Forty years on from the Bradford 12

During the 1970s and early ‘80s, Tariq Mehmood was a leader in the Bradford Asian Youth Movement and a co-founder of the splinter group, the United Black Youth League, during what can be termed loosely as Britain’s Black Power era running from the late 1960s to early ‘80s. Representing one political reaction to an increasingly crisis-ridden post-war order, alongside the New Left and New Right, Black Power in Britain was influenced both by US Black Power movement and revolutionary stirrings in the Third World, with African, Asian and Caribbean youth in Britain self-organising community struggles autonomously from – and at times antagonistic to – white-led socialist organisations and mainstream institutions of British politics.

While always a complicated and uneven phenomenon, Black Power in Britain symbolised a political radicalisation of African, Asian, and Caribbean youth and communities, which reached its zenith in 1981. Following the anti-police uprisings in Brixton and then across the country that year, moves were undertaken by the state to contain and absorb the militancy of these communities by redirecting them into government-funded non-profits, institutionalising them in the Labour Party or encouraging the growth of a Black entrepreneurial and middle class – in short, to socialise Black and brown people to the same patterns of patronage, professionalisation, and political ‘pragmatism’ that had stymied the mass development of radical politics in white Britain. 

As part of the fierce state repression that precipitated this containment strategy, twelve members of the United Black Youth League – including Tariq – found themselves arrested, charged, and tried between 1981 and 1982 in the landmark trial known as the Bradford 12. The twelve were tried under the Explosive Substance Act 1881 and the Criminal Law Act 1977 for having prepared makeshift petrol bombs to defend their community in Manningham, Bradford, from a rumoured far-right mobilisation which never materialised. Following an international campaign of solidarity and creative court strategies mounted by the defendants, with Tariq defending himself in court, under the principle Self-Defence is No Offence, the Bradford 12 left court on June 16th 1982 as free men, in a stunning vindication of the right to self-defence.

In this wide-ranging interview with Ebb Magazine to mark 40 years since the acquittal of the Bradford 12, Tariq spoke to Azfar Shafi about his emerging political consciousness from childhood as being born out of his encounters with popular and street racism, and from witnessing the transformation of his countrymen by the conditions of industrial life in Northern England – drawing him inexorably to the conclusion that organised political struggle was the only solution to the problems facing him and his community. 

As well as reflecting on the legacy of the Bradford 12, Tariq discussed the centrality of anti-imperialism in unifying his politics and in knitting together the political consciousness of Black Power politics in Britain, as well as the breadth of the international solidarity practised by him and his comrades – from supporting dissident Iranian students campaigning against the Shah, Irish anti-colonial republicans and the Palestinian national liberation struggle. And finally Tariq reflected on the often fractious relationship between his comrades and white-led socialist organisations during the 1970s and ‘80s.

While often recast as a simple prelude to liberal multiculturalism – or as a moment of youthful rebellion which ‘matured’ into moderation – Black Power in Britain represented a potentially insurgent challenge both to British state racism, and to the inadequacies of much of Britain’s organised left on questions of race, immigration, and imperialism.

At a time when racism and antiracism has assumed new prominence internationally, Tariq’s own experiences and the lessons of Black Power for class struggle politics remains salient: of the necessity of expanding the sphere of popular democracy for oppressed communities alongside economic battles, and for integrating domestic struggle with the liberation of oppressed nations worldwide.

Azfar Shafi: What would you say were the major political currents and influences on yourself and on the development of Black Power politics in Britain from the period of the late 1960s to early 1980s?

Tariq Mehmood: Well, it's a complex question, firstly. What are the current influences on me perhaps I'm more in a position to answer than the second part, of Black Power politics in Britain; that implies a whole series of understandings and political positions. 

I came to Britain in the 1960s, late 1960s, as a young boy. And in a sense, the overriding influences on me and many people like me, are firstly the poverty of where we live, in the inner city ghettos of Bradford, and similar places up and down the country, but also the wealth in comparison to where we'd come from. 

One of my departed colleagues used to say, ‘I thought I was coming to Britain where the streets are paved with gold. But when I opened my door and walked out onto the pavement, it was full of dogshit.’ And in a way, the pavements were the gold, the streets were the gold, metaphorically speaking. 

And as we were growing up, one of the features, certainly of my education – and I've only just realised [this] in elder age – was that I didn't have any normal education in this country, because I was part of a generation that was bussed out of the inner city ghettos. It was called bussing, it was up and down the country. So I didn't know, I just assumed that my education, like everyone else's – this is what it was. You got up in the morning, and you got on a bus and you went to school. I didn't know that this was because they didn't want people like me diluting white schools by having too many of us. And they dispersed us in a policy called bussing, this is what it got to be known as. 

I went to a school called Ley Top junior school in Bradford, it was incredibly violent. And it was racial violence on the playground, on the way to school, at school, on the way back. Inside the school, it had its own intense colonial racism of the curriculum, of the teachers, of the parents, of the white kids. Now I understand when I look back – and as I said, it's only a few years old, this understanding – that actually it was state-sanctioned violence, is what I was sentenced to as a child, but a state sanctioned racist violence. I have very few memories of the playground without fighting, in one form or another.

So one of the overriding experiences of the very first formative years, we're dealing with 7, 8, 9, 10 [years old], that sort of age group, is the all-embracing nature of racism around and also, it's important to understand in cities like Bradford, we were mostly boys, not women. Women and young girls came much later. I think there was a time the ratio was 69:1. So amongst us lot, because families sent young male children and men to work in the mills and factories of England at the time.

So the overriding experience of the junior school was matched by even more violence of the comprehensive school. That was Tong comprehensive. And once again, the second phase of my education also became bussing. And the only reason I know [was because] the first Black president of the TUC told me – he was a bus driver at the time, he goes, ‘Oh I remember taking you to your school because it were the last stop on the Bradford run and yeah, you were bussed.’ So that was also then violence. But in the struggle against racism, personal struggle is not complicated. It’s not reading a book, it’s trying to duck a punch, trying not to be set upon by a lot of kids, white kids – not to be sworn at, not to be spat at. 

And to be isolated at the school, to be forced to learn English, even when you spoke English, they didn't seem to understand that we could speak the bloody language and they still made us learn English. It was quite bizarre at the time, you would have to bring your own relatives into school to tell them not to teach you English and you would interpret for your relatives, you know, ‘we speak, why do you still do this.’ But along with this process, there were some very interesting white people who didn't stand with the run-of-the-mill of racism. And that's what I wrote about incidentally in Hand on the Sun, which is being republished later on this year… We began to understand that the struggle against racism, by struggling against racism, we understand it's like a key unlocking the door against many other isms.

At that age, I don't really understand that I can be actively part of trying to build an alternative world, I don't have to live this life, I don't have to live a life of permanent humiliation. But also, while we are going through this at school, the generation that came over here from our villages – and men, for most of us, we will from villages around Pakistan, around India, much later on from Bangladesh, very few from Sri Lanka, they were slightly more educated than us, later on joined by the East African Asians – so the first batch that come over, we are from a rural background. And all of a sudden to see uncles and friends and grandparents becoming machines, as part of the industrial architecture of the machinery of this world. They were becoming machines, that were becoming withdrawn from happy talkative people, violent from non-violent people, and so on. Quite a few transformations. 

So the early schooling, the struggle to survive physically on the playground, and then also to have a sense of dignity, that religious education didn't make sense. I was still quite religious in my younger days, the fact that Jesus was a white man who's, you know, this father of the kids who would attack me, his pictures were everywhere, didn't make sense. Lots and lots didn't make sense. And it's because in the struggle to make sense of that which didn't, we had to look much deeper into history. And that comes later, the historical understanding. 

So when you are dealing with an ism, you can't fight it on your own. It's an ideology, it's a process. It's a fragment of society. It's a part and parcel of a society. When you have to fight something in a collective way, you have to learn the collective history of the ways before you. And if you don't do that, the world doesn't make sense. You might as well go to your temple and pray, it's probably just as good – not that there's anything wrong with them. 

So we were forced to learn about history. And the more we learnt about history, we learnt of Britain's imperial past, which we knew anyway. But the imperial past we knew was through the education of the imperial masters, and not an anti-imperial education. The more we understood, we have to often ask ourselves, you know, my mother never came to England – no she did visit me, but she couldn't [migrate] to England due to the immigration legislation and I often said, ‘Well, why can't she come when the mother of a white boy whose family history is not that dissimilar to me can.’ And we began to understand that the whole immigration system was racist, and the resistance against that threw us, if you like, into the need for political organisation that we can't fight on our own. 

And it also made us understand that our problems on surface may be to do with our skin colours, but they certainly were not skin deep. They had a depth in history, they had a depth in the contemporary world. And I mean, certainly I began to understand that the strife on the streets that was born out of racism could not be cured simply by talking about this ideology [of racism], for the ideology wasn't tearing the streets apart, it was actually holding the country together. And so in that sense, we look to those who before us who wanted to negate these ideas. 

And here we then came into context: ‘Well, who on earth are we? Who am I? Am I a Paki like they say? Am I a black bastard like they say?’ I've been called a n****r. I've been called a coon over the years. So what was I, and what was Black and what was white – because the whitest persons we saw were pink, and the darkest person we saw were a shade of brown. The black and white business just did not make sense on a colour basis. My African friends didn't know they were Black until they came to Britain. They just thought like me – I didn't know I was a Paki. I just thought I was me from my village, I didn't even actually know I was really a Pakistani. Even that didn't make any sense, because I'd never – I might have been places in military barracks where my dad took me, but I wouldn't know anything about anything, in that sense. 

So all these ideas and ideologies came into being and the only thing that welded them all together – even then some people would say they were brown – but actually, the only thing that welded us together was a Black political identity. And because we had so many commonalities, now there were [Asian] people amongst us who would refer to themselves as Black. But when referring to Africans and Caribbeans, they would use the word kala – kala means black – and it was quite a bizarre sort of phenomena. 

So the question of Black Power politics in Britain is inappropriately put. Black Power is an American process, it makes sense when you have tens of millions of you there, you know, and you have the economic, political and potentially a military power if need be. We didn't have that in this country. We weren't from the descendants of slaves, though some of us were as well. We were quite disparate groups of people from vastly different lands with [a] multitude of languages, though a very large number from the east and western sides of Punjab, a very large number.

The issue of Black for us was the political colour Black, it offered us an arena around which to unite. On the one hand it was something we chose, consciously. As you may know, the organisation which was busted for the Bradford 12 was called the United Black Youth League, and not a Pakistani association or Bangladeshi or Indian or Asian for that matter, though we were all Asians who were charged. So we didn't see a contradiction at all within this process. And there were Black people's alliances, huge organisations up and down the country. 

So ours was a need for unity. The question of Political Blackness in Britain is about unity. Where Black becomes a term in the current situation, it's about funding and resources, you know – and oppression becomes tradable. And that's not where we were. Oppression was about resistance, resistance required unity, and resistance could not be sold. Whereas today with the funding cycles, and so on and so forth, you can sell any component of culture to get a bit of funding from somewhere else. So that comes later on.

[Those were] our political issues. And the struggle against imperialism was the underlying, unifying process because we were all – then as we are now – we are from the colonised world, [which] was being re-colonised. We were here because they were over there. Their streets were paved with gold because we had no streets; their streets were lit with lights, we had no electricity. We were the generators of the wealth in the world, yet we were the ones who were becoming the labourers for the mills and factories – which were actually decaying and dying, particularly in the North of England and to some extent, in the centre, and South of Britain.

AS: One thing that often appears to be erased from modern accounts of Black Power in Britain is how central anti-imperialism and solidarity with Third World struggles was to that era, and to the groups organising then. Could you speak on how groups such as the United Black Youth League related to and navigated anti-imperialist struggles in the 1970s, ‘80s? And what do you see as the main tasks for building an anti-imperialist internationalism in Britain today?

TM: Well, the United Black Youth League itself was a splinter group out of the [Bradford] Asian Youth Movement, which itself was born out of the Indian Workers’ Association, if you like. It was a transformation from the Indian Progressive Youth Association for us in Bradford, at the very least. And similar processes were taking place before. 

How did we navigate? Navigate implies that there are problems between us. You navigate through stormy seas, you sail across still waters. Ours was the point that we were pulled towards each other, because we were facing common enemies. We were facing a common racist police policy, a common racist immigration policy. So in terms of gravitation towards each other, those who are hungry will smell the food. And we were hungry for change. We were hungry for friends. And so actually going towards each other was not an act. It was a necessity. Because in our journey to find each other, what did that mean? It meant we shared a common worldview. Though we may live in small towns and cities in this country, we belong to a very, very large part of the world with its vibrant history, a struggle that was still taking place in Pakistan, in India, against Pakistan in the case of Bangladesh, in Palestine, in southern Africa. And we understood that we wanted to be with those people who, like us, believed in a culture of change – and a culture of change doesn't stop, it's a historical continuity. 

People like Malcolm X, his speeches I think we must have heard them, we were reading. We had our study groups, we would read, we'd read Marx, we'd read Engels, we'd read Lenin, some of us were Trotskyites, others were Marxist-Leninists. Some of us were vehemently anti-Trotskyites and some of us were completely the other way around. And we still are, these are historical divisions and they won't go away.

And so firstly, we didn't have to navigate an anti-imperialist struggle, we embraced it. These were our waves, and we were happy for them. And in any struggle there are vicissitudes, [in] any sea there are vicissitudes. So we were with those who were struggling, supporting them, whether it be in Managua in Nicaragua, whether it was in Iran. Now sometimes there were people who could not openly campaign for their struggles, such as the Iranian students because of the Shah’s secret police, [so] we would do the leafleting for them, we would design their posters for them, we would distribute them and so on. There were often struggles within the Indian Workers’ Association – quite violent, potentially – we would provide security, because we felt that we were part and parcel of the same struggle, irrespective of where we were from. 

AS: Just to clarify when I say ‘navigate’, I mean less about contradictions, and more about what forms did that take; how did you do anti-imperialist struggle, in the era before say social media and so on?

TM: Yeah, we formed committees, we held public meetings, we had cultural events, we gave leaflets for each other, we marched together. Where it was necessary we patrolled our streets together – if somebody was being harassed by the police, as was the case for Afro-Caribbean youth, we would support the anti-Sus campaigns. We [Asians] were often faced with the fascist skinheads, stuff like that, they [Afro-Caribbeans] would in turn stand with us. 

So the unity was very often not just the unity in the pub, the unity was actually at times on the streets; very often marching together, sharing each other's paraphernalia – and also studying, you know, there's no shortcut to that. The base level of popular organisation isn't on social media, but in committees. [In] a way, [regarding] social media, we had our equivalent and we still do, it has its role, but the fundamental role is to meet human to human, away from state sponsorship, away from state control, and that's how we all met, it wasn't very difficult. 

If the kids in New Cross are massacred, then you know, we are hurting in the North as well. If the National Front want to march through Lewisham? Well, we would mobilise and go there and we would stand with the kids there. ‘No, they won't come through our areas.’ And so up and down the rest of the country, we were marching, we would protest, there's no shortcut to a protest, there's no shortcut to getting off our backsides and going out. We had no funding, absolutely zero. We would raise money, door to door, house to house and pocket to pocket. So to take a coach from Bradford to London is not a small affair. Without any money, we could take up to 11 [people]. And we would fill them. 

So in that sense, there's an organic struggle with those who are similar to us. I mean, one of the things is that Britain, the monster here hasn't changed its teeth. In fact, it is more brutal as time has gone on. It has killed more people in the last few decades than it did in the decades before. Iraq is just one example, let alone what they've helped to do in Syria, what they helped to do in many other places, including Afghanistan, and so forth.

And we were very much supportive of the core struggles which we saw. One of the core struggles we saw was the struggle nearest to where we lived, and that was Ireland. Many of us, we were supporting unconditionally, the right of Irish people to be unified and take up whatever weapons they needed to fight against their colonial oppression. It wasn't for us to determine how they fight. We were just as resolute. And of course, during the hunger strikes, we supported the Irish prisoners. And the Irish prisoners, including Bobby Sands, wrote poems to the campaigners like Anwar Ditta which we were running [with] at the time – the courageous woman who died [last year]. And he would write her a poem, which we would read at our meetings. 

So it's very much an organic struggle for which of course, we were attacked by Loyalists – by even at times soldiers in uniform. I myself have been injured by Loyalist attacks for trying to distribute Nationalist material or pro-Republican material. Now, we did not necessarily glorify violence, though, at times we made really, you know – I did for sure – some irresponsible statements, but actually we glorified the right of the oppressed to struggle and, at times, sometimes emotionally said, you know, inappropriate statements. 

But having said that, the second part was our position with regards [to] Zionism. Ours was a very, very simple, clear-cut position on Zionism. And our posters said Death to Zionism. And we still hold the same view today – that there is no such thing as a liberal Zionist. There is no such thing as a compromise with these things. It is a racist ideology. And a lot of our posters, people forget, were designed by our Jewish comrades who were anti-Zionists, mainly because we were not very literate at the early stage. You know, the Fourth Idea bookshop, if you look at – I know the faces because I can see them and recognise them. We were on the same marches and we shared a common view: anti-Semitism is a form of racism, it has to be fought where it exists – and that’s here. If it exists here, you can't fight it by occupying Palestine. The two are absolutely irreconcilable. But Zionists in those days were not as powerful in Britain as they are today. 

Long Live Palestine! Death to Zionism! poster produced by the Manchester Asian Youth Movement, most likely for a demonstration against the Sabra and Shatila massacre, 1982.

Photo courtesy of Tandana.org

And we took that on, and the rest of [our] positions were not actually very difficult. The problem here is that the British left, or big chunks of it, sometimes would come up with slogans like Black and white unite and fight. But we didn't agree with it – not that we think there should be disunity between Black workers and white workers or Black people and white people. We started from the premise that we are not equal. We live in a society dominated by white supremacy, it colours everything – for white supremacy, in itself, is a product of hundreds of years of colonialism. And by saying these slogans, then we are diluting our need fundamentally to be defended as Black people. And also that white comrades should go and organise amongst white working classes where racism existed, if that is truly the case. 

Now, as to illustrate some of these [with] just one example, and I can give you dozens. On one occasion, when Rock Against Racism was on in London, 30,000 kids were dancing up and down to Rock Against Racism. At exactly the same time, we were fighting tooth and nail, with sticks and stones, hordes of fascists in Brick Lane, trying to charge up the street. We begged [Rock Against Racism] to send people to help us; they didn't. And there's more than one example, from all over the place. 

So the lesson that we've learnt [is] that our only hope lies in self-defence, and progressive white people can support us. But they can't determine the ebb and flow of our struggles. They have to fight against British imperialism – but they don't know how to fight against British imperialism because, in a sense, the internationalism for them is not an anti-colonial internationalism. Very often it was born on a Thursday night in the local pub and then ended in a curry house. In a sense that's not what the requirement is, to support the closest struggle, support the struggle of the people of Ireland – they wouldn't, they would just point blank not do it. Because they would confuse the issue; ‘You have no right for arms, you have no right to this, no right to that.’ No, you don't. You just let the people who are oppressed determine the way of their resistance to their oppressor. 

So I don't know what anti-imperialist internationalism means in Britain today. Because first and foremost, there is no internationalism without being able to organise the working masses against their own immediate oppressors. Ours was born out of trade unions, trades councils, of committees, community organisations – while white workers were primarily interested in the economics of their struggle. We by nature, the products of colonialism, brought politics to the economic struggle; ours was a much deeper and more complex contribution to the evolution of the British working class’s direction of struggle, but we're not there. 

And of course, you can't have a meaningful internationalism without having a vision of the world you want to build, not only the world that you wish to destroy. So in the imperial heartland, this is a very difficult question. Because imperialism is strong, and it's strong ideologically. It's very difficult for people to imagine a world free from the fetters and fetishisms of capitalism. It's a very difficult thing, because the imagination is colonised, not just the mind.

AS: The relationship between Black Power organisations and white-led socialist organisations during this period was often fraught, and developing an integrated politics around race, class and imperialism remains a difficulty for large sections of the British left. How would you assess the overall record of the organised British left on these questions of race, class and imperialism today, especially compared with the ‘70, ‘80s? Do you feel they’ve progressed in any way?

TM: It was indeed very fraught, the relationship with some white organisations – not with all white comrades. There were white comrades who were equally at odds within their organisations. And fundamentally, it was born out of the position that there was an awful lot of opportunism and cheap jingoistic politics, that in a sense, [those organisations] were point scoring. 

But I don't think the white left, so to speak, or the British left, in a sense, actually understood much to do with race, or the depths of our resentment and feeling. They couldn't comprehend how… We didn't disagree that white people should come and stand with us. But when our house was in such a mess, you know, we couldn't get five people together, and fascists are marching around the street – what is the point of us talking about the finer points of a division between the Workers Revolutionary Party, Socialist Workers Party, International Marxist Group, Labour Party Militant group – what on earth are we doing when they are throwing petrol bombs in our houses? 

The fundamental issues were all wrong. Why were they organising, telling us what racism was when they should have been telling white people what racism is? Why were they coming to throw disruption like that? Secondly, you know, as I got older, many of the white left then and now were infiltrated heavily by the police, anyway. And so we had lots of problems. Also, because if you are not from the colonised world, it's very difficult to understand what the effect and legacies of colonialism actually are. And I think that we shouldn't write everyone off as well, you know, in a sense. Ours were often single issue things: stop the deportation, stop the police harassment, release so and so, support this. And a left position has to be an all-embracing position against imperialism when these are different little facets of it. 

Now without having an anti-imperialist ideological understanding, you can't put all the dots together, and anti-imperialism gave us the ideas to make sense of the world. That yes a better world is possible; yes we can defeat the forces against us, and we believed it. We believed it then, I believe it now, that a better world is possible, but it won't happen by sending a tweet. It won't happen by putting up a Facebook post. And it may not happen in our lifetime, and it doesn't really matter. The victory is not the end, but the victory is in the beginning, when we stand up to fight.

I think that some sections of the left did us a great disservice. They assisted in sowing chaos in our ranks. And some lefties actually were phenomenal in teaching – certainly I would not be anything today had I not learned from some of the white comrades that my problems were not about my skin. It was far deeper. And class is not a complicated issue to understand, politics is not complicated, as one of my late friends said in the courtroom.

Really it's very simple, especially today. We can't afford to pay the electricity bill. It's the summer, I've got a jumper on. You know, and a lot of people in the country have now, inside their houses – in the richest country in the world. Why can't we do that? I mean, I have, I can afford to pay it. But many people can't. Why can't you pay your bill? That's politics. How do we overcome it? That's political struggle. Why [have] 19% of the British population, either been to a food bank or thinking about going to a food bank, when billions of dollars have been wasted bombing and fighting wars, which have nothing to do with anyone here? Why? Why are we still sitting on a colonial edifice of Ireland? Why? Why is there never a day in the calendar, when the British army is not engaged in some military activity somewhere in the world for three, four hundred years? These are all politics – within which class is an imperative. And class isn't always a simple boss, worker [relationship] – it can also be an oppressed and oppressor nation [relationship], it can have a multitude of isms within it. 

So I think that the failure of the British left is to do with the fact, in many ways, that there are many unresolved questions of historical legacies: the colonial legacy, the slavery legacy, it's unresolved here, we still benefit from it. The streets are full of the icons of the murderers of yesterday. We're in the midst of a nonsensical Jubilee, you know, [of] 70 years of carnage – and yet the paraphernalia goes on. The English question remains unsolved, it's a hidden monster that is beginning only just to raise its head. So there is in the underbelly of a country like Britain, many different isms, which are still buried. Now there isn't another answer, there is no answer but the organised masses of people fighting for a better world for all, they can't fight it for themselves. 

But also to understand the core issues of imperialism were not complicated. They were really simple. Steal the wealth, natural human resources and human labour of others. Bring it here. Screw the people here and screw them over there. It really isn't any more complex than that. [Everything else] is just smokescreens around to justify something as simple as that and build a load of little colonial tropes along the way. 

So how can we assess the record of the organised British left? I don't know where the left is here. Is there a left now? And what is the left agenda? What is the dream that we have? We had a dream we were going to build socialism. But then we were divided – can we build socialism in one country or not? There are those who believe, with a Trotskyite leaning, ‘No, we can't. We have to wait for the advanced capitalist world to join us otherwise it will become by nature a Degenerated Workers State.’ Now these are one set of arguments, I don't really want to go into them at the moment. There were those who believed, ‘Yes, socialism is possible with our unique characteristics. And no, it's not the end of the world, it has to change.’ This was the pro Marxist-Leninist line. 

We also lived through eras of defeats. We won victories against colonialism only to be replaced with regimes which use the very apparatus of colonialism to oppress, suppress, and steal the wealth – no different to what the colonial masters had done. In fact, [they] went into service of them all over the world, in Pakistan, in India, in Africa, all across. So ours is a global position. It's not a simple position about Britain. It has to be international, but it has to understand the national contradictions, which change and at any one time what is the primary contradiction? I say the primary contradiction today is imperialism. All the other vestiges of it, whether it be racism, whether it be something else, these are just other cloaks under which it hides.

AS: The 16th of June marks 40 years since the conclusion of the Bradford 12 trial, which ended in the landmark acquittal of the defendants and a vindication of the right to self-defence against racist attacks. Could you speak on any reflections you had about the legacy of the trial and the campaign around it and, in times like these, where we’re seeing increasingly violent repression of movements, what lessons can be drawn – and what are the limitations – from the trial and campaign?

TM: I think that the legacy really [of the trial] is the right of self-defence, including bearing arms or making of petrol bombs, or whatever you think is necessary to defend yourself. That self-defence we never saw as an individual act of building muscles, and fighting individual racists on the streets. We felt self-defence was an organised one, and if we were organised, very often we didn't need to use violence – they ran away, when the Paki bashing hordes used to come – because that was the era of the time.

Self-defence vis-a-vis attacks by the state is a far more complex [issue], but it's still self-defence, that requires community, class, and workplace organisation. Again, the common denominator with all of those is organisation and mobilisation.

Ours was a legacy that – as we often said, [the Bradford 12] should never have been charged with such serious offences. The police said we were going to attack the police station, which was not true. We did make petrol bombs, that is true; we were patrolling the streets, that is true; therefore we were armed and we were organised, that is true. The police said that that is a criminal offence, we said no. If you think that is a criminal offence and you release us, we will do it again. It's really very simple, and this is what I actually said in the trial – that it's not a criminal offence, we have a right to live, that life has to be a life of dignity, no point having the right to live when you’re spat at on the street, when you're slapped, when your humanity is taken away from you. And we will fight for both those rights. Now if it is illegal, then so be it – because it's our human right, it's not a legal issue. 

Now by us winning the case it became a legal precedent as well – the right to [be armed]. Now we would not have won, had there not been a campaign, there's no question of it. They would have sent us down to jail. We would not have won had the defendants not been united inside. And we would not have won had we not had a brilliant legal team, which was united as well. What the state did was really, they made a mountain out of a molehill, and in so doing they made a monument to our belief – and that was that self-defence is not an offence. And it was the case then, as it is the case today. 

Anyway I've written this recently – the slogan of Self-defence is no offence, I think the first time I didn't even hear it in English, I heard it in Punjabi. Police te nah aetbaar karo, Aapni rakhi aap karo (Don't trust the police, you protect yourselves). This was one of the slogans that I'd heard from marches in India, on television and stuff like that, and people who brought audio video recordings. So that would be the first campaign. 

The lessons I suppose, are that if you resist, somewhere along the line, you do come into conflict with the forces of law and forces of the state. We didn't set out to break the law, but if the law is broken, we're not rapists, we're not criminals, we're not thieves. We're not doing it for individual self-betterment. If you’re fighting for people, people will defend you. People have enormous memories, remarkable courage. And sometimes the victory is in fighting back. 

And now we are actually in a far more violent period than before. During our period, there would be 20 or 30 fascists and 30,000 of us. It's completely the other way around at the moment, sometimes on the pro-racist and fascist demos, they outnumber us. Also the violence has shifted. In our time, it was usually young men who were subjected to the primary load of violence, certainly from my experience. Very often now, it's Muslim women, Muslim youth, especially the hijab-wearing ones.
So in a sense, we have to organise on the basis of the oppression, so we have to organise against the primary forms of racism of today, and that's Islamophobia as the dominant one. The old ones haven't gone away; anti-Semitism may be there, but it's [used as] a weapon against anti-racists now.

AS: The trial symbolised the repression that Black groups were subject to under the Thatcher government and in the wake of the 1981 uprisings across the country – but during the course of the 1980s we also moves towards the co-option and domestication of Black Power politics into manageable forms of anti-racism, as well as the declining fortunes of the left and anti-imperialist forces worldwide. Could you speak on how organisers navigated the evolving political landscape of the 1980s, and what radical politics in Britain looked like in an era of retreat?

TM: Well, again, it's a very long, complex question. But you can see that the first thing that the state did, in terms of the 1980s was [to] flood organisations with money. It's much cheaper to buy off a militancy than crush it, you know, by repression. So the Asian Youth Movement of which I was a member – in fact I helped to raise the money when I turned against it, after seeing how much corruption it brought. In London with the GLC and all these organisations that were born, and they're very much in existence [today]. In fact, it also starts with Lord Scarman’s inquiry, you can actually see state strategies put in.

So what we have now is a class of professional NGO workers, who might be very articulate, they can pronounce things quite properly, come in front of the television screens and things like that. But they've got no teeth left to fight back with because they're not based in people's organisation where [they are solely] responsible to the people. They get overtime for going on demonstrations! What the… How does that work? You know, they get time off for this, time off for that. And every report that they produce is a report for the intelligence services who mine it. We live in an era of such intense repression of the Muslim population of this country, through the Prevent programme; through all sorts of funding streams, it gets a little bit confusing at times. But I think that the state won in many ways by co-opting so many organisers, giving them nice little jobs into quangos – especially around London, London really benefited from the struggles that we all were engaged in in the North and stuff like that, and it glorified them as well, [to an extent]. 

So I think that it looks to me like a devastated scrapyard of politics, in which you've got a few barons, who now sit on top of – if they're still alive – you know, arts organisations, of community welfare organisations, monitoring projects, a whole plethora of things. You don't need to monitor the police, you need to fight the state. You cannot fight the state if you are as an organisation, indebted to the state, it can't be done. You cannot be funded… That doesn't mean you don't work for institutions which are funded by the state – I do as well. You know, you work for universities, colleges, NGOs, that's okay. But you don't sell your soul, you sell your labour. 

So political organisations, they dissolved. The [Asian Youth Movement] became an institution where people used it as a tool to get into British politics, become an MP in Bradford, we could see that at the time. Whereas we had a policy Labour Tory both the same both play the racist game. These are the slogans that we were raised up on. And they're even more true today than they ever were before. We also had slogans perhaps those are the lessons for the present, Black people have a right, here to stay, here to fight. This was not an accidental slogan, we had a right to be here because it was our wealth, we did not want crumbs from the bakery, we didn't even want the biscuit. We wanted the bloody bakery, we felt it belonged to us. 

And in that sense, where we are now is that not only has anti-imperialism been taken out of the political struggle of the left, so has the colour Black. Black has to be reclaimed, anti-imperialism has to be reclaimed, and the ability to organise on the street, and fight on every front, on the cultural front, on the other fronts. You know, the culture front isn't to get an OBE at the end of writing a few books. And how many artists have done that, you know. There are those who have refused, and salute to them. But they are few. And we don't need to be recognised by the state, we need to continue resisting. 

And the era of retreat isn't just in Britain, the era of retreat is international. That was since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Though I was very anti-Soviet Union, I now look back and see how many millions of people have died as a direct result of the defeat of the Soviet Union because the West unleashed its claws. I think, you know, the era will resolve its own contradictions. Each generation has a contribution to make, but it can't make that contribution without learning the lessons from the generation before it.

Essays on British Politics