State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  These voters, thousands of them, were people who had been almost forgotten amid all the media excitement about the pace of change in the Swinging Sixties, people who felt betrayed by the major parties and were horrified at the rising crime figures, the transformation of the working-class urban landscape and the influx of so many newcomers with strange habits and coloured skin. They were people like Barry Watts, a teenager from an Irish family who moved from a dilapidated back-street terraced house to one of north London’s roughest council estates in 1970, and later became a keen advocate for the National Front. ‘You see them natives on TV, dancing around in the jungle,’ Barry said scornfully. ‘I says, we’ve got ’em living next door to us. We don’t like that. Their music, the food, the smell, they’re different. Their whole attitude to life is different to ours. You got to put a gas mask on to get past their door.’

  As Barry Watts’s words suggested, race was at the very core of the National Front’s appeal. Yet this was not the whole story. Although plenty of people were prejudiced in the early 1970s, most did not vote for the National Front, while not all National Front supporters thought in terms of nothing but race. ‘We’re for the old folks, we’re for them,’ Barry earnestly insisted. ‘We think they should get a better deal. And the kiddies, somewhere for them to play. Better schools.’ In other circumstances, a boy from his background might have become a Labour activist. But he did not think much of Harold Wilson’s Labour Party. ‘They are out to help the rich, they are all for the people with the money,’ he said. This was a common theme among the National Front’s sympathizers, reflecting the fact that not only were Labour MPs increasingly well educated and middle-class, but big-city constituency parties were being taken over by people who read the Guardian rather than the Daily Mirror. At a time when their jobs were disappearing, their incomes had stagnated and their values were being dismissed as anachronistic, the urban white working classes felt abandoned by the ‘wine and cheese set with their posh accents and big words’, said a gruff local councillor who represented Barry’s north London estate. He denied being a ‘racialist’ himself, praising the midweek football league (‘the only thing that works in this borough’)for integrating ‘dozens of black kids, and Greeks, and Turks’. But he had no time for his council colleagues or the community workers, all ‘long hair and plimsolls’, who ‘come here and think they can tell you how to live’. ‘These people fall over backwards to do anything for black people,’ he said contemptuously. ‘They give money to squatters, Bangladeshis, the lot.’48

  For many of the National Front’s supporters, therefore, their aggressive feelings about race and immigration were tightly, almost indistinguishably bound up with all sorts of other resentments, from their suspicion of middle-class do-gooders to their fury at the destruction of their old neighbourhoods. Indeed, a survey of National Front supporters in Harlesden at the end of the 1970s found that its appeal was grounded less in abstract ideas of racial superiority than in rather more mundane, bread-and-butter concerns – jobs, housing, crime, obscenity – that had little to do with immigration itself. But for many of these people, racism made an ideal prism through which to view the world, partly because it tapped into the latent prejudice with which many people had grown up. As the journalist Martin Walker explained in 1974, ‘unemployment was explained as black workers taking British jobs; bad housing as blacks jumping the council house queue; clogged health and social services were the fault of diseased immigrants taking the place of deserving Britons; bad schools were the cause of illiterate black kids, and crime was their fault too’. It was, Walker thought, a ‘potent and poisonous combination’, not least because ‘the bad schools, the bad housing and the unemployment’ were most visible in precisely those ‘run-down, inner-city areas with poor housing in which immigrants have tended to congregate’.

  So it was that the National Front began to gather support in those areas that had been partially cleared in the slum clearances of the 1950s and 1960s, landscapes where traditional working-class communities had been uprooted and rehoused in grey, grim tower blocks. It appealed to teenagers who saw no future after school and to manual workers frightened for their jobs; to shopkeepers resentful of their Asian competitors and to small self-employed businessmen worried about inflation; to Second World War veterans who felt cheated and abandoned and to teenage football fans addicted to the camaraderie of the terraces. To all of their grievances it offered a deceptively simple answer: what had happened to working-class Britain since the war was the fault of the newcomers and the stuck-up Oxford-educated politicians who mollycoddled them. ‘Why do I fight for the National Front?’ one man asked rhetorically:

  Why, because I don’t want parts of my country to become no-go areas, where I feel I can’t walk without the risk of being knifed or mugged. I don’t want to be with black people. I don’t want a multi-racial country. Why should I? I’ve got nothing in common with them … why should I be forced to live with them? I want to be able to go into a pub, I want to be able to go to work without seeing a black face. The National Front is saying the sort of things I want to hear … I want to be just with our own. I don’t want to live in a system that falls over itself to favour blacks. If there’s anything going in this country, I want it for myself. We’ve suffered enough in the past, and now it’s our turn. We’ve had one flabby government after another saying, ‘We’ve got to learn to live together.’ Well, why? They don’t have to live with them, killing goats, wailing at dusk and fasting and being a nuisance.49

  In some ways it is remarkable that the far right did not make deeper inroads into decaying working-class areas in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If it had been better organized, more disciplined and more united, or had benefited from the leadership of an articulate and credible politician, it might have made a handsome profit from the slow decline of Labour support and the dying agonies of the Heath government. Fortunately, the leaders of the various far-right factions were a very bizarre and unsavoury bunch, whose rhetorical extremism repelled far more people than it attracted and who seemed never happier than when engaged in bafflingly obscure internal feuds. Tiny fringe groups like Self-Help and the British League of Rights, which might perhaps have picked up disaffected Conservative voters, undermined their own appeal by banging on about Zionist conspiracies, the influence of ‘Big Finance’ and the dangers of racial ‘mongrelization’. Meanwhile the League of St George, which at least had the sense to pick a good name, espoused a particularly virulent form of National Socialism as well as the pagan cult of ‘Odinism’, a weird mishmash of Norse and Celtic mythology. In a society that venerated the memories of national solidarity and sacrifice against the Nazis – indeed, one in which the Second World War was rarely off the television screens for more than an hour or two – this kind of stuff was fatally counterproductive. But then the far right’s leaders were hardly the best and the brightest. Colin Jordan, the founder of the anti-Semitic British Movement, did have a second-class history degree from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. But the former Coventry maths teacher’s ambitions to become Britain’s answer to Adolf Hitler were cruelly frustrated when, in May 1975, he was convicted of stealing ‘a box of chocolates and three pairs of red women’s knickers’ from a branch of Tescos in Leamington Spa. As even the most faithful Nazi would have to admit, this was hardly the behaviour of a future Führer.50

  The biggest thing in the far right’s favour in the early 1970s, in fact, was an event over which it had no control: the coming of the Ugandan Asians. Within hours of the government’s announcement that it would honour the refugees’ British passports, John Tyndall had organized a demonstration by a hundred National Front activists outside Downing Street, which he followed up by personally delivering a petition to Number 10. Meanwhile it was the National Front that organized the supposedly non-partisan march of the Smithfield meat porters. On 22 August the National Front’s Ron Taylor, armed with leaflets and a loudspeaker, had toured Smithfield calling for action, although he was careful t
o play down his party affiliation. The Ugandans ‘could be black, blue, green or red for all we cared’, he disingenuously told the press, ‘but most of our blokes have sons or daughters waiting for council houses … If there was room for them you would not catch me saying anything about them.’ But when the porters marched on Westminster two days later the organizers’ claims that there was ‘no racialism involved’ rang very hollow. Many carried placards with National Front insignia, and as they marched they sang ‘We don’t want the Asians’, ‘We don’t want to integrate’, and a version of ‘Rule, Britannia’ containing the line ‘Britons never, never, never will be spades’. Outside Rhodesia House and South Africa House they stopped and cheered, and whenever they saw black passers-by, they booed and made monkey noises. Indeed, some organizers made no secret of their fascist associations. Dan Harmston told reporters that he was proud to be a supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley, ‘one of England’s great patriots’. ‘Afro-Asians are the greatest racialists in the world,’ he added. ‘They have no intention of integrating with each other, let alone with us.’51

  Against the background of economic uncertainty and industrial turmoil, the Ugandan Asian furore was a gift to the National Front. At Heathrow, demonstrators brandished placards warning that there were too many people in Britain already; in Manchester, pickets handed out more than 2,000 National Front leaflets; in Hounslow, demonstrators occupied the Town Hall during a council meeting and read out a statement of protest; in Ealing, Leicester and Blackburn, organizers called open-air public meetings attracting busloads of supporters from across the country. By October the party newspaper Spearhead was bragging that 250 new members had joined in a matter of weeks, while Head Office was fielding 100 enquiries a day. Even allowing for exaggeration, these were bountiful days for the far right: as the journalist Martin Walker wrote, Idi Amin ‘was the best recruiting officer the NF ever had’. By the end of the year, he thought, the National Front had 800 new recruits, and, more importantly, its rhetoric seemed to be striking home. Leaflets on the Ugandan Asian issue were designed to tap into a host of loosely related anxieties, from unemployment and housing to strikes and Europe, as the party competed to attract disgruntled Labour and Tory voters alike. ‘If the British people have to worry about fighting for a job in the face of a tide of cheap immigrant labour, and are occupied in trying to get decent housing in competition with teeming millions of immigrants,’ one read, ‘then they will not have time to think about how the International Big Business Establishment is robbing them with such gigantic swindles as the Common Market.’

  At a time when neither of the major parties inspired much confidence, this approach paid handsome dividends. In the local elections of June 1973 the National Front recorded its best performance yet, picking up more than 15 per cent of the vote in Leicester (including more than 20 per cent in three out of ten wards), 24 per cent in Blackburn and 25 per cent in Staines. In Bristol, where its record had been abysmal, the National Front’s four local candidates picked up between 8 and 18 per cent of the vote; in Dartford its three candidates attracted just under 14 per cent; in Nottingham a new branch fought in two wards and won 22 and 14 per cent. Even more striking, however, was the party’s performance in May’s West Bromwich by-election. In many ways this was perfect National Front territory, a seedy, dilapidated industrial town with a large population of Pakistani foundry workers, close not only to Powell’s Wolverhampton heartland but also to the Black Country constituency of Smethwick, notorious for sending the Conservative Peter Griffiths (‘If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Labour’) to Westminster nine years before. Never before had the National Front thrown itself so vigorously into a Westminster election: supporters drove up from London every weekend, parading with Union Jacks and pretty girls, while the candidate Martin Webster, a fat man who dubbed himself ‘Big Mart’, promised to ‘send back the coloured immigrants’. And even though many observers tipped the National Front to pick up hundreds of disaffected Conservative votes, the result nevertheless came as a shock. As expected, Labour’s Betty Boothroyd won the seat with 15,907 votes, while the Tories came second with 7,582 votes. Few had anticipated, however, that the National Front would win 4,879 votes (16 per cent of the total): the best result in its history by a huge margin.52

  ‘The National Front’s challenge to Mr Heath’ was the title of The Times’s post-mortem two days later, which thought that the two major parties needed to be ‘more open’ about ‘the facts about the immigrant community [and] the social tensions to which it undeniably gives rise’. This was sensible advice, yet neither party seemed willing to grasp the nettle. In some ways, this hinted at the growing gulf between middle-class politicians and the people they represented: in an age when new Labour MPs were more likely to be lecturers than miners, many white working-class voters felt that their voices were being squeezed out of the political arena. But it was also a testament to the underlying moderation of British politics in the early 1970s that despite all the strident rhetoric of the day, no ambitious office-seeker wanted to risk being dubbed the next Enoch Powell.53

  In some ways, the National Front at the beginning of 1974 was still a very unimpressive force. As Martin Webster himself had predicted after West Bromwich, the party struggled to match expectations in the next general election, winning a national average of just 3.3 per cent in February 1974. In West Bromwich, its share fell to 7 per cent; in Leicester, it won fewer than 8,000 votes; in Wolverhampton, where the party had campaigned hard to pick up Powell supporters, it won just 5, 4 and 3 per cent of the vote in the city’s three parliamentary seats. And yet few observers thought there were grounds for complacency. In just seven years, the party had established 30 branches and 54 groups around the country, as well as an estimated 20,000 paid-up members. Its activists were highly visible on the streets of major cities, distributing thousands of leaflets that did not confine themselves to race and immigration but tackled issues such as crime, inflation, Northern Ireland, the EEC and industrial unrest. In a telling sign of its broadening ambitions, it was now targeting university students (‘Don’t be bullied by the crackpots and gangsters of the extreme left’) and schoolchildren (‘Are you tired of younger students being bullied or subjected to the alien cult of mugging?’). It was true that 3.3 per cent was hardly an impressive sign of national support; yet as observers pointed out at the time, the Nazi Party won only 2.6 per cent of the vote in Germany in 1928 but was running the country just five years later. We know now that the National Front never broke through to become a serious political force. But nobody could have known that then.54

  Perhaps it would be wrong, though, to end on such a bleak note. For the biggest immigration story of the decade, the arrival of the Ugandan Asians, had a happier ending than could have been predicted. When the first refugees trooped off their planes at Heathrow and Stansted, the men’s faces drawn with anxiety, the women’s saris limp and sodden with rain, their prospects seemed depressingly bleak. Most had only what they could stuff into their battered suitcases, and even then many had been robbed at gunpoint in Entebbe airport. ‘Every piece of baggage was thrown open on the ground and most of the valuables we had, including rings and watches, were taken away,’ a former haulage contractor told reporters after the exhausting nine-hour flight to Heathrow. Others told stories of relatives being harassed, injured and even killed: one student told journalists at Stansted that his uncle had been shot and thrown into a municipal skip, while another man, still trembling with outrage, claimed that Amin’s soldiers had stripped his wife of her jewellery and threatened to cut their throats. And in the corner of an airport waiting room, a reporter spotted the ‘tired, puzzled-looking’ figure of Khanji Dhanji Karsan, a 35-year-old Kampala builder in a second-hand army greatcoat and a green balaclava. Exhausted, nervous and awkward, Mr Karsan spoke only two or three words of English. He had arrived with ‘no friends, no money, no relatives and only the haziest ideas about the country in which he found himself’. All that he had was a grubby black noteb
ook, pushed into his hand by an anonymous well-wisher at Entebbe airport. Inside were three phone numbers, one in Welwyn Garden City, one in Kensal Green and the third for ‘Hitrow Airport’. The last the reporter saw of him, he was boarding a coach for the government transit camp at Stradishall, Suffolk, the notebook clutched firmly in his hand.55

  But despite the trauma of their arrival, the refugees settled far more comfortably into British life than anybody had expected. By July 1973, all but 2,000 had found permanent homes, and many resettlement camps had already closed down. Most moved to areas where there were established Indian communities, such as north-west London, Birmingham and above all Leicester, where their restaurants, jewellers and sari shops lit up the Belgrave Road and became a driving force in the city’s evolution from a decaying manufacturing town into the centrepiece of the new multiracial Britain. Brimming with brains, ambition and commercial enthusiasm, they became the outstanding success story of post-war immigration. To be sure, they still faced prejudice and discrimination, their children often teased at school, their achievements ignored or belittled. Yet that only added to the achievement of people like the Trivedi family, who arrived at Stansted in September 1972 with a few suitcases, two pet African parrots, and less than £30 in Ugandan currency. A few months earlier, Mr Trivedi had been a shoe salesman earning £1,500 a year; now he had virtually nothing. Yet just two weeks after his arrival, he had moved his family into a rented terraced house in Willesden, north London, paid for by his new job as a London Underground guard, his wife’s job as a machine operator in a small components factory, and his eldest daughter’s job as a typist in the West End. Some people might have wallowed in self-pity, but Mr Trivedi was grateful merely to be alive and to have the chance of a new start. ‘I am halfway on my feet,’ he said proudly, ‘and that is what really counts.’ And if his new white neighbours had only shown the same initiative, guts and self-reliance, then Britain in the 1970s might have been an altogether happier place.56