James Kelly
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by Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley BUY THE BOOK
The riots in Southport are just the latest flashpoint in a long history of British reactionary politics. In Fractured, Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley move away from the ahistorical temper of the identity politics debate, exploring how historical class struggles were formed and continue to determine the possibilities for new forms of solidarity in an increasingly dangerous world.
In this edited excerpt the authors explore the relationship between street racism and the modernisation of policing and immigration controls.
Conservative reactions to anti-racist movements are sensitive to temporal shifts in street protests and uprisings. The most dangerous point in a movement cycle is when things quiet down. State functionaries and journalists work hard to alienate the integrity of the utopian moment by generating debates that trivialise its political nucleus, while police move in to make arrests. Conservatives are aware of this and choose their moments carefully. The conservative claim that anti-racism causes racism (or makes racism worse) can be convincing because the state and the press personalise its causes. The pitting of opinions about ‘race’ at the national level creates hypervisibility for racialised people in schools, workplaces and streets. Those who ‘innocently’ identify with Britishness are painted as victims of anti-racist ‘race-baiting’, with many people of colour alienated by the direction this discourse takes, and the dangers it presents. State racism cannot proceed without this kind of maintenance, the ultimate goal being to enhance state powers over the organisation of workers and working-class communities more generally.
After Colston, we saw precisely how this happened. Within days, thousands of white supremacists gathered to protect a Churchill statue. Similar marches engulfed memorial squares across the country. In Coventry, a viral video showed a mass of white male and female football fans mobbing two young Black men. Dozens approached them, hurling glass bottles and racist epithets. When police arrived, the crowd accused one of the Black men of having a knife, even as weapons were visible in the hands of those crowding them. Cops moved in to arrest the two men. As part of the fans’ celebrations, BLM placards, left behind in the town centre from two recent multiracial anti-racist marches, were destroyed. Police later announced the incident wasn’t ‘racially motivated’. Two weeks later, ‘WHITE LIVES MATTER’ was scratched onto a hill in huge letters in a Coventry park, a video showed someone wearing a KKK hood next to it.
One year on, the government commissioned a race report to find out if there was really a racism problem in Britain: ‘In many areas of investigation, including educational failure and crime, we were led upstream to family breakdown as one of the main reasons for poor outcomes.’ The report found prejudice had statistically declined and that a ‘highly subjective dimension’ entered into ‘references to “systemic”, “institutional” or “structural racism” ’. The Daily Mail heralded the report: ‘Britain’s Race Revolution: Landmark report says UK “a model to the world” on diversity – and finds NO evidence of institutional racism.’ Other threats were detected, however,
A strident form of anti-racism … reinforced by a rise of identity politics, as old class divisions have lost traction … tend to stress the ‘lived experience’ of the groups they seek to protect with less emphasis on objective data.
The same oppositions between ‘identity politics’ and class, inculcated on the left for decades, were used as part of a government offensive. If anything was systemic, it was ‘anti-racism’, and with exclusionary effects: ‘the UK is open to all its communities. But we are acutely aware that the door may be only half open to some, including the white working-class.’ Whereas data on various ethnicities were compared, horizontally, and related to cultural or familial explanations, the ‘white working class’ was the only identity where systemic injustice could be explained. The report was launched with an almost trollish smirk from politicians. They searched and searched but no structural racism could be found in the data (except for a disregarded white working class). All this commotion and yet Britain was more inclusive than ever? ‘BLM’ was wrong to make British people feel otherwise. The report was immediately repudiated and discredited, even by some falsely credited as authors. But the government just pushed through the media cycle and pressed harder.
That same month, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill was proposed. This was an opportunity to rubberstamp the far right reaction to ‘wokeness’ with concrete legislation that could suppress future protest waves and direct action tactics. The bill had a broader outlook, however, threatening the very existence of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, by awarding police – and landowners – new powers to criminalise trespass and seize transport, that is, homes. Digital surveillance powers were enhanced, stop and search, as well as legal barriers to protest, including ten-year sentences for vandalising statues. ‘Back to the 80s,’ wrote Liz Fekete, ‘into the kind of territory that led to … the 1981 and 1985 inner city rebellions, the 1984–85 miners’ strike, and the mass unrest that followed the introduction of the Poll Tax’. The Nationality and Borders Bill followed. It presented a heinous broadening of deportation powers. Clause 9 would allow the state to deport any of six million naturalised or dual national British citizens, ‘without notice’, if the decision corresponded with the ‘public interest’. Nisha Kapoor predicts, ‘disqualification from voting rights, the withdrawal of access to services and provisions – bank accounts, passports, driving lessons – already administered … in counterterrorism cases, may become more routine. And should citizenship deprivation come, offshore detention centres will be waiting.’ The verticalisation of far-right social media trends and mainstream policymaking deserves proper attention. Undoubtedly, fascism and electoral politics are aligning. The ramping up of state powers to police, prosecute, deport and brutalise, depends on money and media pressure organised through liberal, conservative and fascist elites. That being said, reasoning around these authoritarian turns can also be underwhelming when the charisma of authoritarians, or fascism more broadly, is isolated as the cause. Racist anti-immigration legislation has been built piece by piece, over time, by politicians of every stripe.
In his writing on the Notting Hill riots of 1958, Peter Fryer describes ‘thousands’ of whites storming migrant neighbourhoods. Rioters surrounded Black people’s cars, shouting ‘let’s lynch them!’ Tory and Labour MPs joined the press (and a returned Oswald Mosley) in calling on the government to halt ‘coloured’ immigration and demanding deportations. The Tory government’s solution to the unrest was the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, ending automatic right of entry and settlement in Britain for Commonwealth subjects. Labour initially opposed the broadening of controls, though largely based on a colonial sentimentality about ‘Mother Country’ duties and maintaining good trade relations with Commonwealth states. Harold Wilson embraced controls once in government,* further restricting ‘coloured’ immigration with a 1965 white paper. Labour’s 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act built on this precedent. It was rushed through amidst government fears Britain would have to accept all Kenyan Asians made stateless by an independent Kenya’s ‘Africanisation’ policy. Restrictions didn’t apply to white Commonwealth settlers, because these ‘patrials’, as they were called, could trace their family lineage back to British blood and soil. Jim Callaghan, future Labour Prime Minister, told Tony Benn: ‘We don’t want any more blacks in Britain.’ The TUC supported Labour policy throughout.
The historical mutability of ‘whiteness’ is concretely determined by the peculiarity of the given racial regime and the stresses of the historical conjuncture. However, over time, best practises and rules of thumb are distinguished and generalised. What we refer to as ‘whiteness riots’ are ‘sparks’ of violence, routinely followed by ‘race reports’ and legislative reactions, designed to impart control through indirect means: the market, but also courts, social care, schools, border forces, policing.
Through these instruments of the liberal democratic state, in the name of equality, racism is not only preserved, but also formalised, nationalised and modernised. It is important therefore to apprehend racist street violence – and the infantilising, innocent register used to explain it – as structural, indeed, as bordering, an action that seeks to incite and lobby for state violence further up the chain. This is why Sivanandan made racism central to his analysis of fascism, rather than isolating the fascist as an egregious extremist: ‘We have fought the idea that racism was an aspect of fascism – our take was that racism was fascism’s breeding ground.’
Whiteness riots have familiar features: police partisanship, local and national media fomentation, moral panics about crime and ‘race-mixing’, followed by calls for new criminal and immigration legislation. They have also operated as significant flash points for constituting the public interest as white. Labour passed a flurry of laws in the 2000s. Help for asylum seekers was cut. New detention centres were built to buttress a new ‘biometric’ regime. Deportations, including charter flights, accelerated with claimants having no right to appeal until they had been ‘returned home’.
Enoch Powell personifies the psychodrama of Britishness. He was an early adopter of post-war immigration as a minister, who later mourned an English race contaminated and in decline. The post-war moment has ever since remained the freezing point for British imaginaries of the migrant – as nation-builder, or nation-destroyer. Powell framed the colonial anxieties of post-war liberal democracy in his 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. It infamously depicted a foreboding future of racial role-reversal, of who would soon hold the ‘whip hand’. He referenced the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the riots that followed in the USA, warning similar would befall Britain unless immigration was halted. Powell’s dismissal from the Tory front bench for his speech was met with solidarity strikes by East End dockers. In an era when strike action was invariably economistic, a ‘political’ strike in support of a Tory politician was extraordinary. Over a thousand dockers and several hundred meat-porters from Smithfield Market marched to Westminster with signs saying: ‘We back Enoch!’ and ‘Back Britain, not Black Britain’. Harry Pearman led the strike, demanding a ‘total ban on immigration because there were enough already here’. After meeting Powell, he declared: ‘It made me feel proud to be an Englishman … We are representatives of the working man. We are not racialists.’ Powell’s popularity with a section of the working class, as Shilliam explains, is due to a perennial ‘defence of the ordinary, deserving working class as the white working class’. Tory legislation in 1971 and 1981,23 as well as its 1972 accession to what would become the EU, cemented Britain’s racist immigration policy.
Michael Richmond was a co-editor of the Occupied Times and of Base Publication. He has written for publications including OpenDemocracy, New Socialist and Protocols. He tweets @Sisyphusa.
Alex Charnley was illustrator and co-editor of the Occupied Times and of Base Publication. He tweets @steinosteino.
This is an edited excerpt of Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics
Image: BRADFORD, WEST YORKSHIRE – AUG 28, 2010 – Police clash with EDL (English Defence League) supporters during demonstrations in Bradford, England