“black locality” of an earlier period, traceable through the presence from the 1950s onward of new black businesses and shops in areas of immigrant settlement, had by the 1980s become a global sensibility that corresponded with a voluntary and local political sector that attempted to advocate on behalf of the particular community it claimed to represent.33
Criticisms of this process have been twofold. First, the extent to which groups were actually representative of the constituents on whose behalf they claimed to speak was not always apparent. Certainly groups that were successful in their funding applications possessed no democratic mandate. The 1980s witnessed the rise of the community leaders, generally men from comparatively middle-class backgrounds who, because of their ability to speak the language of the state, were often presumed to be the authentic gatekeepers to the particular ethnic group they claimed to represent. Reflecting on his own ministerial responsibilities, David Waddington admitted that the government was regularly mistaken about “who the real community leaders were” and was too often seduced by “noisy chaps” whose claims of influence within a particular community often did not match reality.34 More than the unaccountability of these processes, however, for Sivanandan and others it was the way in which the state’s embrace of multiculturalism in the 1980s was seen to provoke ethnic divisions that was the program’s most damaging legacy. People began to see their ethnic identity—as opposed to the more inclusive identity of black—as the only way of obtaining either influence or money. The state’s policies “did not respond to the needs of communities,” the writer Kenan Malik has argued, “but to a large degree created those communities by imposing identities on people.”35 If the emphasis on plurality and diversity in the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival occurred in the context of the disorientation experienced by Britain at the moment of decolonization, to Sivanandan the program of multiculturalism that was aimed at black Commonwealth citizens and their descendants in Britain was—echoing the language used by the ACSHO at its African Liberation Day—nothing less than a form of “domestic neocolonialism.”36
It is certainly striking that the groups who were awarded funding in Birmingham in the 1980s often defined themselves in narrow terms—for example, as the St. Kitts, Nevis, and Anguilla Society, as opposed to the black or even Caribbean society. Allegations of corruption in the distribution of state resources were also commonplace and were often couched in interethnic terms.37 With respect to the attitude of the state, however, a confused picture has emerged. The council actually began to liaise with black community groups from the mid-1960s, adopting the language of plurality and equality and beginning to play a monetary role in community relations. When the multicultural moment definitively arrived following the 1981 rioting, the Birmingham Labour authority, at least, adopted it ambivalently in light of concerns about the effects it would have on their white working-class vote. Nationally, following the 1985 unrest the government allocated a considerable sum of money to Handsworth, ostensibly with the aim of job creation, though this was met with vocal opposition from others inside government. As discussed in this chapter, there were divisions along ethnic lines in Handsworth, but it is simplistic to suggest that this was solely because of the way in which state funding had come to be distributed. In fact, within many organizations this was a process that was already under way independently from the often-confused reach of the state.
ANTIRACISM
In 1970 a group of teachers, academics, and campaigners organized a march on Edgbaston cricket ground, a venue in the south of the city that was due to host a match in a series between England and a whites-only South African team. The march was part of a national Stop the Seventy Tour campaign, led by the activist and future Labour cabinet minister Peter Hain with the support of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). In the event, the protests were a success; the planned matches were abandoned. But the organizers of the Birmingham march—which included local businessman John Plummer; Leslie Mitton, a teacher at a local Methodist College; and John Hick, a prominent lecturer in religious philosophy at Birmingham University—pressed ahead, transforming it into a demand for better community relations. Nine hundred people attended the march, out of which a new organization was born: All Faiths for One Race (AFFOR). From 1974 the group operated out of premises at the corner of Finch Road and Lozells Road in Handsworth, where it continued to be active throughout the 1980s. Initially its members were dismissed as “angry young men intent on stirring up trouble.” Not everyone active in AFFOR was either male or young, Hick later recalled in his memoirs. But it was true “that we were angry—about the injustices of racism.”38
AFFOR had emerged out of a particular conjuncture with respect to the Left’s engagement with Britain’s black population. As Jodi Burkett has suggested, although an anticolonial stance was at the heart of organizations such as the AAM, this did not mean they stood apart from the wider ambivalence about Britain’s imperial past that had emerged in the context of decolonization. In the 1960s, the focus of such organizations on what was understood as the growing imperial status of the United States and the “little empire” that was seen to have developed in South Africa not only displaced the memory of Britain’s own imperial past but also meant that the experiences of its formerly colonial subjects living in Britain could often be overlooked.39 There was a reluctance, as Stuart Hall has reflected with respect to his own experience in the New Left, to explicitly comprehend the black presence as being the product of a colonial formation.40 By the end of the decade, however, the passing of successive race equality acts, immigration legislation and the arrival of Powellism meant that it was virtually impossible for the largely white membership of groups such as the AAM to ignore the domestic race relations scene. As Hain reflected, the prospect of a deterioration in community relations if the South African tour of England were to be allowed to go ahead had become a central plank of the Stop the Seventy Tour’s campaign.41 In Birmingham the transformation of a protest against a segregated South African cricket team into AFFOR, an agency that would both conduct antiracist campaigning and run services for local black communities in Handsworth, was a signal of this broader direction of travel.
By the mid-1970s, prompted by the increasing visibility and electoral successes of the NF, a national antiracist movement had emerged.42 Like AFFOR, it was led primarily by white activists. A key driver was Rock Against Racism (RAR), a coalition established by the Socialist Workers’ Party that capitalized on the popularity of the punk, reggae, and “two-tone” scenes by staging consciously multiracial festivals featuring both white and black acts. This culminated in a carnival in London in 1978 that was attended by more than seventy thousand people. By this point, RAR had been joined by the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), a group formed in 1977 to give the antiracist movement a formal political voice. Its central aim, through the organization of protests and marches and the distribution of its campaign literature, was to expose and raise awareness of the Nazi sympathies of the NF. Between 1977 and 1979 it was estimated that there were 250 ANL branches across Britain and more than forty thousand members.43
The ANL, in particular, has been subject to criticism from those who saw its focus on exposing the “sham patriotism” of the NF as accepting the debate on the nationalist terms of the Far Right. For Paul Gilroy, the ANL closed down what were the broader concerns of RAR and honed in on the Nazism of the NF “to the exclusion of every other consideration,” including the NF campaign of street violence and myriad other forms of racial discrimination that black communities faced on a daily basis.44 Both RAR and the ANL were relatively quiet in Handsworth. In 1978 there had been a failed attempt to stage a “musical march,” for example, partly due to the divided nature of the local ANL branch and its inability to attract the support of local black communities.45 AFFOR, in contrast, continued well into the 1980s. It was undoubtedly at more than one remove from the politics of RAR and the ANL. While AFFOR undertook antiracist campaigning and attempted to uncover the Nazism of local NF members, this was always counterbalanced by a localized politics that was explicitly focused on attempting to meet the varied needs of local black and Asian communities. There could be tensions between these twin ambitions. In 1977 AFFOR summarized its core dilemmas as being “to what extent it should concentrate on casework and to what extent on ‘campaigning.’”46 But it was the
