When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (41 page)

Kanti Nagda, who runs the Sangat Community Centre in Harrow and founded an Anglo-Indian Art Circle, devotes his life to trying to ensure that what happened to Asians in Uganda will never happen in Britain. ‘Asians must get into the corridors of power, have their voices heard and be part of the decision-making process. If you are there, you will be heard; if you are not, you will be ignored,' he said. In Uganda, Asians had got on with making money, leaving politics first to the Europeans and then to the Africans. There were only two or three Asian MPs: Asians could have been the ruling group in several cities. ‘Politicians only understand one language – the cross on the ballot paper.' Mr Nagda identifies parliamentary constituencies where the immigrant vote could swing the seat, tests candidates' views on issues relevant to ethnic minorities, and makes Asians and Afro-Caribbeans conscious of the issues so that they reflect their own interests in the way they vote. At the borough level, these tactics, he said, are paying off. Not only are black and Asian councillors now senior figures, but translation units have been set up, cultural centres – like the one he runs – established, vegetarian meals on wheels offered, and special health services provided.

Six years after arriving in Britain, Mr Nagda was in
Who's Who
. In Uganda he had taught history and Gujerati – and written a novel. He was in his early twenties when Amin expelled the Asians, and came to Britain with only fifty pounds in September 1972. Within three days he had a job as an accounts clerk with an American firm, and owned a house within two months. ‘There's no point in worrying over what you've left behind,' he said. ‘Forget it.' A slim, wiry man, with a goatee beard and a touch of white at the front of his dark hair, he brings the energy to his educating mission that his fellow refugees have put into business. His upbringing had been utterly conventional by Ugandan Asian standards. His father owned a general store, and when friends came, discussed business
ad infinitum
. ‘It was a heritage for us. That gets to you. But I wanted to make Asians aware of the mistakes they made in East Africa.' He feared that militant antiracism would backfire. He cited the hounding of Maureen McGoldrick, who had been suspended as headmistress of a Brent primary school because she was reported to have said she didn't want more black teachers in her school. Miss McGoldrick, shown nightly on television being embraced and kissed by Asian mothers and children in her school playground, was everyone's idea of the perfect head teacher. She clearly loved her job and her children, and her strong face told of her determination. As public opinion swung behind her, the councillors, black and white, who were trying to sack her, appeared increasingly out of touch with public sentiment.

Mr Nagda had little time for the far left: ‘We have to live with the majority, and to live peaceably we have to come to terms with them. We must accept for the present that we are in a “foreign” country. I'm not saying we will accept abuse and discrimination, but a minority cannot fight the majority. It will be a long time before Britain is a genuinely multi-cultural society.'

His headquarters, tucked away behind rows of suburban homes, with bottle-glass windows in replacement, mock-Victorian doors and privet hedges, was symbolic of those patient compromises and unheralded advances that will be necessary for years if Britain is ever to be a multi-racial country. It is a start that Pooter now lives next door to Patel: up to 35,000 people in Harrow are Asian, the vast majority from Uganda. Harassment there is not unknown, but at least in owner-occupier areas it is not an open sore. As I left, Asian women in saris, clutching plastic bags, strolled towards the community centre in disconnected pairs for a session with the chiropodist.

One Asian, Keith Vaz, was elected – for Leicester East – in 1987. However, if Asians were proportionately represented in parliament, there would be twenty-four Asian MPs. There had been three previously, but they were all in ‘pre-immigration' times – two in the late nineteenth century, and one in the twenties. A Bombay-born barrister actually sat for Bethnal Green as a Conservative for eleven years from 1895, a combination that in the modern context would boggle the mind. Several Afro-Caribbeans – including Bernie Grant and Diane Abbott – also won seats for Labour in the 1987 election, and Asians fear privately that, despite their own single representative, these Afro-Caribbeans – mainly on the hard left – will be seen to speak for all minorities. Successful, entrepreneurial Asians ought to be more at home with the Conservative Party than with Labour. But history – in the form of the post-war Labour government that saw India to Independence in the teeth of opposition from Winston Churchill – helps Labour. Several Asians said they felt Conservatives to be less welcoming than Labour Party members. ‘Conservatives are very nationalist-minded people. They don't spell it out, but I sense that they feel we are different,' said one.

Major Narindar Saroop fought Greenwich for the Conservatives in the 1979 general election. He is a caricature of the anglophile Indian, and, as such, falls uneasily into a no man's land between the white British and the new generation of Asians. We met at one of his clubs, the Cavalry and Guards on Piccadilly, the lobby a bustle of tall men in pin-striped suits, some young and loud, some somewhat doddery, most unmistakable members of the British upper classes of the country home and a ‘spot of lunch in town' variety. Their black, well-worn shoes sparkled as if batmen still dutifully polished them each morning. A tiny Scottish porter – who probably
had
been a batman – darted in and out from behind a huge Victorian reception desk. There were occasional cries from a major-domo of ‘My dear general …' and ‘Brigadier, I'll be right there, Sir …' A very elderly party was on a phone trying to reach a woman who had clearly been an early flame – Poona 28? ‘I'm up in London for a dinner, and wondered whether I could give you some lunch. Must warn you though; I've got to catch the 2.44 from Euston. Not much time for sitting in a comfortable chair drinking coffee.' He emerged from the phone, with grey moustache and gold-rimmed glasses, looking as pleased as if, as a young subaltern, he had landed his first date.

Major Saroop was at home in this environment. Neatly swept-back grey hair, pin-striped suit, yellow striped shirt, infinitely courteous. His
Who's Who
entry lists his recreations as: ‘keeping fools, boredom and socialism at bay'. ‘Randal, my dear fellow,' he cried to an elderly man, with swollen arthritic hands, who was tottering past and who turned out to be the Irish poet/peer, Lord Dunsany. They traded nicknames and anecdotes, happily inquiring after each other's nearest and dearest. ‘I am the only man ever to have been ordered to fight to the last cartridge twice, and survived,' said Dunsany, pausing an instant before adding ‘never actually fired a shot.' Arrangements were made for the two men to meet the following day with Kenneth Rose, ‘Albany' of the
Sunday Telegraph
. It was a cosy world, and it was attractive no doubt to belong, but we were a very long way from either Wembley and Harrow or London's east end.

Major Saroop seemed but remotely connected to the experiences of his fellow Asians, but he had some shrewd opinions. The world of the Cavalry and Guards Club was under siege, as much from the Thatcherites as from the left. He spoke of a ‘communications trap', by which he meant poor English, and said that Asian-run corner shops were ‘quite popular from all I hear.' He told me that a Conservative government was in the interests of British Asians, because they would prosper best in a country that was strong both internally and externally. When a country is weak, there is a tendency to turn on minorities. Asians are natural patriots, he said, but they should also vote Conservative out of self-interest.

Looking ahead, the major was fearful. ‘The next generation,' he said, ‘will be more under stress, without the emotional or spiritual comfort their elders had.' This will be partially compensated for by fluent English. He added, however: ‘It is in the British psyche to feel superior to coloured people, and prejudice is more prevalent amongst the working classes. Everyone likes to look down on someone. It is hard for the British to come to terms with the overturning of this order of things when, for example, Asian children do better than their own at school.'

Major Saroop had once been complacent about race relations – ‘the incidence of racial prejudice is far less than imagined, but more than can be identified' – but he appeared to be changing his tune. Thatcherism, with its abrasive intolerances, had led to a general hardening of attitudes; the British were becoming less easy-going. It was sad, he said, because for two centuries the British had been a gentle and civilized people. But manners were deteriorating, even courtesy on the pavement: people were less tolerant of things to which they didn't subscribe – like smoking. Mrs Thatcher, he complained, ‘lets the walking wounded take care of themselves.' It was Tory ‘wet' talk from a disillusioned man. As we parted he asked me what I thought of proportional representation, which, after having been rebuffed for safe Conservative seats, he obviously thought was the only way an Asian such as he was going to get into Westminster.

Mr Vala's chosen Asian parliamentary candidate was Mrs Zerbanoo Gifford, then the Liberal candidate for Harrow East. He and some other young professionals had formed a small group to advance her campaign. Mrs Gifford is scarcely the typical ‘immigrant' – perhaps less so even than Major Saroop. She is, for a start, a Zoroastrian Parsee – her father is president of the world Zoroastrian movement. She was brought up largely in English hotels owned by her father – ‘a good preparation for public life: you're on duty twenty-four hours a day when you live in a hotel. I didn't feel I had a private life' – was educated at Roedean and Watford Technical College, which, she said, immediately confuses the class-conscious English, and is married to an English solicitor. She is what the Americans call ‘feisty', full of spirit and fire, without modesty, false or otherwise. When she talks about being prime minister one day, it's hard to tell whether she's joking. She is irrepressible and self-confident in the way Edwina Currie appears to be.

For three years she was subjected to racial harassment that would have driven someone less resolute from public life. It began during the 1983 general election campaign when she was standing against Cecil Parkinson – she polled 14,000 votes, the highest of any ethnic candidate. She was alone in the house, taking a bath when the telephone rang. An anonymous caller said: ‘We know you are alone. We are not going to let blacks run this country. We are coming to get you right now, and we are coming through the greenhouse.' The caller must have been watching the house and have known the layout. Later calls were both racist and sexual, and one was a threat to kidnap her two small boys. Mrs Gifford was convinced that these were not ‘yobbo' calls, as most of the callers spoke quietly and did not swear. A man slashed the front door with a knife; someone tried to drive her off the road. After she had been adopted for Harrow East as a candidate for the 1987 election, the local paper was told in another anonymous call that the intimidation would continue.

Mrs Gifford eventually responded by telling the full story to a right-wing Sunday paper, which she felt would be a more effective way of rallying support than going to the liberal press. A report there, alongside the Thatcherite editorials and tittle-tattle about the aristocracy, would bring home to the comfortable suburban reader that racial harassment was not suffered only by illiterate Bengali peasants in Brick Lane, but also by well-spoken, well-educated, public-spirited members of the middle classes. A similar prominent feature in the ‘bleeding heart' press would have had a fraction of the impact.

When I lunched with her, she was nervous whenever she had to go to the front door, although the house was by then well protected by alarms. She exudes enormous energy, keeping a conversation going over her shoulder even when she leaves the room to attend to domestic concerns. She told me that a few days earlier at the Oxford Union she had rounded on misguided leftists who had been denouncing members of the ethnic minorities who joined the Conservative Party. ‘I had to attack their closed minds, explain to them the nature of democracy.' She told also of a clash she had had with Roy Hattersley, when he dismissed the validity of her perspective because she was not like ‘my Asians' – i.e. those who live in Hattersley's Birmingham constituency. Both the lefties and Hattersley surely knew they had been in a fight. Mrs Gifford can take a tough line with the far left without being denounced as a race collaborator, because her well-publicized harassment gave her unimpeachable battle honours.

The Gifford home was furnished and decorated in upper-middle-class English taste, restrained and understated where KD Patel's had been brash and exuberant. Mrs Gifford was a little alarmed that I had been to see KD, though she hastily added ‘of course, you did have to see him.' His style was not one she wished to be associated with, nor did she want KD held out before native English eyes as an example of the ‘success' to which other British Asians aspired: the names she gave me of people to see were of upper-class, cultured Indians, members of London clubs and old families.

Mrs Gifford had just taken part in a Liberal Party inquiry into the immigrant experience, and said she found most members of ethnic minorities were crying out for some sign of welcome. What really struck her was that, despite the talents and education of British Asians, nowhere have they made a real breakthrough – not in the City, the armed forces, academia, the professions. She was amazed how slow the British have been to make a virtue of minority communities. Brown Britons, she said, should be encouraged to be bilingual – not for any ideological ‘mother tongue' reason – but so they could open up Far Eastern markets. India, after all, is the second largest potential market in the world. Society suffers, she said, if a minority feel like outsiders. ‘It would help the economy to grow if we were encouraged.' Prominent Asians in British society could assist the country's image abroad. ‘What wonderful PR I'd be,' she added with one of her ambiguous laughs.