Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

planning meeting on 12 April. It led to the whole community taking to the streets on 23 April
to protest at the invasion of the town. Businesses, factories and transport were stopped
from 1pm onwards. Anti-fascists from across London came to Southall in support. The protest
was met by an enormous police presence of 2,700+ officers, including the Special
Patrol Group, which first penned people between cordons, to protect the fascists, and then
used inordinate violence to clear the streets, during which Blair Peach was killed by a blow
to the head and others received serious injuries. (8)
Virginity tests (intimate vaginal checks), supposedly to detect whether fiancées were bona
fide, were carried out at points of entry to the UK not only outraged Southall but the whole
country. And there was much more upheaval in India where every paper and magazine
covered it, and for the first time there was a debate on UK immigration matters in the Indian
parliament. The Indian government made strong diplomatic protests and took the case
to the united Nations. In two days, the British government had to stop these shameful acts.
(We had known that this was going on from 1969, and were complaining about it but government
denied it was happening.) But a girl came from Delhi to Southall in 1979 and at the airport
she was given a gynecological test. Suddenly, because the fiancé found she had signed
a so-called letter of consent when she had no idea what she was signing, it became an issue.
The consent form was brought to the IWA and then was publicly released and published on
the front page of the Guardian and debates then held in the British parliament. The community
had a great victory, they knew that they could move governments!
HP: How do we fight on?
VS: We have to be organised. And I am very proud of the Southall community, I can tell you,
because here, not only the young people who have been victims of racism, not only women,
the whole community, not just the black and Asian, even white people organised in trade
unions and conscious, radical people, the whole Southall community, when it feels that it is
threatened, all come out in the streets – this happened in 1976, this happened in 1979 and it
happened last year in July 1981. These three examples show quite clearly not just that Southall
com- munity is able to fight back, but also Southall community is able to move international
opinion on these sorts of matters. I am very proud that Southall is at the forefront of the
overall fight against racism.
In my view, racism has gone much further than just personal attacks and dam- aging property
or daubing slogans, in areas where black people are settled like St. Paul’s Bristol, Chapeltown
Leeds, Toxteth, Brixton, Southall, a whole town is being discriminated against – look at
housing, streets, traffic, education. Local authorities are deliberately ignoring those towns,
and that is where we must fight.
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