File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0104, message 18


From: "Neil (practical history)" <practicalhistory-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: AUT: Working class racism/NF march
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 11:54:25 -0000


This is the first draft of a discussion article reflecting on the background 
to a racist demonstration in London last Saturday April 7th. It deals with 
some wider questions about the relationship between race and class, and 
white working class racism in particular, which have been touched on in 
discussions on this list recently (it doesn't deal with the wider critique 
of anti-fascist ideology, maybe I will expand it to include this). I would 
welcome any comments anybody may have. Incidentally the local paper is 
reporting that another NF march is planned in the same area this coming 
Saturday.

10 April 2001

Saturday's National Front march in Bermondsey, South East London followed a 
predictable course. No more than 30 flag waving NFers emerged from the train 
station, protected from around 300 anti-fascists by a police force 
outnumbering both. The police effort to contain the counter-demo (organised 
by the Anti-Nazi League and Southwark Trades Council) on the pavement was 
undermined by a surge onto the road, and a further surge when the NF 
appeared was surprizingly successful in pushing the police line back to 
within 10 metres of the fascists. After that there was the usual running 
round the back streets to little effect.

This part of South London has seen it all before. In 1937 barricades were 
set up in Bermondsey as 15,000 took to the streets to oppose a march by the 
British Union of Fascists. A mile down the road in New Cross, police used 
riot shields for the first time in London in 1977 when an NF march was 
physically confronted by a black and white crowd. There were skirmishes 
between Anti-Fascist Action and British National Party and NF paper sellers 
in Bermondsey at various points during the 1990s.

These historical continuities can disguise what has changed in recent years. 
In the 1970s the National Front was becoming a significant political force 
nationally, with a growing share of the vote, large demonstrations and 
support for its 'Keep Britain White'  policies across all social classes 
including far right factions within the state.

Today the NF and BNP demonstrations have a tiny number of participants. 
Their battle to 'Keep Britain White' is definitively lost and hardly anyone 
seriously imagines that it would be possible, let alone desirable, to expel 
all the black people from the country. In practical terms the far right 
seems to have lowered its immediate sights to defending the 'white 
ethnicity' of small working class areas, hence the ‘Keep Bermondsey White' 
theme of Saturday's march. It would easy to be complacent and imagine that 
they are now irrelevant - easy but mistaken.

Anti-racism is now an official ideology of the state. In a modernised 
capitalism, crude discrimination on the basis of race or sex is a barrier to 
the development of a flexible labour force. Of course, racism still exists 
both because as an ideology it has a life of its own and because it remains 
embedded in immigration controls and other state practices.

Among some radical anti-fascists you can almost detect a nostalgia for a 
time when capitalism could be simply identified with the great social evils 
of racism, apartheid and dictatorship (and we are not so naďve as to think 
it couldn't happen again). Things certainly seemed simpler than today when 
the police make a big deal of fighting 'hate crimes' (racist and homophobic 
attacks) and when the British Army sponsors Black History Month and 
International Women's Day. All the forces of respectable Southwark were 
united against the NF march on Saturday - the leader of the Council spoke to 
the crowd and the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs Spokesperson was present  
(local MP Simon Hughes). The local police were also keen that the march 
should not go ahead, but they did not have the power to ban it (this can 
only be ordered by the Home Secretary).

One thing that 'socially inclusive' capitalism can't change is the 
generation of poverty - inequality is not a side effect of the system, it is 
the system. People with the reserves to be able to live as they chose would 
never take the low-paid, boring jobs that capitalism depends upon.

If racism miraculously vanished tomorrow, we would still find black people 
disproportionately living in poverty. Disadvantage reproduces itself over 
generations  - the children of poorer people are more likely grow up to be 
poor. Therefore communities that start off poor tend to stay that way even 
after institutional barriers such as overt discrimination are removed. 
Ultimately it is their class position in capitalism that impoverishes them 
rather than their skin colour.  The social conditions in Peckham (with its 
large black population) and the neighbouring area of Bermondsey/Rotherhithe 
(with its majority white working class population) are actually very 
similar.

In both more than half of children live in families living on income 
support. In both many people live in what is officially deemed as 
‘unsuitable housing’ which is overcrowded and/or in need of major repairs 
(more than 2000 households in the Bermondsey and Rotherhithe area). In both 
health is poor – children born in this part of south London are twice as 
likely to die in childhood as children born in the most affluent families.

According to Marxist orthodoxy, black and white people in Bermondsey should 
be uniting on the basis of their common class position. But no amount of 
chanting ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’ (the slogan of the Anti-Nazi 
League) can disguise the fact that this is very far from happening. This is 
why it would be dangerous to take any comfort in the pathetic turnout for 
the NF march –  the march might have been poorly attended, but that doesn't 
mean it found no echo locally.

Anybody who knows the area knows that there is a major problem with white 
working class racism (even if many white workers are not racist). While few 
local people joined the march, some of those who stood around to watch were 
certainly sympathetic, including the woman who called me a ‘nigger lover’, 
the people cheering the NF outside the Golden Lion pub, and the group with 
their ‘Keep the Blue White’ banner outside the Canterbury Arms on the Old 
Kent Road (the Blue is the local name for the main street in Bermondsey). A 
few hours after the march a 24-year-old Asian man was knocked to the ground 
in a racist attack on Rotherhithe New Road.  A group of local young people 
has carried out a number of racist attacks in the past few months. In 
February a 15-year-old schoolboy, Harifur Rahman, was bottled in the face 
and left unconscious with a fractured skull near the route of the NF march.

Contrary to what patronising liberals might think, there is nothing 
inherently reactionary about white working class cultures. Many of the 
families living in Bermondsey have been there for several generations, back 
to a time when there was a significant working class radical presence in the 
area. Surrey Docks was a centre of working class militancy in the General 
Strike 1926 and again in the late 1940s.  The immediate post-war period also 
saw homeless families squatting empty buildings en masse.  But the Docks are 
long gone along with most of the other big employers of previous generations 
(the remains of the Docks themselves renamed a more yuppie-friendly Surrey 
Quays). The destruction of working class sociability centred around these 
workplaces with nothing to replace it has left behind a resentment against 
the forces of change – to some, black people are just another threatening 
symptom of change, quite apart from any tendency for dispossessed white 
workers to gain a sense of superiority over the next rung in the social 
hierarchy (as seen in the South of the US, or South Africa).

The rise of official anti-racism has probably only increased the allure of 
racism for those who official society has so little to offer.  Written off 
as racist ‘poor white trash’ by middle class liberal leftists, some local 
people take a defiant pride in their outsider status. As fans of Millwall 
FC, the local football team, proudly declare ‘No One Likes Us, We Don’t 
Care’. The NF march on Saturday was prompted by Millwall playing a match 
sponsored by Kick Racism out of Football, a recognition that despite the 
acceptance of black footballers the club’s following remains a potential 
recruiting ground for racists.

In last May’s London Mayoral elections, the British National Party scooped 
up 80,000 votes, the best result for the far right since the NF peaked in 
1977. The issue isn’t any threat of fascists taking political power, but the 
much more immediate possibility of their ideas gaining ascendancy amongst 
sections of the inner city white working class. The result of this would be 
– and arguably already is - a state of terror for isolated black people and 
other minorities in some areas, and a powerful reactionary bulwark against 
the emergence of any radical working class movement.

That this is even a possibility is a testament to the failure of anarchist, 
communist and anti-capitalist ideas/groups to connect with working class 
needs and priorities (the failure to connect with black working class people 
is equally glaring, but not the subject of this article). There is no quick 
solution to redressing this, but a starting point would be an honest 
recognition that while we all get excited about events in Mexico, Seattle, 
Prague and the City of London, the less glamorous reality of what is 
happening on our doorsteps is due some urgent consideration.


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