When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (44 page)

It is easy to assume that purgatory of this nature is suffered by immigrants only when they and their white neighbours live in conditions of overcrowding, poverty and unemployment. But there have been a growing number of serious attacks in suburban areas, such as petrol being poured through the letter-box and set alight while a family sleeps. I stumbled across an example of what it can be like to be brown in Britain in the remote Durham village of Easington Colliery.

While I was researching the north-south divide, a story broke about an Indian shopkeeper, who, driven mad by eight years of persecution from local youths, had snapped, and attacked two teenagers with a metal bar. He was charged with wounding the youths. Although the judge sentenced the Indian to a suspended nine-month prison term, he directed his judicial strictures almost entirely at the village, and bound over the victims of the shopkeeper's assault. The judge said: ‘If there is any more harassment of this family, the magistrates should send the culprits to this court. With any luck I will be able to deal with them.' The story ran across the front page of the
Northern Echo
under the headline ‘
JUDGE SLAMS RACE-HATE VILLAGE
.'

The shopkeeper, Harbhajan Bhondi, was a chubby, friendly man of thirty-six – though he looked considerably older – who ran a sweet shop cum general store halfway down Easington Colliery's steep main street. He was by no means a bloated capitalist – even by Easington standards. His shop was one of many in the large village, and business, because of local prejudice, was poor. ‘When I first came here I was taking five hundred pounds a day. But now I am lucky if I take a hundred, which is a hell of a difference. Instead of going up, I am going down.' During the miners' strike Mr Bhondi had given nearly eight hundred pounds to NUM funds.

He led me upstairs to his sitting room, another of those beleaguered rooms with drawn curtains to which I became accustomed. One of his sons pulled back the orange drapes to show three or four airgun pellet holes in the ugly reinforced glass. The back bedroom windows were boarded. Downstairs, the shop window was covered with a grille that might have deterred the Great Train Robbers. Mr Bhondi had just been released from hospital, where he had been treated for a nervous disorder. ‘I was,' he said, ‘shaking like a jellyfish.' His children had been removed from a local school because of bullying. Once more, immigrant hopes had been destroyed by racial violence and prejudice. Yet the people of Easington Colliery regarded themselves as the salt of the earth, far superior in their tolerance and lack of snobbery to southerners.

Mr Bhondi came to England with his father when he was twelve. His ambition had been to be a doctor, but poor English restricted his education. He trained as a welder and mechanic, and worked for nearly eight years at Ford's Dagenham plant at the same time driving a minicab, putting in long hours to amass some modest capital. In 1978 a friend in Newcastle saw an advertisement for the Easington shop, and the Bhondis came north. ‘We had the impression it was nice and quiet here, but that only lasted a few weeks,' said Mr Bhondi. In the first year, the shop window was smashed fourteen times. Such attacks became so frequent that, by the time of the court case, the family no longer got up in the night if they heard a crash. Daily they were insulted in the shop and on the street – ‘black bastards' and ‘nig-nogs'. Their intimidators rattled the metal grilles at all hours. The children never left home on their own except to visit specific friends, or to go to their new school, where the headmaster kept a tight eye on bullies. Mr Bhondi worked from 9.00 a.m. to 9.00 p.m., only leaving to buy supplies, or visit friends and relatives in other parts of the north-east. If he left his car on the street, it would be vandalized.

For years the police were inert. ‘You'd call them, and they'd come and take the brick away,' said Mr Bhondi. Eventually, the Bhondis themselves obtained the names and addresses of their assailants by paying village informers. After Mr Bhondi had involved his MP, the police became more supportive, and a police constable had recently spent a week in the shop in an effort to deter further attacks. Mr Bhondi said with gratitude: ‘They are the only reason we are alive.' His instinct was to face his persecutors out: ‘If I leave, they'll think I'm running. There'll be a few like them in the next place. It will start all over again, just like the westerns. I don't want to be a fugitive.'

The Bhondis were no threat to anyone in Easington Colliery – they had been, when they arrived, the only Asian family. A social worker neighbour said: ‘Mr Bhondi's friendly and generous. I don't think I'd be like that if what has happened to him and his family had happened to me.' I talked to several people about the family's ordeal; most said that it was clearly a bad business, but they had been unaware of it, which, in such a small community, seemed inconceivable. I heard about it on my first day there – before the court case. A local councillor was honest, if not very courageous. ‘I am aware of it. But I've never kept up with it. I would have to delve into it before I could answer any questions.'

She spoke, I felt, for the rest of us, particularly the national leaders. Intellectually, we know what goes on: we can scarcely avoid it if we take a serious newspaper. In 1986 wide coverage was given to a report of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, which opened with the words: ‘The most shameful and dispiriting aspect of race relations in Britain is the incidence of racial attacks and harassment … the problem is especially serious in a few boroughs … and is particularly directed at those of Asian origin.' The MPs cited a Greater London Council catalogue of reported abuse; ‘racist name-calling, rubbish, rotten eggs, rotten tomatoes, excreta, etc., dumped in front of the victims' doors, urinating through the letter-boxes of the victims, fireworks, burning materials and excreta pushed through letter-boxes, door-knocking, cutting telephone wires, kicking, punching, spitting at victims, serious physical assault, damage to property, e.g. windows being broken, doors smashed, racist graffiti daubed on door or wall. Dogs, cars, motorcycles are still being used to frighten black people. Shotguns and knives have also been used.'

They quoted evidence from the Manchester Council for Community Relations, which stressed the need to remember: ‘the reality which lies behind all of these cases – an individual or family living in fear, subject to humiliation, stress and physical danger, frequently too terrified for their safety to allow children to play outside, driven to tranquillizers and sleeping pills, constantly on the alert wondering whether tonight will bring a brick through the window, or tomorrow morning the words “NF – Pakis go home!” on their front door. Family life is destroyed as the parents and children, almost invariably, show their frustration, anger and fear to each other. What was a home becomes a prison.' The MPs commented: ‘The harm caused by racial incidents is not simply the injury and damage they impose directly, but the fear and the blighted lives to which they give rise.' They also were struck by the degradation caused by spitting, and quoted a Bangladeshi who told them: ‘The daily walk to and from work and school becomes a never-ending nightmare.'

The committee stated the crux of the problem: it is difficult for a white person to imagine the constant fear and the experience of attacks and harassment upon one's self, one's children and one's home motivated solely by racial hatred. The MPs added: ‘This lack of awareness goes far to explain why policies and measures to counter racial attacks have developed only slowly and on an
ad hoc
basis.'

John Tufail-Ali is a member of the management committee of the Community Alliance for Police Accountability (CAPA) based in Tower Hamlets. The day I went to see him in one of those all-purpose protest buildings – ‘Self-defence for Unemployed Women' was being advertised in the lobby, and free newspapers for Gays were on display – Sir Kenneth Newman, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, launched an initiative against racial harassment. In a radio interview Sir Kenneth lambasted organizations like CAPA: ‘These so-called monitoring groups operate from an ideological stance and are very clearly anti-police … they have this long history of tendentious commentary.' Which, though often true, is a useful sleight of hand for dismissing the allegations that monitoring groups bring to public attention.

Mr Tufail-Ali is an unusual man. He appears to be a Yorkshireman, with sandy, curly hair and an instantly recognizable accent. But, he told me, his mother had been a Pakistani – a Pathan from Lahore – from whom he had taken his name, and he had been brought up in Dorset. His father was a soldier, and at fifteen he also had joined up. In the army he found himself a part of what he called ‘virulent racism'. Like the police force, he said, the army envelops its men in ‘a hermetic existence, which sees itself as separate from civilians. This creates an elitist ethos, and is rigidly hierarchical. If you are at the bottom of such a system, you have to find someone who is inferior to you. That's why racism is prevalent in uniformed ranks.' He said his father had brought him up to feel superior to his mother on two counts; because she was coloured and because she was a woman. In his twenties he had had a crisis of remorse – that's when he'd taken his mother's name – resigned from the army, gone to university and been radicalized.

I started to talk about the prevalence of petty racism, like spitting. Before I could continue, he – clearly believing I was ignorant of more serious assaults – cried ‘Can I disabuse you?', and from the top of his desk picked up and brandished a thick wodge of documents, which were a record of racial incidents for the first nine months of 1986 in the Tower Hamlets police division. I later saw the entries for one month, in which most of the victims had been Asian. The incidents included:

v
ICTIM
: Asian male, aged thirty-two years.

INCIDENT
: Assault.

REMARKS
: One of two white males aged twenty to twenty-five slashed victim in the face, inflicting a wound requiring nineteen stitches in an unprovoked attack.

VICTIMS
: Three Asian boys, aged eight, nine and eleven.

INCIDENT
: Assault, Abuse, Threats.

REMARKS
: Victims were walking back to their school with a teacher when two white boys aged about thirteen years abused and threatened them. One of the victims was hit and another was kicked. The boys had previously verbally abused the victims.

VICTIMS
: Asian male, aged thirty-eight years.

INCIDENT
: Criminal Damage.

REMARKS
: A male suspect attempted to smash the window of an unoccupied Indian restaurant with an iron bar and failed. The suspect ran off leaving a bottle containing petrol and a piece of rag outside the premises at 2.45 a.m.

Those incidents are taken at random: the list continued in similar vein for many pages. The most dispiriting reading was the column marked ‘Results'. The only ‘solution' recorded was when a white man drew a knife and threatened an Asian in the presence of a police officer, ‘refused to desist and was arrested'. Typical comments were: ‘Local inquiries made with no useful information being obtained' (entered many times), and ‘Area searched with victim with no trace of suspects.'

These bald reports say nothing as to the diligence of the police. Mr Tufail-Ali said: ‘There seems a marked reluctance by significant sections of the police to pursue racial abuse effectively. Black people lose faith because they get no positive support. By complaining they lay themselves open to reprisals. Eventually this produces emotional paralysis.' Sir Kenneth Newman would disagree entirely, but, after meeting many victims, I had to side with Mr Tufail-Ali.

Sir Kenneth had said in his radio interview: ‘What is important is that the official policy of the force is definitely against any form of racism, and that policy is clearly located in written instructions. We are an equal opportunities employer, and have adopted the code on that subject, so institutionally we are definitely not a racist organization.' Nothing in that statement could be faulted, except its spirit, which reflects the complacent attitude of the British Establishment on this issue. ‘Official policy … written instructions … code … institutionally …' They all miss the point. Only the looniest of the left would actually accuse Scotland Yard of having an officially institutionalized racialist policy. What would cut ice would be if the police showed more enthusiasm for tackling racial intimidation, if a few of the ‘rotten apples', on whom all malpractice in police forces is blamed, were detected and thrown out of the barrel, and if the rest of the force kept its racial opinions to itself.

When Mike Lone reported a break-in near his shop, the police came within three minutes; when he and his son were in danger of their lives, the attack was over before the police appeared. When white youths stoned an east end mosque and the police arrived only in time to arrest three worshippers, a senior officer was widely quoted as having said: ‘We are British police, and we are here to protect our own people.' Monitoring groups accuse officers of ‘harassing and intimidating victims'. One organizer said: ‘They ask questions like “How did you provoke this?” and “Did you do anything to provoke this?” They also ask about the immigration status of victims. Our experience shows that the police are racist and blatantly so, using words like “wogs” and “niggers” in front of witnesses.' An Asian whose house was destroyed by an arsonist during a spate of such attacks in the summer of 1985 said: ‘I can't believe that white families would get taken to the police station and be questioned for eight hours if their house had been burned down.'

Monitoring groups are magnets for bright young Asians with a commitment to their communities. Nishit Kanwar's family were Hindu Punjabis, and he came to England from Kenya in 1972 at the age of ten. He is a handsome, articulate young man, who went to grammar school and then to Keele University, where he read international relations. (He laughed when I asked whether that qualification might have helped him towards a ‘conventional' career.) He was, he said, politically conscious from a young age. He works for the Newham Monitoring Project in the borough that recorded the highest National Front vote in Britain in the 1979 and 1983 general elections. East enders, he said, tended to regard their patch as ‘white by right', and added, ‘in this area a lot of people expect abuse: it is part and parcel of the price they pay for living here. These conditions drive people to extremes: the environment fosters a physical response. People are imprisoned by the fear of going outside. When you visit, it all comes pouring out.' He estimated that 60 per cent of school-leavers from ethnic minorities in the borough were out of work. ‘When the docks thrived, the east end was the bread basket of London, now it is the dumping-ground,' he said.