When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (40 page)

In Britain the Coronary Prevention Group (CPG) reported in 1986 that Asians had a higher rate of heart disease than the national average, which is itself one of the highest in the world. Racism, low incomes, poor housing, unemployment and poor working conditions all take their toll. For most new immigrants, moving to Britain was as stressful as bereavement. They were isolated and helpless in the face of language problems and hostility or, at best, indifference from the host community. The CPG concluded there was ‘urgent need' for research into the effects of discrimination on the health of Asians. This is the adverse context in which the success of men like KD Patel must be judged. It was easy, sitting in comfortable and substantial homes in Wembley or Harrow, to forget what odds Asians face in Britain.

G.S. Bakshi, a Sikh from the Punjab, lives in a mock-Tudor home with a small swimming pool and a large rabbit hutch in the garden. Across open fields one can see Harrow School from his lead-paned front windows. At his side lay a portable car phone, brought in from his Mercedes: normally at that time he would have been on the road pursuing his property-development business. A graduate in political science, economics and English from Punjab University, he arrived in Britain in 1965 at the age of twenty-seven. He had intended continuing his education, but first had to earn a living. He quickly discovered that his Indian degree was useless. ‘I was hardly treated as a school-leaver.' He worked first in a Birmingham factory, and then in the Post Office, where, through massive overtime, he saved enough to buy his first shop. This was run by his wife, who had joined him in 1967, while he continued as a postman. The only white-collar job he was offered, as a clerk in the DHSS, paid less than the Post Office.

Looking back, Mr Bakshi smiled at the memory of attitudes that had angered him then, like that of the fellow postman who had left school at fifteen and who wondered aloud whether Mr Bakshi – a graduate – had ever worn shoes before he came to Britain; and like that of the colleague who told him that it was all right for a white man to swear at a brown one, but not for the brown to swear back. But prejudice was Mr Bakshi's springboard. Had his degree been recognized, he would probably be working his way though the middle-management ranks of a large company instead of making a great deal more money running his own small one. For many, the corner shop is an escape from both the discrimination of the British workplace – in 1987 British Telecom were ordered to pay £1,500 compensation to three Asians, who had been abused by their superior as ‘lazy Pakis', ‘useless Pakis', and as ‘coolieboys who should be in a gas chamber' – and the restraint on earnings imposed by unions. If you work for yourself, the harder you work, the better you do. Thirty-seven per cent of Asian small shopkeepers have degrees, which is a telling measure of how inhospitable even educated Asians find the British commercial environment.

Mr Bakshi's analysis of why white Britons are not as entrepreneurial as some brown Britons drew two themes together. Prejudice against coloured people and lack of enterprise were, he believed, intricately linked in the conditioning of the British working class. At home, in the days of empire, they were treated as ‘white coolies', much as black natives in the colonies. They were kept ignorant, not encouraged to be either constructive or creative, trapped by economic necessity. What the factory owners required were human machines who would go to the factory in the morning and be content with the pub in the evening. A class was created which was almost without initiative.

But in the human pecking order there was still one inferior being – the coloured man. Mr Bakshi said: ‘The English suffer from a superiority complex – in working class, middle class and upper class – a belief that the British are the superior nation in the world. The media brainwash them. They will eventually have to come to their senses and realize that the Raj is over, and with it British domination in the world.' The empire, he said, also fatally encouraged industrial inefficiency in Britain. ‘Forty years ago it didn't matter what the cost was. Goods could be dumped on the colonies. Now Britain is overmanned and undermodernized,' said Mr Bakshi. He argued that the British will to work is sapped by the welfare state, though he was also critical of Mrs Thatcher, whose monetarism, he felt, had been too radical. She should, he said, have diverted funds used to support the unemployed in order to modernize industry.

The self-made Asians I met all had remarkable stories of fortitude and determination to tell. Seen from their perspective, their sometimes punitive attitudes towards the unemployed – very different from those of the liberal English for whom life has been tolerably easy – are at least understandable. Ram Bedi, a Hindu, born in what is now Pakistan, had as a teenager to flee his home in his pyjamas at the time of Partition. He travelled a thousand miles across India to a state where he didn't speak the language to get a job as a railway clerk. Eventually, with three pounds in his pocket, he went to join relatives in Northern Ireland, where he sold clothes from a van to remote farmers. Later he opened a wholesale warehouse in Cookstown, working from 8.00 a.m. to 11.00 p.m. Three times his premises were damaged by IRA bombs. In 1978, he prudently retreated to England, and started a business manufacturing wire hangers for dry-cleaners. When I met him, his small company was producing sixty million hangers a year, exporting almost half, and had an annual turnover of nearly one million pounds: he was a Fellow of the Institute of Directors, lived in a large house overlooking Windsor Castle, drove a Mercedes with a personalized number plate, and was the first Asian president of the Slough Rotarians. He took me to the weekly Rotary Club luncheon, proudly wearing the chain of office that bore the names of fifty-four past presidents.

As we drove to lunch, he showed me a large clothes shop run by Asians, who had been working out of their homes five years before. There is no mystery about the Asian success: it is achieved by hard work, sustained by strong families. Ram Bedi employs ten people and is still expanding. An energetic man, with gold-rimmed glasses, who was going grey at the temples, he tapped the table from time to time, the gesture of a man who gets things done. He had invited me to lunch on the very day I rang, a contrast to the delaying layers of public relations that so often cocoon large firms – ‘frightfully busy time of year, old boy. Let's see. How about early, no, better make that later, next month. After we've had a chat perhaps we could pop you in to see the chairman. He might be able to squeeze in half an hour.' The chairman is usually delighted to see one, and the problem is getting away.

‘I want,' said Mr Bedi, ‘willing people who will work, not take Saturdays off. They need to want to make money and be happy. I don't mind working long hours. I couldn't stop at five o'clock and sit in the pub. If I had no job, I'd clean windows – you can make £400 a week, or £200 a week as a gardener. It's up to the people.' He amused leading local business people by rounding on Nigel Lawson when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Lawson visited a local lunch club. ‘I told him “there is so much unemployment, yet I can't get people for my factory. You pay them fifty to sixty pounds a week, so they are not interested in jobs at seventy-five pounds. They have no incentive. They should be sent to us first before they get the dole.” People should be protected, but they should have some incentive to work.'

Ramniklal Solanki came to Britain from India in 1964 as correspondent for an Indian group of papers. Shortly afterwards, because of an Indian currency crisis, his salary was frozen in India, and he was forced to take a job as an assistant timekeeper at an engineering firm at twelve pounds a week. The then Indian High Commissioner suggested he should start a paper for the growing Gujerati community. There were no Gujerati typesetting machines, so Mr Solanki wrote the paper by hand. On Friday nights he would board a long-distance coach for a provincial city, and, over the weekend, furnished with a list of local Gujeratis, would call door-to-door selling subscriptions. The initial circulation was 1,500. His wife by this time had arrived in England, and supported them both on a nine-pounds-a-week job.

The paper received a significant boost with the arrival of the Ugandan Asians, most of whom were Gujeratis. Mr Solanki distributed it free in the resettlement camps. ‘People needed advice, how to live in this country, what to do, even – for those from remote villages – how to use toilets and baths.' Today that paper –
Garavi Gujarat
(‘Pride of Gujerat') – sells 41,000 copies weekly. In 1985 Mr Solanki launched a sister magazine,
Asian Trader
, aimed at the burgeoning Asian business community: ‘Our people were going into business and wanted advice,' he said. An
Economist
Intelligence Unit report in 1986 found that the decline in independent grocers had been halted by Asian shopkeepers, who by then comprised half the nation's total. In London the figure was 70 per cent.

Mr Solanki employs thirty-five people, including ten journalists, operates his papers from his own plant off the Blackfriars Road in south London, and is in
Who's Who
. He is a short, rotund man, who slips in and out of his cluttered office with bewildering frequency, introducing a visitor to other members of his busy newspaper community – many of whom belong to his family. His wife, clad in a sari, does layouts; one son, Kalpesh, sells advertising space (from an office even more cluttered than his father's, in which pride of place belonged to a trouser press, on which rested a cake of soap and a shoehorn); and a second son, Shailesh, on vacation from University College London, was writing for
Asian Trader
.

The Solankis exemplified the strength of the Asian family unit, the cornerstone of Asian success in Britain. West Indians, with their high number of single-parent families, often don't have sufficient support to see them through the inevitable crises of immigrant life. Mr Solanki had involved in his business, or helped, not just his immediate family, but his father, three brothers and two sisters. Kalpesh had read law at university and been called to the bar: Shailesh was reading economics and wanted to be a journalist. The business, they said, was in the blood: they had learned it at their father's knee.

Before Mr Solanki could afford machinery, the family had to collate by hand each copy of the paper. Inspired by their father, they had worked hard – in Harrow public library after school and on Saturday mornings. Everyone else studying at those times would be Asian, they said. With great pride, they showed me the complicated computers required to set Gujerati type. They were learning from the British all the time. And the Japanese were learning from them. The Solankis had recently been visited by a group of Japanese business school professors, curious about the minor economic miracle achieved by British Asians. No similar group of British professors, or British anybody else, had called, though they did get an occasional letter from schoolchildren and students asking about Asian business success. (Deep in the jungle something stirs.) Kalpesh in particular, visiting companies to sell advertising, was widening his horizons. What he learned was passed on to the community through
Asian Trader
. Asian firms, he said, would have to start taking a longer view, investing more in customer relations.

Solicitor Ramesh Vala, who came to Britain from Kenya to read law at the London School of Economics in 1973, made the same point more bluntly. Although we met when the City was being shaken by scandals like the Guinness affair, he felt vehemently that Asians had to learn from the British tradition of fair dealing, and that they too often cut corners in pursuit of quick profits. ‘In the long term, it is more important to be honest and make a name for yourself. Ethics,' he said, ‘are paramount to the English professional. An Asian too often says: “I'll do it because it makes money.” If you are patient, hang on for two years, you will be more successful. I have nothing but contempt for Asians who make money but contribute nothing back to society.'

Mr Vala was then one of only two Asian partners in the top hundred solicitors' firms in London. He had become a partner in his twenties, and – in his immaculate grey suit, white shirt and heavy-rimmed glasses – looked the part. His partnership – in Harley Street – was even more immaculate. A visitor waits in what appears to be a boudoir, adorned with reproduction French empire furniture, leather-clad phones, chandeliers, and a Grecian urn, filled, even in mid-winter, with carnations, lilies, and chrysanthemums. I was offered tea, coffee or Perrier water. The young Solanki brothers had said that, because of prejudice, it was prudent for an Asian to go it alone: ‘The English are not used to seeing a brown face in a position of authority.' Mr Vala was sterner: he criticized Asians for opting out when the going got tough and starting their own businesses, rather than striving to succeed inside big firms. This practice had, however, been to his advantage, since the new, smaller partnerships couldn't handle big deals, and Indian clients, who like when possible to do business with one of their own, were making a beeline to his firm.

‘My fear,' he said, ‘is that unless Asians show a social conscience, in two or three years' time they will be disliked even more than they are now. People see us as milking society, taking all the cream.' He cited various scandals involving Asians from the Johnson Matthey affair to doctors making amorous advances on patients. Practices once almost taboo to Asians – divorce and sending old people to homes – were losing their stigma.

Asians, he said, tended also to opt out in their personal lives. Their response to a poor school was not to join the PTA but to remove their child. ‘In East Africa they never participated in politics, concentrating instead on carving out a niche for themselves. They ignored the host community, and failed to see the dangers until it was too late. Unfortunately the same may be happening here,' he said. He suggested that communities should make gestures like raising five pounds from each person to donate to the local hospital, adding pragmatically that they should make sure the gift was reported in the local papers. Asians in Britain need to protect themselves from British racial and social prejudice by entering visibly and energetically into public life. He was particularly concerned that there should be Asian members of parliament, contrasting the influence and weight of the forty or more Jewish MPs with the impotence many leading Asians feel.