MLRD — 2 years ago(June 21, 2023 10:23 PM)

THE story of the Empire Windrush, which docked 75 years ago tomorrow, should be a cause for celebration as well as for anger.
We should champion the contributions of immigrants who have brought so much to this country, as well as their courage in the face of state and popular racism.
The passengers on the Windrush were asked to come here, to help rebuild a Britain impoverished by war.
This was in the optimistic years following the defeat of fascism, with a reforming government at home building the NHS and nationalising industry while independence for India raised hopes that the era of colonial servitude was over.
Many on the Windrush were enthusiastic about their prospects here, but we should not lose sight of the economic need they satisfied for Britain’s rulers.
Voluntary passage on the Windrush was worlds away from kidnap, forced transportation and enslavement, but black people were brought to Britain from the West Indies because British capital wanted them here, as centuries before black people were taken to the West Indies from Africa because British capital could profit from it.
But Britain was not the post-imperial, socialist victor over fascism many hoped it would become under the 1945 Labour government.
It was a savage imperial power still, already lining up with the United States in the global confrontation against both Soviet socialism and Third World liberation movements that became known as the cold war.
It had rearmed surrendered Japanese soldiers to help crush independence forces in Vietnam and Indonesia and would go on to fight multiple colonial wars in Africa and Asia in the years to come.
Imperialism and racism go hand in hand and immigrants entered the working class subjected to a racial oppression which was frequently expressed in hostility, abuse and violence.
None of these questions are behind us. In 2014 when Diane Abbott led a lonely six Labour MPs in opposing the Immigration Act, she warned that measures supposedly designed to target irregular migrants would be deployed against black Britons.
The Windrush scandal proved her right, as long-term British residents were seized, deported, denied medical care.
Suella Braverman defends her anti-immigration policy despite herself being a child of immigrants on the grounds that her parents were “good” immigrants who “embraced British values.” But the Windrush scandal victims do not differ from her in any failure to integrate. They differ because they are not just black but working class.
Braverman has this year dropped commitments to act on recommendations of the Windrush Inquiry, as she works to create a hostile environment crueller and more arbitrary even than Theresa May’s.
She can be beaten. The Windrush scandal forced her predecessor Amber Rudd from office — testimony to the determination of anti-racist campaigners, assisted by a principled Labour opposition in Parliament, with Abbott as shadow home secretary.
That victory demonstrated the real strength of Britain’s anti-racist movement — a strength shown currently by the brilliant counter-demonstrations taking on fascists trying to intimidate refugees, fascists who — unlike in France, Germany, Italy or Spain — remain marginal to our political scene.
We must mobilise that strength not just in defence of new arrivals, but to address the systematic oppression of black people so sharply illustrated by the Covid pandemic, expressed in everything from work to housing to healthcare.
That means taking on a ruling class seeking to divide and rule — that dares, like Braverman, to blame immigrants for pressure on housing and public services when Tory governments have engineered crises in both.
It is no accident so many of history’s most famous anti-racists — from Angela Davis to Claudia Jones, from Martin Luther King Jnr to Nelson Mandela — have also been implacable opponents of the capitalist system.
The anti-racist cause is the cause of workers’ unity. We must work to build a united front against racism and fascism committed to the liberation of our whole class.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/race-class-and-empire-how-windrush-saga-can-inform-left