Last year was the 50th anniversary of the Notting Hill Race riots. CS member John Sidwell wrote this article examining some of the issues
The riots that broke out in Notting Hill, 1958 marked the first major race riot in Britain post-mass immigration.  It spanned five nights over the August Bank holiday, sparked by the bating of a mixed race couple by a gang of white youths.  That such a minor event escalated in the manner it did was testament to working-class racial divisions.
However, explanation’s that go no deeper than race fail to understand the riots underlying dynamics.  The state played a key role in fostering the antipathy.  It presided over the deprivation of working-class communities that allowed Oswald Mosley and his fascist Union Movement to galvanise support for its racist, anti-immigration stance.
State repression during and after the riots ensued, often targeted at Caribbean immigrants despite clear evidence that whites had orchestrated the riots.
The riots are these days often touted as a vital stepping stone on the path to a multicultural Britain.  However, the experience of a multicultural Britain has in no way put an end to ‘race riots’.  In fact the establishment’s multicultural agenda intensifies working-class division.  In contrast communists must uphold working-class unity.

Windrush

Emerging from the Second World War Britain faced a labour shortage.  The extensive welfare plans of the Labour government had opened up new avenues of employment. War casualties had however diminished the British labour force.
This situation prompted a considerable wave of Caribbean immigrants.  Upon arrival there was immediate hostility, and several Members of Parliament voiced their concerns.  Despite this there was no widespread bourgeois opposition.  They saw the immigrants as vital statistics in the face of a depleted work force.  Skin colour was, for them, of secondary importance.
For even the most realistic of voyagers, arrival to a London slum was likely to prove a disappointment.  Many landlords simply rejected to house Caribbean’s.  Faced with such conditions they were forced to accept whatever they could get.  They therefore increasingly became concentrated in the most deprived areas of the city, where “anti-social” landlords presided over vast, decaying estates.1
The housing problem, whilst specifically intense for the Caribbean population, was by no means exclusive to them.  Working-class communities in general, had been inadequately catered for. Thus there existed competition for housing, even of such a terrible standard.  Such competition was to flare up conflict, divided on racial grounds, prior to 1958.
Discrimination against the Caribbean immigrants was also present amongst employers.  In times when work was abundant this often meant Caribbean’s filling the jobs with the worst conditions, and lowest pay.  When unemployment rose, Caribbean’s were often the first to loose their jobs.  In such a manner, the immigrant workers were demarked from their white counterparts.  They came to represent an underclass within the class.
Ten years on from the first boat of Caribbean immigrants in 1948, the post-war boom hit a lull.  Accordingly unemployment rates rose.  The states failure to provide employment and adequate housing met with increasing discontent.  In looking for answers many whites became convinced the problem had stemmed from immigration.
Active in stirring up such feelings were Oswald Mosley, and his fascist Union Movement.  Mosley had made immigration the primary focus of his campaigning.  Rather than highlighting the inadequacy of the bourgeois state in meeting the needs of the working-classes, Mosley made a scapegoat of the Caribbean immigrants.  They were targeted for ‘stealing’ white’s jobs and housing.  Cultural differences were also played up; attacking Caribbean’s for failing to assimilate into a ‘British way of life’.  Such conclusion attained support from sections of the white working-class.  The most visible symbol of change in their neighbourhoods had been the influx of Caribbean’s.  In such a way the fascists were able to exploit common, working-class deprivation, and split the class on racial grounds.
This is not to say that the Union Movement was inundated with new members.  The North Kensington (containing Notting Hill) election the year following the riots saw Mosley finish last, achieving eight percent (3,000 votes).  However, there involvement in the Notting Hill riots was central.  It was preceded by a Mosley rally designed to whip up racial tensions.  The “Keep Britain White” graffiti that adorned the Notting Hill streets was reportedly the product of Union fascists, not local Teddy Boys’.2  The two were certainly not the same thing, as some accounts appear to claim.  It would be wrong however to consider this equivalent to a claim that the rioters were all steadfast fascists.  The majority were not.

“Teds” & Reds

At the time the Metropolitan Police dismissed the riots as the work of “ruffians, both coloured and white”.  Unsurprisingly, this was nonsense.  Such portrayals of the riots have been debunked, contradicted by recently revealed Police eye-witness reports’ sighting white’s as the aggressor (Alan Travis ‘After 44 year’s secret papers reveal truth about five nights of violence in Notting Hill’ Guardian 24 August 2002).
The response of the press was to pin the blame entirely on working-class Teddy Boys’.  An appraisal of the riots still largely upheld in the bourgeois press today.3  The Teds were depicted as a homogenous mass of racist workers.  The reality was quite different. In fact there were even communist Teds.
The most appropriate comparison to a social grouping today would be with ‘hoods’.  Both consistently demonised in the press, and considered, in their entirety, as variants on the stereotypical yob.  Both too represent elements of working-class youth, disregarded by the state.
The fact that you are likely to find many more racist ‘hoods’, as was the case with Teds, than communist or socialist ones is a failing of the left.  The official policy of the CPGB toward immigration opposed any restrictions.  The experience of the party for many Caribbean immigrants was however quite different.  Accounts suggest racism was rife in the CPGB (Marika Sherwood Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile London 1999).  Validity to such a claim is boosted by the failure of the CPGB to attract any significant backing from the immigrant population.  This was despite the fact that many had been members of their respective communist parties prior to immigration.
Thus the largest grouping of the far-left clearly failed to seriously challenge the fascists.  Rather than offering a clear, independent alternative of working-class unity the CPGB aped bourgeois attitudes to race.
An assessment of the attitude toward race expressed today by the SWP, along with the majority of the far-left, has some resonance with this.  Whilst obviously they are not racist, their position still tails that of the establishment.  Their anti-fascist front Unite Against Fascism consists of an alliance with bourgeois anti-fascists from all the major parties.  The message this delivers is problematic.  This subordination to the bourgeois agenda on anti-fascism effectively reinforces their legitimacy over far-right groups, ignoring the fact that it is the very rule of such parties that create the conditions under which support for the far-right can flourish.  It should go without saying; latching on to sections of the bourgeoisie cannot help develop a serious working-class threat to the current system.
A party consistently representing the interests of the working-class was a factor sorely missed in the events of 1958.  Without such a challenge the fascists were given free rain to propagate their hate.
The actual clashes constituting the riots began on 30 August, and raged until 5 September.  The Caribbean population organised self-defence “hit squads” in the face of the threat.  These “squads” were often more brutally targeted by the Police than white rioters.
Racism was substantially entrenched throughout the state-apparatus, but the police were considered to be amongst the worst.  Despite clear evidence that whites had orchestrated the riots, of the 108 charged, 36 were “coloured”.4
Guardian­ columnist Alan Travis claims the treatment of Caribbean’s during the riots “ensured a legacy of black mistrust of the Metropolitan police that has never really been eradicated” (‘After 44 year’s secret papers reveal truth about five nights of violence in Notting Hill’ Guardian 24 August 2002).  Such events have intensified black hatred toward the police to a greater extent than many whites, but the antagonism is more fundamentally rooted than that.
The police represent the street-level enforcers of bourgeois state rule; a rule that had seen Caribbean’s subjugated, even below other sections of the working-class.  In fact, the white rioters also expressed substantial hostility to the police.  The root was not in poor treatment at one particular time or another, but in the disenfranchisement of both black and white workers endemic in a capitalist system.  It is hardly surprising that those most exploited by capitalism often express the sharpest hostility towards its police force.
Police hostility toward the Caribbean’s was echoed in many parliamentary quarters.  George Rogers, Labour MP for North Kensington, pinned blame on the immigrants for failure to assimilate.  A declaration fascist’s heralded as his conversion to their cause.
Despite such a soft response from elements of the bourgeois establishment, the riots were also exploited as a means to tighten state control.  The sentencing of nine white youth to a punishment of four years, to act as a deterrent, passed into judicial lore as an example of “exemplary sentencing”.5
Communists oppose any extension of bourgeois state power, even when enforced against the far-right.  Laws and restrictions imposed on fascists can and will be utilised just as forcefully, if not more so, against the far-left when it rears its head in defiance.

Carnival

Caribbean resistance against both racism and dismal living conditions continued after the riots.  The anarchist Tommy Farr established the Organisation for the Protection of Coloured People, the first hit squad to attack the Mosleyite’s.  He later organised the first tenants housing committee in the Notting Hill slums which achieved housing repairs following a rent strike.
The Notting Hill Carnival was also established in response to the riots.  Its original aims were to bring together West Indian immigrants with local working-class whites.  Part of its proceeds went to “assist the payment of fines of coloured and white youths involved in the Notting Hill events” (Marika Sherwood Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile London 1999).
Instrumental in its organisation was Caribbean communist Claudia Jones.  Raised in New York, Jones was deported from America having spent a year in jail on charges of advocating the violent overthrow of the US government.  Arriving in Britain, she entered the CPGB, but found herself constantly constrained by a hostile leadership.
Arising out of such conditions, and with such figures at the helm, it is little surprise the establishment has, in the past, had such a problem with the Carnival.  Heavy police presence at the Carnival had been a continual fixture since its incarnation.
The most obvious example was the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival Riots, where the police met with resistance following “arbitrary harassments and arrests” of young blacks attending the carnival.  Rioting proved fiercer than in 1958.6
As of 1989 however, the role of appointing those who organise the Carnival was wrestled from local community organisations.  It is now in the hands of the state to appoint those who run the Carnival.
In tandem with maximum police deployment, this ascertaining of control has enabled the state to further bludgeon the resistive element of the Carnival.  One would hope Claudia Jones would be most displeased at the soft multiculturalism the Carnival represents today.
Ken Olende writing recently in the Socialist Worker, addresses just this issue.  In doing so he exemplifies the weakness of their position on such questions.  He correctly recognises how the dumbing down of the Carnival has meant it ceases to challenge the racism of the system.  Unfortunately however he concludes, “Despite the limitations of multiculturalism, socialists should always defend it against the ideas of “social cohesion” that the government promotes” (Ken Olende ‘The Notting Hill riot and a Carnival of Defence’ Socialist Worker 23 August 2008).
Such a position fails to recognise that the official stance on race of the government is precisely that of ‘multiculturalism’.  Counter-posing ‘multiculturalism’ to “social cohesion” is illusory.  The very reason the state upholds such a position is the divisions it sows within the working-class.  Above this the state is then portrayed as a benevolent overlord.  One need not look long into the past to find riots where working-class communities have divided spontaneously along racial grounds.  The case can also be made that multiculturalism imposes definitional parameters on a community’s identity.  This sees the community lose control of any possibility to define itself through its own struggle (Gurharpal Singh ‘A Time of Reckoning’ Weekly Worker 13 January 2005).
Whilst attempting to differentiate their position from that of the mainstream the SWP end up once again reinforcing the policy of official anti-racism.  As with their work in UAF this undercuts any potential for the working-class to pose its own, independent solutions.  It also discredits the far-left in working-class communities, who see it as offering little besides the establishment agenda, clouded in leftist rhetoric.
In contrast communists must fight the ideas of multiculturalism.  Working-class unity and struggle must take its place.
A strong voice posing such a criticism is needed.  It was severely lacking in 1958.  Certainly that was prior to the establishment turn toward multiculturalism, but never-the-less the far-left still tailed the mainstream.
When the only challenge to this multiculturalism comes from the far-right, racist ideas can gain more credence by becoming associated as the only alternative to the current status quo.  Levels of support for the BNP today are at least in part predicated upon the failure of the left to tackle the fascists on any more serious a level than hurling “Nazi scum” insults.  This allows the BNP to gain support in white working-class communities where they exploit the failures of the state to meet the people’s needs.  The far-left is, in contrast, seen as being full of bluster and rhetoric, but essentially siding with the bourgeois establishment on issues of anti-fascism and anti-racism.
Amongst a sea of advocates for multiculturalism, the fight for independent working-class unity is as necessary as ever.

Notes:

1. http://www.historytalk.org/Notting Hill History Timeline/timelinechap8.pdf, p. 3

2. http://www.historytalk.org/Notting Hill History Timeline/timelinechap8.pdf, p. 5

3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/30/newsid_2511000/2511059.stm

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notting_Hill_race_riots

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notting_Hill_race_riots

6. http://libconm.org/history/1976-the-notting-hill-carnival-riots