State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  It is ironic, therefore, that foreign observers, especially in Ireland or the United States, often imagined that the average Briton dreamed of Belfast’s pebble-dashed council estates with misty eyes and a thumping heart. In fact, as early as February 1971 the government was worried that the public was ‘beginning actively to resent the situation’, and that ‘many people would favour abandoning the Province to its fate’. Although polls had originally shown strong support for Britain’s military intervention, they soon swung around: by 1974, just 32 per cent favoured keeping the troops in Ulster, while 59 per cent thought the government should bring them home – although few people felt strongly enough to do anything about it. Far from taking sides, most people regarded unionists and nationalists alike with baffled horror. By 1973, 44 per cent agreed that the people of Northern Ireland were intolerant, while only 20 per cent thought them hard-working and just 14 per cent described them as friendly. ‘I hate Bernadette Devlin as much as I hate the Revd. Ian Paisley, if anything worse,’ recorded the diarist James Lees-Milne, a good barometer of conservative opinion, in January 1971. And even atrocities on the mainland provoked not a great wave of sympathy for unionism, but a surge of contempt for all Northern Ireland’s combatants, whether loyalist or republican. ‘I loathe and detest the miserable bastards … savage murderous thugs,’ wrote Lord Arran in the Evening Standard in October 1974. ‘May the Irish, all of them, rot in hell.’37

  But the truth was that many of them were there already. In the aftermath of internment, Northern Ireland sank into the bloodiest period in its history, an orgy of bombings and shootings in which even the most terrible atrocities were almost overlooked amid the carnage. By now, any remaining trust between the rival communities had completely broken down. As in so many sectarian conflicts, each side looked on the other with horror and fear, arming itself in case its enemy struck first. By September, soldiers, paramilitaries and civilians were dying almost every day in shooting incidents and bomb attacks, and at the end of the month the conflict reached a new low when the Provisional IRA detonated a 100-pound bomb in the Four Step Inn on the Shankill Road. It was half-past-ten at night; the lounge was full of local residents watching television, and when the bar’s roof collapsed, twenty-seven were badly injured and two were killed. One of the dead men, Alexander Andrews, was so badly disfigured by shattering glass that his son could only identify him by his shoes. It was a naked sectarian attack, brutal and cold-blooded, and it unleashed a cycle of violence that seemed likely to consume the city itself.

  On 4 December, the UVF took their revenge by planting a 50-pound bomb in McGurk’s Bar in the city centre, a sleepy, Catholic-owned pub with no republican connections, in which old men liked to chat about the horses over a pint. Patrick McGurk himself, who was serving behind the bar when the bomb went off, miraculously survived the explosion; when he came to, he was told that his wife and daughter were among the fifteen people killed. It was a ghastly, terrible scene, the stuff of some sick nightmare, but the blood feud was not over yet. Exactly one week later, the IRA bombed the Balmoral Furnishing Company on the Shankill Road. It was a busy, bustling pre-Christmas Saturday, and the street was packed with shoppers. Two men were killed; so were two infants, aged just 1 and 2. ‘Women were crying. Men were trying to dig out the rubble,’ one man said later. ‘One person was crying beside you and the next person was shouting “Bastards” and things like that. I didn’t actually see the babies’ bodies as they had them wrapped in sheets, but the blood was just coming right through them. They were just like lumps of meat, you know, small lumps of meat.’ The next day, he walked along to a local UDA meeting and announced that he wanted to volunteer. He was prepared to do ‘whatever it took to defend the people of my area’, he said. And so it went on. This was the United Kingdom in December 1971.38

  7

  Love Thy Neighbour

  The stink of the blacks made him sick. He hated spades – wished they’d wash more often or get the hell back where they came from. This was his London – not somewhere for London Transport’s African troops to live.

  – Richard Allen, Skinhead (1970)

  AGGRO BRITAIN: ‘Mindless Violence’ of the Bully Boys Worries Top Policeman

  – Daily Mirror, 14 June 1973

  By the beginning of the 1970s, the British Empire had been consigned to history. As one colonial possession after another had declared independence during the 1950s and 1960s, so the swathes of imperial pink that had once covered maps in classrooms across the country had vanished. When Edward Heath flew to Singapore for the first Commonwealth Conference in January 1971, it was as the chief executive of a rusting industrial conglomerate, once a market leader but left now with just a handful of tiny, scattered subsidiaries: Hong Kong, the Seychelles, St Vincent, the Falkland Islands. Heath could not even console himself that Britain had left a noble legacy, for the record of the newly independent countries, from the permanent tension between India and Pakistan to the civil war in Nigeria, from the ethnic bloodletting in Cyprus to the reactionary defiance of Rhodesia, made for shameful reading. Only two years before, Kenya had become a one-party state, while Uganda’s President Milton Obote, once a hero of the struggle for independence, now ruled as a virtual dictator, imprisoning and torturing anyone who dared criticize him. And what was even worse from a British point of view was that the new post-colonial leaders seemed to have no respect for their old imperial masters, no sense of obligation or community. For when Heath arrived in Singapore, it was to an atmosphere of bitterness and recrimination, with African leaders queuing up to denounce his policy of selling arms to South Africa in return for the use of the Simonstown naval base. And when he faced his severest critics – Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Uganda’s Obote – he found it hard to keep his patience. ‘I wonder how many of you’, he finally snapped, ‘will be allowed to return to your own countries after this conference?’1

  At the time it sounded like a typical example of Heath’s absurd rudeness. In fact, it turned out to be a remarkably accurate prediction, for a week later Milton Obote was on his way home from Singapore when the news broke that he had been toppled by a military coup. After Obote’s flagrant corruption, his intolerance of dissent and his threats to British commercial interests in Uganda, his replacement seemed like a breath of fresh air. All political prisoners, announced Major General Idi Amin, would soon be released, while he hoped to hold ‘free and fair’ civilian elections as soon as possible. And since General Amin had a reputation of being pro-British, noted The Times, his rise to power was greeted ‘with ill-concealed relief in Whitehall’. As a young man he had not only been the Ugandan light heavyweight boxing champion, he had been a warrant officer in the King’s African Rifles, holding the highest rank possible for a black African, and in 1961 had been one of the first two Ugandans given a Queen’s Commission. He had even learned to play rugby, being selected as a reserve forward for the East Africa XV to face the touring British Lions in 1955. The story goes that his Scottish officers used to hit him on the head with a hammer to inspire him before big games: perhaps that explains why he rarely seemed the sharpest of intellects. ‘Idi Amin is a splendid type and a good player,’ one officer reported, ‘but virtually bone from the neck up, and needs things explained in words of one letter.’ By January 1971, however, that was precisely what Uganda needed – or so most British observers thought. Amin was ‘not a man of intellect or political finesse’, admitted the Guardian, ‘but [one] with great ability at man-to-man straight talking with ordinary soldiers’. He would be ‘a welcome contrast to other African leaders and a staunch friend to Britain’, announced the Telegraph. ‘Good luck to General Amin.’2

  It did not take long for the Telegraph to realize its mistake. Within months of the coup, it was clear that Amin had no intention of surrendering power to a civilian administration, and clear too that beneath the blustering, jovial exterior was a thoroughly aggressive, cunning and unscrupulous political operator. To Punch’s
columnist Alan Coren, who regularly parodied Amin’s clumsy ignorance, his grandiose pretensions and his thick African accent, he seemed merely a ‘buffoon’. But the Ugandans imprisoned and murdered under his increasingly paranoid regime were not laughing. And neither were the 60,000 Asians – most of them originally from Gujarat in India – who had come to Uganda during the days of the British Empire, working as clerical staff, bankers and tailors.

  Racial tensions had been growing since Ugandan independence, exacerbated by the fact that the Asians were generally well educated, affluent and socially exclusive, keeping themselves apart from their black African neighbours. ‘We were the visible middle class,’ recalled the columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. ‘We didn’t much care for independence when it came in 1962, and we did what was necessary – bribes, public demonstrations of support for this minister or that – anything that could keep us living enchanted lives in a natural paradise.’ Between the two communities was a thick wall of racial tension: when she played Juliet in a school production alongside a black African Romeo, her own father refused to speak to her for three years. And even before Amin took power, the temperature was rising. Among the Asians, rumours spread that Africans were raping their daughters; among the black Ugandans, there were stories that the ‘greedy’ Asians were hogging all the best jobs, were sending money overseas, were ‘cheating, conspiring and plotting’ to undermine the state. They were the easiest of targets; too easy for Idi Amin to resist. ‘I want the economy to be in the hands of Ugandan citizens, especially black Ugandans,’ he told a military assembly on 4 August 1972. Since the Asians were ‘sabotaging the economy of the country’, all those with British passports should pack their bags. They had ninety days to leave.3

  For Heath and his ministers, Amin’s bombshell left them facing a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, they recognized that Britain had a moral obligation to accept the Asians, not merely because they faced persecution and expulsion, but because an estimated 57,000 of them held British passports. As the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, reminded his colleagues four days after Amin’s announcement, ‘we could not disclaim responsibility for British passport holders even if we so wished’; in any case, the impact on Britain’s reputation overseas would be catastrophic. But public opinion within Britain was a very different matter. Like most of his ministers, Heath had always been determinedly moderate on questions of race and immigration; indeed, his dogged refusal to play the race card and his decision to sack Enoch Powell for rocking the boat on immigration had upset many grass-roots Tories in the last years of the 1960s. But his position in the election campaign of 1970 had been clear. Public opinion overwhelmingly demanded an end to mass immigration, so an end must be made. In October 1971, therefore, the government had passed a landmark Immigration Act bringing up the drawbridge. From now on, only so-called Commonwealth ‘patrials’ with a parent or grandparent born in the United Kingdom (which meant they were likely to be white) had the right to settle in Britain; all other Commonwealth citizens had to apply for work permits, just like everybody else. Some observers detected a hint of racism in the distinction between ‘patrials’ and the rest; indeed, Reginald Maudling told his colleagues that since assimilation was ‘all but impossible’ for Asians, immigration ought to be limited to people from a ‘cultural background fairly akin to our own’. But Heath’s ministers were, by and large, a liberal-minded lot, and certainly far more tolerant than the majority of the population. They closed the door to mass immigration not because they were racist reactionaries, but because public opinion – as manifested in one poll after another – demanded it. The Act worked and the furore died down – until Idi Amin reignited it.4

  At first, even as terrified Ugandan Asians were desperately calling friends and relatives in Britain to beg for help, the government tried to play for time. On 12 August, Heath sent his urbane European troubleshooter, Geoffrey Rippon, to Kampala to persuade Amin to change his mind or, at the very least, to extend his deadline. Unfortunately the former rugby forward made it clear that he would not yield an inch of ground. ‘I have already made up my mind. Finished!’ Amin melodramatically told the press corps. ‘This is British imperialism. I am not going to listen to imperialist advice that we should continue to have foreigners controlling the economy.’ What was more, once Rippon had gone home, the Ugandan president increased the stakes by withdrawing his promised exemption for selected Asian professionals. ‘They could not serve the country with a good spirit after the departure of other Asians,’ he explained. And with Amin standing firm, the British government had no real choice. ‘We will accept our responsibilities,’ Rippon announced. ‘If people are expelled and they are United Kingdom passport holders, then however unreasonable that expulsion may be, and however inhumane and unjust the conditions in which it is brought about, we have to accept the responsibility … I don’t think anyone in a situation like this can stand aside and say, “Oh, it’s no concern of ours.” ’ Other senior Conservatives took a similar view. It was a question of ‘honour and decency’, said Reginald Maudling, now exiled to the back benches. ‘If homes elsewhere in the world cannot be found for them,’ agreed Sir Alec Douglas-Home, ‘we must take these unlucky people in.’5

  Since the Labour leadership agreed that Heath had no choice but to accept the refugees, the Ugandan crisis never became a partisan issue. Almost all senior politicians, in fact, agreed with The Times that even though Britain had recently accepted immigrants ‘at a faster rate than most similar communities would find tolerable … the ultimate responsibility for British citizens lies with Britain’. But it was an academic anthropologist, Nicholas David, who put it best in a letter to the paper the next day. The Ugandan Asians, he pointed out, were ‘our colonial legacy’, and it was the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan that had given them their British passports. To discriminate between different colours of passport holders would be to follow the examples of Nazi Germany and South Africa. ‘These islands are indeed overpopulated, reason enough to discourage all immigration,’ he concluded, ‘but unless we are to forsake what we say we stand for, we cannot refuse entry to fellow subjects of the Queen who have no other country of their own.’

  And yet Dr David, like the editor of The Times and like Heath himself, was in the minority. In the tabloids there was talk of a ‘deluge’ of immigrants, a ‘flood’ of newcomers that would put Britain on ‘panic stations’. In cities with already large Asian populations, which were bound to attract considerable numbers of refugees, there were howls of protest from local councillors. ‘We are virtually full up,’ insisted the Labour leader of Leicester City Council, encouraging residents to send letters of complaint to the government. By early September, the council had even taken out an advertisement in the Uganda Argus imploring Asians not to come to Leicester, while Bolton Council collected thousands of signatures to a petition demanding that they stay out of Bolton, too. And day after day, letters pages burned with the fury of correspondents worried that their country was about to be overrun, their homes, jobs and opportunities threatened by tens of thousands of foreigners who, through a fluke of history, happened to have British passports. ‘I have every sympathy with these unfortunate Asians, some of whom I have counted as friends for many years,’ wrote the former Conservative MP Sir John Fletcher-Cooke (whose friends must have been hastily revising their social diaries). ‘But both they and the British Government failed to realize that peoples of one culture or background will never willingly share power, political or economic, with those of another culture.’ And for another Times reader, Katherine Fussell, who called herself ‘an ordinary British subject and housewife’, the question was one of ‘hard everyday facts’:

  The Clydeside shipyard workers have fought extremely hard for their daily bread, the dockers are in a struggle for theirs, the transport workers are wondering what will happen to some of their jobs, at the Norwich shoe factory women staged a stop-in to save theirs. Not all these fights are successful in these times of much unem
ployment.

  Mines have been shut down, and we hear of men in all walks of life offered redundancies in place of their work. White and black citizens of this country cannot buy or rent a house easily. Many young folk cannot get married because of the housing problem or if they do they live with in-laws and many marriages fail. Young school leavers, white and black, are on the streets with nothing to think about or do, they draw the dole! The future is bleak indeed.

  This situation should not be aggravated by a large influx from any country. These people if allowed in must be housed, fed and found work. Schools must be found to take the children. If they are given national assistance they will strain the economy already at breaking point … Let the Government make it clear to these people from any country wanting to come to us, that the immigration quota remains and they must wait their turn when they will be more than welcome.6

  For some people, however, the Ugandan Asian crisis was a godsend. For the right-wing Monday Club, which had been set up to oppose decolonization in the 1960s, it was an opportunity to attract new supporters and stoke up opposition to Heath within the Conservative Party. As early as 7 August it had issued a statement insisting that the ‘so-called British Asians are no more and no less British than any Indian in the bazaars of Bombay’. They had ‘no connexion with Britain either by blood or residence’, explained the Buckinghamshire South MP Ronald Bell, and should ‘go back to their own country’, meaning India (a country that had already ruled out accepting large numbers). And although there was no chance that the Tory leadership would take a blind bit of notice of the Monday Club’s pronouncements, its members could console themselves that Britain’s best-known politician agreed with them. ‘All the talk of “British passports” is spoof,’ Enoch Powell told a Conservative lunch in Wolverhampton on 14 August. The passports, he explained with his characteristically fierce logic, gave no ‘entitlement to enter this country’ and implied ‘no connexion with the United Kingdom itself’, and while the government might feel morally obliged to accept an ‘infinitesimal’ share of the refugees, it had no obligation to take them all.7