White Riot by Stephen Duncombe

Author:Stephen Duncombe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844676880
Publisher: Verso Books

Anti-racism in the 1970s

Blacks have been actively organizing in defence of their lives and communities ever since they set foot in Britain. Several writers have looked at these patterns of self-organization in greater detail than is possible here.1 Their histories have also occasionally drawn attention to the anti-racist organizations and struggles created during the 1950s and 1960s, which brought black and white together and formed a significant counterpart to the movements for black liberation in Britain and its colonized countries.

The rise and demise of organizations such as the Co-ordinating Committee Against Racial Discrimination (CCARD) formed to oppose the 1961 Commonwealth Immigrants Bill and the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) inaugurated in February 1965 after a visit to London by Dr. Martin Luther King and dedicated to campaigning for the elimination of discrimination in civil society and in the immigration legislation, are important subjects for further research.2 Yet the anti-racisms of the 1970s are even less well known. That decade contained a series of qualitative shifts in the racial politics of Britain. The 1971 Immigration Act brought an end to primary immigration and instituted a new pattern of internal control and surveillance of black settlers. It was paralleled by a new vocabulary of “race” and crime which grew in the aftermath of the first panic over “mugging.” These developments are two of the most important from the point of view of black self-organization. However, the expansion and consolidation of organizations of the extreme, neo-fascist right was also to transform decisively the meaning of anti-racism. Dilip Hiro points to the existence of street level harassment and other activity by extreme racist groups including the British Ku Klux Klan as early as 1965, two years before the National Front (NF) was formed. Threatening letters to the London secretary of CARD had promised “concerted efforts against West Indians, specially those living with white women.”3 It was the entry of these groups into the process of electoral politics which acted as a catalyst for the creation of anti-fascist/anti-racist committees as an outgrowth of the organized labour movement in Britain’s major towns and cities during the early and mid 1970s.

The NF had enjoyed its first party political broadcast during the February 1974 election and had fielded fifty-four candidates, a substantial increase from 1970 when only ten had stood. The party’s journal, Spearhead, told its readers in January 1974 that “It need hardly be said that our election campaign now takes absolute priority over everything else.”

In the second election of that year, the Front fielded ninety candidates, who obtained 113,844 votes. In the local government elections of May 1974, the NF averaged nearly 10 percent of the poll in several districts of London,4 and in a by-election at Newham South, beat the Conservative candidate and took 11.5 percent of the total votes cast.

In June 1974 the anti-fascist forces organized a march and picket of a National Front meeting at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square. The resulting confrontation between demonstrators and the police ended with the death

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