Fighting back against the Far Right: lessons from the past?
JVL Introduction
Last week Channel 4 broadcast an excellent three part documentary, “Defiance: Fighting the Far Right”; “The story of how – from 1976 to 1981 – Britain’s Asian community stood tall against far-right violence and a rising tide of racist murders”. It is thoroughly recommended. (You can see it on All 4, through this link) There is much we can learn from the achievements – and the mistakes -of this important movement, despite the passage of nearly 50 years, despite some gains and perhaps especially despite having the most “diverse” Cabinet in British history.
This article, an interview with Mukhtar Dar, is from March 2023 and explores many of the same issues as the “Defiance” documentary, especially the importance of the role of South Asian young people organising to defend themselves and their communities from the National Front and also the entrenched and blatant racism – and brutality – of the police. Those involved were often highly politicised, with a clear class analysis of racism as part of their oppression and the connections they needed to make to other working class communities. For example, some went to support mining communities during the strike, sometimes encountering racism there. Dar says: “There were individuals within those communities who had racist views. But when we went into those mining communities, we recognised that just as we were a tightknit community, they were too — a community constituted by its relations to the means of production; and, as a community, they saw their future being eradicated. They had the same hatred for the police as we did, for the scabs, for the people who were selling out within their ranks.”
LL
This article was originally published by Tribune on Tue 7 Mar 2023. Read the original here.
Racism and Resistance: How South Asians Fought Back
Mukhtar Dar, a former member of the Sheffield Asian Youth Movement and the Pakistani Workers Association, speaks to Tribune about the rich tradition of political activism in the British South Asian community – and why it’s time to reignite that fighting spirit
Loading article text…
This was a brilliant read, how they came together and fought against racism gets my full respect, it would have been so easy to give in and either suffer it or find a way of leaving.
We’ve seen politicians using racism, to divert attention away from what they were doing. It made people look away and start talking about “All these foreigners” etc. while the Tories, were making decisions that were not in the best interest of the Working Class. Brexit is one of the best examples, they created the conditions that would cause the people to blame the foreigners, there were EU rules that Goverments could use to restrict the numbers of EU foreigners from coming to the UK but they didn’t use them, knowing that it would affect, wages, housing and jobs, the Press backed them by blaming the EU and the migrants.
Along comes Cameron who calls for a Referendum and we vote to leave.
In the 2019 General Election, Starmer pushed for the undemocratic People’s Vote, knowing that Labour voters was more than likely to vote Tory and JC would have to resign. He then blamed Corbyn’s Policies. The rest is history!!