THERE IS a real shift in consciousness going on among Britain's black community, DIANE ABBOTT, of the Labour Black Section Committee and the Women's Action Committee. And even they're not participating directly in the development of black sections in the party, they're certainly watching closely. She discussed with ALAN FREEMAN alliances for Labour.
It's obvious from the Queen's speech that the Tories are going to make a big deal out of law and order. back people?
It's really an attempt to criminalise dissent. Anyone who resists Tories, whether it's miners, students, Greenham women, teachers or black kids on street corners, is branded as criminal in public discourse. You can see this from the way they make a point of linking strikes, pickets, marches and hooligans.
The appeal 'to law and order is very seductive; it conjures up images of security and stability, peals to the fear of the mob. This has been the authoritarian throughout the ages.
In fact it's crazy. peace and stability, the last thing you need is water cannons and plastic bullets on the inner-city estates. It will just turn our streets into something approaching Derry.
Its aim, of course, is not to deal with criminal activity but to keep protest off the streets.
But it won't achieve this either. Every time there is a riot we are told there are 'outside agitators'. In Northern Ireland we are told 'IRA holds the community in thrall'. But just as the IRA couldn't survive without popular support, ment which young black people make has a resonance in the wider community.
These manifestations of dissent are not just marginal. just fringe elements. much wider feeling throughout the working class.
nepression alms to suppress this much wider dissent. In fact, however, it is having an opposite eftect. 1 was on the Anti Apartheid march and I noticed thousands of young people who had no previous involvement in politics.
Thatcher is forcing people into alliances. She is forcing recognise for the first time that they Collie almost being politicised against their will.
Black people have been, I think quite rightly, extremely distrustful of the British movement Labour Party. Do you think this new politicisation indicates a change?
There is a real shift in consciousness going on. Many people used to vote Labour but were not interested in making alliances with Party. They perceive the Labour Party, as an arm of capitalism — with, I must say, remarkable clarity. But now they are coming round to the notion that they have to construct alliances, so they are becoming what is going on in the Labour Party.
Take Lester Lewis in Hackney, who 've known trom a long time back. He used to be a very strong Pan-Africanist. I was very surprised recently to see he has become a coun cillor: it indicates the sort of changes that are going on.
How do you think black people see the black section?
They see black people in the Labour Illaking themselves Whether or not they agree tactic, they still approve of the fact that it is being done.
argues ing to, National if couldn't understand it. The You said that what LOOK alliances Black people, What do LaCKS the used?
whose interest does it work?
state.
and it apappeal British colonialism, If you want what it represents.
self-organisation.
for us as soon as we raised it.
that the the stateThey are not They express a black Diane Abbot them to They are thinks of older peaceful protest against British rule the Labour Morrisonian interested Emit.
Labour Party need?
You have felt. with the I remember a white guy I wa: = 1who was up on brodeFarm recently and was amazed :: * that all the youth saw the biais ie: tion debate on the telly, and fo_c»=: the whole debate in the Guardi they are extremely interested even if they are not taking par.
people were drawn into political activity in of alliances. What kind of alliaaces.
around the questions of state power.
unlonists, people in Northern Ireland are all being drawn together by the state's atDo you mean an alliance around the existence of the state, or the way it is Primarily around the way it is used. But inevitably this will lead people to question its existence, and to ask 'in The labour movement has ignored the state. Black people can't ignore it. *We have always had an analysis of the I don't mean a deep, theoretical I mean our experience of authorities, the police, has taught us That's one of the reasons, I think, why there is such hositility to black moderate demand, yet everyone went Kinnock came boring in to tell us we absolutely can't have it. What are they frightened of?
I think they see us as a sort of virus which will infect people with opposi tion to the state. After all, we've beer fighting it for long enough. Everyone Afro-Caribbean peochurch-goers, forgets that 50 years ago their aunts and uncles were burning canefields in Our approach is a challenge to all the Fabian assumptions that the state is a power for good as long as it is in the right hands. It is a challenge to the theory of nationalisation; to the idea that all you have to do is set up big bureaucratic corporations without any popular control.
We are a virus, and I hope we'll start an epidemic: of refusal to subWhat sort of alliances do you think black people need within the Labour I would look at it the other way round: what kind of alliances does the to start an understanding that all white people are racist. Some of the most pernicious are those who claim to be 'anti-racist'. We can't just ally with - TEET 1 TE 45 peopie =:
We canne: al arc do not accept inss. prepared to ассері а стас* reductionism that says 'at the end of the day, black people and women are expendable'. You can't have unity on the basis of white control. An alliance has to be around what black people themselves want.
The people who oppose this are really saying they know what is best for black people. We are fed up to the back teeth with this. Even Bill Morris, when you put his back to the wall even though in public he says what the bureaucracy tells him, rebels at white people defining what black people need.
The same applies to Women have really been turned over by the left in the Labour Party. Look at the result of reselection. In London, it looks as if Labour will have only two women MPs - after all the gestures and declarations of support for the miners' wives.
There were no male speakers in favour of WAC's positions at the Labour Party debate and WAC keeps losing its resolutions. This year it even lost a proposal that was backed by the NEC, that there whould be a woman on every shortlist.
And when you look at some of the men who have been reselected, it is a real slap in the face for women to say that they are not up to this standard What do you think of what Neil Kin. nock has been doing?
No one can say he is a prisoner of the right any more, that's for sure. No one is forcing him to say what he says. It's his own choice. He is trying to distance himself from the party more and i tore in his presentation.
His speech was very popular even among some of the left because he attacked which is the left's weak flank. But he was actually attacking the whole of the left. When he attacked Liverpool, he was going tol all the councils who might prepared to take on illegality He is playing on people's desire to win the election and get rid of Thatcher. But in all the rapturous press acclaim. Joe Haines made the most astute comment. He said that he made Steel and Owen look like 'pygmies'. What he meant is that if you want to know who is best at marginalising socialism and containing an insurgent working class, then Kinnock's your man The point is, however, line can't win the election. He has accepted the agenda: law order, selling council houses on. But we can't win by fighting on the Tories' agenda.
Why don't working class people vote Labour? Not because it's too extreme, but because they can't see the difference.
It's very distressing. If the only reason to have him is to win the election and he can't even do that, then what's the point?
Can this rightward trend be reversed?
I think there's a lot to be optimistic about. If I can go back to the Anti Apartheid march: there when I could go on these marches and I knew every black face. In the last two years there has been an enormous women.
be that this and so untapped energy young black : people.
the analysis and the black analysis been was a time ASION of white support us and meaning coming in, the energy of black people and above all You could see the same process in The feminist has accepted in the ranks of the NUM who were once the 'grenadier guards of the labour movement', the male patriarchy.
What a change it is to see straight, white, male miners standing up really meaning it Then take Thatcher's new legis tion. She reacts a bit like the So Alcan government. think that if you don't film it, the isn't happening. She thinks tha people don't march, then there any dissent. But the dissent is the and it won't be intimidated out of e istence.
History shows that once the work ing class starts to mobilise, straig repression will not work.
Socialist Action ON THE day before he was executed, South African freedom 15 November 1985 on!' this simple message of support: Fight COLONIALISM