I found Chowdhury Khan to be a difficult and sometimes strange man. But his values, and the values of the Council he represented, are fairly straightforward. He believes in the preeminent value of the family and, for example, the importance of religion in establishing morality. He also believes in the innately inferior position of women. He dislikes liberalism in all its forms, and is an advocate of severe and vengeful retribution against law-breakers.
These are extremely conservative and traditional views. But they are also, isolated from the specifics of their subcontinental context, the values championed by Ray Honeyford, among others. There were a number of interesting ironies developing.
I sought out the younger, more militant section of the community. How did its members see their place in Britain?
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When I was in my teens, in the mid-1960s, there was much talk of the ‘problems’ that kids of my colour and generation faced in Britain because of our racial mix or because our parents were immigrants. We didn’t know where we belonged, it was said; we were neither fish nor fowl. I remember reading that kind of thing in the newspaper. We were frequently referred to as ‘second-generation immigrants’ just so there was no mistake about our not really belonging in Britain. We were ‘Britain’s children without a home’. The phrase ‘caught between two cultures’ was a favourite. It was a little too triumphant for me. Anyway, this view was wrong. It has been easier for us than for our parents. For them Britain really had been a strange land and it must have been hard to feel part of a society if you had spent a good deal of your life elsewhere and intended to return: most immigrants from the Indian subcontinent came to Britain to make money and then go home. Most of the Pakistanis in Bradford had come from one specific district, Mirpur, because that was where the Bradford mill-owners happened to look for cheap labour twenty-five years ago. And many, once here, stayed for good; it was not possible to go back. Yet when they got older the immigrants found they hadn’t really made a place for themselves in Britain. They missed the old country. They’d always thought of Britain as a kind of long stopover rather than the final resting place it would turn out to be.
But for me and the others of my generation born here, Britain was always where we belonged, even when we were told — often in terms of racial abuse — that this was not so. Far from being a conflict of cultures, our lives seemed to synthesise disparate elements: the pub, the mosque, two or three languages, rock ’n’ roll, Indian films. Our extended family and our British individuality commingled.
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Tariq was twenty-two. His office was bare in the modern style: there was a desk; there was a computer. The building was paid for by the EEC and Bradford Council. His job was to advise on the setting-up of businesses and on related legal matters. He also advised the Labour Party on its economic policy. In fact, although so young, Tariq had been active in politics for a number of years: at the age of sixteen, he had been chairman of the Asian Youth Movement, which was founded in 1978 after the National Front began marching on Bradford. But few of the other young men I’d met in Bradford had Tariq’s sense of direction or ambition, including the young activists known as the Bradford Twelve. Five years after their acquittal, most of them were, like Tariq, very active — fighting deportations, monitoring racist organisations, advising on multi-cultural education — but, like other young people in Bradford, they were unemployed. They hung around the pubs; their politics were obscure; they were ‘anti-fascist’ but it was difficult to know what they were for. Unlike their parents, who’d come here for a specific purpose, to make a life in the affluent West away from poverty and lack of opportunity, they, born here, had inherited only pointlessness and emptiness. The emptiness, that is, derived not from racial concerns but economic ones.
Tariq took me to a Pakistani café. Bradford was full of them. They were like English working men’s cafés, except the food was Pakistani, you ate with your fingers and there was always water on the table. The waiter spoke to us in Punjabi and Tariq replied. Then the waiter looked at me and asked a question. I looked vague, nodded stupidly and felt ashamed. Tariq realised I could only speak English.
How many languages did he speak?
Four: English, Malay, Urdu and Punjabi.
I told him about the school I’d visited.
Tariq was against Islamic schools. He thought they made it harder for Asian kids in Britain to get qualifications than in ordinary, mixed-race, mixed-sex schools. He said the people who wanted such schools were not representative; they just made a lot of noise and made the community look like it was made up of separatists, which it was not.
He wasn’t a separatist, he said. He wanted the integration of all into the society. But for him the problem of integration was adjacent to the problem of being poor in Britain: how could people feel themselves to be active participants in the life of a society when they were suffering all the wretchedness of bad housing, poor insulation and the indignity of having their gas and electricity disconnected; or when they were turning to loan sharks to pay their bills; or when they felt themselves being dissipated by unemployment; and when they weren’t being properly educated, because the resources for a proper education didn’t exist.
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There was one Asian in Bradford it was crucial to talk to. He’d had political power. For a year he’d been mayor, and as Britain’s first Asian or black mayor he’d received much attention. He’d also had a terrible time.
I talked to Mohammed Ajeeb in the nineteenth-century town hall. The town hall was a monument to Bradford’s long-gone splendour and pride. Later I ran into him at Bradford’s superb Museum of Film, Television and Photography, where a huge photo of him and his wife was unveiled. Ajeeb is a tall, modest man, sincere, sometimes openly uncertain and highly regarded for his tenacity by the Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Ajeeb is careful in his conversation. He lacks the confident politician’s polish: from him, I heard no well-articulated banalities. He is from a small village in the Punjab. When we met at the Museum, we talked about the differences between us, and he admitted that it had been quite a feat for someone like him to have got so far in Britain. In Pakistan, with its petrified feudal system, he would never have been able to transcend his background.
During his time in office, a stand at the Valley Parade football ground had burned down, killing fifty-six people and injuring three hundred others. There was the Honeyford affair, about which he had been notoriously outspoken (‘I cannot see’, he said in a speech that contributed to Honeyford’s removal, ‘the unity of our great city being destroyed by one man’). As mayor, Ajeeb moved through areas of Bradford society to which he never had access before, and the racism he experienced, both explicit and covert, was of a viciousness he hadn’t anticipated. And it was relentless. His house was attacked, and he, as mayor, was forced to move; and at Grimsby Town football ground, when he presented a cheque to the families of those killed in the fire, the crowd abused him with racist slogans; finally, several thousand football supporters started chanting Honeyford’s name so loudly that Ajeeb was unable to complete his speech. He received sackfuls of hate mail and few letters of support.