AB Thatcherism, as you know, was linked to Powellism in the previous decade. Enoch Powell famously, or infamously, talked about young people, Black people, Asians, saying that they could be born in Britain but could never be of Britain. He talked about young ‘piccanninies’ and used all kinds of racialised language, and gave a speech focusing on ‘the rivers of blood’ that might flow in Britain, which expressed his predictions of the violence that might ensue. Margaret Thatcher built on and continued the same kind of discourse. She didn’t always use the same language, but it was a very similar discourse. In a 1978 TV interview, she talked about the British people being scared that Britain might be ‘swamped by people of a different culture’. That kind of language was creating many problems, giving respectability to racism. There was a lot of racial violence on the streets, which we tend to forget now, but there were many racial attacks; people had been murdered. I remember in Southall, for instance, Gurdip Chaggar was murdered in 1976 by young white people.3 So there was a lot of racist violence.
But economically, as well, we were seeing not the emergence of neoliberalism (because it is much older than that), but neoliberalism becoming much more rampant, particularly in Thatcher’s policies. There were attacks, which are happening again now, on the trade unions. You will remember that 1984 was when the miners were on strike and Thatcher had basically said she was totally committed to destroying the miners. There were figures given in the media about the huge sums of money the government spent on campaigning against the miners and their union, and the government did succeed in the end – that was one of the very sad moments in labour history. The attacks on the unions had a major impact on people of colour, partly because people of colour held jobs in places of work affected by Thatcherite policies. There were high levels of unemployment among people of colour.
All of this was happening everywhere. In 1979 in Southall, Blair Peach, a teacher, was killed by injuries sustained to the head, at the hands of the police. This happened when the racist and fascist National Front came marching through Southall to hold an election rally against which the local people had gathered to protest. The police, in the form of the notorious Special Patrol Group, came in large numbers to ensure that the National Front rally took place. In the process many protestors were injured, arrested and taken to police stations all over London. Over 700 people, mainly Asians, were arrested, and 345 were charged. Clarence Baker, the manager of the Black reggae band Misty in Roots was so badly injured on the head that he spent considerable time in hospital. So there was a lot of that kind of political ferment going on, within which there was a great deal of contestation of, and challenges to, the racism people were experiencing. At the same time, in factories there were strikes. I was in Southall in the early 1980s, and I remember there was a strike of workers at the Chix bubblegum factory in Slough.4 We used to go and support those women – it was mostly women who were on strike. Such events were happening all the time. Mainly the term ‘diaspora’ itself emerged during this time to challenge racialised regimes which were connected to the very material, everyday lives of people because of unemployment and racist violence.
BB You also draw a connection between the fall of the Berlin Wall – and the demise of the Soviet bloc, the massive impact that had on left politics – and the contemporaneous racial violence against people of colour and anti-racist resistance.
AB Absolutely, that was a very major event of the period, globally too. We all went into depression, those of us who were involved in socialist projects. We were always critical of the Soviet Union, but nonetheless, globally there was a socialist presence, a project that we subscribed to. There was a huge amount of melancholia at the time. But also, internationally it’s quite important, because the Black struggles – and I’ll use the term ‘Black’ for the moment, including Asians – were always international struggles. The Left, particularly the Black Left, looked at imperialism always in relation to racism, whereas in other discourses they often talked about racism as if it occurred on its own. But the Black Left always looked at the links between colonialism and postcolonialism, and imperialism and new imperialisms.
That, of course, shifted after the demise of Soviet Communism because the ways in which global power relations had been constituted, changed. A new order, a new political order, was born now in which capitalism gained a much more pronounced ascendancy. Also, for a period, at least – although that has changed now – we found that the Soviet Union was no longer seen as a threat by the West. There was a period when the Iron Curtain was no longer seen as the Iron Curtain. So internationally, that meant the left project in Britain was affected by what happened, because it weakened the arguments for alternatives. That has changed now, of course, because Russia is again not in the good books of the West, but for a period it was not seen as a threat.
It was also the case that in, for example, the Black women’s groups that we had in those days, we always explored the ways in which our life trajectories as groups had been constituted over periods of time in and through histories of imperialism. And the ways in which our presence here in Britain was connected with colonialism, in the sense that during the postwar period, Britain recruited Black people, people of colour, from its colonies to come and do the work the white workers didn’t want to do, in the lowest rungs of the economy. So that was very important. Our presence here was connected with colonialism. Therefore, such issues were always crucial to emphasise. We always foregrounded those international struggles alongside our political struggles here in Britain.
BB/RZ Do you feel that goes missing nowadays, that grounding?
AB Yes, to some degree. Moreover, in those days we talked about capitalism. One of the biggest problems has been that there is not the same degree of focus today on the problems produced by capitalist social relations. Sometimes you find nowadays that people talk about the disadvantaged 99 per cent and all that, and it’s good that it’s happening, but I find it quite frustrating that people don’t really talk about capitalism. There are discussions about the wars in the Middle East, and so forth, but not enough emphasis on the histories of colonialism and imperialism, which resulted in the carving out of these different countries and created these different territorial lines, new countries and new nation-states which are now having all kinds of problems. Indeed, there is insufficient problematisation of the links between capitalism and imperialism. I know we’re jumping around here, but people talk about all these migrants coming from abroad, as if capitalism and imperialism has no effect in making other countries poor. In those days there was considerable discussion about the ways in which certain parts of the world became impoverished.
There was a focus on the global inequalities and inequities – people talked about them. There was a discourse around them in the media, even. But now that discourse has disappeared. There is much talk about all these so-called economic migrants coming here, but very little attention to why it is mainly people from the global South who become economic migrants to the rich global North. I find this gaping absence really problematic.
BB/RZ It’s quite common in the academy for people to take up a self-described stance as ‘being critical’ without considering capitalism or class in any serious fashion. What do you make of the identification of being critical, or the idea of critique, when it no longer addresses precisely the issues you were just talking about?
AB Well, it is a big problem, even in terms of resources. Of course, you have Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and books like that, which are important, but they’re not critiques of capitalism as such from a socialist perspective. Similarly, I was excited when I came across Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism (2010). But then he clearly states that he’s not against capitalism. Whereas in the eighties and nineties, there were resources, there were books – for instance Susan George’s How the Other Half Dies (1976), which looks at global poverty and why people in certain parts of the world are actually dying. And they were quite easily accessible kinds of books, not heavy theory, but they contained a lot of theoretical insight and you could use those with students. There used to be lots of video programmes; Channel 4 for example, did some very interesting programmes around multinational corporations,