Forty years ago, in July 1981, city centres across Britain exploded as black youth, supported in many cases by white youth, took to the streets engaging in pitched battles with the police. Goaded by decades of police racism, young people showed they were not prepared to accept a future blighted by soaring unemployment and lack of any opportunity. Underlying these events was a profound political development – the emergence of a political vanguard of the working class pitting itself against the Labour Party and its apologists on the left. The tragedy was that the combined forces of the opportunists in the end proved so entrenched that, in alliance with the British state, they were able to isolate and destroy this new trend. ROBERT CLOUGH reports.
The challenge of liberation struggles
The background to these developments was two-fold: first the challenge liberation struggles across the world presented to imperialism as the post-war boom came to an end, and second, the role of the 1974-79 Labour government in sustaining British capitalism.
1975 had seen the victory of the Vietnamese revolution and the liberation of former Portuguese colonies in Africa – Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. That year, Cuba had sent troops to Angola to support the new government in a successful defence against South African invasion. In June 1976, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa was reignited by the uprising in Soweto. In neighbouring Zimbabwe, the white settler government was proving unable to contain the black majority led by ZANU-ZAPU forces.
There were armed uprisings against imperialist-backed regimes taking place in Iran and Oman in the Middle East as well as in Palestine, and in El Salvador and Guatemala in Central America. And throughout the 1970s, the British army occupation of the Six Counties in the north of Ireland had been unable to defeat the Provisional Republican movement; by 1979, the movement in support of Republican prisoners of war was mobilising thousands of people on the streets on a weekly basis. The continued existence of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc severely limited imperialism’s freedom of manoeuvre: it was being pushed into retreat.
1974-79 Labour government
The crisis was particularly acute for British capitalism: with a domestic economy characterised by a combination of stagnation, inflation and rising unemployment, it was becoming increasingly dependent on the super-profits from its expanding overseas assets (see D Yaffe: Imperialism, national oppression and the new petit bourgeoisie, Revolutionary Communist No 9, June 1979 for a summary). Defending these global interests was a primary concern of the ruling class, and for this it turned to Labour after the 1970 Tory government failed to contain trade union opposition. Throughout its life, the 1974-79 Labour government proved to be thoroughly racist and pro-imperialist. In summary, it:
- Passed the first Prevention of Terrorism Act to threaten Irish people with arbitrary arrest and frame-up including the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six; supervised the criminalisation of the Irish freedom struggle by stripping Republican POWs of their political status in 1976; supervised the conveyor belt of arbitrary detention, extraction of confessions through the use of torture, and the use of Diplock juryless courts to railroad prisoners into the H-blocks.
- Used its veto on the UN Security Council twice to prevent sanctions being imposed on apartheid South Africa which was also propping up white minority rule in Zimbabwe.
- Continued the operation of the 1971 Immigration Act despite its promise to repeal it. This involved the notorious ‘virginity tests’ at Heathrow in the most grotesque attempt to ‘disprove’ claims for settlement in Britain by young Asian women and their children.
- Turned a blind eye to the racist policing of black youth which included the use of the so-called ‘sus’ law (the 1824 Vagrancy Act) to arbitrarily stop, search and abuse black youth as part of criminalising black people in general.
- In 1976, took an axe to state spending and with punitive wage controls ensured an average cut in real wages of 7% over the next 12 months; trade unions were to co-operate with the government’s incomes policies until their control over their membership broke down in the winter of 1978/79 as poorly-paid government workers participated in widespread strikes against continued wage cuts.
This record did not deter British opportunist organisations like the SWP from supporting a Labour vote in the 1979 general election. However, a very different political process was taking place among black and Irish workers. Black and Asian people organised dozens of campaigns in defence of those facing police frame-ups across the country. In August 1977, black and white youth confronted a march by the National Front, driving the racists out of Lewisham despite the vicious retaliation of the hundreds of police protecting them. Among Asian people, the constant threat of racist attacks and what amounted to police collusion pushed the formation of youth movements – the earliest in Southall in June 1976 following the racist murder of Gurdip Chaggar, and arguably the most influential, the Asian Youth Movement – Bradford (AYM-B) in early 1978. Black people were forming a vanguard within the working class because of their double oppression as workers and their specific oppression at the hands of a necessarily racist state. The job of communists in this context was to ‘expose the opportunists and prevent them from sabotaging the building of a revolutionary anti-imperialist movement in this country’ (FRFI No 1, November/December 1979).
Asian youth movements
The experience of those who formed the youth movements was of a state racism supervised by the Labour Party. It went further: their families had been forced from their homelands by the consequences of British colonialism. The connection between the Labour government’s racism and its pursuit of British imperialist interests was evident with its defence of the apartheid state. Anti-imperialism became the AYMs’ default political standpoint. They did not share or peddle the illusion of the British opportunist left that Labour could serve as a vehicle for social progress – their experience was of anything but. In November 1979, at a huge demonstration against immigration controls, youth among the overwhelmingly Asian protestors heckled Tony Benn as he attempted to defend the Labour government’s immigration record. Taking direct aim at Benn, AYM-B chair Manjit Singh urged the demonstrators to ‘beware of false friends’. Two months later, in January 1980, an AYM-B representative at a Provisional Sinn Fein rally commemorating Bloody Sunday gave unequivocal support for the armed struggle, linking the Irish struggle very clearly to the anti-racist struggle in Britain:
‘…for centuries the British state subjugated the people of the Third World. Not only to plunder our wealth but also attempted and still attempts to plunder our minds. The forces of liberation in the Third World from Cuba to Palestine, from Palestine to Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe to Vietnam and from Vietnam to Ireland have shown that the future will be in the hands of the oppressed.’
He explained that the AYM-B had been set up to fight ‘our own systematic oppression in this country by the British state’ and that ‘our response to this oppression of our people is resistance. For this reason, we say: We are here to stay; we are here to fight’. He continued: ‘We are for the liberation of all oppressed people and in this spirit we have come to show solidarity with the Republicans’ struggle in Ireland…And we will continue to show solidarity with the Irish struggle until the liberation of the Irish people has been won. Long live the Irish Republican Movement! Victory to the IRA!’ (Hands off Ireland No 10, March 1980)
This revolutionary position was in complete contrast to that of the petit bourgeois left. As the struggle in the Six Counties escalated in 1979 with the working class Relatives Actions Committees organising massive demonstrations in support of Republican prisoners, so the opportunists wound down their already minimal solidarity activity. Their most significant event was a march in August organised by the unashamedly pro-imperialist Young Liberals, the publicity for which said nothing about the prisoners. In March 1980, Tariq Ali (International Marxist Group) and Paul Foot (SWP) joined Tony Benn in the so-called ‘Debate of the Decade.’ The armed working class uprising taking place across the Irish Sea did not feature; an RCG banner on prominent display asking ‘Are you with Benn or the H-Block men?’ forced Benn to state he did not support the withdrawal of British troops, and he refused to say anything about Republican POWs. Ali and Foot also chose silence, as they did not want to break their alliance with the Labour left.
Anti-imperialism and secularism
With anti-imperialism the cornerstone of AYM politics, religion was not a significant political issue; as Anandi Ramamurthy points out in Black Star – Britain’s Asian Youth Movements, the AYM’s ‘advocated identity was with an anti-imperialist blackness which was secular through its inclusive nature’ (Ramamurthy, p5), later adding ‘For the AYMs and others, who adopted an anti-imperialist black identity, the Iranians, the Chileans and any other group struggling against colonial oppression could be included in their blackness’ (p69).
AYMs excluded those who were members of what they described as white left organisations. This was in major part because these groups had often dismissed the need to defend Asian communities against fascist and racist attacks. This had come to a head in November 1977 when the SWP established the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) to rehabilitate the Labour left and divert the movement from challenging Labour-directed state racism into a struggle against ‘Nazism’. However, even this limited aim proved a fiction. Twice in 1978 the ANL leadership refused to divert events it had organised into defending Brick Lane against National Front marches, most shockingly in September of that year when it urged supporters to stay at a carnival in Brixton and listen to a Labour cabinet minister – the ubiquitous ‘pink charlatan’ Tony Benn – rather than support Asian youth fighting a racist invasion. The real point was not these organisations’ whiteness, but their refusal to confront imperialism or state racism and their determination instead to promote the Labour left.
Anwar Ditta Defence Committee
Central to the AYM’s fight against state racism were the many campaigns supporting families hit by immigration controls. The one which perhaps had the highest profile was the Anwar Ditta Defence Committee which the RCG along with AYM-B and others set up at the beginning of 1980. Anwar Ditta was an Asian woman born in Britain who had married in Pakistan before returning to Rochdale with her husband, leaving three children to join her at a later date. Her application to bring them over under the Labour government was rejected, the racist Home Office claiming they were not her children. This was of course a lie, one maintained during an appeal which she lost because her representative from the Manchester Law Centre failed to challenge the Home Office’s case. When she expelled the Law Centre from the Defence Campaign for being spies of the Home Office, ‘the ANL, SWP and Rochdale Labour Party walked out of the Defence Committee…in solidarity with the agents of the British state!’ (FRFI No 6, September/October 1980) In 1982, an investigation by the Granada TV programme proved conclusively through blood tests that the children were indeed hers, and the Home Office had to allow them in.
Uprisings: St Pauls…
The first uprising, in St Paul’s Bristol in April 1980, was in response to a police raid on a well-known meeting place, the Black and White Café. The black youth drove the police off, and then attacked government buildings and torched the local Lloyds Bank. A black youth summed the situation up when he said ‘All the oppressed and sufferers are IRA.’ (FRFI No 4, May/June 1980) We wrote that the ruling class was terrified by these events, ‘…not only about being defeated and being driven out of Ireland, but also about a growing revolutionary struggle led by black people here in the heart of the monster itself.’ (ibid, emphasis in original) The Communist Party dismissed St Paul’s as a ‘primitive uprising’; Militant castigated the youth for ‘resorting to smashing up their communities’ as if Lloyds Bank was part of a working class community. At each step, the opportunist and social chauvinist organisations were clear they were on the opposite side to this new vanguard.
…The Black People’s Day of Action…
On 2 March 1981, six weeks after an unexplained fire at a party killed 13 black youth in New Cross, tens of thousands of black protesters marched through the City of London on a Black People’s Day of Action demonstrating their anger at the state’s refusal to consider it a racist attack: ‘13 dead – nothing said’. In a display of class anger, they smashed up banks and shops selling luxury goods; the media expressed racist outrage with headlines like ‘The day the blacks ran riot in London’.
…Brixton…
A month later, on 10-13 April 1981, Brixton went up in flames as youth responded to ‘Operation Swamp’ which had flooded the area with plain clothes policemen arbitrarily stopping, searching and detaining young black people. For three days the youth fought back: ‘…they spurn the weapons beloved by the corrupt and aristocratic official Labour Movement – Parliament, peaceful protest and petition. They choose the weapons which are the only weapons understood by the British state – the weapons of revolutionary uprising.’ (FRFI No 10, May/June 1981) Summarising this development we wrote ‘Every severe crisis of a social system brings forward something new. It pushes to the fore those forces which represent the future and shows ever more clearly the bankruptcy of those forces which desperately hold into the past.’ The forces of the future were being led by a black vanguard; Tony Benn with his reactionary admirers and supporters in the opportunist left were definitely the forces of the past.
…Liverpool and across the country
Less than three months later on 3 July, Liverpool 8 erupted in response to continuous racist police harassment, to be followed days later by Moss Side in Manchester. Throughout July there were battles in dozens of towns and cities across the country as black youth, supported by white youth, fought the police in their thousands. In Liverpool, 4,000 police were drafted in from other forces; it was an occupation force with dozens standing at each end of the streets radiating from Granby Street for several days. At the end of July there was a further outbreak: Davy Moore, a young disabled man, was run over and killed by one of the police Landrovers that were being deliberately driven into the crowds on the site of what is now the Maternity Hospital.
The Labour left and its allies went into overdrive to distance themselves from the events. Leader Michael Foot told the 1981 Labour Conference that ‘what happened in Moss Side and Liverpool is what we in the Labour Party are dedicated to stop’, while Benn decided that ‘the Labour Party does not believe in rioting as a route to social progress, nor are we prepared to see the police injured in the course of their duties.’ The SWP expressed itself in racist terms, referring to the black youth as ‘street people’ who were ‘the vulnerable underbelly of the working class.’ (Quoted in FRFI 14, November/December 1981). The SWP author adds ‘Their economic position makes street people militant, angry, and disorganised’, wilfully ignoring the working class organisation that was indeed taking place for instance in the AYMs. The SWP’s former leading theoretician Chris Harman concluded ‘Attempts to organise these youth can also channel the anger from the streets into the ranks of powerful sections of the class’ (International Socialism 14, 1981). Yet, then as now, these ‘powerful sections’ were dominated by privileged pro-imperialist layers of the working class, and showed themselves completely unwilling to enter into a serious confrontation with the Thatcher government.
As the same FRFI article argued, ‘Harman and the SWP fear revolutionary struggle, particularly when it takes a violent form and is completely divorced from the more lofty concerns (Benn, the Labour Party, CND etc) of the British left.’ That the issue was never one of organisation per se, but the politics of revolution, was highlighted by the SWP’s contemptuous dismissal of the highly-organised Provisional IRA, describing its leaders as ‘full of their own bullshit and political gamesmanship, cut off from reality, never grasping the real initiative, their forms of organisation (road blocks, searches, military offensives) a carbon copy of the methods of the British state.’ (Socialist Worker, 23 June 1979)
The Bradford 12
That the British state had a better understanding of the threat from black organisation became evident when it launched a determined attack on Asian youth organisations in Bradford. On 28 July 1981, following the discovery of a small cache of petrol bombs in the Manningham area of Bradford, police arrested 13 people of whom 12 were to be charged. The petrol bombs had been assembled nearly three weeks earlier by members of the United Black Youth League, a split from AYM-B, because of a threatened attack by the racist National Front. Charged with conspiracy and therefore facing possible life sentences if guilty, the Bradford 12 decided to go on the offensive. First, they successfully challenged the state’s selection of an all-white jury panel; the final jury was made up of Asian, Black and white working class people. Second, rather than deny responsibility for the petrol bombs, they asserted that their actions were justified by the need to protect their community given a long history of police inaction against previous attacks. The slogan ‘self-defence is no offence’ of the Bradford 12 Defence Campaign enabled it to mobilise widespread support; 500 demonstrated outside the court in Bradford on the first day of the trial in April 1982. The determination to get a jury of real peers paid off when it agreed that self-defence was indeed no offence and acquitted the 12 on all charges.
March for Freedom
Despite this victory, the movement as a whole was in political retreat. The failure to establish a national organisation of the youth movements was to be a serious blow. This had been the ambition of AYM-B when in March 1980 it proposed a March for Freedom from Bradford to London (see FRFI No 3 March/April 1980 for its statement). Freedom meant ‘…freedom from immigration restrictions, freedom from police harassment, freedom from racist attacks, freedom from racism, freedom to organise ourselves and freedom to live with dignity.’ The march never took place; Ramamurthy suggests it was abandoned because of differences between London and Northern youth movements (Ramamurthy, p116), but there was also an opportunist trend within AYM-B which was opposed to the event because it could lead to political developments beyond its control.
The turn to state funding
This trend, led by the same Singh who had denounced Labour in 1979, wanted AYM-B to accept a £3,000 grant from the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE). Hitherto AYM-B had been funded by its own members and supporters. Accepting such a grant would however require the AYM-B to be accountable to the state for its use, rather than its membership. Inevitably the movement would be absorbed into the state apparatus, and the revolutionary wing rejected this prospect. Put to a vote, the opportunists won by a narrow margin. Singh was later to be a Labour MP for Bradford; those opposed to this reactionary step set up the United Black Youth League in 1981.
But the debate over whether to accept funding from the state via the CRE was not exclusive to the AYM-B, and, as Ramamurthy says, the split in AYM-B ‘was representative of two trends that were to exist in many anti-racist organisations at this time – one that increasingly sought respectability and the other that wished to maintain their external pressure status’ (Ramamurthy, p62), adding that in following this path of funding, AYM-B was acting in a similar manner ‘to Southall and other youth movements in the East End and Haringey which were eventually absorbed into state structures’ (Ramamurthy, p61). It was a process whose purpose was to purge these organisations of any revolutionary consciousness, and one which was actively encouraged by Labour-run councils.
As the Tory government-induced recession pushed the official unemployment rate beyond three million in 1981, the opportunists drove harder to rehabilitate Labour. Apart from the Bradford 12, campaigns to defend the hundreds arrested after the 1981 uprisings never developed into organisations mobilising local working class communities. Rather, they actively excluded the youth they claimed to represent. Local government funding through the CRE was made available to them to set up centres and create jobs. Ramamurthy describes the AYM-B’s shift in this period ‘from a militant/campaigning organisation to one providing social services’; state racism became diluted to Tory racism as alliances developed with the Labour Party. In the case of sections of the Liverpool 8 Defence Campaign, this would become a pact with the openly reactionary leader Neil Kinnock against the Militant-dominated Labour council. By the time of the 1984/85 miners’ strike, there was hardly any vestige of the movement against imperialism and state racism: the black vanguard had been defeated. It left the miners without any revolutionary allies in their battle against the state and the Labour Party leadership, a crucial factor in their defeat.
The legacy of the uprisings
The 1981 uprisings were the apogee of political developments which Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! saw as crucial to the emergence of a revolutionary challenge to the British imperialist state. However, the opportunist left was determined to destroy this threat to its privileged position, and moved to rehabilitate the Labour Party by creating the fiction of a radical Labour left based on figures like Tony Benn. On its own, the Labour left could not do this – it needed the opportunists to create an audience and to amplify its every radical gesture however empty or duplicitous. That is why FRFI argued that the revolutionary movement ‘must help to consolidate the vanguard which already exists in Britain’ and that this ‘would necessarily demand a struggle against what is now the greatest barrier to building a revolutionary party in Britain – the petit bourgeois socialist organisations of the British left.’ In the end, the forces of petit bourgeois opportunism were to prevail.
Today, the basics of revolutionary political organisation have yet to be re-created – the grassroots campaigns against state racism that proliferated in the 1970s and movements such as the AYMs which openly allied themselves with the fight against imperialism. The need for anti-imperialist struggle is evident given the eco-destruction imperialism leaves in its wake as it plunders and loots the resources of the poorest countries of the world. The state racism which black organisations fought against has grown more oppressive and all-embracing over the intervening period. The petit bourgeois opportunist groups are undoubtedly much weaker, but as the underlying crisis of capitalism continues to spiral out of control, the privileged layers they represent will have to find alternative political expressions for their narrow self-interest, their purpose the same: to undermine any emerging revolutionary movement. Communists have to prevent this, and that is the purpose of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 283, August/September 2021
