There were also older Asians, with poor English and no skills. They kept to their rooms in the camps, lacklustre and apprehensive. Their subsequent achievements were a greater triumph for human tenacity and the extended Asian family than even the business fortunes made by some younger people. Within ten years of their arrival, all 5,600 families who had been expelled by Amin had re-established themselves. A leading member of the community said: ‘The people forty-five years plus had trouble – language, jobs, even the weather – but eventually they found work, often in department stores. They learned the ropes, got to know how business worked, and then started on their own.’
KD, who had friends in London, had bypassed the camps. At first he had not believed he would be expelled, but rapidly changed his mind after soldiers had twice demanded the contents of his safe at gunpoint. Leaving behind four businesses, including a car rental company, a travel agency – through which he issued himself and his family getaway tickets – and several petrol stations, he arrived in Britain with £1,500 and a few suitcases of clothes. He had been stripped of property worth £200,000 – enough in 1972 to buy three or four houses in Chelsea. He first worked as a manager for the Heron chain of petrol stations, clocking up overtime to make the money to start on his own, establishing contacts and learning the tricks of the trade as he went. By 1977 he was earning between £20,000 and £25,000 a year. When he did launch his own business, he worked, he told me, an 86-hour week. His profile claimed it was a 110-hour week. ‘We didn’t watch TV or have lunch breaks. By working hard, you can learn fast. If I had worked a forty-hour week, it would have taken twenty-five years to get where I am now.’
He said that a great crisis was required to bring the best out of the indigenous British. ‘Faced with disaster,’ and he cited the examples of Napoleon and the Second World War, ‘they prove they are the best.’ (I am writing this during the ‘great freeze’ of 1987, when the papers are full of British plumbers charging pensioners £160 for mending a burst pipe, and spivs demanding £1.80 for a bottle of milk and £1.00 for a loaf of bread. The Dunkirk spirit, invoked ad nauseum in the post-war years, was, whatever its original proof, somewhat less potent by 1987 than it had been in 1940. We had uncorked it like drunkards to cope with economic calamity, three-day weeks, the Argentinians, industrial anarchy and the cold.) KD’s business is selling petrol and repairing cars. He employs mainly Asians. The English, he said, finish on the dot, or before. They start washing at five o’clock for a six o’clock getaway. They do not respond to an emergency (short presumably of the Second World War) – like getting a job promised for that day finished before they go home. This is largely why, he said, Asians employ other Asians.
Why, I asked, should a capitalist, who had been a vice-chairman of the Anglo-Asian Conservative Association, now support a wife as a member of a council that had become the national symbol of the ‘loony left’? He was, he said, disillusioned with Mrs Thatcher, not because of her lukewarm enthusiasm towards the aspirations of brown-skinned Britons, but because she had not done enough for small businesses. ‘In the beginning she was all right, but after four or five years I expected something substantial to happen, but it didn’t.’ Millions of pounds, he said, are pumped into British Coal and Austin-Rover, yet there is no encouragement for the entrepreneur. It is the enterprising businessman, as in the United States, who creates new jobs. KD felt there was little scope for further expansion in Britain. ‘I am at a crossroads; I’m not satisfied.’ He might, he said, try to start a new enterprise in the States. But he added: ‘I am grateful to the British in every respect from the day I landed. I do feel at home, but in the US my progress would have been much faster.’ It was a self-assessment I was to hear from other Asians.
Asians, who outnumber West Indians two to one in Britain, are lumped together as one cohesive people in the undiscriminating native mind, yet they are as varied in their backgrounds, cultures and languages as are western Europeans. Imagine the response of the British skinheads who harass Asians if they were to be abused as ‘Eyetyes’ when they travelled abroad on their beer-sodden package tours. A banker, who first came to Britain in 1933 to study for the bar, was later a chief minister in a princely state, then a judge and diplomat in independent India before returning to this country, is abused on Underground platforms as a ‘Paki’, and told to ‘go home’. A former Conservative parliamentary candidate said: ‘Once every Indian in Britain was treated like a maharajah; now even maharajahs are treated like uneducated immigrants.’ An activist in the Federation of Bengali Youth Organizations told a woman who gratuitously called him a ‘Paki’ in an Oxford Street store: ‘You wouldn’t know a Paki, madam, if you fell over one.’
I write in Chapter 11 about outright violence and intimidation, but even rich and successful Asians, living in what are known as ‘safe’ areas, are affected by attitudes that prevent the British moving towards a genuinely multi-cultural society. To the British psyche, fashioned by years of empire, black or brown means inferior. A well-educated Bengali said: ‘A lot of people still expect you to speak with a Peter Sellers accent, and stare in amazement when you don’t. Eventually they accept you, you’re OK. It is just the “others”. You’re an exception to the stereotype, but the stereotype never gets altered.’
I had first read KD’s story in a tabloid newspaper, under the headline ‘YOU CAN STILL MAKE A MILLION FROM NOTHING!’ and written, predictably, by an Asian journalist. Such reporting (and use of coloured reporters to do it) is part of the stereotyping: it is shorthand for ‘anyone who really tries can make it in British society, so don’t start whingeing about prejudice and unequal opportunity’. It is also part of a patronizing attitude: haven’t they done wonderfully well? But the East African and other successful Asians are exceptional. Brown and black British as a whole are twice as likely to be unemployed as white, and those whose families came from Pakistan and Bangladesh are three times as likely. In 1985, 16 per cent of white young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four were out of work, while the figure for those of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin was 48 per cent. Of the ethnic groups, the Indians were the most successful, with 24 per cent of their young people without jobs, yet even this figure was half as many again as whites. The survey that produced these statistics showed there were 2,400,000 members of ethnic minorities in Britain – 4·4 per cent of the population. Asians, accounting for over one million, formed by far the largest group.
The reality of the problems facing ethnic minorities is illustrated by the slow progress made by the Vietnamese ‘boat people’. A Home Office research group reported: ‘It is difficult to identify any other refugee group arriving in any other Western country which has fared as badly.’ While the Vietnamese elsewhere have prospered far beyond expectations, many in Britain live isolated, frightened lives – attacked even in Shropshire – without jobs, English or hope. Some families live in bed-and-breakfast hotels, a way of life that threatens the prospects for children born here. The only skill they have acquired after years in Britain is to operate the social-security system. Physics teachers, who ‘topped up’ with British qualifications, are doing manual jobs.
In America, Asians are already outperforming whites in schools and universities – 94 per cent of children whose families come from the Indian sub-continent graduate from high school, compared to 87 per cent of whites. Other Asian groups – Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese – have comparable success rates. Ivy League universities are so alarmed by the imbalance caused by Asian achievements – especially in certain maths and science courses – that they appear to discriminate in favour of other groups. Siblings of Asians who came to Britain tend to do better in the United States. (Gujeratis have been concentrating on the hotel trade: the Washington Post ran a business-page story under the headline ‘MOTELS, HOTELS AND PATELS’.)
In Britain the Coronary Prevention Group (CPG) reported in 1986 that Asians had a higher rate of heart disease than the national average, which is itself one of the highest in the worl
d. Racism, low incomes, poor housing, unemployment and poor working conditions all take their toll. For most new immigrants, moving to Britain was as stressful as bereavement. They were isolated and helpless in the face of language problems and hostility or, at best, indifference from the host community. The CPG concluded there was ‘urgent need’ for research into the effects of discrimination on the health of Asians. This is the adverse context in which the success of men like KD Patel must be judged. It was easy, sitting in comfortable and substantial homes in Wembley or Harrow, to forget what odds Asians face in Britain.
G.S. Bakshi, a Sikh from the Punjab, lives in a mock-Tudor home with a small swimming pool and a large rabbit hutch in the garden. Across open fields one can see Harrow School from his lead-paned front windows. At his side lay a portable car phone, brought in from his Mercedes: normally at that time he would have been on the road pursuing his property-development business. A graduate in political science, economics and English from Punjab University, he arrived in Britain in 1965 at the age of twenty-seven. He had intended continuing his education, but first had to earn a living. He quickly discovered that his Indian degree was useless. ‘I was hardly treated as a school-leaver.’ He worked first in a Birmingham factory, and then in the Post Office, where, through massive overtime, he saved enough to buy his first shop. This was run by his wife, who had joined him in 1967, while he continued as a postman. The only white-collar job he was offered, as a clerk in the DHSS, paid less than the Post Office.
Looking back, Mr Bakshi smiled at the memory of attitudes that had angered him then, like that of the fellow postman who had left school at fifteen and who wondered aloud whether Mr Bakshi – a graduate – had ever worn shoes before he came to Britain; and like that of the colleague who told him that it was all right for a white man to swear at a brown one, but not for the brown to swear back. But prejudice was Mr Bakshi’s springboard. Had his degree been recognized, he would probably be working his way though the middle-management ranks of a large company instead of making a great deal more money running his own small one. For many, the corner shop is an escape from both the discrimination of the British workplace – in 1987 British Telecom were ordered to pay £1,500 compensation to three Asians, who had been abused by their superior as ‘lazy Pakis’, ‘useless Pakis’, and as ‘coolieboys who should be in a gas chamber’ – and the restraint on earnings imposed by unions. If you work for yourself, the harder you work, the better you do. Thirty-seven per cent of Asian small shopkeepers have degrees, which is a telling measure of how inhospitable even educated Asians find the British commercial environment.
Mr Bakshi’s analysis of why white Britons are not as entrepreneurial as some brown Britons drew two themes together. Prejudice against coloured people and lack of enterprise were, he believed, intricately linked in the conditioning of the British working class. At home, in the days of empire, they were treated as ‘white coolies’, much as black natives in the colonies. They were kept ignorant, not encouraged to be either constructive or creative, trapped by economic necessity. What the factory owners required were human machines who would go to the factory in the morning and be content with the pub in the evening. A class was created which was almost without initiative.
But in the human pecking order there was still one inferior being – the coloured man. Mr Bakshi said: ‘The English suffer from a superiority complex – in working class, middle class and upper class – a belief that the British are the superior nation in the world. The media brainwash them. They will eventually have to come to their senses and realize that the Raj is over, and with it British domination in the world.’ The empire, he said, also fatally encouraged industrial inefficiency in Britain. ‘Forty years ago it didn’t matter what the cost was. Goods could be dumped on the colonies. Now Britain is overmanned and undermodernized,’ said Mr Bakshi. He argued that the British will to work is sapped by the welfare state, though he was also critical of Mrs Thatcher, whose monetarism, he felt, had been too radical. She should, he said, have diverted funds used to support the unemployed in order to modernize industry.
The self-made Asians I met all had remarkable stories of fortitude and determination to tell. Seen from their perspective, their sometimes punitive attitudes towards the unemployed – very different from those of the liberal English for whom life has been tolerably easy – are at least understandable. Ram Bedi, a Hindu, born in what is now Pakistan, had as a teenager to flee his home in his pyjamas at the time of Partition. He travelled a thousand miles across India to a state where he didn’t speak the language to get a job as a railway clerk. Eventually, with three pounds in his pocket, he went to join relatives in Northern Ireland, where he sold clothes from a van to remote farmers. Later he opened a wholesale warehouse in Cookstown, working from 8.00 a.m. to 11.00 p.m. Three times his premises were damaged by IRA bombs. In 1978, he prudently retreated to England, and started a business manufacturing wire hangers for dry-cleaners. When I met him, his small company was producing sixty million hangers a year, exporting almost half, and had an annual turnover of nearly one million pounds: he was a Fellow of the Institute of Directors, lived in a large house overlooking Windsor Castle, drove a Mercedes with a personalized number plate, and was the first Asian president of the Slough Rotarians. He took me to the weekly Rotary Club luncheon, proudly wearing the chain of office that bore the names of fifty-four past presidents.
As we drove to lunch, he showed me a large clothes shop run by Asians, who had been working out of their homes five years before. There is no mystery about the Asian success: it is achieved by hard work, sustained by strong families. Ram Bedi employs ten people and is still expanding. An energetic man, with gold-rimmed glasses, who was going grey at the temples, he tapped the table from time to time, the gesture of a man who gets things done. He had invited me to lunch on the very day I rang, a contrast to the delaying layers of public relations that so often cocoon large firms – ‘frightfully busy time of year, old boy. Let’s see. How about early, no, better make that later, next month. After we’ve had a chat perhaps we could pop you in to see the chairman. He might be able to squeeze in half an hour.’ The chairman is usually delighted to see one, and the problem is getting away.
‘I want,’ said Mr Bedi, ‘willing people who will work, not take Saturdays off. They need to want to make money and be happy. I don’t mind working long hours. I couldn’t stop at five o’clock and sit in the pub. If I had no job, I’d clean windows – you can make £400 a week, or £200 a week as a gardener. It’s up to the people.’ He amused leading local business people by rounding on Nigel Lawson when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Lawson visited a local lunch club. ‘I told him “there is so much unemployment, yet I can’t get people for my factory. You pay them fifty to sixty pounds a week, so they are not interested in jobs at seventy-five pounds. They have no incentive. They should be sent to us first before they get the dole.” People should be protected, but they should have some incentive to work.’
Ramniklal Solanki came to Britain from India in 1964 as correspondent for an Indian group of papers. Shortly afterwards, because of an Indian currency crisis, his salary was frozen in India, and he was forced to take a job as an assistant timekeeper at an engineering firm at twelve pounds a week. The then Indian High Commissioner suggested he should start a paper for the growing Gujerati community. There were no Gujerati typesetting machines, so Mr Solanki wrote the paper by hand. On Friday nights he would board a long-distance coach for a provincial city, and, over the weekend, furnished with a list of local Gujeratis, would call door-to-door selling subscriptions. The initial circulation was 1,500. His wife by this time had arrived in England, and supported them both on a nine-pounds-a-week job.
The paper received a significant boost with the arrival of the Ugandan Asians, most of whom were Gujeratis. Mr Solanki distributed it free in the resettlement camps. ‘People needed advice, how to live in this country, what to do, even – for those from remote villages – how to use toilets and
baths.’ Today that paper – Garavi Gujarat (‘Pride of Gujerat’) – sells 41,000 copies weekly. In 1985 Mr Solanki launched a sister magazine, Asian Trader, aimed at the burgeoning Asian business community: ‘Our people were going into business and wanted advice,’ he said. An Economist Intelligence Unit report in 1986 found that the decline in independent grocers had been halted by Asian shopkeepers, who by then comprised half the nation’s total. In London the figure was 70 per cent.
Mr Solanki employs thirty-five people, including ten journalists, operates his papers from his own plant off the Blackfriars Road in south London, and is in Who’s Who. He is a short, rotund man, who slips in and out of his cluttered office with bewildering frequency, introducing a visitor to other members of his busy newspaper community – many of whom belong to his family. His wife, clad in a sari, does layouts; one son, Kalpesh, sells advertising space (from an office even more cluttered than his father’s, in which pride of place belonged to a trouser press, on which rested a cake of soap and a shoehorn); and a second son, Shailesh, on vacation from University College London, was writing for Asian Trader.
The Solankis exemplified the strength of the Asian family unit, the cornerstone of Asian success in Britain. West Indians, with their high number of single-parent families, often don’t have sufficient support to see them through the inevitable crises of immigrant life. Mr Solanki had involved in his business, or helped, not just his immediate family, but his father, three brothers and two sisters. Kalpesh had read law at university and been called to the bar: Shailesh was reading economics and wanted to be a journalist. The business, they said, was in the blood: they had learned it at their father’s knee.
When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain Page 34
