allenge DALL CRATION NIPA.SNTI-F MONS NU BHNS ON ANTI-FASCIST DEMONSTRATIOYS nere Britain, WOULD YOU rather be hit on the hammer strangled to death? For black people in the choice between Labour and the Tories looks like that option. Whichever of these parties has been in power, the black experience has been the same.
The midnight knock and being taken to a detention centre as an immigrant'. Watching our youth being subjected to continual police harassment on the streets. and labelled as 'muggers" and 'criminals.
Doing the thankless, monotonous. dirty jobs which they could not fill with white workers.
While the politicians prattle about "immigration' and 'race relations', we say the issue is racism. The question is how to make racism an issue in the elections. How do we, as black people, project our struggle and our demands on to the stage c. national electoral polities?
Traditionally, the large majority of the black communities have placed their trust in Labour. After all, it was which backed ndependence in the period followin Second World War But more importantly, because Labour has always claimed to be the socialist politics, and black people know that our struggle for liberation cannot be divorced from the prospects for socialist advance for the working class as a wnole There are other reasons. Throughout the 60s and early '70s, presented a coherent set of reformist policies designed to tackle discrimination, Relations Acts to the setting up of the community relations councils and the Commission for Equality.
Coupled with policies on renewal and multi-cultural education, and an effort to co-opt some local black leaders into the hierarchy of the Labour Party and the race relations industry', that present this as an anti-racist record, different balance sheet and coming to different political conclusions.
We remember Labour's inability to SUFESS Malawi Asians story' directly to the death of our brother Gurdip Singh Chaggar in Southall. We remember Labour's defence of Lewisham and Ladywood, We know the Virk brothers were convicted for the 'crime' of defending themselves against racist attack We know Abdul Azad and the other brothers and sisters who languish in detention centres, and of the so-called virginity tests which have been carried out on black women. This adds up to a painted by the Labour government and its apologists.
No faith can be placed anu-racist pretensions of me abou leaders. The left wing of the Labour sadly, has proved no capable than Callaghan or Rees of defending the people. themselves in chauvinist calls import controls, we get not a whimper SLOWIN an organised Callaghan's racist policies.
In 1976, the conference passed an extremely fine resolution which called for the repeal the building labour movement support for "illegal black self-defence. A fine resolution it has remained, public view by Transport House like an insane relative There are those who say we have to vote Labour because the Tories will be so much worse. But no government in post-war Britain has done more to fuel the racist inferno than the Labour government.
Of course, black people cannot turn to the Tories, the party of big business, or to the Liberals, irrelevant business. Should we then say a plague on all their houses?
Such a reaction on our part be understandable, but in the las analysis of no use to the struggle for black liberation. As black people we colonial have a fundamental stake in the fight for a genuine socialist which takes as its starting point the interests of the party of oppressed.
How to build alternative — that is the key question in these conditions for building an alternative are created by the fight of the workers movement against its own reformist Labour leaders, we stand for the return of a racial Kace Racial urban in the WHOLE interests of black While they regularly surpass for opposition to Labour Party Acts and for locked away from the party of would black alternative, exploited and tion.
such a socialist forces in Because the best confident of that.
The way in which we fight for the return of a Labour government and alternative is ine opposite of what the Labour leaders people will no content to act as passive footsoldier! and vote for a Labour Party which is bottom. Instead we take our hopeful must be confronted by black people with the question: "Are you for Will they pledge themselves to scrap youth? Will they unconditionally free every other prisoner of race? Will they Photo: ANDREW WIARD (Report)
evidence of its own racism is one way in which we can take the fight for freedom forward the At the same time we can support and join those campaigns the campaigns of Socialist Unity and candidates which have a record of clear and principled support for black liberaThese campaigns represent the small Britain today are prepared to use the elections as a platform from which to fight for a socialist alternative small at the moment, but they will grow. We are Socialist Challenge 19 April 1979 page 9
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