by Andy Beckett
By the late seventies, the attitudes of many Britons to unions had hardened further. The difference between the relatively reverent treatment of the massed Saltley pickets by the press, public and police and how their counterparts at Grunwick were generally received only five years later demonstrated the shift. And yet, as the Conservatives recognized, it was one thing to think the unions were too powerful, another to know what to do about it. Margaret Thatcher’s shadow cabinet was full of politicians, herself included, who had seen at first hand what happened to Heath, and since the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, even more Britons had joined unions. ‘Trade unionists’ were not, yet, political bogeymen who could be invoked with little risk; they were a majority of the workforce and a large minority of the Conservatives’ own voters.
In 1978, moreover, with the number of British working days lost to strikes down by three quarters from its early-seventies peak, public interest in industrial relations had faded somewhat. In January, in a Gallup poll cited by Conservative strategists, the issue was ranked fifth in importance, well behind law and order, inflation, unemployment and taxation. Despite the fraying of the social contract, the survey gave Labour a 9 per cent lead over the Conservatives on the union issue, its largest advantage in any policy area. By the following month, John Hoskyns, the Thatcher adviser keenest to confront the unions and the co-author of ‘Stepping Stones’ – a radical, intoxicatingly confident blueprint for achieving ‘a Tory landslide’ and then ‘national recovery’, with the political neutering of the unions the precondition to both – was despairing about the shadow cabinet’s resistance to his strategy. ‘In my heart I know the country’s finished and the Tories aren’t going to save it,’ he wrote in his diary. In March, Sir Ian Gilmour, the most outspoken and influential of the many union-friendly Conservatives still in the shadow cabinet, felt able to dismiss Hosykns’ scheme by asking: ‘Do we even agree that there is a need to change union behaviour at all?’
There was at least agreement in the party about the importance of the coming general election. The Conservatives had lost four of the last five. ‘Our last chance is nearly here,’ ‘Stepping Stones’ warned in one of its many melodramatic passages. ‘If we speak with an uncertain voice, the collectivists will … continue to impose their minority solutions on a majority tranquilised with the North Sea bonus.’
In the absence of a Tory consensus about the unions, or of an economic crisis to sink the government, the Conservatives turned in 1978 to an even more fraught political theme. ‘We must not shirk the immigration issue,’ wrote the promising young Tory MP and leader’s adviser Nigel Lawson to Thatcher on 15 January, underlining the entire sentence. ‘[It] is almost the acid test of whether a political party is in tune with the ordinary people.’ Twelve days later, on the high-profile television current-affairs programme World in Action, the Conservative leader answered a question about immigration with the following:
People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture … We do have to hold out the prospect of an end to immigration, except, of course, for compassionate cases … Everyone who is here must be treated equally under the law … [But] quite a lot of them [immigrants] are fearful that their position might be put in jeopardy, or people might be hostile to them, unless we cut down the incoming numbers.
It was ten years since Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, and ten years since a mainstream British politician had said anything as racially provocative. Thatcher was condemned for the language and content of her remarks by Callaghan and Healey, by bishops, by the Liberal leader David Steel and even, in private, by some shadow cabinet colleagues. Powell expressed his ‘hope and relief’ at her words. As he had in 1968, Thatcher received thousands of letters, most of them supportive. ‘I was taken aback by the reaction to these extremely mild remarks,’ she writes in The Path to Power, but she also admits that before the interview she had been giving immigration ‘a good deal of thought’.
By the late seventies, she had come to feel that the mass immigration to Britain since the Second World War was causing ‘real problems’, principally among ‘Poorer people … [who] watch their neighbourhoods changing and the value of their house falling.’ Politicians who ‘dismissed the anxieties of those who were directly affected as “racist”’ were ‘dishonest and snobbish’. She also considered her comments on World in Action justified on broader political grounds. ‘Before my interview, the opinion polls showed us level-pegging with Labour. Afterwards, they showed the Conservatives with an eleven-point lead… It provided a large and welcome boost at an extremely difficult time.’
When the Tory leader made her ‘swamping’ intervention, the total number of immigrants settling in Britain was not rising, in fact, but falling quite sharply. In 1977, 44,000 had entered the country, compared to 55,000 the previous year, most of them the dependants of existing British citizens, and this downward trend continued during 1978 and 1979. Post-war immigration had been in large part a consequence of Britain’s economic good times and of the sharp rises in state spending during the late forties, the fifties and the early sixties. The mills of Bradford needed nightworkers; the new National Health Service needed nurses. Now, in the late seventies, with the economy and the state in a less expansive phase, immigration was easier to criticize.
Prejudice and tensions about race had long been present in Britain: the first British race riot took place in Liverpool in 1919, three decades before the start of mass immigration. The fact that many of the post-war immigrants came from Britain’s colonies and former colonies had initially eased the process. But by the sixties and seventies, with British imperial pride receding fast and a debate about national decline established in its place, Commonwealth immigration could look, to a certain kind of British patriot, less like a healthy post-imperial exchange and more like a national defeat: an invasion of territory of the kind previously mounted by Britain against other states. To sharpen the immigration issue further, the overcrowded and worn inner-city areas and industrial centres where immigrants tended to live and work, together with many white working-class Britons – the places where the opportunities for immigrants, such as they were, had originally been – were precisely the places which the recessions and economic changes of the seventies damaged most. It was not the best setting for racial harmony.
The Conservatives had imposed the first restrictions on immigration as early as 1961, beginning two decades of competition between the two main parties, in opposition and in government, to devise politically advantageous clampdowns. Periodically, both parties drew back from this form of politics: the Conservatives when they allowed the East African Asians into Britain in the early seventies; Labour when they introduced the Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968 and 1976, which cumulatively outlawed discrimination in employment, education and the provision of goods and services, and established the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE). Powell apart, until Thatcher’s World in Action interview senior politicians did not condemn immigration. Yet their basic attitude to it and to the race-related questions with which immigration was inextricably linked – the immigrants on whom debate focused were never the many white Europeans, Americans and Australians settling in Britain – was not fundamentally liberal. ‘Callaghan’, writes his biographer Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘felt that immigration was an issue to be handled in a way attuned to public opinion rather than on the basis of abstract liberal political theory.’ And that public opinion Callaghan took to be broadly hostile: ‘He was unsentimental on the principle of restricting immigration into Britain.’ Ambalavaner Sivanandan, the director of the Institute of Race Relations then and since, and a harsh but perceptive critic of many British governments, was dismissive even of Labour’s best work for racial equality. ‘The 1976 Race Relations Act had no teeth,’ he told me. ‘Never mind no teeth, it had no gums.’
The 1976 Act, conceived by the Wilson government and made a reality by Callaghan’s, outlawed not only racial discri
mination but racial segregation. It required local councils actively to promote equal opportunities, and it made the publication, distribution or public use of language ‘likely to encourage’ hatred against any ‘racial group’ a criminal offence. On paper, the Act seemed in tune with the new, racially progressive left-wing politics coming into being at Grunwick. Yet, by the end of 1978, the CRE, one of the main tools for enforcing the Act, had launched only twenty-nine investigations into racial discrimination and concluded one, against a restaurant. More damaging still to the Act’s credibility, for all its potent-sounding provisions regarding incitement to racial hatred, the legislation was having little effect on the activities of a recently established, increasingly influential British political party whose central function, as demonstrated almost daily on the pavements from Leeds to London, appeared to be racial incitement at its rawest.
The National Front had been founded in 1966. Its first leader, A. K. Chesterton, was a former editor of Blackshirt, the journal of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, in the thirties, and the National Front also brought together members of other far-right groups which had been struggling for political impact since Mosley’s heyday: the Racial Preservation Society, the British National Party, the League of Empire Loyalists. Initially, the National Front struggled, too. It was full of quarrelling, conspiracy-minded factions, ranging from English nationalists to Nazi sympathizers to anti-Semites, but, by the late sixties, they had rallied around the idea of opposition to immigration. The recent success of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as a single-issue pressure group was their unlikely but well-chosen model. Powell’s spectacular 1968 attack on immigration, and his advocacy of repatriation for those already living in the country, gave the National Front, whose policies were often hard to tell apart from Powell’s, momentum and the beginnings of a mass membership. With Powell effectively disowned by the Conservative leadership, Tory voters and activists who strongly agreed with him found in the National Front a new political home. The Heath government’s acceptance of the East African Asians, and its growing tendency to alienate right-wing Conservatives, pushed the process further.
Between 1968 and 1972, the National Front’s membership swelled from 4,000 to 17,500. It started to do strikingly well in elections for a so-called minor party. In the West Bromwich by-election of 1973, a constituency with a history of hostility to immigrants and support for Powell, it won a sixth of the vote. In local elections the following month, in wards from Staines to Blackburn, it won as much as a quarter. At the 1974 general elections, the National Front contested enough constituencies – ninety in the October contest – to be permitted a party political broadcast. In 1977, the then Guardian journalist Martin Walker published a breathless but well-researched paperback which described the National Front as ‘the country’s fourth largest political party’.
In reality, the NF was too unstable a coalition, always splitting and arguing with itself even in this period of electoral promise, to be a successful party in the conventional sense. ‘The membership’, Walker admitted, ‘is rather like a bath with both taps running and the plughole empty. Members pour in and pour out.’ The same went for NF voters: apart from a hardcore of committed racists and extreme right-wingers, at best a few hundred people in a parliamentary constituency, the majority could always potentially be drawn away by less erratic, more mainstream parties. Usually – and this was what Margaret Thatcher’s ‘swamping’ comments tacitly acknowledged – that party was the Conservatives.
In The Path to Power, she writes of the immigration issue in the seventies: ‘I felt no sympathy for rabble rousers, like the National Front, who sought to exploit race.’ But what was her World in Action interview, with its disapproving reference to ‘people with a different culture’ if not a politician doing something at least very close to that? Yet in her book, after this brief reference to the NF’s racism, she immediately moves on, focusing instead on one of the party’s much less significant characteristics: its occasional tendency in the seventies to advocate vaguely left-wing policies such as the nationalization of North Sea oil. ‘I found it deeply significant that such groups [as the NF] … were just as much socialist as they were nationalist. All collectivism is always conducive to oppression …’
After the ‘swamping’ interview, the Conservatives did not start advocating repatriation for immigrants or an end to Britain accepting any new ones. Thatcher did not speak so negatively about immigration again. But a signal had been sent. Four weeks after the interview, a by-election was due to take place in Ilford North, a Labour seat in one of the NF’s strongest areas, the Essex–east London borders, and a seat where the NF had been doing well in the early campaigning. In the event, the Conservatives won; a rare and welcome election success for them in 1978. Enoch Powell, reflecting later on Thatcher’s World in Action comments, told an interviewer: ‘If you’re trying to convey what you feel to the electorate, perhaps you only have to do it once.’ At the 1979 general election, the NF vote fell by more than half from what it had been at the 1974 general elections.
Almost as harmful to Labour as Thatcher’s reaching out to the most race-conscious segment of the electorate was what the NF did away from the ballot box. There had always been a street-corner machismo to the NF – not least from its links back to Mosley’s Blackshirts – but from 1974 onwards deliberately provocative marches through immigrant neighbourhoods, intimidating pavement meetings and other aggressive occupations of public spaces became key NF tactics. Brick Lane in east London, a narrow, busy, mainly Bangladeshi street close to several areas known for decades as centres of racist politics, was a frequent target. During June 1978, a report by the local trades council recorded, ‘There were more and more racists selling National Front News and Spearhead each week on the corner.’ On 11 June,
Skinhead youngsters, many wearing badges saying ‘NF rules OK’, NF T-shirts, or with copies of NF News in their pockets, had been gathering at the top of Brick Lane since about 11am … Some had come from Peckham, Ealing, Putney. Some came in minibuses … At about 12 noon … after an NF meeting … a group of white youths marched down the Lane … clapping and shouting ‘the National Front is a White Man’s front’… The police had all suddenly disappeared… [Then] 150 white youths ran down Brick Lane shouting ‘Kill the Black Bastards’ and smashing the windows of a dozen shops and the car windscreens of Bengali shop keepers. 55 year-old Abdul Monan was knocked unconscious by a hail of rocks and stones hurled through his shop window. He ended up in hospital and needed five stitches … Some Asians and anti-racists fought off the attackers. It was perhaps ten minutes before the police arrived. They held 20 of the white youths, but released all except three whom they eventually charged only with the minor charge of threatening behaviour … The police said the ‘spontaneous outbreak’ happened just at the time they were changing shift and they were totally unprepared …
The trades council report, which was titled ‘Blood on the Streets: Racial Attacks in East London’, gave the details of over a hundred such incidents, including two murders, between January 1976 and August 1978.
A number were directly attributable to members of racist groups like… the National Front. However, the great majority of the attackers … are largely ‘apolitical’ youths, usually white. They have no direct involvement with racist politics except in their almost unconscious absorption of the relentless propaganda …
Whether those involved were ‘apolitical’ or not, such scenes had consequences for British politics. Regardless of the improving economy by the late seventies, and of Callaghan’s reassuring qualities, regardless of the promise of North Sea oil and the bright new vistas seemingly opening up for consumerism and leisure, it was hard to feel that Britain was entirely on the right track with the NF on the streets, immigrants being assaulted and the police apparently able – or willing – to do little about it. Did these things happen in healthy, contented countries? In Europe in the early twenty-first century, anti-immigrant violence,
both physical and rhetorical, is depressingly close to being an accepted fact of political life. But in Britain in the late seventies, which was only partially emerging from its mid-decade panic about mass pickets, ‘private armies’ and the possible collapse of the whole comfortable post-war order, what was occurring in Brick Lane and elsewhere was taken more seriously. It was seen as the kind of thing that happened in Germany – not in the broadly peaceful and prosperous Germany of the mid-seventies, which Callaghan and Gavyn Davies hoped might be a model for Britain, but in the Germany of the thirties.
‘It was a real chance in the seventies for the Nazis,’ Roger Huddle, one of the founders of Rock Against Racism, told me. ‘When the Nazis came out in Britain, it was necessary to move very, very quickly.’ Rock Against Racism began as a letter to the NME. During the mid-seventies, Huddle and a friend of his called Red Saunders, both of them restless veterans of the sixties Vietnam protests and British left-wing activism, and both with an interest in the political possibilities of popular culture, began worrying about the apparent surge of the far right in Britain. ‘We talked about the rise of the Nazis, [David] Bowie’s flirtation with fascism,’ Huddle remembered. ‘We came up with the name Rock Against Racism. We talked about doing a one-off gig.’ Then, in August 1976, they read about a recent Eric Clapton concert in Birmingham where the guitarist had made an impromptu speech in support of Powell’s immigration stance. Saunders decided to write to the NME. ‘Red read the letter out to me over the phone’, said Huddle, ‘and asked me to sign it.’ Half a dozen friends of theirs agreed to sign too. The letter was published on 11 September. It began,
