The Daily Mail, which supported Hitler all through the 1930s, falsely accuses Corbyn of antisemitism, but Jewish socialists knows who the real antisemites are and who our allies are.

Our allies are in every minority community that is a victim of race hate and among everyone, like Jeremy Corbyn, who unites against race hate, mysoginy and homophobia.

Racists accumulate and switch targets easily – from Muslims, to Polish workers, to Jews. We have to defend all communities under attack. Unconditionally. With solidarity we will win. No Pasaran!

We know nothing about walls…

I spoke this afternoon as a representative of the Jewish Socialists’ Group and the bloc of Jewish organisations that marched together on the anti-Trump demonstration in London today. After the massive mobilisation for the women’s demo on 21 January and the huge emergency protest at Downing Street on Monday night, it was important to keep the pressure up on Trump and May. The Stop the War Coalition and Stand Up to Racism allied with several Muslim organisations in calling today’s demonstration.

It was a lively demo with a young demographic, despite poor weather at the start.  The mobilisation received a blow yesterday when one of the prominent organisers of last Monday’s demo, who has a significant media profile, (Owen Jones), tweeted that he wouldn’t be marching today, citing his strong political criticisms of the groups calling today’s protests  – groups he has been very happy to work with in recent years.

It was a deliberate, cynical, arrogant and egotistical attempt to sabotage the march. If he felt that strongly he could have stayed away and told us why on Monday. Or, alternatively, he could have come along to show solidarity with the victims of Trump’s policies and discussed his misgivings while protesting. I was not impressed, nor were any people I discussed it with.

The movement against Trump is involving new forces who want to publicly show their revulsion at Trump’s aggressive actions so soon after he assumed the presidency, and they want to show their anger at our Prime Minister’s obsequious attitude to the new incumbent of what she keeps describing as “our most important ally”.  Of course the organisers of a demonstration influence the tone of it, but the people who come are not robots and will show if they do not appreciate how it is being run. It was very clear to me from the platform that what the diverse speakers were collectively saying was very enthusiastically received and touched the mood that many feel. It wasn’t as large as the earlier protests, and inflated claims of numbers are unhelpful, but it was young, it was lively, it was united  and it felt meaningful. Here was my speech:

“I bring greetings from the Jewish Socialists’ Group and from all the Jewish organisations who are here today. We live in a world where too many people would like Jews and Muslims to be enemies. We are here as Jews to express our complete solidarity with Muslims threatened and victimised by Donald Trump’s racism. You are our sisters and brothers, our friends and neighbours and as Jews we stand by you.

We stand also with the Mexican people – mainly catholic –  bearing the brunt of Trump’s racism. And, as Jews, who know something about being refugees, we give total solidarity to all refugees, of all nationalities, and of all faiths and none, who are being kept out of that tiny overcrowded country called the USA, and enduring humiliating and inhuman border controls.

We are proud that American Jews voted overwhelmingly against Trump. They recognised him, and the white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists he collected around him during his campaign, as anti-Semites. But this wasn’t just self-interest. American Jews were very prominent in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. When they reject Trump today, they are also rejecting his racism against others, his sexism, his attacks on the environment, and the naked greed of corporations that he will strengthen at the expense of the poor.

We know our history. When we heard what he was doing to Muslims we remembered the Jewish refugees during the holocaust turned away by America, and sent back to Europe to add to the funeral pyre. We also know  how few Jews were allowed to enter Britain after Hitler came to power in Germany. When they finally allowed some to enter in 1938/39 the Daily mail, and Daily Express were screaming and shouting about “Alien Jews pouring in, over-running the country”, and all that shit.

Before she became PM Theresa May spent six years as Home Secretary. Her appalling record towards refugees than was as bad as her predecessors in the 1930s towards Jews. Trump and May are made for each other.

We know from the brilliant demos over the last couple of weeks – the women’s march and the huge demo here on Monday, that Trump has very few friends in the world. And a lot of enemies. But one of his friends will be here on Monday, the prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, butcher of Palestinians, prime minister for the settlers, for the occupiers but not for the ordinary people of Israel and certainly not for the Jewish diaspora. Netanyahu is no friend of ours. This warmonger does not speak in our name. Be here to greet him on Monday!

Last point. May and Trump can talk about how to help rich corporations grown richer. Netanyahu and Trump can talk about building walls. We are the Jews who know nothing about walls but who know everything about barricades. And our message to Maggie May, to warmonger Netanyahu, to racist Trump, is No Pasaran! They Shall Not pass!”

 

Ghettoes of the mind

Last week I was re-reading an angry but meticulously argued pamphlet, from 1980, by my late friend, colleague and comrade Ken Leech: Brick Lane 1978: The events and their significance. It focused on the Bengali community in the East End, many of whom had arrived in the previous 10 years. They were struggling economically, and under siege from racists and fascists. Their daily concerns merited little attention from the police or the press. They lived close to each other, not just for safety in numbers but as a result of discrimination and social exclusion. Among them, and nearby, lived other struggling East Enders, black and white. In social commentary about the Bengali community, the word “ghetto” cropped up repeatedly, but Leech told his readers:

“Brick Lane is not a ghetto in the racial sense. But it is a ghetto of the poor, of the marginalised, of the oppressed. No attempt to deal with racism alone will be adequate any  more than will the attempt to evade racism. The attack on racism, whether in the form of organised racist groups or in the more pervasive form of our institutions and laws, must not be watered down. However it is essential to widen the attack into one on the oppression of the urban poor… Brick Lane is a community disfigured by unemployment, by racial discrimination by deprivation of resources.”

Leech challenged “the commonly held white mythology of the oppressed, victimised Asian, passive and fearful, helpless…” and showed how that community  helped and organised itself and found allies in the diverse, wider community locally.

Yesterday I read the 18-page executive summary of Louise Casey’s “Review into Opportunity and Integration”, which talks of “ghettoes” and “segregation”. I was so glad I had read Ken Leech’s pamphlet first. Their approaches and assumptions are like chalk and cheese. Everything that is so insightful in Leech’s work is missing in Casey’s.

Casey says quite candidly: “I approached this review with an absolute belief that we are a compassionate, tolerant and liberal country” with “a media that exposes corruption and injustice whoever you are, and a legal system that treats everybody as innocent until proved otherwise”. For Casey, “Creating a just, fair society where everyone can prosper and get on is a cornerstone of Britain’s values.” The Britain she knows “has developed some of the strongest equalities legislation in the world, and provided greater freedoms to be different.” It has made “great strides in gender equality.”

Nothing that Casey  encountered during her review seems to have challenged her own narrow assumptions. But let’s look at some truths here about this “compassionate, tolerant and liberal country”.

Since the 1970s, under both Tory and Labour governments and a Tory Lib-Dem coalition, the wealth gap between rich and poor in Britain has grown enormously, homelessness has mushroomed, gentrification is enacting social cleansing, while rights to protest and wider civil liberties have been severely eroded alongside the removal of legal aid channels for many who need it to challenge injustices. Meanwhile the discriminatory Prevent Strategy spreads unease within Muslim communities.

The media, with occasional exceptions, gives a free pass to those who have cornered most of that wealth for themselves, praising their entrepreneurial spirit, treating them as celebrities, preferring to scapegoat the poor for poverty, targeting immigrants and refugees for social problems, and whipping up Islamophobic prejudices.

As for gender equality, there is still a gap of 14% in Britain between the earnings of men and women in full-time employment. Men are still more concentrated in senior roles and women more likely to be working in low paid, low skilled jobs. Women are also less likely to be working full time, partly because of spiraling childcare costs, with women taking on the main burden of childcare.

In this period since the 1970s, segregation and ghettoisation has occurred, but not the segregation Casey notices.  As one of our foremost Human Geographers, Danny Dorling, has pointed out, the most aggressive moves towards geographical ghettoisation, have come from mainly white people within the predominantly middle and upper income bracket, housing themselves within gated communities; guarding their wealth and power by limiting their physical contact with people from less privileged classes and especially from ethnic minorities within those poorer classes, while ensuring that their children are educated in schools  largely devoid of those minorities. They may not mind Sajid Javid living next door but might not be keen on having his poorer relatives living on the other side

Casey’s focus on ghettoes is not here. She avoid questions of class and accumulation of substantial wealth,  but notes that Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in particular, are generally not keeping up. She hints that some are held back by prejudice, and “social exclusion”, but remarks that they  “tend to live in more residentially segregated communities than other ethnic minority groups”. In these communities, she says,  “economic inactivity levels remain unusually high among women”. Arguing  that “English language is a common denominator and a strong enabler of integration” (and social mobility), she states that:  “Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic groups have the lowest levels of English language proficiency of any Black or Minority Ethnic group… and women in those communities are twice as likely as men to have poor English.”

If you are expecting details about the drastic cuts to ESOL classes, and the widespread and unchecked discrimination that keeps minority ethnic women in casualised, low-paid work or more prone to unemployment, you will need to look elsewhere. Casey looks mainly for explanations within those struggling communities themselves. If this sounds familiar, it does appear to dovetail  with David Cameron’s assertions in 2016, which cast women from Muslim communities as “traditionally submissive” and blamed them for not integrating, rather than giving due weight to the direct and indirect racism they suffer, including regular abuse and frequent physical attacks that blight their lives and hamper their desire for equality.

What those of us fighting for equality should take more seriously, even if it is uncomfortable and tricky territory, is when Casey talks of  “regressive cultural and religious practices”, and “religious, cultural and social barriers” preventing women “from accessing even their basic rights”. She refers explicitly to “criminal practices, such as female genital mutilation, forced marriage and so called ‘honour’ based crime”, and also claims that “lesbian, gay and bisexual groups who suffer discrimination in mainstream society… are affected twice over when they also belong to a community that can be culturally intolerant of non-heterosexual identification.”

Apart from the massive generalisation/stereotype of the range of attitudes within Muslim communities, those of us who have grown up in traditional Jewish or Christian communities or attended faith schools within these religions, will know that practices of cultural intolerance towards LGBT individuals can be equally repressive. Casey’s almost exclusive focus on Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim communities is suspect, to put it charitably.

Some anti-racists are wary of acknowledging and tackling human rights issues within minority communities. We shouldn’t be. Human rights are indivisible. If we support the most vulnerable, oppressed and marginalised within society in general, then we must also support the oppressed and marginalised within minority communities.

What does bother me is that Casey does nothing to enlighten us as to how these issues have been and continue to be  challenged by courageous individuals and groups within the minority communities she homes in on, such as, for example, by Southall Black Sisters, at the very same time as they are challenging economic discrimination, social exclusion, institutional racism and racist attacks.

Casey’s executive summary  gives no agency to those she sees as passive victims. Instead she informs us that “Too many public institutions… have ignored or even condoned regressive, divisive and harmful cultural and religious practices, for fear of being branded racist or Islamophobic.” It is a complacent and blinkered attitude that may result her review itself being branded as racist and Islamophobic. That would not be wrong, but that is not the only problem with it, and it would be tragic if that meant that progressives outside these communities do not support women and sexual minorities within them who are taking up these human rights issues at the same time as they expose the prejudiced class ridden perspectives that Cameron and Casey seem to embody.

In one small section of the Executive summary, Casey seems to refer to communities other than Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims, when she turns her attention to immigration in general.  She talks of the “unease” felt by “traditional White British communities” (as if all white people are of one mind) adding that “in a situation where the country has been through an economic downturn, it is understandable that the pace and scale of immigration has felt too much for some communities.”

But who are these “traditional White British communities”? Immigrants have been coming to Britain for thousands of years. They have tended to settle in towns and cities, predominantly among the working class. And while in some areas a majority or even a large majority of them may be white, working class communities have long been diverse. Which brings us back to Ken Leech’s observation about the oppression of the marginalised and oppressed urban poor – the diverse urban poor. Casey, like Cameron is locked into a set of “us and them” perspectives without, apparently, even being conscious of how narrow a perspective it really is. The ghettoes of Britain today are to be found in the growing gated communities of the privileged.  They are also to be found in the walled-in mindset of elite commentators such as Cameron and Casey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The New Model Nazis

“It is clear from your internet and other researches that your inspiration is… an admiration for Nazism, and similar anti-democratic white supremacist creeds where democracy and political persuasion are supplanted by violence towards and intimidation of opponents and those who, in whatever ways, are thought to be different, and for that reason, open to persecution. Our parents’ generation made huge sacrifices to defeat those ideas and values in the Second World War. What you did, and your admiration for those views which informed your crime betrays the sacrifices of that generation.”

Many praise Justice Wilkie’s verdict but are angry that Thomas Mair was not charged under counter-terror laws, that he has not been described as a terrorist. They point out the obvious double standards in respect of individual Muslims who have taken lives in acts inspired by their adherence to a fanatical ideology. No, he wasn’t charged under terror legislation but the Crown Prosecution Service statement said: “…his pre-meditated crimes were nothing less than acts of terrorism designed to advance his twisted ideology.”

Although a trial under counter-terrorism may have involved more exploration of the motives involved, the judge made a very clear statement of the conclusions he came to about the political and ideological motivation that was present in this case, and used that to bolster his case for the sentence he passed.

I’m probably going to say something heretical here, but while we must continue to call for completely equal treatment of perpetrators of crimes, and for completely equal respect for the victims by the police, courts and media, the battle over language may not be the most important one, and maybe we need to start to liberate ourselves from it.

The language of “terrrorist” or “extremist” is, after all, their language not ours. And one word that seemed to be ours – “radical” – often expressed “Prevent” style, by politicians and media, as “radicalised” or “radicalisation” has been twisted and given a very different meaning. In the age of “Prevent”, more and more actions including many legitimate political actions will get labelled as extreme or terrorist-inspired. We need to make it harder, not easier for our opponents to maintain that control over language and control over progressive radical movements.

Another controversial area. We will resist being told that he was a “loner” or a “lone wolf” and will want to show that he was closely connected with fascist organisations, who are responsible. That is half right and half wrong. “Lone Wolf” and “organised fascist” are not mutually exclusive categories in 2016. The Far Right was once organised into tightly controlled, centralist organisations, and para-military movements with cells that operate collectively. To some extent the cell model still operates, but the overall  model has  changed significantly, and we need to catch up.

What we face now is perhaps more dangerous – a very decentralised fascist segment of society split into myriad groupuscules, which draw on and spread similar poisonous ideas and materials, but without much coordination. They inspire rather than command. The new model encourages more “lone wolf” activity – ie activity that seems to be by one lone person. Our task is to make that transparent, not to counterpose lone wolf (mad and bad) and chain of command (organised conspiracy). What we face is a deliberately disorganised conspiracy and that, in many ways, is harder to guard against and to combat.

One further thought about this case. Many anti-racists and anti-fascists, still operate as if, ideologically, fascist groups can only focus on one enemy at a time. It encourages arguments and slogans that say they used to be against  X but now they are against Y. We underestimate the versatility of racism at our peril. Fascists today accumulate rather than replace enemies. They can attack several enemies at once, and switch main enemies quickly. They also know their history. Mair shouted “Britain First” – the name of a recent splinter group from the BNP but also the logo published under the masthead of Oswald Mosley’s newspaper in the 1930s.

A look at Thomas Mair’s bookshelves, including his neatly-organised collections of National Vanguard journals, and his eagle memorabilia, suggests that classic Nazism/antisemitism were absolutely part of his mindset inspiring the action he took this year against an individual less know for statements opposing fascism than for supporting multiculturalism, migrants and refugees.