Dark luminosity, p.35
Dark Luminosity, page 35
Within a couple of years it was not unusual for white and black people (especially Somalians) to be brutally targeted by very large gangs of Bangladeshis. It was also, by that time, quite routine for weapons like machetes, knives and baseball bats to be used by the borough’s various Bangladeshi gangs in attacks on each other (often in turf wars related to drug-dealing issues), as well as in their racist attacks.
Additionally, at that time, Bangladeshis from the Borough of Camden, whose descendents hailed from Dhaka, would do battle with the gangs from Tower Hamlets, whose descendants largely hailed from Sylhet province. Sometimes white middle-class liberals would play down the racist attacks and claim that these were simply violent out-of-control gangs. On a couple of occasions I pointed out to representatives of the white chattering class that the old skinhead gangs used to do battle with each other as well as go ‘Paki bashing’. ‘So was I then mistaken,’ I asked them, ‘in thinking that the Paki bashing of the seventies and eighties was racist?’ Predictably their answers were weak and contradictory. I recall one particularly appalling attack by a gang of Bangladeshis. Two Portuguese boys were in the process of visiting London while on their ‘gap year’. Naïvely they found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time when they were accosted by a gang of marauding Bangladeshis at Shadwell Docklands Light Railway station. They were both thrown into the path of an oncoming (driverless) train. The gang callously prevented them from scrambling to safety onto the station platform. One of the boys died from the injuries that he sustained. It was a truly horrifying attack.
Local people became angry that these violent, sometimes fatal incidents were not reported widely in the media, particularly at a national level. People felt that if it had been gangs of whites beating up Bangladeshis it would undoubtedly have received widespread coverage across the media. It seemed to many of us, in the area, that large sections of the media chose to see, regardless of the evidence, all Asians as blameless victims and all working-class whites as racist bigots out for trouble. Broadly speaking, the white liberal chattering classes in the media – still wedged tight in a 1970s ‘right on’ attitude – were, in their own way, just as stuck in the mud as right-wing retired colonels living in mock Tudor houses in Surrey were. Which was fitting, because they are often of the same bloodline as those colonels.
The PC mob also turned a blind eye to the rabidly racist posters that Muslim fundamentalist groups were putting up around the East End. I think that those posters really helped to fuel the flames of anger in the disaffected Muslim youth. At the time I couldn’t believe that the people behind those posters were not brought to account. If a white power group had gone around putting up posters calling for a pogrom against the Jews and unbelievers, there would have been a massive outcry. It was also not unusual to see the slogan ‘whites out’ scrawled on walls around the area. The council would come and remove that sort of graffiti pretty quickly, far quicker than they would come to mend your leaking pipe (or broken ceiling). However, the council never moved to tackle the real problem: the people putting up the graffiti. The whole problem of race was a hot potato that nobody in authority wanted to pick up. I noticed that by 1997 the white kids were too scared to ‘play out’ in the local area. Like the elderly they would venture out only when they had to, in a cowed fashion at that. It was sad to see. Whereas in the seventies I had found myself remonstrating with white kids to stop bullying Bangladeshis, now it was the other way around. Sociologists working in the borough of Tower Hamlets at that time placed white boys at the bottom of the heap in regard to academic achievement, self-confidence and expectations for their future. However, their reports were never highly publicised. But, then again, who, in late-twentieth-century London, would stand up for poor working-class white boys? Certainly not the metropolitan elite, that’s for sure.
It didn’t escape my attention that one hundred years or so after the East End was gripped by a Jewish-influenced secular political radicalism, an Islamic-inspired religious fundamentalism had now taken root. The East End was still, I had to admit, an extreme and dynamic place. People still liked to throw stones and kick up a fuss. If I had been a young Muslim, I bet there’s a fair chance that I would have had some degree of sympathy with the new religious radicals. But I felt the road they were travelling down was a very dangerous one for everyone, as the London bombings of 2005 clearly demonstrated. Of course, the counter argument for many young Muslims at the time was that many of the umma were already living in mortal danger every day – indeed, many innocent Muslims went on to lose their lives in Iraq and other places – so what was there for them to lose by being radical?
It came as no surprise to me when the BNP started to gain in popularity in Tower Hamlets. Hardly anybody in the media or politics gave a flying fuck about what was happening to poor whites (and blacks, for that matter) there. Even I flirted, for five minutes, with the idea of voting, out of desperation, for them (the BNP) in the election of 1997, so you can get some idea of how bad things had got. I thought that, maybe, if enough people voted for the BNP in the area it would cause a stink and more might be done to protect us. But there was one main and very obvious reason why I couldn’t bring myself to vote for them. The BNP wouldn’t want black or Asian people in their party. They only want white people. That, for me, does not fly. And, ultimately, they would probably want to send my wife ‘home’ to China. Well, fuck that; I’d miss her. And, more to the point, who would cook me tea? (Disclaimer: I cook her tea even more than she cooks mine nowadays.) Anyway, joking apart, I did predict in the original Memoirs of a Geezer that there would be a British National Socialist Party with all races and creeds in it. Well, to be fair, I wasn’t that far off the mark – just look at UKIP. I would not call them ‘national socialist’, but they do have members from ethnic minorities, and they are pretty right wing and nationalistic. I didn’t vote for Blair in that election. I went for a truly independent left-wing option (along with about sixty others). It was either that or be a paper spoiler. I hated New Labour from the word go. They were ultimately vacuous, nothing more than a big PR company. They segued perfectly from Thatcherism. ‘Things can only get better’ – yeah, right. I couldn’t believe the number of people I knew who bought into that bullshit at the time. To be fair, some of their policies were good. Especially in the area of social care. People forget, for instance, how bad the NHS had got in the nineties before Blair came to power. But there was a feeling that they didn’t know us. They definitely didn’t speak FOR us. We weren’t really invited to the party. We were the untouchables that no major party needed or wanted. New Labour complacently knew that most of us would, in Pavlovian manner, continue to vote for them. New Labour had worked out that it was the middle classes that they needed to woo in order to win.
Looking back, I can see that the post-John Smith era clearly contains the beginnings of the ‘blue-collar disaffection’ that led eventually to Brexit. I suppose there was a similar blue-collar disaffection in the States in regard to Democrat voters, who turned in their droves to Trump. I can clearly see that they felt that they no longer had a political voice. I can identify with that. In fact, I still feel that way. But there was no way on earth that I would have ever supported either Brexit or a politician such as Trump, or indeed our very own Nigel Farage, who I tend to classify as a sort of saloon bar wag/chancer more than a serious politician.
Back in the late nineties, one or two other people that I knew in the borough, who came from either India or Pakistan, told me that ‘these Bangladeshis are backward country people’. However, I thought that was a rather glib and easy explanation. I knew full well that the same thing had been said about my Irish ancestors. Those people were the first to advise me to get out of the borough way back in 1993. They guaranteed that it would get worse. Unfortunately they were right. It was a shame. My broadly socialist outlook had led me to believe that all races and creeds could, indeed should, get along fine; united we stand, and all that. The big issue in this country, as far as I was concerned, was still class. All this race and religious conflict was, in my opinion, a red herring.
The Bangladeshis were the first immigrants into the East End who didn’t seem to assimilate at all. One of the reasons for that was the fact that they didn’t use local pubs. (In light of my own problems with alcohol, I can’t criticise that.) Also, the Bangladeshi women were not, generally speaking, as able as their non-Muslim counterparts to mix freely with wider society. I think that was another factor. They were also not able to freely associate with young men. That, of course, meant that the young men would, generally speaking, be denied the possibility of mixing with young girls from their own background – although from what I hear that is fast changing. I think that helped to nurture and accentuate the sort of ‘all boys together’ misogynistic gang culture that became so pervasive in the borough. It also meant that women from other cultures would sometimes be seen in a very disrespectful way, as mere sexual objects. They would be seen as girls (who incidentally were sometimes underage) that they would groom for and/or use exclusively for sex, but never consider marrying or having a respectful relationship with. That sort of outlook is part and parcel of cultural imperialism. White men have been doing it all over the world for years. I find it really ugly to observe. It is so psychologically and spiritually damaging for all concerned. One would have hoped that women’s groups would have come through and said something at the time. But of course they would have been terrified of being labelled racist, and, anyway, who gives a fuck about a poor working-class white girl?
It started to feel increasingly weird living in an area where you didn’t have any meaningful contact with what was now (around Shadwell) the majority of the population. Often on my forays up Watney Street market I would be the only non-Asian in sight. Apart from the architecture of the buildings you could have thought that you were in Dhaka. Sometimes I would make a point of going into Bangladeshi shops (to buy things like okra and coriander), but that was about the only contact I would have with their community, apart from my regular visits to my favourite curry house up Brick Lane, where I was friendly with the staff (however, to me that doesn’t really count, because somehow it’s too easy).
By the late nineties everyone I knew in Tower Hamlets was very concerned about the levels of violence that some members of the Bangladeshi community were inflicting on themselves and on those around them. Everybody that I knew had encountered problems. I’d had a couple of run-ins with smaller gangs when out walking by the canal, but it was nothing that I couldn’t handle. However, like my pals, I knew it was only a matter of time before I encountered larger and therefore more aggressive gangs. And, indeed, that came to pass. I ended up defending myself from an all-out assault by a very large Bangladeshi gang, who were armed with knives, bottles, machetes and bricks. I had a proper row with them. I wasn’t going to run away from anybody, especially not around where I lived, so I stood up to them. It really was one hell of a mêlée. I think they were quite surprised that I fought back with such determination. God was certainly with me that night. Incredibly, I only needed a few stitches in a head wound.
In the A&E department, before stitching me up, the young doctor asked me the sort of questions that doctors put to anyone who may possibly be suffering from concussion (which I most certainly wasn’t). She asked me what day of the week it was, what year and, finally, who the current prime minister was. I answered the first couple of questions sensibly. To the last question I answered, ‘Rupert Murdoch.’ She looked sharply up at me. I looked back at her in deadpan fashion for a few seconds before bursting out in laughter. I quite like myself sometimes. I had experienced a very scary incident and yet still had the ability to fuck around. (I like to think that one day, shortly after this life is over, I will meet St Peter at the pearly gates. I will then probably make a weak joke to him about being on the guest-list, or something.)
The young doctor, who was very cheerful and pleasant, said that she also did A&E up the road in Hackney at Homerton Hospital. She said that the nature of the injuries she dealt with was often markedly different in the two hospitals. Where I was (the Royal London in Whitechapel) it tended to be knife and machete wounds, whereas at the Homerton (owing no doubt to its close proximity to ‘Murder Mile’) it was mainly gunshot wounds. So for once I was not the exception to the rule, not that night anyway.
Anyhow, that attack was the straw that broke the camel’s back in regard to me deciding to leave the East End. I had, in the months leading up to it, put my house on the market and then taken it off again (twice). Zi-Lan and I had already had a look at some houses in other areas of London. I admit it: we made a few sorties out to Essex (I was just looking – OK?) too. However, I just couldn’t bring myself to leave the East End. ‘The Manor’ still had me in its gravitational pull. Well, I now had to admit the game was finally up. I could no longer call it ‘my area’. It was no longer, for the most part, populated by people of a similar disposition or culture to me. I knew in my heart of hearts that it was time to move on. I was in a very fortunate (financial) position, in that I could do that with no problem. I got two very serious propositions from people that I knew, offering to make serious retaliations on my behalf. I did not hesitate in declining those offers. I wasn’t that bothered. Not much harm had been done; I’d stood my ground, and the local gang members were giving me a very wide berth. Anyway, I knew full well that reprisals would simply create new problems. I felt that the area could go up like a tinderbox at any time. I certainly didn’t want to be the bloke responsible for making that happen.
By that time it was commonplace to hear the ‘call to prayer’ coming from the mosque up at Whitechapel Road. Funnily enough, at first I used to like hearing the ‘call to prayer’. You could hear it all over Whitechapel, Stepney and Bethnal Green. Initially, I found its sound as calming as the resonance of church bells. But, to be honest, towards the end of my tenure in the East End, I regarded it as the soundtrack to a foreign culture. One that was, generally speaking, more than happy to see my kind leave what was now their ‘area’. Sometimes, to me, some of the Bangladeshis seemed as ludicrous and as out of place (and time) as many of the expat British do in Spain, with their Daily Mails, all-day breakfasts and ‘no Spanish food served here’ signs.
I’m delighted to report that now that I have been out of the area for so long, when I hear the call to prayer, I no longer feel negative; again it reminds me of Christian plainsong. Reminding me of what is beyond phenomena, unchanging and ever present.
Don’t get me wrong: I know full well that if I told my tale of woe to a Palestinian, an Armenian or a Kurd, they would laugh in my face. I’m sure that they would love to put me straight about what it is to be truly displaced. However, it’s my story, and you did say that you wanted to hear it. I’m also aware that there must be quite a few Asian people, Bangladeshi or otherwise, around my age and older, who could tell their stories of how they came to this country with an open mind and a warm heart, and were then shocked at the cold and hostile reception that they received from the indigenous population.
Whenever I spoke to representatives of the chattering class at that time they were generally shocked at my opinions. Sometimes, from their reaction, you would have thought that I had informed them that I made a point, every year, of celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday, and that ‘by the way, the Holocaust never happened’, rather than simply picking fault with the attitudes of some local Bangladeshis. Those middle-class dwellers of Clapham and Highgate tended to have been brainwashed by the unrealistic and unenforceable philosophies of multiculturalism and political correctness. I can understand full well why those philosophies came into being. I certainly wouldn’t claim that no good has ever come from them. They were, at the beginning at least, a well-intentioned attempt to make a level playing field and protect the underdog. However, dealing with race and issues of equality is a difficult and complex matter (he says, stating the obvious). The crude application of multiculturalism tends to become reminiscent of the ways in which totalitarian regimes sometimes function. Multiculturalism begins eventually to work against itself. Instead of helping to achieve social harmony, it results, at best, in a lack of social cohesiveness, and at worst in serious civil disorder. Since I wrote the book multiculuralism and political correctness have, I think, become even more of an issue. So many people, when communicating, tie themselves in knots, going around the houses, terrified of saying the wrong thing and getting cancelled. On the other hand, Brexit emboldened the dimwits to spout their bile, and the sort of casual racism that abounded in the seventies came back big time. These two extremes, the PC mob and the right-wing reactionary mob, are equally abhorrent to me.
By the way, I wasn’t expecting my Bangladeshi neighbours to join me for a ‘good old cockney knees-up’ and the enforced ingestion of jellied eels. All I wanted was the opportunity to meet them halfway, if only in terms of general attitude. Just a bit of eye contact and the willingness to return a smile would have done, for starters. I knew full well that many of those chattering denizens of Hampstead, Islington and Chelsea would in time come to see things the way I did. I knew the time would arrive when many of them would also feel threatened and affronted. Well, of course, that too came to pass. It is now not terribly unusual to see them, via newspaper columns and the like, getting all angry and indignant about the possible threat to their ‘Western freedoms and values’. People such as the writer Martin Amis began to lead the charge for them.
