Читать книгу Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England - Nick Cohen - Страница 13

WHEN I WAS a reporter on the Birmingham Post & Mail, I could guess readers’ politics by how they described the looting and murder that overwhelmed Handsworth in September 1985. If they talked about the ‘Handsworth riots’, I knew they were conservatives who had seen criminals go berserk. When they said ‘riot’ they meant that the two days of violence were a thugs’ orgy open to all regardless of colour or creed. Its ‘root cause’ was unbridled criminality. Drug dealers and gangsters were fighting a legitimate police attempt to uphold the law in what had been a no-go area. As I ducked and dived to escape machete-wielding rioters, I took their point. When a pair of men cornered me and demanded my money, I was saved only by the honest conviction of my junior reporter’s cry: ‘But, but…I don’t have any money!’

Equally, I knew without needing to ask that those who talked of the ‘Handsworth uprising’ or ‘rebellion’ were on the left. Dick Knowles, the old Labour leader of Birmingham City Council, muttered that real revolutionaries would not have burned their neighbours’ homes but headed for Sutton Coldfield, in Birmingham’s stockbroker belt. But his younger comrades did not listen. They did not see dangerous fools destroying what little their community had, but insurgents rising up against the poverty and racism of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

Before they became respectable, Herman Ouseley and Keith Vaz were fire-spouting radicals who announced in a report for the old West Midlands County Council that the word ‘riot’ didn’t begin to describe what had happened in Handsworth. ‘The never-employed black under-class, interned in the workless gulags of Britain’, had risen up against their oppressors, they insisted. Birmingham was seeing ‘violent resistance’ by blacks who believed they were being forced to live under ‘a form of apartheid’.

Fire crews found the charred bodies of two Asian shopkeepers in the wreckage of the Lozells Road post office, but Vaz and his colleagues warned that you were falling for the ruling class’s old ‘divide and rule tactic’ if you said there were tensions between ethnic minorities. In ‘Handsworth Revolution’, the reggae band Steel Pulse sang, ‘We once beggars are now choosers/No intention to be losers’—and black Birmingham, the young and the university-educated left of the eighties agreed that the dispossessed were fighting back.

For all the hyperbole, I had sympathy with the leftists as well. In Brixton, Tottenham and Handsworth, riots began after a real or rumoured assault on a black woman by the police. The rioters were poor young men without a future. To say the violence had nothing to do with racism and the mass destruction of manufacturing jobs in Margaret Thatcher’s first recession was wishful thinking or Tory propaganda. No one rioted in Maidenhead, after all.

Twenty years on, I am back on the Lozells Road after another riot. Nothing has changed, but everything is different. The red-brick terraced houses are as poky and dilapidated as ever. Handsworth remains a place where you can smell the disappointment of people who must live in a slum because they have nowhere better to go.

Little else was familiar. The arguments of the eighties about why young men took to the streets felt antique and irrelevant. Beyond repeating the platitude that workers with good jobs tend to be law-abiding, you could not pretend the 2005 riot was an uprising against unemployment. The economic and law enforcement policies of official society—‘white society’, to stretch a point—had nothing to do with the violence. Racism was on display, but not between blacks and whites. So were religious tensions, to which I had never given a second’s thought in 1985.

The 2005 riot did not start with a bungled police round-up of drug dealers, but a racist rumour that swept black Birmingham. Everyone knew someone who could swear that an Asian shopkeeper had locked up a fourteen-year-old black girl he had caught shoplifting and then raped her with the help of his friends. Detectives have been investigating for a week. They have not found the girl, the crime scene or the rapists. Unless that changes,* and it probably won’t, the rumour will be a grotesque libel that painted Asian shopkeepers as the bestial abusers of female innocence.

Warren G spread it on his show on a pirate station. Mr G is not a standard DJ. He is a religious man who worships at the New Testament Church of God, which glares across the Lozells Road at Handsworth’s mosque. The congregation met to discuss the ‘rape’. Rumour fed on rumour. The radio stations and Net got to work and the fighting began. Gangs hit each other and passers-by with petrol bombs and guns. One police officer and thirty-five civilians were injured. An Asian gang murdered Isaiah Young-Sam, a twenty-three-year-old black man who, by a stroke of capricious fortune, was a school friend of Warren G.

Ligali, a black African pressure group, called for a boycott of Asian shops. Not of the shop where the crime took place—no one knew where it was or if, indeed, it existed—but of all Asian shops. When I knew Handsworth, there were black traders. But while Hindu, Sikh and Muslim families have followed the classic immigrant path of sticking together and building on the success of a well-run business, many blacks have fallen behind. The postings in chat rooms blamed an Asian conspiracy. They succeeded in taking over black hairdressing salons, which once dotted Handsworth, by undercutting their rates and forcing black owners to buckle under the ‘unreasonable’ competition. ‘Black people need to realise that they are being shitted on by Indians who now supply them with the very food they eat, their cosmetics and health care.’

Theodore Dalrymple, the pseudonym of a Birmingham doctor and writer, noted recently in the Telegraph that the shopkeepers were facing a modern variant of anti-Semitism. Once, white Christians accused Jewish traders of kidnapping their children and draining their blood; now, black Christians accuse Asian traders of kidnapping their girls and raping them.

These prejudices are incredibly powerful because they combine race hatred of the alien, class hatred of the prosperous and religious hatred of the infidel.

In World on Fire, published in 2004, Amy Chua argued that globalisation had created an explosion of racism in the anti-Semitic mould. The new wave of capitalism had raised the living standards of ordinary people by a little and of the rich by a lot. The supporters of free markets and democracy thought everyone was benefiting and had not noticed that their ideas helped fuel resentments in those countries where ethnic minorities dominated business.

Sectarian leaders were exploiting the antipathies of race and class. Across the planet, you heard the same demonic accusations of bloodsucking, corruption and secret influence, whether about the Chinese business class in South-East Asia, the white farmers in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the Spanish ‘whites’ in Latin America, the Jews in Russia, the Ibo in Nigeria, the Croats in the last days of Yugoslavia and the Americans everywhere. The markets of economic globalisation made minorities richer. The democracy of political globalisation allowed demagogues to whip up the resentments of the majority.

I said earlier that unlike its predecessor the 2005 Handsworth riot had nothing to do with the official world of local and national government. That was true in all respects but one. With unforgivable recklessness, our leaders are not diminishing the importance of race and religion, but fuelling sectarianism.

The untutored might think it the job of government to promote common citizenship. Yet in Birmingham, you see projects for the black unemployed, not all the unemployed, for disadvantaged Asians or Indians or Muslims, not all the disadvantaged. Across the country, wherever the BNP makes gains, you can guarantee it has been the beneficiary of white anger at grants and services dispensed on communalist lines.

State-sponsored sectarianism is about to take off. We are to have religions redefined as races, which they are not, and opposition to religion redefined as race hatred, which it is not. Meanwhile, Labour promises more faith schools that will segregate children and their parents by religion and race and, indeed, class in the case of top-end church schools.

I can see no more urgent task than taking the fight to those on the right and the left who are busily piling bricks on ghetto walls. If they are not stopped, I do not like to think what Handsworth or the rest of the country will be like in another twenty years.

Observer, October 2005

* It didn’t, of course.