Communities of Resistance by A. Sivanandan

Author:A. Sivanandan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

7

Race, Class and Brent

Increasingly, over the past year, the Tory government (supported by its satraps in the gutter press) has given up even the pretence of attacking the crucial issues of racial discrimination, police racism and inner-city decay and has gone over to attacking instead the ‘anti-racism’ of local Labour parties and their radical black councillors. Unfortunately, this shift from tackling racism to tackling the discourse on racism (via anti-anti-racism) was a red herring that the Labour Party was bound to follow, given its inability, refusal even, to recognise and develop the inherent compatibility of socialism and black struggle. And it was precisely in the London Borough of Brent that the possibility of such a rapprochement was being held out. But the national Labour Party, in disowning the struggles there, and in implicitly accepting the dominant propaganda that the Left in Brent was indeed ‘loony’, was able neither to ameliorate the stylistic excesses of ‘anti-racism’ nor to validate its vaunted socialist thrust and principles.

Two incidents in Brent focused national attention. First, there was the disciplining of the white head teacher, Maureen McGoldrick, for allegedly telling a council employee not to send her any more black teachers to fill vacant posts. Second, there was the decision to appoint black teachers to 180 specialist posts as race advisers, which were funded under the government scheme aimed at areas of special deprivation and high ‘ethnic’ concentration. But, in the hands of the media, Brent has come to symbolise left-wing totalitarianism – a place where ‘thought police’ and ‘race spies’ are used to hound and persecute decent, English teachers who just cannot get on with the job they are paid to do because of unwarranted political interference.

It is a view which has met with little, and largely ineffective, opposition. Even those Left analysts who tried to disentangle the threads of the Brent debate have, by and large, confined themselves to ‘anti-racism’ and missed, therefore, many of the wider ramifications of the struggles in Brent over education. For, though the issue came to the fore in Brent over increasing the appointment of black teachers, the issue itself was not black teachers per se, but entrenched class disparities in the provision of education. In other words, an issue of class was being fought out on the terrain of race.

Every ‘fact’, therefore, needs to be analysed twice, once on the touchstone of race and once on the touchstone of class. To do that, however, it is first necessary to look at the social geography of Brent. The most startling thing about Brent is that it displays within one borough a microcosm of Thatcher’s ‘two nations’. Though, statistically, Brent as a whole has some of the worst housing, highest overcrowding, and highest unemployment in all London, the deprivation is not equally distributed. On the contrary, the north and west of the borough (north of London’s North Circular Road), formerly the Borough of Wembley, is predominantly middle-class with a high degree of owner occupation. It is an area which

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