The recent Black Lives Matter mobilisations have involved hundreds of thousands of people across Britain. They have withstood fascist attacks, hundreds of arrests, and in the initial period took place in open defiance of coronavirus bans on public gatherings. The strength of the movement in the United States has been an important inspiration, but many protesters have made clear that their target is also British state racism. This has been expressed in the popular slogan, ‘The UK is Not Innocent’, which has appeared on many homemade placards. Many of these protests were called by small groups of individuals with little or no previous political experience. They have been strongly working class and diverse in make-up, although young black people have generally played a leading role. While the initial wave of mobilisations appears to have subsided, thousands of people will have drawn important political lessons and it has brought a new level of consciousness that will feed into future struggles. TOM VICKERS reports.
Racist Britain
There have been 1,741 deaths in custody or following contact with the police In England and Wales since 1990. Black people make up 3% of the population, but 8% of these deaths and 12% of the prison population. Overall, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people account for 14% of the population, but 27% of the prison population. This is in addition to the thousands locked up indefinitely and without charge in Britain’s immigration prisons, where abuse from guards has been widely documented. Black people and many other ethnic minorities also have a much greater likelihood of being stopped by the police, arrested, and remanded in custody while on trial, and are given longer sentences on average. It is even worse for young people and children, where 40% of prisoners under 18 years of age are BAME – 29% are black.
The treatment black people receive in police custody and prisons also shows the racism of the system. The government’s own statistics show that African-Caribbeans are more likely than any other ethnic group to be strip-searched by British police, and in recent years 48% of children and young people who were subjected to strip-searches inside Young Offenders Institutions were Black or Asian. Surveys show that BAME prisoners are less likely to feel safe, less likely to report being treated with respect by guards, more likely to experience outright abuse from guards, and less likely to feel able to make complaints or to have complaints handled fairly.
The racism of British society is also reflected in ethnic minorities having lower average wages, working disproportionately in low paid and insecure jobs, being less likely to receive state support and more likely to be homeless or living in overcrowded conditions, and being more likely to suffer from long term limiting illness and disability. What this means overall is that ethnic minorities in Britain are disproportionately concentrated among poorer sections of the working class and face more extreme conditions of exploitation because of the racism they face. This toxic mix has contributed to black people being significantly more likely than white people to die from Covid-19 – 3.3 times as likely for men and 2.4 times as likely for women after taking into account age differences, based on ONS data for 2 March-15 May.1
Learning from history
The recent mobilisations call to mind the black and Asian movements of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1983 we wrote:
The 1981 Uprisings established beyond doubt that black people are a leading force opposed to the British imperialist state. Their oppressed condition and their daily experience of racist harassment by the state has given them – in advance of any other section of the working class – the ability to see the British state as an oppressive machine. In addition they have shown that they identify with oppressed peoples fighting imperialism throughout the world. ‘We are the black IRA’ said the St Pauls youth during their Uprising and they also show instinctive support for the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
In fighting back against racism and state oppression, black people have been the first major social force to confront the state. They have rejected the bankrupt peaceful and constitutional channels of bourgeois democracy so beloved by the British labour movement. They are playing a vanguard role and inevitably will draw other sections behind them, as when the dispossessed white youth joined the 1981 Uprisings. 2
Those movements built on traditions of internationalist solidarity that had developed through anti-colonial struggles, which were inseparable from the international communist movement. They created organisations, like the Asian and Black Youth Movements, the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, the Race Today Collective, and many more, and defended the movement against police brutality, frame-ups and fascist attacks. In some cases, they also made a clear break with the Labour Party. For example, when hero of the Labour left Tony Benn appeared on the platform in Trafalgar Square at a 20,000-strong Campaign Against Racist Laws demonstration in 1979, he was denounced on stage by Manjit Singh, Chair of the Bradford Asian Youth Movement. Singh described Benn as a ‘false friend’ because of the racist policies of the Labour government, to loud applause and jeers from the crowd.
The RCG gave unconditional support to those movements, because we recognised racism as central to capitalism and saw the vanguard role that black and Asian young people were playing in leading working-class resistance to imperialism. In the 1979 General Election the RCG challenged attempts by the Labour Party and its apologists to divert opposition to racism into narrow anti-fascism, and combined this with anti-imperialist interventions in hustings with the call ‘Vote H for the H-Block Men’, to force Britain’s occupation of Ireland and the criminalisation of Republican prisoners onto the agenda.
The movements of that earlier period were defeated through a combination of what we described at the time as the ‘big stick’ of state repression and the ‘rotten carrot’ of community relations. While entire communities were criminalised, funding was directed at community projects, on the condition that they remained apolitical, offering concessions to undermine resistance and recruiting black leaders to careers as salaried community workers. Sections of the British left that were aligned to the Labour Party actively helped to isolate and undermine the movement’s potential for revolutionary leadership within the working class. Following the uprisings of 1981, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) adopted the term ‘street people’ as a euphemism for black workers, and sneered:
The street people are the vulnerable under-belly of the working class. The SPG cops who practise on black kids in Brixton graduate to picket lines.
Their economic position makes street people militant, angry, and disorganised … The protests can be very angry indeed — they burn down whole cities. But in the end they die away, because there is no organisation and nothing to hold onto.3
The SWP and many other groups on the British left sought to channel the militant movement on the streets into the passive and stultifying embrace of British trade unions. Alongside this the state actively cultivated a more privileged layer of black workers, to form a basis for opportunism within the movement. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s a small minority of black and Asian workers were allowed to move into a more comfortable, middle class position, while the majority remained disproportionately concentrated in low-paid and insecure jobs, in substandard housing, with limited access to state support and subject to constant state surveillance and repression. This fuelled individual aspiration to undermine the struggle for collective liberation and provided an infrastructure for managing the anger of the black working class from within. This was continued under the Labour government from 1997, through a depoliticised form of multiculturalism that offered ‘sambas and samosas’, cultural recognition in exchange for loyalty to British imperialism.
Racism has not abated since the 1980s, but resistance has largely been contained, such as the determined but small campaigns waged by the families of those killed by the police and refugee struggles against deportation and detention. The RCG has supported many such campaigns, and they have won some victories but have not succeeded in building into a wider movement. There have been further uprisings against police violence and racist injustices – including 1995 (Brixton), 2001 (Oldham and other towns), and 2011 (London spreading to other cities) – but these were short-lived and quickly repressed, and did not give rise to the kind of sustained political challenge that occurred during 1979-81.
Why now?
As Lenin points out, mass mobilisations tend to arise when people’s lives are not just bad, but getting worse. That has certainly happened for many BAME people in Britain over recent years – growing poverty, increasing state surveillance and repression, and no real prospect of things improving any time soon.
The 2007/08 financial crisis, and the recession and austerity that followed, destabilised the ‘community relations’ arrangements outlined above. The BAME voluntary sector was decimated by cuts, and with it went both the comfortable jobs and the apparatus of social control. Many of the better paid jobs held by BAME people in the public sector were also lost. Among poorer sections of the working class, the impact of austerity has fallen heavily, and disproportionately, on minority ethnic workers. The Women’s Budget Group calculated that benefit cuts and tax changes between 2010-20 led to an average reduction of annual income for the poorest third of households by:
19% for Asian women;
14% for Black women;
11% for White women.
They also assessed the impact of service cuts in cash terms, representing a cut for the poorest fifth of households of:
11.2% for Asian households;
11.6% for Black households;
8.9% for White households.
Together with the growth of precarious work and the housing crisis, this has resulted in children of middle-class BAME people having their aspirations blocked, while poorer black sections of the working class are driven further into poverty, and with less infrastructure to manage people’s anger.
There have also been changes in policing, justified by racist media narratives about knife crime and ‘gangs’. Police repression in Britain has always targeted ethnic minorities disproportionately, and black people most severely, but this has got even worse in recent years. In 2018/19 the number of stop and searches by police in England and Wales increased by 32% and became even more focused on black and Asian people. Between 2014/15 the percentage of stop and searches carried out on black people increased from 13% to 22%; for Asian people, it increased from 8% to 13%. The number of people detained under the Mental Health Act also increased over the same period, by 12%, with black people significantly more likely to be detained. Since then police have been given increased powers to search without reasonable suspicion of a crime, starting in March 2019, and restrictions on stop and search powers were relaxed even further in August last year. During the Covid lockdown the Metropolitan Police carried out stop and searches on 21,950 young black men, amounting to 30% of all young black men in London. Alongside such increased harassment, police cuts over the last decade have reduced capacity for community engagement, and internally the police have been refocussed on ‘crime fighting’, taking explicit inspiration from US policing methods. This reflects a hardening of state violence against the working class in a period of deepening capitalist crisis.
Added to this is the so-called ‘hostile environment’, which is technically targeted at migrants but also affects minority ethnic British citizens. This was exposed most graphically in the Windrush scandal but has also involved increased racial profiling in housing, health care, education, employment, and banking.4 Then there was Grenfell, widely seen as a racist act of social murder that has not been accounted for.
Now we have an openly racist Prime Minister and a government that has presided over a massive public health crisis that has disproportionately affected black people and has led public confidence in the government to plummet. Add to this the rightward shift by the Labour Party, and it is hardly surprising that people are taking to the streets. With no credible force to protect their interests people are quite rightly taking action themselves.
Questions facing the movement
This emerging movement’s politics express the contradictory conditions from which it has arisen, including blocked aspirations for some middle-class young people alongside working-class anger at deepening poverty and police harassment and violence. Calls for working-class unity on an anti-racist basis have mixed together with all sorts of identity politics. Demands for equal representation in elite bourgeois institutions have been made alongside demands to end the imperialist plunder that sustains those same institutions. Today we do not have the kind of liberation movements in Africa, or indeed in Ireland, which helped give the movements of the 1970s and ‘80s such a strong anti-imperialist character, but there is a generalised sense of injustice at Britain’s parasitic relationship to other countries – particularly in Africa – and a strong current of support for the Palestinian liberation struggle, based on a recognition that Zionism is fundamentally racist.
The next waves of resistance are likely to come sooner rather than later, considering that millions of people are already unemployed, thousands more are likely to lose their jobs as the government’s job retention scheme is wound down, and thousands of private renters will be threatened this autumn as the pause on evictions comes to an end. Because of the systemic racism that black and Asian people face in employment and housing, we know they will be hardest hit and they will doubtless respond with the same militancy we saw in June.
There are only two possible positions for black and anti-racist movements in Britain today: to turn to the capitalists and plead for a larger share of the imperialist plunder, for a few more black people to be represented among the privileged layers of capitalists, landlords and functionaries who live off the backs of a multicultural majority of exploited workers; or to turn to the working class and build an internationalist movement to abolish capitalism and put power in the hands of the people. The latter would make it possible to to use society’s resources to meet everybody’s needs and replace Britain’s parasitic relationships with other countries with relationships of respect and solidarity.
The division between these two positions has been graphically illustrated by the split between two groups that are both claiming leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement in Britain – the first, using the Twitter handle @ukblm, explicitly calls for the dismantling of capitalism and stands in solidarity with Palestine; the second, using @blmuk, say that the struggle of black people has nothing to do with either capitalism or Palestine, and appeals to middle class respectability. It has also been reflected on a local level. For example, in Nottingham three individuals called a protest on 7 June that attracted 4,000 people, but subsequently announced that they were prioritising meetings with police, councillors and other ‘people in high places’ and would: ‘not be putting on another protest. We are working behind the scenes to make real changes in Nottingham, the protest made the noise we needed to get our foot in the door’. In contrast, Nottingham United Against Racism has organised weekly demonstrations in the city centre, with an open mic, regular mobilisations taking over the streets, protests outside police stations and courts, regular work in local communities across the city and educational meetings examining the history of black and anti-racist struggles.
We need to be clear: capitalism is inherently racist; it was built on the back of colonialism, slavery and genocide; in its modern, imperialist, form racism reflects and justifies the exploitation of other countries that is vital for British capitalism to survive. This means that the defeat of racism requires the defeat of capitalism. Recognition of this truth provides a source of strength, because it shows there is a material basis for alliances between black people, other ethnic minorities, and all those who are oppressed and exploited under capitalism, and points toward the only practical alternative – socialism.
- Coronavirus (Covid-19) related deaths by ethnic group. England and Wales, 2 March to 15 May 2020. ons.gov.uk
- RCG (1983) The Revohitiondry Road to Socialism in Britain, Larkin Publications. https://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/publications/manifesto-index.html
- Jondthan Neal (1981) lumpenproletariat Socialist Review No.34.
- Tom Vicker. ‘Hostile Britain: injustice and incompetence‘, FRFI 271
