Guerrilla History - Black & Brown Resistance in the UK (1960s-80s) w/ Preeti Dhillon

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we discuss a fascinating new book The Shoulders We Stand On: How Black and Brown people fought for change in the United Kingdom with its author, Preeti Dhillon.  This conversation is a terrific look at the repression against racially oppressed communities in the UK from the 1960s-80s, and the resistance of those communities.  This episode works excellently in conjunction with our previous episode  African & Caribbean People in Britain - A History w/ Hakim Adi, so be sure to listen to that episode as well if you have not already! Preeti Dhillon is is a researcher, writer and historian who is passionate about capturing hidden stories from oppressed and marginalised communities. Preeti was an Independent Research Fellow with the Women’s History Network 2021-2022 and has written for many outlets and venues.  Keep up with her work by checking out her website, and follow her on twitter @preetikdhillon. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You don't remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims

to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. It's wonderful to be with you, Henry. Absolutely. And we're playing where in the world is Carmen San Diego again because Adnan is on the road once again. Where are you calling in from today, Adnan? Oh, I'm so delighted to be in Istanbul, Turkey.

Just love this city, so I'm back here for a few days. Excellent. We'll have a chat later about all of the things that you get to do there because I have only been in the airport in Istanbul, unfortunately. Now, before I introduce the excellent guest and the topic in the book that we're going to be talking about today, I would like to remind the listeners that you can help support the show by going to Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history.

That's a G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Your contributions there are what allow us to continue making episodes like this, and in return you do get some bonus content, although we try to make as much just publicly accessible as we can. So your contributions just allow us to keep the lights on, really. You can also follow us on Twitter, or the site that was formerly known as Twitter, at Gorilla underscore Pod, again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Pod. Keep up with everything that Adnan and I are doing individually as well as what the show is putting out collectively.

With that out of the way, now we can turn to the topic at hand. We have a terrific guest who's going to be telling us about her really, really interesting book. We have Prithy Dillon, who is the author of The Shoulders We Stand on, How Black and Brown People Thought for Change in the United Kingdom. She's a researcher, historian, and author. Hello, Priti. It's nice to have you on the show. Thank you very much for having me. It's wonderful to meet you both.

Absolutely. It's a pleasure. Adnan, I'm going to turn this over to you to get us into the conversation about this really wonderful and very fun read. Well, I completely agree. It's beautifully written. So congratulations on being able to make this very dynamic and exciting history so accessible and readable.

It was really a joy. reading it and I just wondered maybe you could tell us you do start in the preface of kind of talking about the personal stakes involved in your own journey to discover a history that although you grew up in South Hall you didn't know a lot about even though South Hall was a place where much of you talk about you have a whole chapter basically dedicated to movements that took place in in South Hole. So I was wondering if you could maybe tell us a little bit about how you got into this, why you wanted to write it, and what that kind of experience for you of discovering and

uncovering these stories for yourself was what's like. Yeah, absolutely. Well, firstly, I'm glad that it reads as a classable because that was definitely one of the, one of the aims in writing it. And yes, so as you mentioned, I grew up in Southall, which is in West London, near Nehito Airport. And it's an area where a lot of Northern Indians, a lot of Punjabis have settled. And I was born there, went to high school there. My family still lives there, a lot of them. But I didn't really know anything about the history of Southville. To be honest, I wasn't really a huge fan of Southall growing up. It was just very, very loud. A lot of hat-calling and letchery on the streets and just not a very, you know, the infrastructure is kind of

crumbling and, yeah, it's just not kind of a place I would be proud to have come from. And then we'll fast forward to 2019. So we're talking a few years post-Brexit. Everything has just gone really, really quite wonky. And I'm not, no one's really sure why. At least kind of my generation. I was born in the late 80s and grew up under Tony Blair and new labor and thought everything was great and on the up. And then I graduate university as the conservative's come to power and it all goes downhill and it's nine years later in 2019. I'm just kind of left scratching my head as to what's happened. And I go to see Angela Davis speak for International Women's Day. which was, yeah, I think it's probably one of the most memorable nights of my life.

And, you know, as Angela Davis tends to do, she was talking about different movements from the US experience that I'd never heard of. And so I made note of all those. I was looking them all up when I got home. And it just got me thinking, though, that it must have been some sort of anti-racist movements happening in the UK. And so I just started kind of poking around. to be honest. I found some great things like this group of Jewish anti-Nazi fighters post-World

war in the UK. I dug around a bit more. And suddenly I found a lot that happened in the kind of 60s to 80s, movements led by black and brown people, a lot of which actually originated in Southwell itself, of which I had absolutely no idea and bringing it up with my family and they're like oh yeah yeah we remember this we were there and it's been a really interesting experience

discussing it with them as they talk about how they didn't necessarily want to burden our generation whereas I see it as being informed and understanding the past to understand the present and kind of how Brexit everything that's happened

kind of from 2010 onwards and even before, it's all been a continuation. There's not been kind of a disruption, but we didn't, we weren't equipped with that information. I mean, we don't learn it in school, that's for sure. We stopped learning history in 1945. And so, yeah, without our kind of family, without some communities talking about it, we've got a generation or multiple generations of people who are kind of just, a bit unmoored, which is what led me to write this book, because I then found when I was

digging around that these histories, it's not that they weren't, they're completely hidden. I know that term gets used a lot of these hidden histories. They're not hidden, but they're hidden from the people who really most need to know. Like a lot of this information was hidden in academia, either academic books or articles, you know, a lot of paywall, a lot of very dense material. Or there were local history projects, which are fantastic and wonderful and get the history where it needs to go, but they're temporary both in terms of space and time. And so I wanted to kind of meet in the middle and do something for my generation and for the generations that come that talk about this important history, basically our civil rights

movement in the UK, in a way that's accessible and can be read by people. who don't necessarily want to pick up a history book. I don't want to pick up a history book often in my spare time. So I'm not speaking as an historian. So, yeah, that's kind of a very long answer of how I came to write, not just a book about this topic, but this book in particular. Well, I'm really happy to hear that answer because the way that you described it, you know,

the last thing that you said really describes the reason that we do guerrilla history, which is bringing these important histories of movements and of struggles from kind of the vaunted halls of academia where they are sequestered away from people that are actually trying to affect change within society and trying to bring these sorts of histories of struggle of resistance to exploitative and oppressive systems to people who are actually with a vested interest

in changing these systems. Now, whether or not we're entirely successful with that is a different question. I know we've been accused of being overly academic ourselves many times, but that is kind of the goal of the program is to try to bring these histories to where they need to be in order to be accessible to people that actually can make use of it. And I agree that that is one of the big problems that we face is that these histories, these important histories, they're not unknown. They're just unknown to the people who need

to know them and who would actually be able to utilize them in an effective way. So I do appreciate that that was your project and, you know, hearing that it really does jive with what our project is. But before I get into the next question, I also want to just let the listeners know that the conversation that we're going to have on this book more generally really is a great supplement to the previous conversation that we had with Hakim Adi about his terrific book, African and Caribbean people in Britain, a history. So if you have already listened to that episode, you will notice that this conversation is going to connect very well. with that conversation. And if you haven't listened to that conversation yet, you don't have to

stop this conversation, go back and listen to that one first. But I do recommend that you listen to both of them, you know, kind of close to each other because I think that they are going to inform one another, at least, you know, going back and looking at Professor Adi's work again, as I was also going through yours, was quite informative in thinking about these questions. But turning to your book now, you're focusing on a much smaller time period than Hakim Adi is. I mean, he's looking back to the Roman period and pre-Roman period and going all the way up to today. As you kind of mentioned in your previous answer, you were focusing mostly on the 60s to 80s. I'd like us to do a grounding in a material condition analysis, you know, analysis of the material conditions

for black and brown people in Britain. Starting in this period where you're analyzing, primarily in the 60s, but then also tracing how these conditions, material conditions for these people, has changed, and in some cases, in many cases, hasn't changed through to today, because understanding this material basis for struggle is going to help us understand these struggles that we're then going to discuss during the conversation. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, And it's really interesting as well because I wanted to be very clear in the discussion. I think what Hubble gets lost a lot today is that people don't discuss race and class together. And that's why I think you also had as a previous guest, Aaron Kunani, whose book is fantastic.

And yeah, it puts that front and center of why racism means anti-capitalism. because that's that's kind of falling out with the mainstream and that was completely the case back in the 60s to 80s. So people came over to the UK from various countries of the Commonwealth, from the Caribbean, from countries in South Asia, from Africa, largely in search of kind of better economic means. The idea was they come to the famous mother country where the streets aligned with gold, make some money and go home. So you often had males coming by themselves because they thought they'd be gone for a few years and that was about it. And this was so people were usually not hugely wealthy and this was the same kind of from where about people were coming from. This was seen in the kind of decolonial era or post, well not only postcolonial at that time, in the

area of decolonization and economies were suffering were suffering globally. So people coming to try and make trying to make some money. And the UK were welcoming them. This was another thing at the time, that the doors were open early on in the kind of 50s, especially for people to come on over because World War II had decimated the UK. And so 1960s were actually the kind of golden era in the UK. People look very fondly on the 1960s, at least a lot of white people. But also in terms of economically, it was okay. Growth even hit, I think, 6% at one point. Housing was fairly affordable.

However, obviously, a lot of this wasn't actually accessible for our immigrant population. You had a colour bar in housing and employment. This meant that there were often either limits, like kind of quotas on how many people, black and brown people would be hired, often limited. limited to about 5%, or people simply weren't hired or weren't rented accommodation. And crucially, as well, this was completely legal until the mid-1960s. So this often meant that, yeah, it was very, very hard to find work. Whenever someone was known to hire black and brown people, people would block to the area

and everyone would work. This happened in Southville. you had this rubber factory and they hired a lot of Punjabi people they were completely open to that and so you ended up having a lot of immigration into the area for that reason to work in this particular factory

we get to the 1970s and the economy tanks by this point the colour bar is supposedly gone although we know that actually in reality it still exists and the unions still aren't friendly to black and brown people and the economy completely panks.

Inflation gets to over 10%. By the end of the decade, it's into over 20%. There were minor strikes as well happening in the UK, which led to shorter working weeks because there just wasn't the energy to have a five-day work a week factory, just couldn't run. So they went down to three days. And by the end of the 1970s, there was a wimper of discontent. and a general strike

and those rubbish was piling up in the streets, bodies were piling up the factory sealed banks because there was no one to process them. And so obviously, unemployment is also rising for everybody. This is worst for black and brown people,

the worst for young black people. And so then we come into the early 1980s. And by 1979, this is what leads to the manufacture being elected because people wanted change, people wanted something to be done. And so by 1980, employment is the highest it has been since the kind of 1930s. And inevitably, yes, worse again for black and brown

people. And so young black men in particular. And so we see the condition of just getting worse and worse. And this is why kind of my book kind of stops in 1981 because by this point it kind of hit rock bottom, and this was just before the dawn of Thatcher and Reagan economics. And before this, there had been this idea that there could be a new possibility, that there could be this reshaping of society. And then by 1981, yeah, this was all kind of abandoned, or at least, yeah, things took a turn in the UK. And so we look from, yeah, we can talk about kind of how it looks from there compared to now. But I think the important thing in this time is that pretty much everyone was affected similarly,

which is why there was a lot of solidarity between black and brown struggles, which is I get asked a lot as to why I include both, because we often separate the histories when we talk about them today. And in my head, that wasn't even a question because you can't separate them at the time. People identified as politically black. And there was so much overlap, so much support. And you didn't have just black and brown organizations. You had people all supporting everyone and not just each other.

They were always supporting the white working class. There was a real solidarity along both race and class lines at the time. And that is what has changed, I think up to now. We can talk about why. But that is definitely not what we see today in the UK. But, yeah, in that era, I'm talking about it was, yeah, it was unfortunately pretty poor for everyone. Before Adnan Hobson with the next question, I would just like to also recommend the listeners turn back to another episode that we did at the beginning of this year, as it relates to something that you said at the beginning of that question regarding how Britain was viewed by people who would be labor migrants. They would come, they would work, they would send some money back.

and then once they had saved up enough, they would go back to their homeland. This is something that we discussed at length with fan favorite, Manning Ness, about his really, really terrific book, Migration is Economic Imperialism, how international labor mobility undermines economic development in poor countries. I highly recommend everybody check out that book. It's one of my favorite books that I've read in the last couple years, as it tackles a really important topic from a perspective that we'd never hear

within mainstream discourse. And we had a just over two-hour-long episode with Manny about that book. Again, at the beginning of 2024. So scroll back in your feeds for the episode, Migration is Economic Imperialism to hear that. Listeners. Adnan. Yeah, I just want to pick up on something you just concluded on, which is about how sometimes these histories are told as separate ones. So blacks in Britain, like we had Hakim Adi's book, of course, when you come to the modern period in the 60s, 70s, 80s, there starts to be a lot of more intersection in even the way people start to tell them because of what you're talking about is that there was maybe some kind of concept in some ways you characterized it as being politically black.

Like black wasn't just a kind of racial, you know, kind of a narrow racial designation. It was the people who were non-white who were struggling for justice against racial discrimination and so on. So I'm wondering if maybe you can elaborate a little bit. it more what do you think are some of the best examples that your book the shoulders we stand on how black and brown people fought for change in the united kingdom um actually exemplified this kind of situation of ross community solidarity because they saw their material interests and their struggle as being a common and shared one yeah i think um there one thing i like to discuss a lot

is how some members of the core committee of the British Black Panthers were actually brown. We had Therup Dundi and Marles Sen, who had previously actually been associated with the Indian Workers Association when they were students. And then they were so taken by the oratory skills of the leader of the British Black Panthers, Althea Jones-Ca-Cwan,

that they joined the British Black Panthers. And these weren't isolated incidences. I think one of the best is with the trial of the Bradford 12. These were 12 young brown men who were put on trial under terrorist charges in 1982. And we see defense committees spring up all over the country. And we even see protesting happening in L.A. from black domestic. women wages for housework. There was a real sense of this was everybody's struggle that we see there's a very popular journal from the time called Race Today. And they didn't, they reported on

everybody's struggles. They reported on what was happening with the Bengali communities in the East End. They reported on what was happening with the Bradford 12. They reported on the British Black Panthers. They reported on the other black power groups. They reported on on everyone, on the Asian youth movements, because this was seen as kind of oppressed people everywhere, were united. And that's where we also see a lot of support for anti-apartheid. We see a lot of work against the Vietnam War, and a lot, and this is a whole book that is in itself, of support for the Northern Irish. calls for the Irish cause. And vice versa.

This wasn't even just kind of a one way. One of my favorites is there was a hunger strike, an Irish hunger strike called Bobby Sands. And he wrote a poem about this woman, Anwadita, who was fighting an immigration case to get her kids recognized as her own kids. And so she was in the UK and there in Pakistan. And the home office said that they weren't her children, that somehow it was another annaudita who was married to her husband and in the end there was a TV company who got involved and did kind of the first DNA testing to prove otherwise and this went on for

for years and years and Bobby Sanz wrote her a poem in solidarity of the amazing fight that she was putting up and Amadita would go and talk along with Darkus Howe who was a major black activists. They would talk alongside each other at different events. There was, it was an incredible, it was incredible show people of, people would take coaches from the Asian youth movements to take coaches and go and support marches in other cities. This was just a common thing to do. It wasn't seen as, as unusual or it wasn't a decision to be made. It was like, okay, there's something happening in this area. Then we, we must. go and support. You've had people going over to France in 1968 as well to support the protests

there. It was just seen as that is what you do, that these struggles are interconnected. Hey, there's a lot that you brought up here that I hope that we can talk about over the course of this conversation. I know that you brought up the Bradford 12. That's definitely something that I have a few questions about. But before I get there, you mentioned a couple of groups that I had planned on asking about the Indian Workers Alliance, the British Black Pan. There is another one, the Fasimbas was another one that I wanted to talk about. One of the things that's always really interesting for me, and I think particularly useful for our listeners when thinking about organizing is on what grounds did these organizations

begin, what were the struggles that they had identified in which they decided that an organization around these struggles was necessary? How did this membership come into these organizations? You know, how did they reach out to the community to make this a mass, you know, popular organization? And what were some things that they did as an organization to fight the injustice that they were seeing that was the cause for their creation in the first place? And then also, of course, you know, talk about how the state acted against these organizations in many ways. So kind of these different questions, you can, of course, bring up other organizations and groups as you wish. But these were kind of the three that I wanted to flag up in terms of discussing, you know, where did they come from? What were the struggles that

they had identified within their community? How did they draw from the community? And how did the state react to their organizations? Yeah, big questions. So interestingly, I think the state reaction question is kind of also linked to the formation question, because a lot of these organizations from throughout the kind of 70s, the Indian Workers Association is slightly separate. They were initially formed as a welfare organization, who were then really quite, who became really quite big, that they became kind of the go-to organization with your issues. And so they then, and depending, there was different branches around the UK, one of those radicals was in Birmingham. And so they were all, you had job

Mohan Joshi, who was the leader of the IWA in Birmingham, and he was also the leader of this coalition called the Black Workers Alliance. Whereas the IWA, for example, in Southall was a bit slightly more conservative, but they would take up issues as they came to them. So they fought against busing of students, of mostly brown students away from Southall because white parents were worried that the schools were becoming too, yeah, two immigrant focused. And so they fought against that policy and they fought against things like virginity testing. But these were, and against immigration laws. But their first focus had been as a welfare organization and also as a workers association,

encouraging people to unionize, encouraging them to run as shop stewards. When we come to, and they formed, well, they formed in the 50s. And then when we come to the organizations that were formed in the kind of 70s, like the British Black Panthers, like the Asian youth movements where the Bradford 12 came out of, these were formed because of relationships with the state. So you had the sense that, okay, well, we have more and more increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the UK. The Race Relations Act, when it came in finally in 1965, it was actually first used against black people and as in this kind of incitement to racism. And this idea was that black people are inciting racism against white people. And so it was very much seen, okay, well, we know that the state isn't going to help us. And this was always an interesting kind of discussion going on in lots of the organizations as to how.

much state involvement or should you accept kind of state funding. But people like the British Black Panthers were very, very much later from the beginning. No, this is not happening. We are not getting involved with the state. So it was against things like police brutality under laws like the Suss Laws, which was based on this archaic 19th century vagrancy act, but essentially meant that police could stop and search people with very little reason. And this is often used against black and brown people,

young black and brown people. And so you had the Black Panthers who formed to to free the oppressed, both in the UK and worldwide, from state repression. And then you had the Asian youth movements who actually sprung up because you ended up having a spate of racist murders. And the police were not calling them racist murders. By the end of the 1970s, because of the economic, economic conditions as well, and the politicians blaming immigrants for everything that was happening, you see a real intensity of violent murders, which the police refused to call racist. And so a lot of people will say that this was against things like the National Front, who were a right-wing neo-Nazi movement, a precursor to British National Party and to UKIP and all that we have now.

And that's not, that's not wrong. And it was also, that was also kind of a street defense. But the bigger picture was that, okay, well, they are a symptom. They are being facilitated by the police and by the state. So they weren't the cause of the problem, but a symptom of it. And so the state reaction was probably quite predictably, not great. there was a lot of repression we saw at least one murder at the hands of the police in 1979 there's a massive protest in Southville when the National Front wanted to hold an election meeting

and like I mentioned before that Southville was hit a huge Punjabi population this was not an area that were going to vote National Front but the National Front wanted to raise the heckles of people there. And so the Asian youth movement organized a massive protest and you had people come from all over the country for that, including the anti-Nazi league who were big at the time. And Blair Peach was a teacher from New Zealand who came to that march and he was hit over the head and he was killed by a member of the police. And we know it was a member of the police and not just the police, but a branch of the police called the special patrol group who were

a paramilitary arm of the police. And they were not brought to justice. The police only admitted it happened in 2010. They only apologized in 2010. Instead, they actually then ended up spying on the partner of Blair Peach, who was trying to fight for justice

as part of this ongoing spy cops investigation. All of that information is now coming out. So, and the other, I think, one of the most outrageous things I found in terms of state reaction that sounds very paranoid, but is state surveillance. You had part of the MI5, part of our kind of secret service, which was called Special Branch. And even the name sounds made up, even the same sounds like it would be in some sort of, some sort of Tom Cruise film. He had special branch and they had files on all the key players.

They were observing people. So the Black Panthers, we don't actually know much about the inner workings apart from oral history. We don't have documents because they didn't keep documents because they knew they were being spied on. And so this was the tug of war that was happening essentially throughout this time. And yeah, and I really, urge people not to just think of it as just the kind of racist on the street. And I think that

happens a lot then and it happens a lot now. And it was never, never about that. I'm so glad you brought that up and that was where I want to follow up and ask you a little bit more about because in the conclusion, you mentioned that if you look at this phenomenon, as you have in detail over several decades that what you were quite impressed by is how it really wasn't a question of some of these extreme right-wing nationalist and fascistic groups, but that the perpetrators of racism against black and brown people really was principally a state affair. It was something of a sponsor by the state. through its various institutions.

And so I wanted to ask you a little bit more about your analysis there because there are so many parallels. I mean, when you say that Angela Davis's talk really kind of inspired you to start digging in your own country, the parallels are quite dramatic. It seems to me both in terms of the brutality, police brutality of violent racism against and murder of black and brown people. I was actually quite astonished because I hadn't seen the statistics as clearly as you talk about them in the course of like a four-year period, 31 murders at least.

And then on the other side is, of course, co-intel pro state surveillance and attempts to break up political formations. And we're fighting against capitalism, against racism, on behalf of these communities. And I wanted, you know, to think a little bit more about how this all works out and maybe go back to the mid-60s with the Race Relations Act of 1965, which you, you know, would think, you know, is a very progressive step and a gesture of acknowledging that there is a widespread racial discrimination that needs to be dealt with and affirming these democratic principles. of equality before the law and so on. And yet, your analysis was that, A, it left out the police and the prison from the institutional requirements to provide equality, and that I got the sense from your analysis that this was fundamentally a way of managing, you know, race questions within the context of a racist

architecture, right? And it's like how they used various, you know, means and mechanisms were, you know, for creating, you might say, a distracting focus away from the deeper structures that the state itself was involved with. So I'm wondering if maybe you can unfold that perspective that I think was very powerful in this book with some of the stories that, really led to that conclusion of yours that the state was the one that, you know, that was the most responsible, not just far right groups and individuals who, you know, reacted negatively to, you know, cultural and racial difference of new immigrants, but an actual kind of state architecture that was more complicit and more responsible than

anything else. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And also when you were speaking, it came to mind a very, very, striking thing that happened in kind of mid-60s. In 1964 you had what was dubbed as Britain's racist election and there's this area called Smethik in near Birmingham. And Michael Malcolm X came and he was actually invited by the Indian Workers Association there which I think is again a nice detail of showing that kind of sense of

solidarity and where people's allegiances were. And and he he was horrified by what he saw in Smedic. He, he was like, I wouldn't wait here and I'm going to butcher his words now, but he said, I wouldn't wait here to be, for the, for the pyre to be lit, because he saw this as a complete powder keg. He said that, yeah, there's basically going to be, going to be a genocide here. And, and we had, yeah, we asked us when we also had the Ku Klux Klan, kind of the UK version also

kind of yeah well doing what the Ku Klux Klan does and it's fascinating when you look at this time period so this is happening in

1964 and then 1965 the first Race Relations Act comes in but before that we have to look at the Race Relations Acts in combination with the Immigration Act so we have 1948 with the British

Nationality Act that was this attempt to try and get people into the UK and also try and hold on to the Commonwealth. Canada had just introduced their own citizenship laws and they thought, oh, oh crap, everyone's kind of separating from the UK. What can we do? So they created this idea of a Commonwealth citizen with this British Nazi Act.

And they said, well, you are the same regardless of whether you're in a colony or whether you're in Britain, you can come and go freely. what they didn't expect was that this would lead to people from the Caribbean, from Africa, from South Asia coming, coming over. Meanwhile, a lot of white Brits went over to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, because they had their own labor shortages. So then over the 50s, you have this kind of reconfiguration based on the Bush Nationality Act. and by the end of the 50s about just kind of just under about half a million

black and brown people were in the UK and so then they very quickly backtracked and 1962 had the Commonwealth Immigrants Act which closed the door on this open immigration and introduced a voucher system so you had to apply based on your skills to get a voucher to come into the country and then say in between we have this

we have this Richard's racist election we also have the Bristol bus boycott which I discuss in the book which was inspired by the US and that was in 1963 the same the same time around the kind of March from Washington

was happening in Bristol this bus bus bus boycott was trying to change the colour bar at this one company and they became a real national syllable as well and the Labour leader at the time had even said to one of the leaders of the bus boycott, I will make sure we introduce some racial discrimination legislation if we get into power.

They did get into power. And so in 1965, we see this first Race Relations Act, an attempt to dampen down the kind of fever that had come from the 1962 Immigrants Act and the racist election. But as you mentioned, I'd known, this didn't include employment, it didn't include housing, shops, education,

the police, I mean, It included very little. It created a race relations board to take up cases of incitement to racism, but this was used against people like Michael X, who was, well, he was an activist in his own right. He's not really owned by the black power groups activists in the UK, but he was one of the first to be prosecuted under this. And just to just start to interrupt, but isn't it true also that further updates, you know, like the Equality's Act and other kind of bodies that have been created

that, you know, even in contemporary Britain, and over the last 10 years, they've been used more to suppress political speech of, you know, black and brown radical activists who've been prosecuted under this. Of course, we even recently had this case where Rishi Sunak and Zwella Braverman at, you know, a protest were characterized. as quote unquote coconuts, you know, and this person who was a brown woman herself, Asian woman, was prosecuted, is being prosecuted under, you know, these Equalities Act. So, you know, it seemed like a progressive step, but in fact actually was used against, you know, black and brown activists more frequently than it has been used to hold to account, you know,

racist in the dominant you know culture for you know entrenched racism which is allegedly why it was created absolutely absolutely I think a good example of that is what's happened recently with um Diane Abbott who's a black female MP and she was she's been a black female MP um she was one of the first and she came into power in 1987 um which was part of the aftermath of the 1980 I won uprisings, which I'm sure will come to. And she has a lot of racist abuse. I mean, she has now for decades.

Studies have shown that she is the most abused MP online. And there was a Tory donor who had made some comments. I can't remember the exact wording, but they were pretty horrific and unequivocally racist. And especially an entire bit of towards Diane Abbott. And there's been no backlash, no, no ramifications under some sort of prosecution for him. So absolutely, this is always the case.

That's because she's not a football player. You know, we do have examples of people being prosecuted for tweeting racist abuse against, you know, black British football players. But as you mentioned, we have another very clear case against a black politician that is not being prosecuted in the same way that somebody is when they tweet something about, you know, Marcus Rashford, for example. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Or Bukai Osaka, as an Arsenal fan, I have to. Or Rahim Sterling. I mean, the list goes on Adnan. I'm not going to let you stop with an Arsenal player. And I claim Bukkaio, he went to a school down the road from me. So he's a local boy. So, yeah,

yeah, particularly, I'm particularly protected with him. And also in 1965, when we see this first Race and Relations Act, they actually end up reducing the number of vouchers available under the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. They slash it by more than half. And then we get to the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which essentially did away with any kind of idea that this wasn't racist and made it very obviously racist by introducing the idea of patriality, meaning that you had to have a parent or grandparent born in the UK in order to come and go freely. And this essentially meant that if you were a white Brit who had emigrated to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, that your kids were fine, that you would be fine. But if you were

in, say, India or Trinidad and Tobago, that the chances are you would now, most of your avenues to come to the UK were being cut off. And the same year, you have another Regis Relations Act, It's a hurrah, which covers housing and employment. And this happens again in 1971. You have an Immigration Act, and then you end up having another Race Valations Act a few years later. And it's really striking when you see it alongside each other just how they were trying to have it both ways throughout this period.

And the other thing that's really striking is that, I lost track of who was in charge, of who was in power, whether it was labor or the conservatives at this time. It did not matter. It did not matter. And there's this great line from Ambalana Sivanandan, who was formidable thinker of race and class relations in the UK. And he was the director of the Institute of Race Relations for decades. And he said that what Enoch Powell says today, conservative. say tomorrow and Labor legislates on the day after.

And Eno Powell, I'm sure some of your listeners know, was a conservative, a conservative politician who gave this famous Rivers of Blood Speech in 1968, in 1968 before the introduction of the Race Relations Act, which essentially said that black and brown people are taking over the country and they are soon going to have the whip hand over the white man. and that unleashed a complete barrage of open racism but it really didn't matter

I mean he was he was actually then chastised by the Conservatives but it didn't matter because they then started spouting his policies as the Labour so that is yeah what's what's really fascinating when you see that all happening side by side you could easily ignore the narrative of the Immigration Acts and just talk about well we introduce this race relation act and everything looks great, but the bigger picture is that, no,

they were definitely going hand in hand to try and have their cake and eat it too. Well, I wonder if maybe more than just having their cake and eat at two what the dynamic between these are, because I think it's wonderful that you track how these closely parallel each other or that they're related to one another, that is it that there's restrictions and limitations

on immigration that are happening in response to having to make adjustments to the organized political, you know, pressure that black and brown people demanding their rights, demanding equality, becoming politically activated in British society, that as that happens, then you need to, you know, the British state needs to limit the numbers and make sure that the, uh, uh, uh, the, these people's impact on society will be lessened, you know, like it's fine to bring in many, many thousands of workers as, you know, as long as they're not going to be organized, they'll accept their low wages, their terrible treatment and, you know, racist abuse and open discrimination.

But once they start pushing back on that, then suddenly it becomes riskier to be bringing people in. And so there's a direct relationship, you know, between, you know, how immigration has to be controlled because for economic reasons, they want to bring in the necessary labor, but they don't want to pay a political cost, a social cost, you know, and be able to maintain a kind of in a racist society or racism is the luxury of like, you know, black and brown people not being politically organized. Once they are, you have to do these racial equality acts, but then you've got to stop more of them coming, because now they're a big problem in a different way politically.

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, that exactly hits the nail their head because at this point also there is not one single Black or Brown MP. You had people who tried to join the Labour Party, and they were refused membership. People were trying to get involved in the establishment and change things from the inside, and they were cut off.

And we can have conversations about how effective that actually is as a strategy, but the fact was that that was not there. I mean, and not only were black and brown people excluded, I mean, the number of female MPs also was absolutely minuscule throughout this time period. So that's the kind of institution we're dealing with. And they absolutely thought that people would be grateful and shut up and get on with it.

essentially. And that's why there were the two prongs of, okay, increased police brutality and the use of the special patrol group who also they started using tear gas. They used tear gas in 1981, which is the first time they'd used it on the mainland. They'd been using in Northern Ireland, but they used all the techniques they were using in Northern Ireland against black and brown people on the mainland. They were fully trained in riot tactics, which they very happily showed in this time period. And they, and also as the economy was tanking,

it was also very convenient to use, to be able to introduce kind of immigration acts as to scapegoat what the government was doing. when actually throughout this entire time period there were more people emigrating than actually immigrating to the UK except in 1979 but we hear the politicians always talking about this idea of having a very small island

which again was very funny when you listen to what people say today and so absolutely there was this idea of okay we need to control people and I think you see this a lot especially with the Grunwick strike which was a strike from 1976 to 1978

so we're getting to this time of a really poor economy and a group of mostly brown women led a strike against this photo processing factory in northwest London and they were actually helped out

by this organisation called the National Association for Freedom who were closely associated with the Conservatives. So they were actually helping the photo processing factory and the manager to overcome this strike. And the special patrol group were actually used against this strike as well. You know, one of the things that Adnan mentioned is that the powers that be,

like when there is immigration for very low paid jobs and when these workers are not organized. But as soon as there's attempts at organization, that's when you see this kind of pushing back against these. One of the examples that somebody who grew up in the United States would probably be familiar with, as it's been reported on numerous, numerous times, is that there is looking away or turning a blind eye to undocumented migrant laborers in agricultural fields in the southwest of the United States until these same workers try to organize or unionize. You know, they're being paid very, very sub-minimum wage levels. We're talking one, two, three dollars an hour to work in these very hot, very dirty, in some cases quite dangerous conditions, this back-breaking

labor of doing agricultural work, which, let's be honest, most people do not want to do. Most natural-born Americans don't want to do that work. But these undocumented migrant workers do do this work. And as long as they just, you know, as it is, shut up and take the abuse, take the poor work conditions, take the meager pay, the state turns a blind eye, the employers turn a blind eye. But as soon as these workers decide to organize or unionize, what's the first thing that happens is the employers will make a call to immigration services and say, you know, it's a really, real big surprise, turns out that there's undocumented people on my farm, whoever would have

thought that there was undocumented people on my farm. And of course, this is done strategically and tactically, and the state surely knows that this is what is being done. Yet there is never any sort of consequence for the employer. The only consequence is for the people who are doing the labor when they are trying to fight for better work conditions. Now, something that a non-hance had mentioned earlier is that when we're talking about the case of black and brown people in Britain, the focus of your book, they came to the analysis that it is not just these racist groups that are manifesting this sort of abuse and oppression on these people. It's not just far right elements within society. It is the state as well. And as a result of this

analysis, what we began to see, as you point out in the book, is that there was a push for self-defense, which then leads to the Bradford-12, a case that you brought up earlier in the conversation. So my question is, Pritzie, I know it's kind of a big question and a very long preamble to the question. Can you talk a little bit about the Bradford-12 case, how they came to this analysis that self-defense is necessary, as well. as their defense, that self-defense is no offense, which is something that, you know, you point out was their rally and cry in many ways. Because I think that this analysis is something that we can draw from when we're analyzing current day society, not just in Britain and not

just in the case of black and brown communities, but in the case of marginalized and oppressed communities globally, both in terms of being oppressed by their national government as well, is within the imperialist world system. We see that there is oppression on these people. We see that there is violent oppression against these people. And as time goes on, we are seeing that as people are coming to the realization that it is not just far-right elements in society, it is also the state that is complicit and not only complicit but driving this violent repression and oppression of people, that self-defense is inherently going to become an important part, an important arrow in the quiver.

I know that I'm using defense and this analogy. But then also how we have to understand that self-defense in this case certainly is no offense and how we can connect that to struggles today. So I apologize for the long preamble and the kind of really big scope of this question. No, absolutely. And it was absolutely as kind of seminal as you point out. But to understand where we got to then by 1982 and we had the trial at the bad for 12, we have to look at where we'd come from, especially in those previous five years. And then you'd mentioned that there'd been over 30, murders. And yeah, from 1976 to

1981, there were over 30 murders of black and brown people in the UK. And this was, some of them were burned alive in their homes. They were stabbed on the streets and left to die. And where we saw this happening time and time again, we saw these pockets of people rising up to resist. So we had 1976.

Ghalib Singh Chaga was stabbed, this teenage boy was stabbed in Southall and his blood was let on the streets and the police didn't care. And that's where the South Wales Asian youth movement came from to rise up against that. And then in 1979, when the National Front goes to Southville, the youth again take to the street or everyone takes to the streets to protect it. And then the police have killed Blair Peach and the fight continues there. We have then, meanwhile, happening in the east end of London, Al-Pab Ali was murdered, a Bengali textile worker. He was murdered in 1978. And there was this battle for Brick Lane that spurred out of that from the Bengali community,

who were against, they didn't use the phrase per se, self-defense is no offense, but that's what they were doing. They were defending themselves against the National Front because the police weren't doing it. and they were very, very clear about that. And so we had this happening time and time again. And then we see 1981. In 1981 happens, and there are uprisings across the country, starting with Brixton, or actually started in 1980,

in Bristol, where there was an uprising against the police. But we see this starting in 1981 in Brixton, following a week of stop and search activities where a couple of thousand people were stopped in the course of one week. People were on edge. People were agitated. As I said, there was really high unemployment.

There had been just constant police brutality and constant police ignorance. And they kept saying, every time they were accused of something, he said, oh, what we need is more black and brown recruitment into the police force. That will solve everything. we need to have better complaints systems that will solve everything it's just a few bad apples

and so people took it into their own hands and we see these uprisings happening these clashes on the street things were set on fire we're seeing people launching bricks at the police and the police fighting back and we see this happening all over the country small towns as well as um um um um um um as well as in the bigger cities. We see this happening all over the country. And it was a real shock for a lot of people. But not for not for anyone paying attention. But it was a real shock for a lot of people.

But so essentially this idea of self-defense was then in Bradford, you had this United Black Youth League who had splintered off from the Asian youth movement in Bradford. And in 1981, they were seeing all this happening and they had heard that there was going to be a march of the National Front happening in Bradford. So what did they do? They knew that the police weren't going to protect them. They knew the police would be there to protect the National Front. So they created their, they made their own petrol bombs.

Now, as it turns out, the National Front didn't show up, so they just discarded the petrol bombs and didn't think anything of it. And then they were discovered. And then there was a whole chain of arrests of people, and you ended up with these 12 young, ground men, many of whom were then the leaders of the United Black Youthly, who were then given the most severe charges that had been brought against anyone. There were a few major court cases throughout this time, but they were given the most severe

charges, which would essentially mean life imprisonment. They were put on terrorist charges, essentially. As they were made, it was a big show trial, essentially, for the state. So when they were finally put on trial in 1982, you had all of them admitted to making the petrol bombs. There was no way, all pleaded guilty making. There was no question that they doubted or denied making those bombs. But they said, well, of course, what else are we going to do? So the line of argument was, have you seen what's happening?

They said, have you seen what's happening around the country? Have you seen what's happened in South? Or have you seen what's happened in Brix? Have you seen what's happened in the East End? Have you seen what's happened in Ireland? seen what's happening, then of course, of course we're going to defend ourselves. Have you seen what's happened also in Bradford and nearby in Manchester? And that was really interesting because it wasn't, at no point did they deny it, but the trial basically hinged on then

proving that there was racism and that the police were not willing to do anything about it. So on one side, you had the police who, quite frankly, but after fools of themselves, just denying that there was any sort of racism to the point where the judge himself got annoyed and was like, are you kidding me? Are you just going to ignore everything that's been happening? And then you had on the other side, the Bradford 12, who stood up for themselves and talked time and time again about their experiences and saying how they were fearful of, of havoc arson attacks on their house, how they would seal up their letterbox so that they wouldn't get attacked. like this family had in North London.

And they, so they brought in people from around the country to basically talk about, yep, racism exists, it's here. They brought in firefighters who had worked on this arson case in North London. They brought in actually in Anwar Dita from this immigration case to talk about her experience. They brought in all of these community leaders, local officials, people of good standing, as it were, to say, yes, racism does exist and the police aren't doing anything. And that is what it ended up hindering on. It wasn't, was as a terrorist

act or not, it was what society do you want to live in? Is it one where people can actually feel safe and can do what they need to do to feel safe when the police won't protect them? or should we all have our faith in the police? And that's what that trial turned into. And the jury voted on the side of the Bradford 12, which was huge. There was even one of the jury member who was actually wearing under their top. They were wearing a free the Bradford 12 t-shirt. So you're just how far this campaign had gone.

And there were concerns that the self-defense has no offense line would actually then be used for organizations like the National. front, because obviously everything had been weaponized against black and brown people up to that point. But interestingly, the next examples we see are also examples of black and brown people using it in similar cases where the police had unfairly treated them against acts of racism. Turning to another case and going back in time a little bit, but I think that we can trace this, even though we're going back chronologically to conclusions, which is the case of the Oval 4.

The reason that I bring up the Oval 4 is because, as I'm going to have you explain this case, what we see is that we have wrongful conviction here, a very clear case of wrongful conviction. But the reason why I want to flag this up is because just because the justice system eventually figures out that there was wrongful conviction, we still see the weaponization of the legal system and the court system in terms of pushing back against these collective groups or people of marginalized

communities that may be members of collective groups that the state is trying to repress. And what we see, and I'm again going to have you explain this a little bit, but I want to kind of throw out a little bit of a tangential point here. which is that wrongful conviction is a weapon in itself. It's not just that by putting things into the court system, you might end up with a conviction. Even if they know that it is a completely, let's just be frank, BS charge that is eventually going to be found out to be a BS charge,

the fact that that person has on their record, at least for the time being, that they are being brought up on these charges, is damaging personally for that individual, as well as for the groups that they are associated with. This is something that we see today. We see groups that are organizing in solidarity with marginalized groups. We see groups that are organized of marginalized groups.

We see absolutely ridiculous charges being brought forth against people for what are minor infractions or no infraction at all, with the explicit and very blatant intent of scaring people from standing up in solidarity with those who are marginalized and oppressed, as well as having retribution against people for having the temerity to stand up against the oppressive state structures of the capitalist state, this racist capitalist state. We could list examples. I know that we've had Cala Walsh on the show before. Here's a pretty good example of somebody who is having ridiculous charges levied against them

for a very, very minor thing. I don't want to drag Cala into this. She has her own legal case that is being processed right now. But the point is that what we see is this weaponization and even wrongful conviction and wrongful charges. in themselves are weapons that are utilized by the state in order to push back against any sort of solidarity or any sort of collective action by these marginalized groups. So, with, again, I apologize, I do have a tendency to ramble on a bit too long and pretty in case you haven't

noticed. Can you tell us a little bit about the case of the Oval Four and how this wrongful conviction impacted the individuals that were brought up and what you see, as the usage of wrongful conviction or the legal and court system more generally as a weapon of the state against these sorts of collective actions against state repression. Yeah, it's a really good question.

And I want to mention another couple of tools that were used at the time as well in the legal system. And one was actually using charges that would only be seen in a magistrate's court. So at the beginning of the 70s, there was a famous case the trial of the mangrove 9,

and they were brought up on things like a fray and riot charges. And these were things that were seen by a jury. And that really had a backlash against the police. And what we see by the end of the 70s with, for example, in that protest in 1979 and Southall, there were over 300,

people who were eventually charged. Over 600 are arrested, 300 are eventually charged. And they were all charged with more minor offenses, but that would be seen then in magistrates court. So wouldn't ever go to jury. And this was obviously a deliberate tactic so that people didn't have to be, there's a bit more leeway as to what could be pressed against them. They were also tried in a court miles away from where they lived in the hope that that people wouldn't go and support them. That didn't work. People were there every single day for months and months and months and

months and picketed the court and were in the public gallery and all of that. And the other thing that was really used a lot during those cases in particular was this idea of actually inculcating witnesses. So people would come and testify and they themselves would then essentially be hit with their own charges, even though they were there as a witness and had a big charge for anything. And so kind of this idea of trying to scare people. They used to have kind of things like probation was used a lot

and suspended sentences to scare people because it meant that, okay, we don't actually have to deal with you within the system. We don't have to take that cost on. But we know that you are going to be afraid and you were hopefully going to toe the line. You're probably going to pay us a lot of money over the next couple of years. as well under these conditions. And when you eventually do get arrested again because that's how the system is rigged,

we can then very quickly process you and imprison you. So these were various tactics that were used over the time. We see this change as well from these kind of big show trials throughout the 70s to kind of keeping things in the cause until the trial of the Bradford 12, which is when they went big with the terrorist charges, It's thinking that they had this in the bag after 1981, but they completely misread the room. So the case of the Oval Four in particular,

so this was in, this was just after the case of the mangrove 9, where I'd talk about where the police were humiliated and they did, they lost this case against some lead members of the British Black Panthers. And you had four young men who were, part of this black power group called the Fissimbers. And the Fisimbers, they were closely affiliated with another group called the Black Liberation Front. And the difference in these groups compared to, for example, the Black Panthers is there was a more pan-Africanist bent, and they also were trying to stay out of the public limelight so much.

They didn't really hold protests. They did a lot of things like supplementary schooling. They learned martial arts. They studied a lot of history, which all the things the Black Panthers did as well, but they also did more kind of public activities. But this wasn't really the line that the Fissimbers and the Black Liberation Front took. And then the leader of the Black Liberation Front, Tony Suarez, was arrested for reprinting a recipe for making a volatile cocktail, which I believe actually came from the US.

But he was arrested because he wasn't even. editor of the newsletter that we printed it, but he was the leader, and so he was arrested. And so the Pissimba's, these four young men, went to the headquarters of the Black Liberation Front one evening to discuss what they can do to support the campaign. And they're on their way home, and they get accosted in a tube station, in one of the subway stations, by the undercover transport police. And these are quite big at the time, and they would be at plainclothes, police officers, specifically an arm of the police just for, just for trial sport.

And they were rallying against what they termed this new phenomenon of mugging, which again, I think, was a term that came from the US. And mugging was a specific term used against black people to determine robbery. And these four black men were accosted by the police and accused of robbery. And they were all arrested, taken to the police station, separated, and beaten into signing these confessions. Now, as they were doing this, one of the, then became known as the Oval Four because they were arrested in the Oval Underground Station. Winston True, he was thinking, okay, how am I going to get out of this? We all have now signed these confessions.

What can we do? And he thought, okay, well, they were trying to get him to confess to all sorts of other crimes at the time. They literally had this kind of big book of unsolved crimes. And he thought, okay, I'm going to actually confess to some of these crimes, but only the ones where I have a solid alibi because I was at the job center, because I was unemployed, you know, saying, yes, I'm still unemployed, still looking for work, you know, I'm here at every Thursday morning. And he can prove that. And so we thought, well, as soon as a jury sees that, they're going to. to throw the case out. They're going to know that this is this is absolute rubbish. And unfortunately, that kind of backfired. Whilst the, those cases, those unsolved cases were

indeed shown to be false. They brought in the manager of the job centre who said that, yep, he's there. Every, every day we have the sheets to prove it. One of my favourite details from that case is the prosecution was so humiliated by that that they tried every which way. They literally went on the buses to see, could he have committed these crimes where he said he was and then gone to the job centre at the time he was supposed to be there? They were doing the timings to figure out if the roommates would work. Those charters were thrown out,

but this was actually used against them to say, well, see, they're liars. They're lying about these cases. Therefore, they must be lying when they say they weren't involved in this robbery that had happened, or this attempted robbery that happened at the Oval Underground. and they were all charged on multiple charges of two-year sentences, and they were concurrent sentences.

So that meant that, so I think, for example, Winston True had four charges against him. Now, this meant he thought he meant that he had eight years to defend in prison. No, no, this meant he had two years, but he was being, had those two years, each on a different charge. Now, this meant that legally it would be much more difficult for him to be freed. because if one charge was dropped, he would still be serving a sentence for one of the other charges. So this is, again, another tricksy tactic that was used. Then there was a massive campaign run by the, led by the Fisimbus, and an appeal was launched for the overfall.

And their sentences were actually cut short after about seven, eight months, which is great, but the convictions still still. and as you said Henry they were wrong for convictions and these were young black men starting their lives and they had these charges that they had to then declare and it was really

really tough and meanwhile the police officer who had arrested them Sergeant Ridgwell he's getting multiple multiple kind of coverage so we start again So Sergeant Ridgwell, the officer who arrested them, he is getting a lot of coverage because it turns out that this is kind of his modus up around that.

He goes around London arresting young black men and accusing them of various things. Does it happen in multiple cases? And there was a TD program even about him, which also included the Oval Four. And then he gets moved into another branch of the police. and he actually eventually gets imprisoned himself because it turns out that he was doing mail theft. So he eventually gets imprisoned and he ends up dying young. And when he asks kind of what happened to him,

he said that I just went bent. So this comes out that he admits to those wrong for doing. He himself was imprisoned, yet the convictions, everyone who was convicted under him, that all still stood. Until decades later, where Winston Shrew, who was one of the Oval Four he was living with this

conviction over him and he by his own words was very angry and he started looking into it he started looking into Ridwell he was using the Freedom Information Act in the UK to try and get all this information that he could and he put together he wrote his own book

which he self-published which looked into the details of his case and of Ridwell and fast forward then a few decades and a concurrent thing is happening where this white man is calling into a radio station. And he's saying how years ago I was wrongfully convicted by someone called Ridgwell.

I was arrested by Ridgwell. What can I do? And the lawyer on the end of the radio line said, okay, you should Google this police officer. So he did and he found out the Ridgwell story and he found Winston True's book. And interestingly, his book was then used to overturn the conviction of this white man who had been wrongfully convicted under Ridgwell. And so from then, the CCRC, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, finally actually took up the case of the Oval Four. And by 2019, we're talking In 2019, this is nearly 40 years after everything had happened, the overfall convictions were overturned. And so they were living with this for decades, for absolutely decades. And only in the last few years have they been exonerated from this.

And I spoke, I had the honor, I was speaking to Winston True. And he wasn't even happy at the end. He was just, he wasn't even relieved. He was just tired. He was just tired. I mean, he's been living with, living with Ridgel in his head for all these decades and with his wrongful conviction, which, yeah, which he managed to then overturn the case of a wine man, but his case took a few years longer.

And obviously, when this happened, the police were a bit sheepish, and the criminal system was a bit sheepish, but they actually said, oh, well, it's, you know, it's a shame we did that, but we're doing the right thing now, so all good. and yeah and that has that has been the story of of Winston True's lives and I would imagine also the lives of the other members of the Oval Four I want to hit on something that's kind of tangentially related to this before we turn to Adnan who will have a couple of concluding questions after this

so you know feel free to be as brief on this as you would like because it is tangentially related but when you're talking about how this self-published book became so important for these individuals. It also just reminds me of something else that came up over the course of this book a few other times, which is that you had mentioned that there was a big importance on the publishing of materials for this community and for these groups of people. And as listeners may know, I'm on the editorial board of Iskra books, so thinking about how publishing can be very useful for movements and for communities. If we can get that sort of

material into their hands, that's something that I like to think about, especially considering that, you know, listeners, Iskra Books makes all of the PDFs available for free.iskerbooks.org, plug, plug. You can get the physical copies too, but the PDFs of every book that Iskra has are free because that's, you know, we think that that's important. But then also something else that came up throughout the book is that there's this idea of education for liberation, which again is tangentially related to this idea of, you know, publishing, but you had mentioned throughout the book how the educational paradigm within Britain was set up in an incredibly racist way. And in many ways it still is, and we see this expressly perpetuate itself in many different

national context, but again, this book is looking at Britain. But we have to think about how we can combat the racist structures and also the class structures of education systems within these national contexts. And what are the sorts of community efforts that we can undertake to try to combat these structures that are put in place? So the question, and again, feel free to be as brief because it is tangential to what we were talking about. And Adnan does have a couple of concluding questions, and we want to be respectful of your time. But how should we be thinking about the publication of materials for fighting against these sorts of repressive and oppressive state structures that are constantly pushing down on marginalized communities, as well as how do we think about the role of education, the structures of racist and classist education, systems that are set up and what we can do as members of communities that are either

communities themselves that are being repressed or individuals that are standing in solidarity with these communities. What can we do from a community standpoint to combat these racists and class-based structures within education for a liberatory future? Yes, really important points your first thing about publishing and the importance of that, it's something I was really keen to emphasise in the book because there's a lot, everyone focuses on the glamorous side of organising on the protests, on the big court cases and that actually what I call kind of quiet resistance of publishing was really quite groundbreaking. And what we see is, and what we see the time was every single group would have their own newsletters, which they would either distribute

for free but usually sell for a few pennies on groups outside black and brown owned businesses. People would subscribe to them. Lots of mail order subscription existed at the time. You had more national kind of overview journals like the Race Today journal. and then you had publishing houses independent publishing houses which sprung up and there were multiple of them

and these publishing houses also had independent bookshops and you had also the black liberation for example one of the black power groups they had about two or three of their own bookshops dotted around London you had independently black and brown bookshops

across the country, some of them published and some of them just sold books that weren't available anywhere else. And these were absolutely critical. I mean, this was obviously a time very, very free internet where nothing else was available. And despite the high costs, this was seen as a very effective way of distributing information. So as well as as those journals was actually this book which leads into the education which is called

how the West Indian child is made educationally subnormal and this is an example of the book that was essentially crowdfunded to be published because none of the major publishers were going to touch it so the smaller publishing houses

they put their money behind it and did their own printing and distribution distribution was at that point house to house and this was an important book which showed how black children in particular were being categorized as educationally subnormal and funneled off into special schools, which were essentially just kind of holding houses where they were taught to kind of very basic skills, nothing academic, and very few people ever went back to a mainstream education. And so there was a lot of effort as well to, as well as using things like this book to, to, to, to, to lobby the government to change his policy and recognize that policy was happening. The other thing that was going on at the time, recognizing that this would take a long time, is the creation of supplementary schools.

We see this springing up in from the late 60s. And we don't have numbers on how many existed because they were, they're called schools, but it was basically in people's houses. A few had their own kind of official centres. But essentially what it would be is on a, perhaps a Wednesday evening or a Saturday morning, a few young black children from the area would go to the house of a local community leader. They might not even be a teacher. They might be an activist.

It might be a publisher. They might just be a very interested party. and they would have this completely different kind of schooling. And they would do some of the traditional topics. They would look at reading, writing, maths, but they would do so through a black lens. They would look at reading comprehension by reading books like how the slave trade was started.

They would read Solidab Brother. They looked at pan-Africanism. They talked about big ideas and looked at the history of where they came from. And this was obviously completely new. And this was not covered at all in the schools. Then you had some attempts to create black studies as a subject in a couple of schools, but this was very kind of quickly shut down by the government authorities. And supplementary schools were very, very popular, even though we don't know how many

there were, they were very popular. And a lot of our prominent thinkers in the UK credit supplementary schools as the origins of their radical thinking. And they also still exist today. And there's now a national association in the force at supplementary schools, which exists in order to try and connect people. and connect schools. And so this is something that has kind of really stood the test of time.

There's a few organizations from the 60s to 80s, including various housing associations, including one of the bookshops as well, which still exists. I think the supplementary schools are seen as one of the most successful ways. And I think one of those ideas where you can definitely see how it can be introduced today, where it's fairly low resource to, start and high impact and yeah I think a lot of the time when see we're looking to history for for learnings and a lot of the things who say oh well conditions are very different today we're

not going to start our own publishing house that's not that's not feasible and but like you say we have we have pdeps now we have zines we have podcasts um but supplementary schools I think are a phenomenal model um in looking at terms of education for for liberation it really instilled a sense of pride in people. Well, indeed, it's so important to have these histories told. You've made a big contribution to that, of course, with this book. But I did want to say that I loved this reference that you had in the conclusion that no one expected, you know, Ridgwell or Pulley to suddenly realize their errors and buy a copy of

CLR. James as the Black Jacobins from New Beacon Books. I was just at New Beacon Books for a book event about a graphic novel portraying the Haitian Revolution, Tucson, Lower Virture, and it was packed. There were like 60, 70 people crammed into this tiny bookstore because people really want to hear these stories and learn about these histories. In fact, actually, this graphic novel is based on CLR. James's play that preceded the Black Jacobins. And listeners, of course, if you haven't already gone and heard our interview with the authors of the graphic novel, Tucson, Low Berger, go and listen to that. But these things are really important to give people a sense of grounding in their histories and their identities, and to give them a sense that resistance was possible, has made a change, has made a difference. And it reminds me that since we brought up your conclusion and you've been so generous with your time, so I just want to give you a chance maybe now to talk about what you took from the post-1981 period to the present.

And the kinds of recommendations, well, not quite recommendations, but reflections that you had at the end. You had another beautiful line that I really loved, which was that it wasn't, this book wasn't a guide book. It was a history book that unexpectedly turned into a call to arms, which I'm very much in sympathy with. That's the kind of history we need. But I was wondering if maybe you would reflect a little bit about some of the conclusions and what you would call people to arms too, especially since, as we've seen over the last couple of decades, the way in which anti-racism work has been co-opted by the state. by a kind of anti-racism industry that's kind of become corporatized and is part of neoliberal human resources, basically, you know, this is what we're seeing. And it allows situations where you have

somebody like Suella Braberman as home minister, giving essentially a second kind of rivers of blood speech that actually in some ways was worse than Enoch Powell's and suffering no real consequences for it. I mean, that's the difference is that in this case it is a woman with South Asian, you know, of South Asian descent, who is part of this, you know, conservative cabinet can throw red meat to the extreme right wing and actually not be forced to resign the way Enoch Powell was. I mean, as you pointed out, it didn't end up achieving much because they still put forward his plans about restricting immigration and so on. But we have a case, we have a case now where, you know, there's been a lot of appropriation. And there are

paths and avenues for advancement in society if you're willing to, you know, reflect a right-wing agenda and abandon the interests of the larger black and brown community. There are lots of opportunities for people who are willing to do that. And so, you know, know, what do you recommend, you know, what do we have to keep in mind from this history? And what is the call to arms? You know, I thought you had some great analysis and great reflections here. So maybe you could share a little bit more of your conclusions in light of that situation that we've been facing for the last 20, 30 years, where the forms of racism have changed where, but nonetheless, you know, there may be progress in certain fronts, but

fundamentally we still have real issues on the agenda that we have to, that we have to face and confront. Yeah. And so the reason I stopped the book in 1981 is because this is the exact time where we start to then see this shift to what we see today. We see the rise of kind of anti-racism from above where you have black and brown people and now let into the political parties. You have black section of the Labour Party.

You have the Bengalis in the eastern end of London who are trying to join the Labour Party. Suddenly they're not only conjoined, but they're elected as local councillors. Then 1987, you have the first four black and brown MPs of the modern era who get elected. And you have community relations officers springing up. You have this whole race relations

in kind of industrialisation that was going on. at this time and as a way to try and get co-op to all the radical segments and all those segments who had always argued for working with the state suddenly they were given this way in and they thought oh great we had this massive uprising and now actually were being listened to so let's let's kind of go for and a lot of state funding that was happening at the time as well they were pumping money into groups, but only if they were based on certain, they don't have to identify as certain ethnicities. So this is where we also start to see the breakdown of the solidarity that was so common from the 60s to 80s. You had to identify as Indian or as Pakistani. You couldn't

just identify as Asian. You couldn't apply as black. You also had to start applying under the banner of women and as a women, black women's group in particular. And so this led to a lot of competition, obviously, for state funding between groups and people had to really isolate and show that their cause was the most worthy. So we come to today. And I think my main, my main to have two main I think call to arms for our time period

and one is not to see this representation as the answer and when Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister it was really interesting to see their reactions

I mean people were just were celebrating and like hurrah this is fantastic you know we have a we have a Brown Prime Minister and And it's a kind of imagine the same jubilation that happened when Batcha became Prime Minister.

It was, meanwhile, a few of us were sitting around saying, okay, we don't want to, you know, we don't want to be seen as, you know, kind of traitors to our community, but really? Like, are you kidding me? And so I think representation is not the answer. And that is not an easy pill to swallow. that is a really, really, because that's been seen as the answer. I mean, that's what all the diversity and inclusion schemes are about. It's about getting minorities of all kinds into, into the establishments.

And I'm not saying that it's a bad thing per se. I mean, I'd rather that than, you know, having the same kind of makeup as we had back in the 60s. But the problem is we start. also have a House of Lords. We still also have a monarchy. We still have just a two-party system based on first past the posts. And most people have been to Oxford or Cambridge or have known each other, have come from money. And so what really changes? We look at Rishi Sunak. How many of us can identify with Rishi Sunat? Who is he representing, really? He's one of the richest prime minutes we've ever had. And so I think it's, and it's really hard because, especially like,

for example, in the US, you know, I look up to AOC, who doesn't, right? And we have fantastic female brown ministers in the UK as well, like Apana Begum. But it's, it's one, it's one prong and it's not going to be the answer. It's the plaster, it's the bandaid on, on the situation. have to look at the bigger structures. We had a referendum a few years ago to change the first past the post system. And I thought that would be the moment that things really would change. But that was shot down because all the alternatives were seen as a bit too complicated for people to understand, or at least, you know, that was the party line. And so that would be my first call to arms is to focus on the bigger structures, to not focus on representation,

to not get bogged down in looking at just individual police officers that, yes, we should absolutely bring to justice those who do absolutely horrific things, but we're looking at the bigger structure that why do we have a police force to start with and in whose interests are they serving? And then the second thing I'd like people to keep in mind today is that idea of solidarity.

So it's, I get asked, a lot of how we can recapture that. And I'm also not saying that it was perfect. It wasn't, you know, everyone wasn't getting along. It wasn't all hugs and roses. There were a lot of factions. There were a lot of divisions back then as well. But there absolutely was more solidarity along race and class and recognition race and class than there was today. And this is also a really interesting one because we don't have the same class makeup as we did back then. For example, Indians in the UK are far wealthier than Pakistanis and Bangladeshi and actually some of the white demographic. And so it would really, it really takes a lot of, um, introspection and a lot

of work for communities to, to see across these class lines and actually, uh, would actually work to actually work together again. But that is another thing that needs to be taken into account is to recognize the similarities between people's struggles and not just the differences. That Islamophobia doesn't just affect the Muslim community. It affects everyone in the UK. And so that is something, again, is a very hard conversations to be had. A lot of conversations need to be at about anti-blackness within the brown community. That was started in 2020 after George Mood's murder.

but there's a lot to be learned in terms of solidarity and to take forward from that. And then I have one which is less in terms of activism and more from the historian point of that we need to document these stories more. That people need to talk to their parents and their grandparents and get them to dust off whatever boxes they have, in the attic and give them to archives, that this information matters, the photos matter, that their stories matter, that they need to tell their stories, record them and have them

archived. And it's especially important for the women's history of this era, for brown history in this era. There's a black cultural archives, but the history of brown activism in this time is really piecemeal and scattered and archives are crying out for it and as are we as historians and as activists learning today we need this to be

to be in the archives and that is a plea that I have that I think everyone can get involved in well there's a lot more that we could ask but we will be respectful of your time and close for now as that was a really terrific concluding remark again

listeners, our guest was Pertie Dillon, who was a researcher historian and author of the book that we've been discussing today, the shoulders we stand on how black and brown people fought for change in the United Kingdom. Really great read. Highly recommend everybody pick it up. We'll have it linked in the show notes. And of course, on Twitter, we will have the link to the book as well when we put out this promo tweet about this episode. Pertie, it was really great to have you on the show today. It was a pleasure to talk with you. It was a pleasure to read your book. Can you let the listeners know how they can find your book and more of your work? Keep up to date with what you're working on. Yes, absolutely. So you can find me on Twitter at Prithee K. Dillon or on

Instagram at Prithee Dillon underscore Rights, as in W and not the R. And in In North America, you can buy my book, Blackwells.co.com. They ship to North America and worldwide, actually. And in the UK, you can find it at all good bookstores, preferably independent. And there's also audio version, not read by me, and obviously the e-book as well. Terrific. And of course, we will have all of that linked in the show notes as well. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other excellent podcasts?

and also let us know what the latest episode that'll be out is. Well, you can follow me on Twitter. Yes, I'm going to keep calling it Twitter until I'm no longer on any platform. At Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. And you can take a listen to my other podcast, The M-A-J-L-I-S. It's somehow migrated not by anything I did to Spotify now, but it's available on all the other platforms and we have

one fun episode and one very you know disturbed disturbing episode one is a Middle East roundup about what's going on in the Middle East with Juan Cole and of course it's very sobering and the other is a kind of fun episode I talked with Gene Bajelon about Dune

the movie and the sort of use of kind of Islamic history and themes and also whether it is a good anti-colonialist film or not. So listeners, you may enjoy those. Fascinating. As somebody who knows absolutely nothing about Dune, knowing that there's an episode of the Mudgellus coming out about it, might encourage me to either read it or watch it. As I understand, there's a book and a movie. That's about the extent of my knowledge of that.

Yeah, there's a book series from the middle 60s by Frank Herbert, and the first book has been turned into a two-part movie. So there's, you know, the first and the second part. They're interesting and much discussed these days, I think. So anyway, Gene Bajalan was very interesting and entertaining about the book and the movie, the political projects involved. and so listeners, you might enjoy that. Yeah, it's always funny because this is just as an aside before we wrap up.

Adnan is not to give anything away, but Adnan is quite a bit older than I am, but he's also much more in tune with the culture than I am. I know when we talked about the Toussaint-Lovertshire graphic novel, I had mentioned like, I only found out that graphic novels were a thing like two years ago, and Adnan was like, I have been reading them for however many decades. And now, you know, Adnan's telling me about these science fiction things that I had no idea exists. Man, I tell you, I am living under a rock.

But if you want to keep up with me and the things that I do living under the rock, you can follow me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1995. I'm going to encourage everybody to check out Iskra Books again, which I am on the editorial board of IskraBooks.org. Just download everything for free. Why not? Or pick up the physical books if you want to help support the podcast. publishing company, as it's a, you know, non-profit volunteer run thing. Nobody gets anything

for it, but there are operating expenses. As for guerrilla history, you can help us keep the lights on and help allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow us on Twitter. Yes, I am also calling it Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A- underscore pod. And until next time, listeners, solidarity. Thank you.