LITMIR.BIZ

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racial groups who have a common loyalty, a common love, to their common country… In spite of criticism of Mr de Klerk,’ I said, and then looked over at him, ‘sir, you are one of those I rely upon. We are going to face the problem of this country together.’ At which point I reached over to take his hand and said, ‘I am proud to hold your hand for us to go forward. ‘Mr de Klerk seemed surprised, but pleased.

      Nelson Mandela

      At the end of January 2007 the Anglo-Dutch metals giant Corus, which had until a 1999 merger been British Steel, was bought by the Indian company, Tata Steel, of Jamshedpur. One hundred years earlier, when the British Empire was at its height, such a future concept would have been unthinkable. Even sixty years ago, when, in August 1947, India finally achieved its independence in a hurried and, some still argue, botched job by its last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the idea of an Indian concern taking over a British one would have been beyond the scope of most imaginations, Indian or British. The visionary novelist Salman Rushdie, whose seminal work, Midnight’s Children, redefined the moment of independence for a new generation, could not have conceived of it when his ground-breaking work was published twenty-six years ago, when the author himself was a mere thirty-four years old.

      The world has turned radically in a half-century, and in doing so it has submerged the greatest, largest and longest-lived empire that ever was, and seen the reduction of its mother country from a real world leader to one which on the one hand hangs on the coat-tails of the USA, and on the other refuses fully to integrate with its natural partners in Europe. We, the Children of Empire, still retain a memory that seems more concrete than ghostly of our powerful past, and it still influences our thinking.

      But when I say ‘we’ in such a context I am immediately at fault, because there are Children of Empire who are not by descent British at all, except for the fact that the countries they or their parents or grandparents or even earlier forebears came from for generations – in some cases back to the seventeenth century – lived under the shadow and protection of the British Crown. As we settle into the twenty-first century, we must grow used to the idea that India will soon overtake China in terms of population size; and that both those countries will soon become the dominant industrial and economic powers of the world.

      In the pages that follow we will hear some of their stories, but here at the beginning it is worth making one allusion to the first wave of Caribbean immigrants to British shores, in 1948, nearly sixty years ago, on the Empire Windrush. Small in number – there were fewer than 500 of them – the men and women of the Windrush, dressed in their best, who had come to seek a new life in a mother country they had always been taught to love, respect and revere, met a mixed reception. A nervous parliament prevaricated – though Prime Minister Clement Attlee stood firmly on the side of the angels – while the racist extreme right, headed by Oswald Mosley, who had previously supported Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies, foamed at the mouth. A decade later, after suffering years of poor lodgings for high rents, and a gamut of racist prejudice from the locals, the immigrants had to suffer one more great indignity – the race riots of Nottingham and then Notting Hill in the summer of 1958. Here it will suffice merely to quote from Mike and Trevor Phillips’s masterly account, largely through vox pop interviews, of early immigration to Britain, Windrush – the Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, to give a flavour of those times:

       Notting Dale differed considerably from Brixton or Paddington, and it might have been tailormade [sic] for the main event. Notting Dale had everything St Ann’s Well Road [in Nottingham] had, and more, in much larger quantities. It had multi-occupied houses with families of different races on each floor. It had a large population of internal migrants, gypsies and Irish, many of them transient single men, packed into a honeycomb of rooms with communal kitchens, toilets and no bathrooms. It had depressed English families who had lived through the war years then watched the rush to the suburbs pass them by while they were trapped in low income jobs and rotten housing. It had a raft of dodgy pubs and poor street lighting. It had gang fighting, illegal drinking clubs, gambling and prostitution. It had a large proportion of frightened and resentful residents. A fortnight before the riots broke out there was a ‘pitched battle’ in Cambridge Gardens, off Ladbroke Grove, between rival gangs, and the residents of several streets got together to present a petition to the London County Council asking for something to be done about the rowdy parties, the mushroom clubs and the violence.

      Notting Dale also had a clutch of racist activists, operating at the street corners and in the pubs. Parties like Sir Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement actually had very few members, but in the atmosphere of hostility and uncertainty which had begun to surround the migrants they provided the country with an idiom, a vocabulary and a programme of action which shaped the resentments of inarticulate and disgruntled people at various levels of society. In the week before the Notting Hill riots broke out a drunken fifteen-year-old approached a black man in a railway carriage at Liverpool Street station and was reported as shouting, ‘Here’s one of them – you black knave. We have complained to our government about you people. You come here, you take our women and do all sorts of things free of charge. They won’t hang you so we will have to do it.’

      Leaving aside the peculiarity of the boy’s language after it had been filtered through various official reports, the style and content echoes precisely the rhetoric being peddled by such right-wing activists as Mosley, John Bean and Colin Jordan.

      There follows an interview with Barbadian osteopath Rudy Braithwaite, who arrived in Britain in 1957:

       I remember going to listen to some of the speeches that Mosley would make, you know. I was too young to really take on board what it meant when you talk about the Third Reich and all that sort of thing. And Britain is a white country and it’s for white people, and that sort of thing. That was the gist of the discussion that he would have on this little soap box. And there were a lot of people, who are very respectable now, who used to be supporters of Mosley. I could put my finger on them. I know who they are.

      Very massive crowds, big crowds used to come, you know. A lot of people would follow him. I mean, he used to have his meetings on one of the side streets off Westbourne Park Road. And there were people who would really come from everywhere and listen to Mosley, you know. And it was crazy. But that happened. He was a very convincing speaker. And he spoke without a breath, he didn’t take much. He would speak and things would roll out of his mouth, so that he was very impressive. When I remember some of the things that were being said. It’s very impressive. And he said, and perhaps that is true, he used to say, ‘Many of the people who are in high places, who are politicians, would love to say what I am saying now.’

      I remember those words. But they are too scared to say it because of the likelihood of jeopardising their wonderful, tidy positions. And, of course, that was borne out by Duncan Sandys [a right-wing Tory MP and minister with a chequered career], who talked about ‘polka-dot grandchildren’. And Gerald Nabarro [a right-wing Tory MP and notorious roué of the 1950s and 1960s, mainly famous for his handlebar moustache], who couldn’t even drive on a main street without driving up the wrong way. Yet he got away with it, his racism. He was very blatant about his racist behaviour.

      The Empire Windrush, by the way, set off on her final voyage in February 1954, sailing from Yokohama and Kure to the United Kingdom with 1,500 wounded UN soldiers from the Korean War. The battered ship, long past her best, took ten weeks to make Port Said, and she was later condemned.

      Prejudice of a different kind hit Britain hard nearly fifty years after the Notting Hill riots, and the form it took is indicative of how radically and dramatically our culture has changed within a generation.

      During the London rush hour on 7 July 2005 four bombs exploded, three on the underground at 08.50, and another on a Number 30 bus in Tavistock Square, not far from Euston Station, an hour later. Fifty-two innocent people were killed, and more than 700 injured, some seriously disabled for life. The four suicide bombers were young Muslim men, all of whom were British citizens and all of whom would have had a perfect right to identity cards – the introduction of which as a means of countering terrorism is clearly invalid.

      The London bombing (a similar attack was launched in the same

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