Enoch Powell: No Room For Asians? Rubbish! No Room For Racism! An Open Letter To A Racist Politician [1973]

Submitted by dalcassian on 31 March, 2013 - 7:36

NO ROOM FOR ASIANS? RUBBISH! NO ROOM FOR RACISM!

Many things have changed greatly in the four decades since this “open letter” to Britain's foremost racist agitator, the Tory MP, Enoch Powell, was written.

It appeared in the paper Workers' Fight, published by what is now the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, in two of the industrial papers, for dockers and steel workers, which we also published, and in leaflets which we gave out on demonstrations.

The labour movement was then at the peak of its strength and militancy. Within a year we would bring down the Tory Government and replace it with the Wilson Labour Government. The same chauvinist abuse, scapegoating, and hostility hurled now at immigrants from Eastern Europe was then directed at Asians and Afro-Caribbean. Then, however, the shameless nationalism and racism, though it was very influential, came mainly from right-wing political fringes.

Powell, a leading Tory, was dismissed from the Tory Shadow Cabinet by Edward Heath in 1968 because he made an inflammatory racist speech. Today Prime Minister Cameron is one of the worst chauvinist demagogues. The "Open Letter", written by Sean Matgamna, appeared under the names of Tony Duffy, editor of Real Steel News and Harold Youd, editor of The Hook.


AN OPEN LETTER TO ENOCH POWELL

LISTEN, POWELL!

The Tory Government and the bosses it serves now desperately need all the help you can give them. We have - so far - thwarted its plans and defeated it, again and again. We have spat on its laws. And we will drive it from office before long.

WE? The working class. The men and women of all creeds and colours who do the work in Britain, who man the factories, drive the trains, clean the streets, erect the buildings, care for the sick in hospitals, build the ships and load and unload them, stoke the furnaces and dig the coal. We, the real people of Britain, the "Lower classes", on whose backs your class stands.

Millions upon millions of workers hate and despise this Tory Government. They recognise it as their most bitter enemy, and they demand its immediate resignation.

And that's where you crawl out of your rat hole. You see the tragedy of the Uganda Asians as another chance to whip up racialist hysteria In Britain. Wrapped in the cloak of a far-seeing 'patriot', a man who speaks for the 'People', your service to the bosses is to try to get the Tories off the hook by dividing worker against worker, white against black; to deflect the anger of the working class, to head off its discontent and to pit one part of our ranks against another, to our common injury and to the benefit of your class.

Your message is the sick message of hatred and division. In the name of averting a "national catastrophe" you want to promote a working class catastrophe — that of racial conflict. You harvest race hatred and you sow it. You have become the prophet of a race war which you do your best and worst to set alight.

After your 1968 speeches, fascists organised anti-black demonstrations, and racialist gangs took to assaulting black workers and youths - IN YOUR NAME.

That, Powell, is where you link arms with the Mosley fascists and the National Front, those sick and obscene gangs of misfits, Hitler-lovers who get their kicks from hatred of blacks and Jews, and who want to destroy the trade unions and labour movement.

That is why you are one of the most dangerous enemies of the British working class - black and white - right now. You are the carrier of a disease of racialism that could ravage the working class and cripple our ability to go on standing up to the attacks of
Heath's Government.

You are also the biggest fraud and con-man in the whole Tory party. You are a shameless, habitual, bare-faced liar. AND WE CAN PROVE IT.

YOU SAY: Immigration equals national catastrophe. Why? How? For whom? Immigrants to any healthy society are an asset and a "bonus". They are fully grown, educated (and they are educated) and capable of working, whereas additions to the population by natural increase need years of education, care and social benefits.

You play on the fears and the insecurity of workers under capitalism. But you, Powell, are a fanatical defender of capitalism and enemy of socialism, which is the real solution to the problems of the working class.

You believe in the free market, even if it means 3 million unemployed. You care nothing for the working class or for the effects of capitalism. You are against the Trade Unions, you were a minister in a Tory government whose every anti-working class act you supported.

You are no "friend of the ordinary man". No — you have nothing but a spiv's contempt for working people. You have one concern only – to divide our class on the Idiotic basis of skin colour, to cripple us in the real fight.

Keeping out immigrants will not solve unemployment or any other problem: If workers listen to you they will be less able to fight unemployment. Instead of attacking its real cause they will start attacking each other.

You are not the exponent of a cure for our ills: you are an ulcerated carrier of the disease - capitalism - which afflicts British society.

YOU SAY: Britain is overcrowded. But what about the thousands who LEAVE every year?

YOU SAY: That immigrants differ in culture and background. Yes, they do. (So do the Welsh, English, Scots and Irish, and the large numbers of European workers who came here after the war.) But not nearly so much as the culture, lifestyle and values of the British workers differ from those of our British boss class.

The breadth of understanding, the real culture, even the general knowledge, of the British working class is in fact all the better, is all the richer, for the mixing. Our understanding of a common interest with workers of other countries is sharper for the experience. Our grasp of the need for INTERNATIONAL working-class solidarity is stronger for the contact.

In the Common Market the working class will only be able to defend itself by cutting across narrow nationalism and forging strong links with European trade unionists.

That's what worries you, Powell, and your class, - as does the sight of black and white and Asian workers united on flying pickets. The working class maxim UNITY IS STRENGTH applies outside the country, as well as in it.

You SAY: The British people are denied the facts about what is happening in their country. But whose country is It, Powell? Two or three per cent of the people — those you represent — own all the substantial wealth of the country. They contribute little or nothing to the wealth of the country, to the well being of the majority of its people.

50,000 immigrants who work for just so much as one year (and they do work) will contribute more to the common wealth of the British people than will the whole gaggle of spivs and parasites that make up the ruling class during all the natural lives of a whole useless generation of them.

Black workers have more right to live in this country than all the winter-in-the-Bahamas set, all the Reggie Maudlings, the Arnold Welnstocks. the Lord Vesteys and the Enoch Powells - they have earned that right through hard work. And one day, quite soon perhaps, they will help "us" make it really OUR country by taking it out of the hands of rats like you.

In 1968 some muddled workers joined with fascists in supporting you. Since then the working class has felt its own strength, it has got a clearer picture of its real enemy now than for a long time past. It has the experience of a series of victorious struggles in common with tens of thousands of black and Asian workers.

Many militants must and will rally to protect our black brothers it the fascist gangs and backward workers of '68 once again try to use the 'respectable' cover you provide to attack blacks and Asians.

This time working class militants, black and white, can create defence groups to drive your fascist followers back into the sewers from which you encourage them to emerge. If they don't, they are allowing you, Powell, and your class, to inflict a wound on the working class which can turn septic.

With all our hearts we, working class militants from the port and steel industries, pledge ourselves to fight to root out, and to wipe out, the racialist poison you represent for our class.

The black workers are our brothers in the struggle of the working class. You, Powell, contemptible gutter-rat that you are, are one of the most diseased representatives of everything we are struggling against.

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