As campaigning intensified, the Lib Dems redoubled their own efforts, distributing an ‘Island Homes for Island People’ newsletter, which demanded that Labour councillors ‘listen to Islanders and not the Commission for Racial Equality’.18 The Lib Dems also toured the constituency in cars flying Union Jacks and tried to paint their Labour rivals as unfairly favoring Bengali residents, distributing a leaflet that claimed Millwall councillors had given £30,000 to Bangladesh for flood relief rather than spending it on local repairs.19
All the while, the luxury apartments and office blocks continued to rise, on land that had once provided working-class jobs. The connection seems so obvious in retrospect – but the inhabitants of ‘yuppie’ flats, in gated developments and driving on and off the Island by way of the Limehouse Link, were in another world. As Sheila, a white resident of the Barkantine estate (where the Choudhurys also lived) told me, ‘None of the yuppies ever bothered us. At least you knew they were paying their way. That’s what you wanted.’
Then, one week before the 1993 by-election, Labour made a disastrous error. On 9 September, in an effort to squeeze the Lib Dems out of the race, Labour leaked a canvass report that claimed it was neck and neck with the BNP, on 34 per cent each.20 The idea was to scare voters into supporting Labour – but it also worked in reverse. As John Biggs, a former Tower Hamlets Labour councillor (and now London Assembly member), explains, while Tower Hamlets at the time was run by Liberal Democrats, many ordinary residents would still have perceived Labour, which had dominated local politics for decades, as the ‘establishment’: ‘People don’t sit at home going through the last opinion polls and the last election results and say “ah, it’s the Liberal council”. They blamed Labour for the state of housing on the Isle of Dogs and they wanted to work out who best to vote for to give Labour a kicking.’
It may only have been on a small scale, but this was a total breakdown of mainstream politics: the Isle of Dogs was a Labour-run neighbourhood, in a Lib Dem-run borough, under a Tory Government – and nobody seemed able to provide the basic necessities. As one Island resident, Maureen Lowther, 49, told the East London Advertiser several days after Beackon’s election: ‘It’s not a racial thing, it’s resentment. You are getting Bangladeshis getting eight-bedroom houses. Of course we’re going to be resentful. I’m not in full agreement with all the BNP stands for, but Rights for Whites, yes. All them councillors have created this situation, they are fighting against racism but why aren’t they fighting for all? All we want is equality.’21
On the Sunday after Derek Beackon’s election, the Reverend Nicholas Holtam gave a sheet of paper to his congregation at Christ Church on the Isle of Dogs and asked them to write down how they felt. The page was soon filled with words like ‘angry’, ‘tearful’, ‘ashamed’, ‘frightened’ and ‘pissed off’. One elderly man, a member of the British Legion, left the church in tears. ‘I spent four years of my life fighting Nazis, and now we’ve voted them in,’ he told Holtam as he walked out.22
With 33.8 per cent of the vote, the BNP never represented the majority of Islanders, and many whites had bitterly opposed the party. The day after the election, unionised council workers on the Isle of Dogs went on strike in protest at Beackon’s election (the first of a series of walk-outs), and groups including the Anti-Nazi League, the Anti-Racist Alliance and Youth Against Racism in Europe continued to organize protests across Tower Hamlets. Large anti-racism demos were also held in Trafalgar Square and at the BNP’s headquarters in Welling.
As Holtam – who is now the Bishop of Salisbury – told me when we met in 2011, the country’s media now seemed to regard the BNP as an expression of white working-class East Enders’ inherent stupidity and bigotry, seemingly encapsulated by the ‘Cockney Wanker’ character in the satirical magazine Viz shortly after Beackon’s victory. ‘There were jokes on TV about Millwall and the Isle of Dogs,’ Holtam continued. ‘The rest of the country looked at us and laughed. It was a hideous time.’
But the problems thrown into sharp relief by Beackon’s victory were national as much as they were local. Britain in 1993 was in the grip of an economic recession and John Major, derided by the Telegraph as ‘the least popular leader since polls began’, had taken to peddling sentimental nostalgia in speeches evoking a bygone England of warm beer and village greens. One of his backbench MPs, Winston Churchill (a grandson of the former prime minister), went further, warning that summer that the ‘British way of life’ itself was under threat from immigration. On 20 September, Churchill prophesied more fascist victories in British cities unless the government cracked down on immigration.23
On 26 September, the News of the World risked further inflaming the situation in Tower Hamlets by sending one white and one Asian journalist to the council’s housing office. The two did not present identical stories – one claimed to be homeless, the other a ‘refugee’ – and the Asian man was offered housing because his story fit the legal criteria better.24 For the right, the BNP’s emergence seemed to confirm their contention that immigration had been a disaster, and that local government was in the grip of politically-correct lunacy.
Worse still, all the negative attention generated by the BNP made it even less likely that the Isle of Dogs would receive the investment it sorely needed. Holtam, who had made representations to government on behalf of Islanders, said that some of the least creditable conversations he had ‘were with a government minister and executives at the LDDC. All of them owned up to the problem [i.e., that underinvestment in social housing was at the root of BNP support], but they all said, “We can’t be seen to be giving in to this sort of political pressure.”’ The LDDC executives in particular were terrified that an association with the BNP would jeopardise the whole Docklands project: ‘I had a conversation with a senior executive on the board of the LDDC who said, “You’ve got to understand it from our point of view that if this ward votes BNP at the next election, this development is down the tube and all of the money that’s been invested in here will simply go. The property will be left empty and nobody will want to work here.”’
While LDDC executives worried about property deals, the people of Tower Hamlets were facing a more pressing problem as the borough experienced a resurgence of racist violence. On 8 September, an Asian teenager named Quddus Ali had been beaten into a coma in Whitechapel. On the afternoon of 19 September, a group of BNP activists, newly emboldened by their election victory, were drinking outside the Ship pub in Bethnal Green, when a black man, Stephen Browne, and his white girlfriend, Jenny Bone, tried to pass through the crowd on their way to the supermarket. The couple were spat at and showered with beer by BNP members, who shouted ‘nigger lover’ and ‘monkey’ at them. When the couple replied by telling the group to shut up and calling them cowards, the BNP’s national organizer Richard Edmonds threw a glass. Others then ‘glassed’ Browne in the face and punched and kicked him as he lay on the ground. Browne was left scarred for life; Edmonds was later sentenced to three months in prison for his part in the assault.25
On the Isle of Dogs, police statistics showed a spike in ‘recorded racial incidents’, breaking the 100 barrier for the first time in 1993 and peaking at 180 in 1994.26 Many Bengali families remained in their houses, scared to go out – and one man left altogether after a scaffolding pole was thrown through the glass of his front door.27 ‘After he [Beackon] was elected, we got really scared,’ recalled Syeda Choudhury. ‘I used to know white neighbours who would say hello to me in the street,’ Choudhury said. ‘They stopped. That’s how bad it got.’
By 1993, Choudhury was married and had a one-year-old son, although the young family continued to live in her parents’ council flat. Her husband was a student and used to work evening shifts at a restaurant, often returning home after midnight. So scared were the Choudhurys for his safety at night that they would escort him, en masse, from his car to the entrance of their tower block: ‘He would phone us when he was leaving the restaurant, so me, my brother, my mum and my dad, all four of us, would have to go downstairs to where he’d park his car. We used to carry big sticks and a baseball bat. You could not have peace of mind all through the day and