Ever since the start of industrial history the ruling classes have sought propaganda methods to divert the attention of the workers from the ineptitude and savagery of capitalism. Imperialism and Race have been used with recurrent fervour for this purpose – and with great success. Both issues are closely interlocked. Hand in hand with propaganda about the glories of empire – so assiduously used to drug the militancy of the worker in the last century – went the notion that those conquered by British marauders were in some way intrinsically inferior to them. For the British such notions were tinged with colour. For the colonised peoples were almost all black or brown, while the British colonists, including those in Australia and America, were white. Thus all white men were great men, and all black men were ignorant illiterate savages. This was no accidental conclusion. It was the deliberate propaganda of 19th century imperialists. Paul Foot, article 1965, ‘Imperialism and Race Ideologies’
Race had played a big part in the election in the Midlands especially at Smethwick where the Tory campaign was supported with the slogan, ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’. As a result, Labour trimmed its original opposition to Commonwealth immigration controls, and adopted a fudged compromise.
On that Clapham lorry Wilson could easily have retreated into this compromise and answered the racist taunts with the usual politician’s claptrap, ‘On the one hand, this, on the other, that’. But he didn’t. Every time the cry went up, ‘Send home the blacks,’ he rounded on the heckler, angry and sarcastic. ‘Whom should we send home? The nurses in our hospitals? The people who drive our buses? Where would our health service be without the black workers who keep it going?’ These questions were greeted with great roars of approval from the crowd, and the hecklers were silenced ...
As the months of Labour government went on, the joy subsided, but the hope persevered. My first really grim disillusionment came in July 1965, when the government ushered in immigration laws far more racist and ruthless than anything the Tories had contemplated ...
In 1967 he re-imposed the health prescription charges he’d abolished. In 1968 he sanctioned another, even more racist, immigration act to keep out persecuted Asians from East Africa. In 1969 he proposed to ban unofficial strikes, the first plan for anti-union laws since the war. Throughout all this he supported the barbaric US invasion of Vietnam with a passion which inspired the US president Johnson to describe him as ‘another Churchill’. Paul Foot, article June 1995, ‘Pipe Dreams’
We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen. Enoch Powell, speech 20th April 1968
As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. ibid.
I would like to see a time when man loves his fellow man and forgets his colour of his creed. We will never be civilized until that time comes. I know the Negro race has a long road to go. I believe that the life of the Negro race has been a life of tragedy, of injustice, of oppression. The law has made him equal, but man has not. Clarence Darrow, 1857-1938, speech 19th May 1926
Mortimer: Of course there’s something wrong with him. He’s a Negro. Probably been stealing since he could crawl. Trading Places 1983 starring Dan Aykroyd & Eddie Murphy & Ralph Bellamy & Don Ameche & Denholm Elliott & Jamie Lee Curtis & Kristin Holby & Paul Gleason, director John Landis
Randoph: We took a perfectly useless psychopath like Valentine and turned him into a successful executive. During the same time we turned an honest hard-working man into a violently deranged would-be killer. Ha ha ha ...
Mortimer: Do you really believe I would have a nigger run our family business, Randolph?
Randolph: Of course not. Neither would I. ibid.
A jewel set in Australia’s northern sea is Bathurst Island – it’s inhabited by a people whose instincts are not far removed from the lower animals. White missionaries have come among the coloured Aboriginals; they are doing noble work in saving the blacks from themselves. Pathé News
The general English populace has no idea of the Jewish danger ... Our worst Jews only operate behind the scenes ... We look forward to the day when we can say with force and authority: England for the English! Jews get out! Unity Mitford, open letter
The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it alone – its ideologies and intentions – which eradicates autonomous civilisations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. Susan Sontag, cited Partisan Review 1967
This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture ... I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist. Glenn Beck
How can we say to a Negro in Jackson when war comes you will be an American citizen but in the meantime you’re a citizen of Mississippi, and we cannot help you? How by any moral standards can we tell our Negro citizens our forefathers brought your forefathers over here against their will and we are going to make you pay for it? Yet isn’t that what this argument boils down to? The United States is dominated by white people politically and economically. The question is whether we in this position of dominance are going to have not the charity but the wisdom to stop penalising our fellow citizens whose only former sin is that they were born. Robert Kennedy
I think the great divisions in the country at the present moment are between those who are less affluent – our black citizens, Mexican-Americans and those who are poor whites – and the rest of the United States. They feel that they have been disenfranchised. Or that they have no association or identification with the United States government or with our society. That is the division. Robert Kennedy
Some of the Turks ... and the Blacks ... their nature is like the nature of mute animals ... they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does. Rabbi Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, Book III Chapter 51
There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. Loving v Virginia 388 US 1 1967
I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust ... We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better. Thurgood Marshall
And I’ll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl’s revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students’ Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I’m talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this – this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it’s probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you. Christopher Hitchens
Ford of Britain can produce 3,100 cars a day. Made in Dagenham 2010 starring Bob Hoskins & Miranda Richardson & Sally Hawkins & Geraldine James & Rosamund Pike & Andrea Riseborough & Jaime Winstone & Daniel Mays & Richard Schiff & Phil Cornwell et al, director Nigel Cole, Ford advert
Now occupy more than seven square miles. ibid.
‘Those for industrial action hands up.’ ibid. Albert
‘Machinists threatening strike action – they couldn’t believe it.’ ibid.
‘That is not unskilled work.’ ibid. Rita convenor
‘Everybody out.’ ibid.
‘26,000 strikes in the United Kingdom.’ ibid. Barbara Castle
‘Because they can. They’re allowed to pay women a lower wage than men. All over the country women are getting less because they’re women.’ ibid. Albert
‘It’s a glimpse innit of what it could be.’ ibid. woman
‘This strike is about one thing and one thing only – fairness.’ ibid.
‘In six months’ time your union won’t exist. Industry cannot afford to pay women the same rates as men ... It will collapse under the weight of the extra wages.’ ibid. Ford boss
Ford Women Fight On ... Tide Turns Against Dagenham Women. ibid. newspaper headline
‘Rights is not privileges.’ ibid. Rita
‘It was a matter of principle. You had to stand up and do what was right otherwise you wouldn’t be able to look yourself in the mirror ... When did we in this country decide to stop fighting? ... We are the working classes, the men and the women ... Equal pay for women is right.’ ibid. Rita at conference
‘What’s worth fighting for?’ ibid. Rita to Barbara Castle
‘The government is in full support of the creation of an Equal Pay Act.’ ibid. Barbara Castle
‘Nobody expected us to come out on strike.’ ibid. striker
How are we fallen! Fallen by mistaken rules,
And education’s, more than nature’s, fools;
Debarred from all improvements of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and designed. Anne Finch, The Introduction, 1913