Printer FriendlySouthall: solidarity with samosas
The 1984/85 miners' strike attracted support from many different corners of this country. In Southall, amongst activists and ordinary people alike, there was visible support for the striking miners, their struggle for the right to work, and their right to defend their communities in the face of state repression.
Southall has its own memories of battles against the state, so clearly symbolised by the death of Blair Peach who died in the midst of the anti-racist mobilisation in 1979. That was a seminal moment in its history when, in a relatively rare act of unity, the predominantely Asian community - men and women, young and old - came forward to defend itself against the National Front and a police force which was intent on protecting the rights of the fascists to march and hold meetings in 'our' community. Hundreds of Asian youth were arrested, and one man - Blair Peach - died at the hands of one or more police officers of the Special Patrol Group in circumstances which have never been properly investigated. This was a memory frequently invoked in the support shown by that very same community for the miners' strike.
For us, as black anti-racists and feminist activists working in Southall, the miners' strike represented a moment in history that was pregnant with the possibilities of forging unity between black and white people against inequality and injustice. We tried to seize that moment. We recognised that there were immediate points of connection between our struggle against racism - on the streets, in workplaces and in state institutions - and the miners' struggle in their workplaces and in their communities. Perhaps the most obvious point of connection between us was the fact of police brutality. Margaret Thatcher's decision to use the full might of the state to crush the miners' strike politicised and militarised the police response in a way which was readily understood by many in black and Asian communities.
The public meetings that we organised in Southall often involved an unholy but productive alliance between socialist activists and Asian business entrepreneurs who provided the necessary resources (no doubt through a sense of residual solidarity borne out of their previous incarnations as trade union activists and communists). Those businessmen gave us a lesson - Indian style - on how to organise support. One in particular - an enterprising if slightly eccentric business man, not known for any recent gestures betraying any socialist values - came to the fore with his ability to get his business contacts to public meetings at which the doors would be locked until and unless they made substantial contributions in money or kind. It was he who tirelessly traipsed up and down the streets with us, persuading and even forcing shopkeepers to give food or other generous provisions. And people gave generously, from tins of baked beans to crates of samosas and even crates of whisky which accompanied us on our solidarity delegations to the mining communities in Kent and Yorkshire, where we were received with some considerable incredulity.
Those delegations to Kent and Yorkshire provide the most poignant memories, involving not just black activists but also many ordinary Asian women and children from refuges where they had sought sanctuary, having fled their own communities due to domestic violence. The feminists amongst us were keen to show that the struggle for 'our' communities necessarily involved the struggle for women's rights - another point of connection this time with the miners' wives who formed 'Women Against Pit Closures' The arrival of coach loads of black people, including Asian women, with our food and our music, in mining communities where few had encountered black people or eaten Asian food before, must have been a sight to behold. Sitting in their working men's clubs, drinking and chatting, both sides were acutely conscious of the fact that we had occupied parallel worlds until that point. We would like to think that our involvement as Asian women might have helped, not only by showing our solidarity for communities which were otherwise under siege, but also to dismantle their stereotypes about black people in general and Asian women in particular. In turn, we know we came back, not only with the songs and chants of solidarity that we learnt on their picket lines, but also a sense of their plain and simple courage in the face of great adversity.
Those lessons came to be put into practice in later years when, for example, we found ourselves standing up to the anti- Rushdie demonstrations in 1989 with Women Against Fundamentalism, a small group of black and white women who came together to oppose racism and to assert the rights of women to control their own minds and bodies in the face of the alarming rise of fundamentalism in all religions. So, the song 'Arthur Scargill walks on water...' became 'We are women who walk on water / we are fighting for the future of our sons and daughters...' And, confronted by the angry and fanatical male demonstrators on the anti-Rushdie march on the one hand and on the other an equally angry but smaller group of white fascists who came upon us as an easier target, we sought inspiration from the courage we had witnessed during the miners' strike. Ironically, at that point, it was the police who provided us with some protection from the hostility that was directed at us.
It would be easy to paint a romantic picture of the nature of the solidarity that existed between the mining communities and black communities during the miners' strike. The solidarity was momentary and not between entire sections of both communities. But there were genuine attempts to forge alliances between the different struggles in which we were involved - alliances which tried to confront, not just state oppression, but also those internal divisions of power within our communities which give rise to other forms of oppression and inequality, and therefore questioned notions of community and community representation. We sought to demonstrate that issues such as the right to work, police brutality, racism and women's rights are all aspects of the same struggle for equality and justice, and that we cannot win any of those struggles at the expense of other vulnerable or powerless sections of our communities - which is why progressive alliances are necessary. I do not know whether or to what extent we succeeded. What I do know is that in facing present and future challenges, we should not forget these attempts to build a politics of solidarity - there are lessons to be learnt.
Pragna Patel (founding member of the Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism, she has worked as a coordinator and senior caseworker for SBS from 1982 and is currently the chair)
