The
Handsworth riots could be the prelude to deeper segregation,
something Tony Blair is abetting
When I was a reporter on the Birmingham
Post & Mail, I could guess anyone's politics by
how they described the looting and murder that overwhelmed
Handsworth in September 1985. If they talked about the
'Handsworth riots', I knew they were conservatives who
had seen criminals going berserk after the police arrested
local dope traders. Thugs of all creeds and colours
had joined the fun. It was a yobs' orgy, not a political
protest. As I'd ducked and dived to escape machete-wielding
rioters, I took the point. When a couple cornered me
and demanded my money, I was saved only by the honest
conviction of my junior reporter's cry: 'But, but, I
don't have any money!'
On the other hand, people who talked
of the 'Handsworth rebellion' were clearly from the
left. Before they became respectable, Herman Ouseley
and Keith Vaz were fire-spouting revolutionaries who
declared in a report for the old West Midlands County
Council that the word 'riot' didn't begin to describe
what had happened in Handsworth. 'The never-employed
black under-class, interned in the workless gulags of
Britain' had risen up against their oppressors, they
insisted. Birmingham was seeing 'violent resistance'
by blacks who believed they were being forced to live
under 'a form of apartheid'.
The charred bodies of two Asians were
found in the wreckage of the Lozells Road post office,
but Vaz and his colleagues warned that you were falling
for the ruling class's old 'divide and rule tactic'
if you said there were divisions between ethnic minorities.
For all the hyperbole, I had sympathy
for them as well. In Brixton, Tottenham and Handsworth,
the classic riot of the period began after a real or
rumoured assault on a black woman by the police. The
rioters were poor young men without a future. To say
the violence had nothing to do with racism and the mass
destruction of manufacturing jobs in Margaret Thatcher's
first recession was wishful thinking or Tory propaganda.
Twenty years on, I am back on the Lozells
Road after another riot. Nothing has changed, but everything
is different. The red-brick terrace houses are as pokey
and dilapidated as ever. It remains a place where you
can catch the smell of disappointment; a place where
people stay because they've nowhere else to go.
Yet little else was familiar. The arguments
of the Eighties about why young men took to the streets
felt antique and irrelevant. Beyond repeating the platitude
that workers with good jobs tend to be law-abiding,
you couldn't pretend the 2005 riot was a protest against
unemployment. The economic and law enforcement policies
of official society - 'white society', to stretch a
point - had nothing to do with the violence. Racism
was on display, but not between blacks and whites. So
were religious tensions, which I'd never given a second's
thought in 1985.
What started the riot was not a bungled
police round-up of drug dealers, but a racist rumour
which swept black Birmingham. Everyone knew someone
who could swear that an Asian shopkeeper had locked
up a 14-year-old black girl he had caught shoplifting
and then raped her with the help of his friends. The
police have been investigating for a week. They haven't
found the girl or the crime scene or the rapists. Unless
that changes, and my guess is it won't, the rumour will
be a grotesque libel that painted Asian shopkeepers
as the bestial abusers of feminine innocence.
Warren G spread it on his show on a
pirate station. Mr G isn't a standard DJ. He's a religious
man and left the studio for a meeting about the rape
at the New Testament Church of God. It stands on the
other side of Lozells Road from Handsworth's mosque
and it was hard to resist the illusion that they were
glaring at each other like two fighters after a brawl.
The meeting ended and the riots began.
Gangs hit each other and passers-by with petrol bombs
and guns. One police officer and 35 civilians were injured.
An Asian gang murdered Isiah Young-Sam, a 23-year-old
black man, who, by a stroke of capricious fortune, was
a school friend of Warren G.
As striking as the violence were the
wild statements on the radio and in internet chatrooms.
There was plenty of talk of Asian racism, and all sides
accepted that there are racist Asians as there are racist
blacks, whites and whatever. Ligali, a black African
pressure group, went further and damned everyone. It
called for a boycott of Asian shops. Not of the shop
where the crime took place - no one knew where it was
or if it existed - but of all Asian shops. Pickled Politics,
a website run by a sharp team of Asian writers, picked
up an email which was doing the rounds.
Tellingly, it, too, was about Asian
shopkeepers. When I knew Handsworth, there were black
traders. But while many Hindu, Sikh and Muslim families
have followed the classic immigrant path of sticking
together and building a business, many blacks have fallen
behind. The emailer blamed a conspiracy. Asians succeeded
in taking over hairdressers for black women by forcing
them 'to buckle under unreasonable' competition. 'Black
people need to realise that they are been shitted on
by Indians who now supply them with the very food they
eat, their cosmetics and health care.'
Theodore Dalrymple, the pseudonym of
a Birmingham doctor and writer, noted recently in the
Telegraph that the shopkeepers were facing a modern
variant of European (and now Middle Eastern) anti-semitism.
Once, white Christians accused Jewish traders of kidnapping
their children and draining their blood; now, black
Christians accuse Asian traders of kidnapping their
girls and raping them.
These prejudices are incredibly powerful
because they combine race hatred of the alien, class
hatred of the prosperous and religious hatred of the
infidel.
In World on Fire, published two years
ago and which deserved far more attention than it received,
Amy Chua showed how globalisation had created an explosion
of racism in the anti-semitic tradition. The new wave
of capitalism had raised the living standards of ordinary
people by a little and the rich by a lot, her argument
ran. The supporters of free markets and democracy thought
everyone was benefiting and hadn't noticed that their
ideas helped fuel resentments in those countries where
ethnic minorities dominated business.
Sectarian leaders from the Slobodan
Milosevic mould were exploiting the double antipathy
of race and class. Across the planet, you heard the
same demonic accusations of blood-sucking, corruption
and secret influence about the Chinese business class
in south east Asia, the white farmers in Zimbabwe and
South Africa, the Spanish 'whites' in Latin America,
the Jews in Russia, the Ibo in Nigeria, the Croats in
Milosevic's Yugoslavia and the Americans everywhere.
I said earlier that the 1985 Handsworth
riots had nothing to do with government. That was true
in all respects but one. With unforgivable recklessness,
our leaders aren't diminishing the importance of race,
but fuelling sectarianism.
In Handsworth, blacks complained that
Asians were doing too well from the government's SRB6
grants programme. The naive might imagine that the job
of government is to promote common citizenship. Yet
in Birmingham, you see projects for the black unemployed,
not all the unemployed; for disadvantaged Asians or
Indians or Muslims, not all the disadvantaged. Across
the country, wherever the BNP makes gains, you can guarantee
it has been the beneficiary of white anger at grants
and services dispensed on communalist lines.
As I'm sure you know, state-sponsored
sectarianism is about to take off. We're to have religions
redefined as races, which they're not, and opposition
to religion redefined as race hatred, which it isn't.
Meanwhile, the only coherent part of Tony Blair's education
white paper is his promise to build faith schools that
will segregate children and their parents by religion
and race and, indeed, class in the case of top-end church
schools.
I can see no more urgent task than
taking the fight to those on the right and the left
who are busily piling bricks on ghetto walls. If they're
not stopped, I don't like to think what Handsworth or
the rest of the country will be like in 20 years.
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