It’s been a long time and momentous things have happened in the past eight months, personally. My mother died last October at the age of 97. She had been in a care home since falling and breaking her hip in 2015 and triggering an increasingly rapid descent into the haze of dementia. Memories then personal recognition dropped away until I was the only person she could identify. But she was overwhelmingly happy and in no pain. She had led a full life, full of a long string of people she cared for, starting with yours truly. So, sadness was tinged with satisfaction and a little joy for her release. She had not been Joan Bowden, as we knew her, for a long time.
Then Pauline’s 70th birthday followed by our 44th wedding anniversary 4 days later. We spent the whole week surrounding these dates in St Ives in Cornwall, the first place we spent a week together and a part of our and our children’s lives ever since. Neither statistic exists within our hearts and minds as real but we must accept that the calendar does not lie!
But these were not the thoughts trickling through my mind this morning on my shopping trip. Not a gentle recollection but an anger that creased my brow. An anger at what is happening in this country at this time. As Frank Zappa said ‘The torture never stops.’
From the 16th to the 19th century, England, along with other European countries, shipped vast numbers of native Africans to the Caribbean, to work on sugar plantations. Having endured a sea journey in appalling conditions, if they even survived, they faced a life of hard labour, punctuated by harsh punishments, beatings, rape, squalor. Until they, we, finally woke up, applied those Christian principles that they found easy to apply on their knees every Sunday to their treatment of these hordes, who had built the riches of this country, riches which had driven, and continued to drive the Industrial Revolution. They were free, citizens of the British Empire. They served the ‘Mother Country’ (remember that term!) in both world wars.
In 1948 a troopship, Empire Windrush, en route from Australia, intending to pick up servicemen there on leave, docked in Kingston, Jamaica. An advertisement had appeared in local newspapers offering cheap transport to anyone who wished to come to the UK to join the local workforce and help rebuild a still damaged and ruined country. 492 took the opportunity, were welcomed with open arms and the newsreel films of their arrival became an image of the beginning of our multicultural society.
There was plenty of work in postwar Britain and British Rail, the National Health Service and local transport benefitted from the influx of people keen to work and grateful for the chance to build a life. Where they were allowed to. They met a great deal of prejudice in all areas of life. Housing was short after the destruction wrought by the war so most of them, and there were now more coming in from Barbados and the smaller island colonies, finished up in ghettoes, in squalid conditions. In Bristol we had a bus boycott because the local bus company refused to employ black or Asian staff. After four months of drastically reduced income, and a fitter portion of Bristol society that had never walked so much (!), the bus company reversed their decision and we all got back on! But white supremacist organisations flourished, thugs and malcontents, who benefitted from general discontent as problems in our economy caused unemployment and widespread strikes. The black population suffered worst and what were known as uprisings took place in many English cities, including Bristol, twice. Even some politicians gave tacit support to prejudicial groups. Not so tacit in the case of one Enoch Powell, a cold and immensely gifted MP who gave a notorious speech warning that in future generations Britain would labour under the black man and the result would be civil disturbances such that had never been seen, and, controversially, ‘rivers of blood’.
Things slowly improved but equality is still a long way away and the average black still has a much higher chance of being stopped and searched in the street. Educational standards in many areas with predominantly black and Asian population is not up to standard. The fatal stabbing of a bright, 19-year-old black student, Stephen Lawrence, 25 years ago this week, followed by a botched police investigation, diluted by endemic racism in the London force means the case still taints black and police relations.
And now to the reason all this crowded my mind this morning. You all know about Brexit. Aside from all the misinformation about available cash for the Health service, chest-beating rubbish about taking our country back, making Britain GREAT again, with distorted memories of Empire, the thing that tipped the balance was immigration. The popular press in this country is hysterically right wing, misreporting many aspects of our membership of the EU, subtly or not so subtly slanting articles to give a poor version of anything involving foreigners now living here. Scared stiff of UKIP, an increasingly popular party with a one policy manifesto, draining votes away with their more strident anti EU and racist rhetoric, the Conservative party, and especially the current Home Secretary at the time, whose remit included control of immigration, a Mrs. Theresa May, made it clear to operational staff that they should create a hostile environment in any case of immigration and seek to justify on all occasions a decision that anyone under investigation could be viewed as an illegal immigrant and deported.
In the modern world, here as everywhere, the way to prove you have the right to be here is to possess the correct paperwork. Now back to the Empire Windrush and many subsequent and similar arrivals. All those people arrived with no passports. When you want a man to abandon his family, sail thousands of miles, put on a uniform and fight in a war that has absolutely nothing to do with him, you don’t give him a passport. There’s no time to waste feeding the killing machine. So people arrived with only cards they were issued with on boarding. That were collected by the Home Office and eventually destroyed.
The first generation that came and settled and worked and paid taxes and national insurance (health contributions) had children that worked and paid taxes and national insurance and had children that .... you get the picture. On the back of this hostile environment that was to be pursued, employers were instructed to ensure that their employees were valid citizens. Landlords were instructed to do the same with tenants. Over the last 4 years people who came on the Empire Windrush and their progeny, many of whom travelled as children on their parents’ paperwork, have lost jobs, lost homes, been imprisoned as illegal immigrants. Even been deported back to places they have either never been or not seen for scores of years!!
Finally, in recent weeks, the popular press has decided that this is a scandal, following the lead of newspapers that deserve to be so called who have been publishing stories for two years, and the government has been forced into apology after apology. First by the current Home Secretary. Then by the former, Mrs. May, who you may know now rules the country as Prime Minister. No resignations. Nothing that might do personal damage. Just words.
The television has been full of black men and women, telling tales of distress, cruelty. A cancer patient refused chemotherapy because the 45 years that he has worked in this country does not prove he should be here. Tears. Anger. Lots of anger.
Racism and its effects have been a part of my life since my teens. My father was a working-class man who called black people darkies. But it was not a pejorative term. He never treated anyone differently for any reason until they gave him a reason by their conduct. Since my teens, life, social and political conditions around the world have been poisoned by racism. Many of those people that I consider heroes of my life have been black. Martin Luther King. Malcolm X. Angela Davis. Nelson and Winnie Mandela. Paul Robeson. John Coltrane. Miles Davis. And many, many more. So that’s why I’m angry. Disappointed. That’s why I could but think of these things whilst walking through the peace of the park today.