Re: As the days wear on, it appears as if only the British will really stand by us.
Don't bet on it.... Does "Bradford Race Riot" ring a bell?? Here you are:
Poverty is the new black
A Sivanandan traces the roots of this summer's violence to the xenophobic culture of globalisation
Special report: race issues in the UK
Special report: globalisation
Special report: refugees in Britain
Friday August 17, 2001
The Guardian
guardian.co.uk
Excerpt:
More to the point is the the fate of the working class in these industries. Some, such as mining and shipbuilding, had an almost wholly white workforce, whereas the steel and textile mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire had recruited labour from the Indian sub-continent. And it was these mill towns that the government failed to bring into the modern economy.
White workers moved to jobs elsewhere, but racism and family ties pointed Bangladeshis and Pakistanis towards restaurant work and mini-cabbing - and the solidarity between white and Asian workers created on the factory floor was lost.
Segregation in housing, resulting from local government policies, separated the communities further and led to segregation in schooling. Multiculturalism, which was
really a sop to white racism (people don't need to be given
their cultures, only their rights) deepened the fissures. And
ethnic funding, instead of improving the local economy as a
whole, helped only to improve the personal economy of a
few.
All of which served to brand the Bangladeshis and
Pakistanis as self-segregating and better served by local
authorities than the local whites. That the former were
mostly Muslim Asians served to focus white hate on
Islam. And it was that potent combination of racial and
religious hatred that provided the breeding ground for the
electoral politics of the British National party, on the one
hand, and the goonda politics of the National Front, on the
other - and provoked the recent uprisings of young Asians.
What were the youth to do? They had been born here,
schooled here, had been media-maddened by all the good
things in life that should be available to them - and yet all
around them were "the rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds"
of the industrial wastelands of Britain.
Whatever leadership there was had either retreated into the
safety of religion or defected to the service of local and
central government, from where they condemned these
youth while feathering their own nests.
No economic infrastructures or hope of socialisation
through work. No political parties, no ideology to unite
the fragmented communities or emerge as a political force
- all that had died with New Labour.
Locked into their degradation by a racist police force,
vilified by a racist press and violated, finally, by the true
fascists. What were the youth to do but break out in
violence, self-destructive, reactive violence, the violence
of the violated?
* Taken from "Three Faces of British Racism", a special report by the Institute of Race Relations
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