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From Socialist Worker, No. 99, 30 November 1968, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
ENOCH POWELL and his friends have given us the picture of a strange battleground.
On one side stand the ordinary, decent, patriotic, British working men, who know about the blacks from their own experience; on the other are a weird gathering of long-haired students, Hampstead intellectuals and archbishops, who have never had to live with ‘them’ and who preach liberalism from their comfortable ivory towers.
If we blow away some of the fog, we’d see that a Tory MP from Belgravia is no expert on living with immigrants.
If you do live in a slum area of mixed population and keep your eyes half open, you see a different battleground: working people, of all races, struggling to live decently and bring up their children, facing every kind of racketeer, Rachman and bureaucrat who end up pocketing most of their low wages, and the fruits of long hours of overtime.
Most workers keep up their standards, some disintegrate under the pressure, becoming mad or vicious. The latter are the worst-hit victims, but they are still a menace to their neighbours.
The immigrants suffer the same kind of exploitation as the natives – only more so. ‘They segregate themselves ...’ say the letters to the papers.
The writers can never have been near Kilburn or Islington or Lambeth, with their shop windows full of cards all saying ‘Rooms to let, no coloured.’ But the same landladies also demand ‘No children’ and ‘Suit business gent only.’
That dear old persecuted landlady the dockers thought they were marching for last April, would not have let their children or themselves, cross her threshold, however desperate their need.
Meanwhile the homeless, black and white, multiply. The papers recently reported two landladies who turned a white woman in labour on to the street to have her baby on the pavement where it died because they ‘didn’t want a mess.’
Living on the backs of the landlords who discriminate, are those who don’t, who are often the biggest sewer rats of all. They welcome immigrants, who have so little choice that they can be squeezed for as much as double the already exhorbitant rents demanded of natives, and who will not dare to go to the rent tribunal or to the health inspector if the roof leaks.
Like the working class, these landlords are of all races, with names like Rachman, Goldberg, Mohammed and (one of the biggest) Bowen-Davies.
If you live without prejudice in such an area you get to know immigrants and their stories.
People like the Morrisons, evicted with their two children from an unfurnished flat at 24-hours notice. The landlord (Bowen-Davies, owner of hundreds of houses before his suicide) had found a loophole
in the Rent Act, and simply cleared the entire house of four families.
The council legal officials thought the case ‘too exceptional to be worth investigating,’ and objected to the term ‘Rachmanite’ being applied to the landlord.
People like Mary, an English girl with a coloured child to whom she is devoted, living in a flat provided by her employer for whom she had to work over 60 hours a week to pay the rent. When she got a better job he evicted her.
The child’s father had left the country, but a West Indian family, former friends of his, were so ashamed of his behaviour that they invited her to spend weekends and evenings with them, minded her child, argued with her boss, and helped her search for another flat.
People like Mrs. James. Her father was killed in the British army and she was brought up in Jamaica to be a patriotic Britisher.
She’s not so sure now. She brings up her five small children in two damp rooms.
They are intelligent, polite, always clean kids – but they all have bronchial trouble. Her seven-year-old niece was found choking to death from it in bed one morning in a similar room.
Her husband is a skilled electrician. His name has been down for years as willing to go to a New Town, where skilled workers are in greater demand than supply.
Each time he goes for an interview for a job there, he is rejected on sight.
People like the Simmonds. Mr. Simmonds is a building worker who has helped build dozens of houses for other people.
The Simmonds bought an old house with an English family. The council acquired the house, offered Mr. Simmonds £70 for it and charged him 30/– a week rent to continue living there. The two families were later moved to another house awaiting demolition.
The English family, after six years there emigrated, (they still correspond), and another West Indian family were moved in.
There were now seven children and four adults sharing the bathroom in an increasingly decrepit house. The families quarrelled. The new family swore and fought; they nailed up the Simmonds’ coal cellar, barred their access to the garden and the dustbins.
They behaved like the racialists’ imaginary stereotype – or like the only too real minority of all races who have cracked up. The English and Irish neighbours, who had known and liked the black Simmonds for years, understood that the issue was not colour but coping with individual hooliganism.
They signed petitions against the new tenants and broke their windows; but they took the frightened Mrs. Simmonds and her children into their homes each day, and even offered to come to court and testify for her.
The police and council officials refused to intervene, month after month, reckoning that ‘you can expect blacks to fight among themselves,’ and no doubt nodding knowingly as they read Powell’s inflammatory speeches.
The line of exploitation and suffering, the line of battle, does not run between black and white any more than it runs between Poplar and Hampstead.
It runs clearly between landlords, bosses and bureaucrats, of all colours, on one hand, and the entire working class on the other.
The racialist spirit which turns white worker against black has the same destructive effect as the frustration which drives a man to knife his own neighbour or beat his own children.
The answer to racialism is not the platitudes of the archbishops, but unity in class struggle.
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