I can still remember the chill I felt on first hearing of the murders of Parveen Khan and her three young children, Aqsa, Kamran and Imran. It was July 1981. In the middle of the night, someone had poured petrol through the letter box of their house in Walthamstow, north-east London, and set it alight. The only person to escape the inferno was Parveen’s husband, Yunus, who had jumped from an upstairs window, his injuries leaving him hospitalised for several weeks.
The perpetrators were never caught. Don Gibson was one of the investigating officers. Now, as then, he insists the arsonist was most likely Yunus Khan himself. For this to be true, observes Pete Hope, a firefighter who attended the scene, Khan must have gone out of the house, poured petrol through the letter box, come inside, set the petrol ablaze, gone upstairs, waited until the fire made escape almost impossible and then thrown himself out of a window.
The story of the Walthamstow firebombing, of Gibson’s “theory” and of Hope’s observation, was a small part of Riz Ahmed’s Channel 4 trilogy, Defiance, which aired last week. The series told of how, in the late 1970s, a new generation of activists from Asian communities confronted racism. For the Asian Youth Movements (AYMs) that sprang up across the country, racism could only be challenged by taking matters into their own hands. “Self-defence is no offence”, as the slogan ran.
The killings of Parveen Khan and her children, and Gibson’s fingering of Yunus Khan, captures something of what life was like then; both the brutal violence that was the everyday experience of black people and the disdain with which the authorities viewed them. Being of migrant background was sufficient to condemn someone as guilty. Interweaving interviews with old activists with footage of the bigotry of the time, Defiance provided for many a shocking, eye-opening portrait of a viscerally racist Britain, the memory of which has slipped from public consciousness, and of a hidden history of resistance. To make it more than simply a window into a forgotten history, though, we need to place the story in a wider context, and to ask: what links that Britain to the Britain of today?
The anger expressed within Asian communities was part of a broader set of eruptions in Britain’s inner cities in the late 70s and early 80s, from Brixton to Toxteth. It is easy to forget the scale of the ferment – even southern towns rarely thought of as racial tinderboxes, such as High Wycombe and Cirencester, caught alight. The authorities feared that, unless minority communities were given a political stake in the system, tensions would threaten urban stability.
The state, in the words of Sir George Young, Britain’s first minister for race relations, had to “back the good guys, the sensible, moderate, responsible leaders of ethnic minorities”. “If they are seen to deliver, to get financial aid and support,” then that “reinforces their standing and credibility in the community”. If the “moderates… don’t deliver,” Young warned, “people will turn to the militants.”
It was not central government, but local authorities, such as the Greater London Council, through which much of the funding was dispersed. The results were deeply contradictory.
AYM activists had sought to challenge not just racism but also institutional power within minority communities, confronting traditionalists on issues such as the role of women and the dominance of the mosque. Now, many of those same traditionalists were receiving backing from the state as the “good guys” and “moderates”.
This process entrenched what the writer Arun Kundnani has described as “ethnic fiefdoms”, as “community leaders” created specific, and often clashing, constituencies of support. In Birmingham, one study observed, the council’s policies “tended to result in competition between BME [black and minority ethnic] communities for resources” as each group “attempted to maximise their own interests”. Few AYM activists viewed themselves as “Muslim” or “Hindu” or “Sikh” – “it never occurred to me to think like that”, observes Balraj Purewal, one of the founders of the Southall Youth Movement. They saw themselves, rather, as “black”, in those days a political label as much as an ethnic one, and one that sought to be inclusive of racial, cultural and religious differences.
Through the 80s, though, the concept of political blackness dissolved into a collection of more parochial identities, as every group was encouraged, in the words of Bradford council’s race relations plan, to “maintain its own identity, culture, language, religion and customs”. The focus of anti-racist protest in the city shifted from political issues to more religious and cultural ones culminating in the confrontation over the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. All this encouraged the growth of what we now call “the politics of identity”, a development that went hand-in-hand with the decline of class consciousness. The story that Defiance tells is, paradoxically, one of class as well as of race. As Tariq Mehmood, one of the founders of the Bradford Asian Youth Movement, has put it: “Most of us were workers and sons of workers. For us race and class were inseparable.”
That view came to change in the 1980s. The wider decline of trade union power and disparagement of class politics that marked that decade, combined with the growth of a black middle class and the development of narrower concepts of identity, cut away at the sense of working-class belonging. Minorities came to be perceived instead as belonging to almost classless “communities”.
The politics of identity came also to provide a new language through which to express hostility to immigration. The arguments of the racists in Defiance, raging about immigration and the loss of “white Britain”, may seem eerily familiar. Today, though, concern about London becoming a “minority white” city, fear that white Britons are being forced to “surrender their territory”, the dread of Europeans “losing their homeland” to immigrants are seen by many not as racist but as a legitimate defence of “white racial self-interest”.
What links the old Britain portrayed in Defiance with the Britain of today is a complex, often contradictory, concatenation of social changes. These changes marked the slow effacing of the kind of raw racism that disfigured Britain of the 70s and 80s. They also helped create a more atomised society and more fragmented communities and identities. It is in those complexities and contradictions that we begin to grasp the realities of race and class in Britain today.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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