31.07.2002

Injury to one is injury to all

The authoritarian social programme of Tony Blair's Labour government has in the past few months given rise to a scandalous legal and judicial witch-hunt against militant Asian and muslim youth in the north of England. In the summer of 2001, in the run-up to and the immediate aftermath of the general election, the far-right British National Party engaged in a series of high-profile interventions in a number of northern towns and cities. Seeking to feed off the despair that has grown up over years of impoverishment and working class defeat, the BNP threw fuel on the flames of an already extremely tense situation. Due to the near-total collapse of many of the old manufacturing industries that were once the livelihood of many of these towns, and being bypassed by most of the economic growth in 'services' that has led to periodic economic booms in the south of the country, white and ethnic minority working class communities have often been set at each other's throats in the north in competition for resources. Such events as September 11 and the declaration of the 'war against terrorism' have stoked up popular antipathy to muslims; the advances of the far right in Europe have further given Blair and Blunkett an incentive to push 'toughness' against immigrants, which despite their disavowal of any 'anti-muslim' agenda (quite consistent with their liberal anti-racist ideology, by the way), only feeds popular prejudice. The fact that the police felt bold enough to batter down the doors of a mosque in Lee, West Midlands last week, in order to forcibly deport a family of Afghan refugees, is indicative of the way things have shifted over the past year. One result of this has been a rise in racial tension, as the Blair government attacks the working class economically with one hand while issuing honeyed anti-racist verbiage on the other. In the northern cities, meanwhile, the police engaged in their own anti-Asian agitation, falsely claiming that a number of areas with a mainly Asian population were 'no-go' areas for whites, and maliciously utilising some unpleasant but fundamentally ordinary acts of criminality by lumpen Asian youth to argue that there was in some way a pattern of racist attacks by Asians on white people. On one notorious occasion, a well known Asian activist and Labour Party NEC member, Shahid Malik, was publicly and brutally beaten up by police while trying to defuse a riot situation - such was the bloodlust of the cops who had been sent to crack heads as part of the scapegoating of the Asian community. This was evidently fertile ground for anti-immigrant agitation, as the BNP showed in winning three councillors in the recent local elections in Burnley. Last summer, as the BNP's intervention was running in high gear for the general election, the Asian youth of Oldham, Burnley and subsequently Bradford engaged in what were effectively revolts against racism, fighting for several days at a time with militarised cops. The Blair government, of course, professes deep antipathy for racism of any sort - indeed the entire bourgeois establishment, now even including the Tories themselves, have over the past period manufactured for themselves a whole, relatively coherent ideology of official anti-racism. Tory politicians these days are even sacked for telling racist jokes in their after-dinner speeches - not so long ago, you would have had to sack the lot. But there is one thing the official 'anti-racist' establishment detests more than racism - and that is militant direct action against racism; struggle and rebellion by the oppressed against racial oppression. Hence the Asian youth of Bradford in particular are being made an example of, with the full blessing of New Labour, official 'anti-racism' notwithstanding. Similar show trials are also reportedly in preparation in Oldham and Burnley. New Labour have sent in a hanging judge, Stephen Gullick, to cut a swathe through the militant Asian youth of Bradford. According to an article in Tribune by Yvonne Ridley, "Of the 270 people arrested during the Bradford disturbances, 145 were charged with riot, and more than 90% were muslims. "More than 150, the majority first-time offenders, have been dealt with by the courts receiving, on average, sentences of four years. Comparisons of sentencing have been made with Belfast, where a petrol-bomb-thrower will get a suspended sentence or a fine for a first conviction" (July 26). Some examples: Istifar Iqbal, sentenced to 11 months for picking up, but not throwing, two stones; Asam Latif, sentenced to four years and nine months for lobbing six stones; Mohammad Akram, sentenced to five years for hurling various missiles; Mohammad Munir, sentenced to four years and nine months for throwing two stones; and Ashraf Hussain, sentenced to four years for throwing three stones. What makes these sentences all the more draconian is the fact that most of the accused were teenagers who pleaded guilty on the advice of lawyers that they would get less severe treatment if they did so and who had no criminal record prior to these convictions. Furthermore, charges of riot must have the prior consent of the director of public prosecutions before they can be brought. This fact, taken together with the action of the Labour council in Bradford in awarding Gullick the 'freedom of the city', clearly indicates direct political input - quite likely from Blunkett's home office or even Downing Street itself - in these brutal and barbaric sentences. Gullick has openly boasted that his sentences of individuals are based also on the reported actions of people other than those actually in the dock, on the basis of the doctrine of "common purpose" and their alleged actions "taken together". Local activists have aptly compared this kind of 'collective guilt' sentencing to the practices of apartheid South Africa, or of the racist judiciary in the deep south in the US. Indeed, such is the anger of the Asian community that they have called in Imran Khan and Michael Mansfield QC, both reputed socialist civil rights lawyers, to help wage a campaign in defence of the Asian youth. Local Asian women have started the Fair Justice Campaign, aimed at overturning the vindictive sentences. The campaign has already scored one significant partial success, in that the sentence of one teenager, 18-year-old Imran Ghafoor, has had his sentence cut from four years to 18 months. The appeal court judge who overturned the original sentence, Lord Justice Dyson, explicitly noted that, in defiance of human rights laws, Gullick had not taken into account the defendant's age when sentencing him. Thinking legalistically for a moment, one can only wonder, given the circumstances of this officially acknowledged breach of human rights legislation, which looks quite likely to be the first of many, whether there might be grounds for an investigation into a conspiracy to systematically violate such human rights laws originating at the highest level of the New Labour administration. In any case, while this is not a likely possibility under the present capitalist state, such a demand might well have an educational function in terms of clarifying for many in society the real class nature of the law. While socialists should support any and all campaigns to deflect the establishment's vindictive campaign against these victimised youth, we should not content ourselves with calling for reduced sentences. We should also make it clear that fighting against racism is not a crime: indeed, it is a heroic and laudable act. Rioting is of course not something that socialists advocate; it often has uncontrolled and anti-social aspects to it, in terms of injuries to non-combatants and the destruction of buildings and facilities, which can lead to worse deprivation. But nevertheless, taking up whatever comes to hand in the face of far-right or police provocation and victimisation is a legitimate act of resistance to fundamentally inhuman forces, forces whose ultimate tendency is to reduce society to barbarism. The youth who took up sticks and stones against the far right and their protectors in the Labour Party and the local constabulary are not criminals, but victims of a defeated struggle against oppression. We demand that all those jailed be freed, all sentences reversed, all charges dropped. If anything, their real failing was that, because they were simply outraged and rebellious youth, not connected to a real, rooted mass working class movement, they were left comparatively isolated and therefore prey to the state. Taking up a physical struggle against far-right groups and rampaging cops is a job for the workers' movement itself. The formation of workers' defence corps, for instance, to protect vulnerable immigrant communities from fascist incitement and the police is a task that the entire working class will sooner or later have to begin. Indeed, if we sit back and allow such layers to be victimised in this way, sooner or later bosses and their frame-up artists will be coming for wider layers of our class. As the old labour movement tradition says, an injury to one is an injury to all. Ian Donovan