Racism in the election.

The night train pulled into Waterloo Station and scores of black faces, tired but hopeful, looked out. We were the only ones to meet them - myself and the Daily Mirror's reporter, and we had less than half an hour to file our stories for the midnight editions.
The arrivals were from the Caribbean, shipped on boats normally carrying bananas, to work on London's Tube trains and buses. They had sold homes and parcels of land to get on the boats, answering advertisements from a London transport system in 1951 short of labour.
An arm clutched mine, and a young woman asked "How can I get to Birmingham?" Another appealed to me: "Can you tell me way to south London?" We were surrounded by calls for help and directions to places where the arrivals knew West Indians were already settled. Both the Daily Mirror and the Yorkshire Post carried front page stories about how no one from the government or the London Transport authorities were there to meet and guide the new arrivals.
Nearly 15 years later, Melbourne Good, a 45-year old immigrant from Jamaica, now with a house, job and family in south London, told me of the racist persecution he had endured to get there since those days. A general election was coming up, with Harold Wilson and the Labour Party hopeful of winning, but he said that most of his friends had torn up their Party cards and sworn they would never vote again. They had contracted out of English life. They said England was not only more deeply colour-prejudiced than most of America, but also more hypocritical about it, which made prejudice harder to fight.
"Harold Wilson has been cowardly and a coward can't win. He's tried to please everybody to catch votes, but he's ended by pleasing nobody. You have to fight for what you believe in, not be frightened of the consequences."
Now he had a shell so tough that no white rejection, no cry of "nigger" in the streets could move him any more.
Yet he had been reared in a climate of unquestioning patriotism in Kingston, where many had gone to defend Britain in the war and wore their medals proudly at every opportunity. Britain was the mother country. Unfortunately, it seemed the mother didn't love them any longer.
"My, what we thought of the British," said his wife. "Looking back, I can't believe it. They were everything wonderful to us." She pinches her arm and stares at it. "That bit of epidermis. Could you believe it would make so much difference?"
How much difference does it still make? It is now illegal to cry "nigger" in the streets, but the British National Party is having a relatively successful election campaign and guaranteed air time. White racism has been added to black, if immigrants come from eastern Europe or Asia. The white ones arrive with the same idealised notions of Britain as the former black immigrants had of the "motherland" and learn quickly how wrong they were.
Melbourne Good said he had learned to be careful, not to trust the English, and to keep out of their way. Now, thousands of others doing the street-cleaning, caring, hospital and building jobs others don't want to do, are learning the same. In the "illegal immigrant" detention centres abuse and neglect go on in our name, almost as little reported on as the concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
The LibDem's forward-thinking election agenda calls for a review of the immigrant restrictions and a review of the system. But the Tory Party have made a major attack on their proposals. And the British National Party has a freedom and acceptance it could never have had in 1951, so soon after the war against fascism. Black people are stopped and searched far more often than white and a white immigrant mending a roof without the correct papers is arrested and sent to detention. We have not changed.



ends