BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen
AR: I was born in Pakistan and my parents came to the UK as economic migrants. They ended up in the north-west of England, where a lot of people from our part of Pakistan, in the Punjab, were originally brought over to work in the factories and mills. We lived in Burnley, which was one of the places that was experiencing rapid deindustrialisation. It was a very white, working-class area, and I was one of the first non-white kids in my primary school. People often ask: how did you get political? And I say: I had no choice, because of the context and reality of racist violence I grew up in.
The National Front used to sell newspapers in my secondary school. Every day, there would be some form of racist abuse, some physical attack. People would pour beer on the Asian women. They would use dogs to terrorise them when their husbands went to work. The house we lived in was firebombed and constantly scrawled with swastikas. And the police weren’t doing anything. In school, it was basically paki-bashing. The break-time bell rang and all the non-white kids would pretty much barricade themselves into one classroom because, if you were down the corridors or in the playground, you would be attacked. Teachers were too scared to do anything.
Racists forced me to learn more about black history because of the stuff they’d say to us. You’d get beaten up, but it would spur me on. What was going on on television screens would play out on the streets and at school. When Roots first aired [in 1977], they’d say to us: ‘say your name is Kunta Kinte’. But then, when in the show [the character’s grandson is] given Chicken George as his slave name, the kids would say to us: ‘say your name is Chicken George’ – and we’d say, ‘no, it’s Kunte Kinte’. Apart from that there was Mind Your Language, Love Thy Neighbour, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum – popular, casual racism was on TV screens.
At 14 or 15, I organised a school strike against racist violence – we would go to school but not go in. It was a necessity just to organise. We moved to another area which had slightly more non-white people and an Asian community, because it was safer, but that area was close to the Burnley football ground – so on Saturdays, you’d get football fans come through doing a bit of paki-bashing, smashing a few windows. Every morning, all the kids going to school would get together – we’d put the younger kids in the middle, and then we’d head off – if you went by yourself, or one or two, you’d definitely be attacked. So it was organising without thinking it was organising – just for safety.
Being seven, eight, nine was different, because you felt totally powerless. An example of how random the violence could be … when I was in primary school, I was stood at the bus stop and somebody walked by with a cricket bat and smashed me right in the face. As a kid, you’re thinking, ‘I’m not going to go home because my parents will be more worried, I’ll go to school’. We didn’t want to tell our parents too much of what was happening because they then felt even more powerless. But when you got to 12 and 13, and a few more families moved in and they had kids who were 15 or 16, we suddenly became a bit more able to stand up for ourselves.
I joined the Labour Party Young Socialists, a youth wing controlled at that time by the Trotskyist Militants, and they were a whole bunch of lefties who were like ‘ooh, a non-white person and lefty who wants to talk about these things’. So I found an outlet. Then one day, an Indian nurse, who had come to my house to see my mum, showed me a [leaflet for the] Asian Youth Movement around the Bradford 12 [a group of young Asian and black men, many of whom were members of the United Black Youth League, who were charged in 1981 with terrorism offences after making petrol bombs to defend against racist attacks. In 1982, they were acquitted by an all-white jury on the grounds of lawful self-defence]. So I set up an Asian Youth Movement in Burnley.
That period was super-political. You’d turn on the TV and there was Boys from the Blackstuff, it was Thatcher, three million unemployed, riots on the streets in Brixton and Handsworth, Israel was bombing Beirut, Soweto … It was hard not to be political and draw these threads.
When I was growing up and you’d talk to people in the Indian Workers’ Association or those kinds of organisations – people who came to the UK in the 1950s and 60s – they told a really horrific story of what it was like, and it was very different. My parents would constantly say ‘it doesn’t matter how long, but one day, they’ll kick us out of their country – like we kicked them out of our country. The only thing they can’t take from you is your education’. It’s the immigrant story, right? Your education is your way out of poverty. We were the first generation who said: we’re not like our parents – we’re not dreaming about going back home, we’re here.
My parents’ generation was deeply religious and had a sense of ‘everyone’s in our community’. Yes, there was all this horrific stuff, but there was also a quiet sense of solidarity among lots of people. I remember during the 1984 miners’ strike, my mum – who didn’t speak English – watched the television and turned to me and said, pointing at Arthur Scargill, ‘he’s a good man, he cares about ordinary people, they’re like us, it’s really bad what’s happening to them. Go and knock on the aunties’ doors and say I said we’ve got to give food for the miners’. So, even people who didn’t have English as a language had a political language. My parents would talk about themselves as being black – asi kaala haan.
I think the biggest change between then and now is that there were far more structures and institutions that allowed you to shape your values and stories – stronger trade unions, community organisations. That has hollowed-out. So people felt more agency. Even though we were being defeated, like in the miners’ strike, you still felt that this was a fight; and you still felt that you could fight and win things. We mobilised. We ran protests. In 1986, I spent my weekends going to Wapping from university to stand on the picket line with striking print workers. The first time I went, there were BNP members there and I was told ‘hey, pakis, we don’t want you’. But, by the end, the far-right had been driven off – and the print workers were saying this was about community and that they now understood what we [the black and Asian community] meant when we spoke about police violence.
So it always felt like there were real moments and bonds of solidarity. And much more of a sense of possibility. Places of community – they were being built and you never felt alone; you always felt like it was a collective experience, not that you were dealing with this in isolation. There was a subtle ‘black person’s nod’, which used to speak so much. We would see each other.
It was deliberately engineered.
When I finished university, I was lucky enough to get a job at the Newham Monitoring Project in east London, an area that was at the heart of radical black institution-building. It came out of the murder in East Ham of Akhtar Ali Baig, who was stabbed to death for a £5 bet on ‘who could kill the first paki’. There were huge protests. On the back of countless other racist murders and incidents – Altab Ali was murdered in Whitechapel – people in the community at that point said: we need something from ourselves. And so the Newham Monitoring Project became this incredible organisation – you could ring up at any point in the day or night and we’d have volunteers come to you. [Formed in 1980, the Project provided legal support, advocacy, and casework, as well as emergency helplines to minority communities dealing with racist violence or state misconduct.] It was building pressure and framing the state as having an obligation to protect us, which it was failing to do – at the same time, police were the instigators of violence against us.
[The establishment] were really fearful of this ‘lair’ of radical black organising. So, where we were fighting for an anti-racist society, they started talking about ‘multiculturalism’ – that we have to live and just be tolerant of each other. But, for us, the most important thing that mattered was the state’s ability to use violence against us and the economic and structural questions. They started saying ‘what we need is Afro-Carribean organisations and Asian organisations and then Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian organisations. And then, if you’re Muslim, Gujarati and Pakistani Muslim centres’ … The community was constantly being fragmented, while we were trying to consciously weave it together to create a positive collective identity. We used to run campaigns together and talk about our common experience: you had to forge blackness politically, it was not a given.
These were identities that were formed through struggle – and they were deconstructed in a very deliberate way.
Extremism always evolves. It seems paradoxical, but also logical, that at the same time that racism moved away from street violence such as the National Front, and conversations about multiculturalism and diversity went national, elements seen as fringe within the far-right 30 years ago have now entered the mainstream – both as a backlash and a continuation of what has always been there under the surface?
I’ve got an old National Front leaflet somewhere with a call for demands – and many of them are now being put forward as mainstream policy.
I remember Jean-Marie Le Pen said [in 2007 after finishing fourth in the French Presidential Election], ‘we have won the battle of ideas: the nation and patriotism, immigration, and insecurity have been put at the heart of this campaign by my adversaries’. In the 1970s and 80s, there was the threat of far-right violence on the streets from the National Front. From the 1990s to the 2000s, it was replaced by the British National Party, which didn’t have quite the same extent but was very violent in key areas such as east and south-east London – it used a ‘rights for whites’ campaign in a 1993 by-election in Tower Hamlets. But, at the same time, the state was saying that we now welcome and celebrate being a multicultural society (they didn’t say we should celebrate being an anti-racist society).
Now, for the first time, we’ve got them not just on the streets, not just in Parliament, but also controlling the public square – in a way that the far-right have never been able to do. I know to some this will sound like an analogy too far, but when people ask ‘is this like the 1970s?’, I say: no, it’s more like the 1930s, where you’ve got a large part of the establishment willing to go along with far-right ideas.
When you see the ideas of displacement, the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, remigration – these [used to be seen as] nutty far-right, and now they are mainstream. You won’t destroy your career if you say these things – you can be on television every other day and say these things; you can have a television station like GB News and radio stations all saying these things, because it’s all valid now. And in that way, fundamentally, the terrain and the landscape is very different now.
The Englishness debate sits alongside interesting other debates about the nation we’re in. Scottish nationalism, for example, went through a sense of Scotland and Scottishness being an ethnicity to now saying it’s about ‘are you in this place?’ That was a big debate I remember having with the SNP at the time – between the old SNP traditionalists and the new, who said: if your feet are on the soils of Scotland, you are Scottish. We used to remark how interesting it was that you’d get Asians in Scotland in kilts and turbans singing the Scottish anthem in a way that was more inclusive than English nationalism had been.
It’s hard for some generations. It’s hard for me personally because I grew up always being told ‘you are not English, this flag isn’t yours – “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack”’. But now, I also see my nephews in England tops, cheering for England, saying: that’s my team – ‘look, this team is full of black and brown people, this is our team’. It is strange, because I have no problem holding the Saltire or the Welsh flag, yet I do have a problem holding the cross of St George because of what it meant to me throughout my life. But I also understand that that’s not now the experience of young black people who see in that flag something different; who see Bukayo Saka and Jude Bellingham. That’s great.
If someone says to me ‘where are you from?’ I say Burnley – I still have a strong identity with the town even though the experience for me was horrific. But I can live with that. But, if someone says ‘you’re English’, I say: no, I’m not. But I’m also not willing to cede the ground that Englishness is purely about a form of ethnonationalism.
I think what the left or progressives have failed to do is understand how much place matters to people in their identity. We talk often in very universal ways, which is right, but for a lot of people whose lives are within a 40-minute radius of where they were born, and all their friends and family live there and they work there, that’s their world – that is the lens through which they look at absolutely everything. Sometimes, what we talk about doesn’t land with them and the far-right can talk to them about place. And often in a way that’s nostalgic – about what the flag represents, which is contested.
For me, it’s about: how do we capture that moment at the [opening ceremony of the London 2012] Olympics and say: that’s our nationalism? There is so much about solidarity [in our shared history] that is more than the flag. I’m not interested in the flag – I’m interested in the story of who we are, however we have come together.
I used to say many years ago that I’m a reluctant environmentalist, right? Because I didn’t come to environmentalism through the environment. I came to it because originally I was very active in the anti-globalisation movement [an international network of organisations fighting for global justice and highlighting the impact of neoliberal policies]. As somebody who had come through radical black and progressive politics, I was an internationalist and suddenly in these spaces I met all these movements from all around the world and they would talk about what was happening to them. For them, the climate crisis was a systemic problem … There was a weaving together [of issues] and the anti-globalisation movement tried very hard to bring together the labour, human rights, and the environment movements, finding commonalities and connections …
We were always thinking intersectional. Our lives are not experienced in this way that the mainstream left or progressives think of as – poverty ‘over here’ and environment ‘over there’. So through that experience, I came across the issue of climate. And I would be like: how is it that this thing which everyone says is potentially going to devastate the world, which is going to unravel everything we’ve ever fought for, [is being talked about] as being for your grandchildren [to deal with]? And they’re talking about it with a polar bear on an iceberg? And they’re talking about it in such ways that it’s about a plastic bag and a fucking plastic straw? To me, it just made no sense at all. Here’s this picture of catastrophe and you’ve totally depoliticised it.
Through that experience, I came across Friends of the Earth, and it’s not like other environmental groups – it talks about environmental justice. We recently released new data which showed people of colour and those on lower incomes are twice as likely to live in neighbourhoods most at risk of flooding, extreme heat, noise pollution, and lack of green space. Twenty years ago, this m…
