‘We were the only Bengali people in our block – and in the two or three other blocks, there was like one or two families.’ The Choudhurys soon found they were not welcome.
East London’s Bengalis, their lives marked by the same empire that had sustained the docks, were no strangers to hostility: the thousands of families like the Choudhurys who had arrived from Bangladesh during the 1960s and 1970s had faced abuse and systematic discrimination since their arrival. Asian families were far more likely to experience homelessness or overcrowded living conditions,4 and had been a target for violence encouraged by the BNP’s forerunner, the National Front, during the 1970s and 80s. Choudhury remembers her shock the first time she saw a gang of Union Jack-toting racists: ‘I was nine when we came over from Bangladesh and we used to love this Union Jack, everyone loves the British Queen. But when I saw it here, in their hands, and the way they were abusing it, you don’t like it any more.’
By the mid-80s, Bengalis had resisted the worst racism, but in 1987, the Choudhurys were dropped into the middle of an acute housing crisis. As the Island’s waterfront properties had been sold off for private development, the Right to Buy scheme was severely diminishing the available housing stock: in 1985 there were 5,537 council homes on the Isle of Dogs; by 1993 this had fallen to 4,000.5 Community life on the Isle of Dogs had already been torn asunder when many dockers moved downriver to work at the Tilbury container port; now the remaining working-class residents found it increasingly difficult to ensure that their friends and relatives were housed nearby.
This problem was by no means confined to the Island – across Tower Hamlets, one of the country’s poorest boroughs, housing was in short supply. A shortage of homes, combined with rising unemployment, had bred discontent at the borough’s long-reigning Labour administration, and in 1986 Tower Hamlets elected a Liberal-run council. The Liberals (who became the Liberal Democrats in 1988) had won power with a populist campaign that sought to play up fears of crime and social breakdown and promised a ‘Sons and Daughters’ housing scheme, which would ensure ‘local’ people were at the front of the queue for homes.
This was an empty promise, since councils were obliged by law to house homeless families first. What’s more, as the Liberals were well aware, to many East Londoners ‘local’ meant ‘white’. Once in power, councillors sought to shore up their position by playing on white resentment. In 1987, Liberal councillors claimed that Bengali families living in bed and breakfast accommodation had made themselves intentionally homeless by coming to Britain; a year later, the mayor of Tower Hamlets, Jeremy Shaw, staged a publicity stunt, willingly relayed by the East London Advertiser, when he travelled to Bangladesh to tell the government there that Tower Hamlets had no more room for migrants.6
And while the Liberals raised the hopes of white Tower Hamlets residents, their commitment to localism had created a further problem: power in the borough was devolved into ‘neighbourhoods’, each with their own budget and spending powers. The Isle of Dogs neighbourhood was represented by three Labour councillors and when Asian families began arriving in 1987, many white residents blamed Labour for giving away homes they believed should have been theirs. As Pye, who stood as a Lib Dem council candidate in 1990, put it to me: ‘Everybody felt that Labour was fine on the Bengalis or West Indians or whatever, but if you were white you got nothing. The feeling was, we’ve got to get houses, same as anybody else.’
Pye is no bigot, and he has worked hard to make people of the different colours and creeds who inhabit the Isle of Dogs today feel welcome: St John’s provides space for Muslim prayer sessions, plus West Indian, African and Anglican church congregations. But during the late 80s, other Islanders let their resentment spill over into something much nastier. Choudhury recalled being chased off a bus by white youths shortly after moving to the Isle of Dogs (‘I ran home and just shut the curtains’), and described a steadily worsening atmosphere as more Asian families moved onto the Island. ‘You couldn’t go to the park, never. If I went to the park, to play, on the swings and stuff, there would be white boys and girls chasing me. They used to bring dogs to chase you. We had to come home before dark, much earlier than other people. In winter you had to get home as soon as it turned four o’clock.’
Between 1987 and 1988, 104 racist attacks were reported to the Isle of Dogs housing office, despite only 260 Bangladeshi families living on the Island at the time. The next year, the number of incidents doubled, leaving people terrified. On one estate, some Bengali women had not been out of their home for more than six months.7 ‘If you’re not Bengali, Asian, you’d think “oh, come on”; you wouldn’t believe it,’ Choudhury insists. ‘But that was the reality. It happened.’
A photo of Eddy Butler from the early 1990s reveals a gaunt young man in a black bomber jacket, leading members of the BNP’s feared ‘security’ team Combat 188 through the streets of London’s East End. Butler’s determined stare suggests that he relishes what he described to me, in retrospect, as the ‘high adrenaline’ pursuits of the BNP.9 Formed in 1983, after a split in the National Front, the BNP was led by John Tyndall, a neo-Nazi with a long pedigree in the most extreme and violent quarters of Britain’s far right. Its political programme demanded the forcible ‘repatriation’ of non-white Britons, and proposed the restoration of the British Empire along with a series of authoritarian measures derived from Hitler. The BNP followed a familiar pattern of holding provocative marches and rallies; its members attacked left-wing meetings and sought to create ethnic divisions by encouraging – or even perpetrating – racist assaults.10
Butler, a former National Front member, had joined the party in 1986 and before long was given the position of East London organizer. By the early 90s, the BNP was gaining notoriety thanks to a string of racist murders near its south-east London headquarters in Welling – which culminated in the killing of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, in 1993 – and by launching a ‘Rights for Whites’ campaign in Tower Hamlets, overseen by Butler.11 ‘Rights for Whites’ was a slogan used in 1990 after the stabbing of a white teenager by his Asian classmates. The boy’s parents had complained that police were not taking the crime seriously and the BNP hijacked their campaign, holding rallies and public meetings in the Bethnal Green area.
Not since the days of the National Front had there been such a concerted effort by the far right to spark conflict in the East End. But the Rights for Whites marches marked a departure for the BNP, who had been inspired by the success of the Lib Dems’ ‘community politics’ strategy. As Butler put it, ‘Instead of focusing on national issues and complex aspects of party policy, we simply appealed to ordinary whites . . . by discussing the local issues that concerned and worried them.’12 For the far right, local and national elections had long been used as a way to gain publicity, mainly by holding election ‘meetings’ that would inevitably turn violent. But the Rights for Whites strategy also began to pay dividends in local elections, enticing ‘patriotically inclined’ voters away from the Lib Dems, who in the eyes of the BNP ‘had been perceived as a party that at local level defended white interests’.13 At a 1990 by-election in Bethnal Green, the BNP candidate helped overturn a Lib Dem majority of 800, handing the seat to Labour.
After 1992, the BNP began to abandon the public meetings and take electioneering more seriously. Partly this was a result of necessity: Squads of militant anti-fascists had literally beaten BNP activists off the streets,14 but activists like Butler also thought the party had a real chance of winning seats. The tactics, as he explained, were primitive to begin with: ‘We had a series of by-elections where we were improving our tactics, copying what the Liberal Democrats did, doing very simple leaflets on local issues. Each time we were improving our canvassing techniques, doing multiple sweeps. We didn’t use canvass sheets at first, we’d just use the electoral register and draw lines down. It’s a mathematical thing; if you identify people then you’ve got people to get out on polling day. The more you knock, the more people you find. For a party like us, explaining to people on the door why they should vote for us is more important than for other parties.’
These efforts focused largely on Bethnal Green and Bow, districts at the north end of Tower
