Collected Essays

The Rainbow Sign

Bradford

Some time ago, I noticed that there was something unusual about the city of Bradford, something that distinguished it from other northern industrial cities.

To begin with, there was Ray Honeyford. Three years ago Honeyford, the headmaster of Bradford’s Drummond Middle School, wrote a short, three-page article that was published in the Salisbury Review. The Salisbury Review has a circulation of about 1,000, but the impact of Honeyford’s article was felt beyond the magazine’s readership. It was discussed in the Yorkshire Post and reprinted in the local Telegraph and Argus. A parents’ group demanded Honeyford’s resignation. His school was then boycotted, and children, instructed by their parents not to attend classes, gathered outside, shouting abuse at the man who weeks before was their teacher. There were fights, sometimes physical brawls, between local leaders and politicians. The ‘Honeyford Affair’, as it became known, attracted so much attention that it became common every morning to come upon national journalists and television crews outside the school. And when it was finally resolved that Honeyford had to go, the Bradford district council had to pay him over £160,000 to get him to leave: ten times his annual salary.

But there were other things about Bradford. The Yorkshire Ripper was from Bradford. The prostitutes who came down to London on the train on ‘cheap-day return’ tickets were from Bradford. At a time when the game of soccer was threatened by so many troubles, Bradford seemed to have troubles of the most extreme kind. Days after the deaths in Brussels at the Heysel stadium, fifty-six Bradford football supporters were killed in one of the worst fires in the history of the sport. Eighteen months later, there was yet another fire, and a match stopped because of crowd violence.

There was more: there was unemployment in excess of 20 per cent; there was a prominent branch of the National Front; there were regular racial attacks on taxi drivers; there were stories of forced emigration; there was a mayor from a village in Pakistan. Bradford, I felt, was a place I had to see for myself, because it seemed that so many important issues, of race, culture, nationalism, and education, were evident in an extremely concentrated way in this medium-sized city of 400,000 people, situated between the much larger cities of Manchester and Leeds. These were issues that related to the whole notion of what it was to be British and what that would mean in the future. Bradford seemed to be a microcosm of a larger British society that was struggling to find a sense of itself, even as it was undergoing radical change. And it was a struggle not seen by the people governing the country, who, after all, had been brought up in a world far different from today’s. In 1945, England ruled over six hundred million people. And there were few black faces on its streets.

*

The first thing you notice as you get on the Inter-City train to Bradford is that the first three carriages are first class. These are followed by the first-class restaurant car. Then you are free to sit down. But if the train is packed and you cannot find an empty seat, you have to stand. You stand for the whole journey, with other people lying on the floor around you, and you look through at the empty seats in the first-class carriages where men sit in their shirt-sleeves doing important work and not looking up. The ticket collector has to climb over us to get to them.

Like the porters on the station, the ticket collector was black, probably of West Indian origin. In other words, black British. Most of the men fixing the railway line, in their luminous orange jackets, with pickaxes over their shoulders, were also black. The guard on the train was Pakistani, or should I say another Briton, probably born here, and therefore ‘black’.

When I got to Bradford I took a taxi. It was simple: Bradford is full of taxis. Raise an arm and three taxis rush at you. Like most taxi drivers in Bradford, the driver was Asian and his car had furry, bright purple seats, covered with the kind of material people in the suburbs sometimes put on the lids of their toilets. It smelled of perfume, and Indian music was playing. The taxi driver had a Bradford-Pakistani accent, a cross between the north of England and Lahore, which sounds odd the first few times you hear it. Mentioning the accent irritates people in Bradford. How else do you expect people to talk? they say. And they are right. But hearing it for the first time disconcerted me because I found that I associated northern accents with white faces, with people who eat puddings, with Geoffrey Boycott and Roy Hattersley.

We drove up a steep hill, which overlooked the city. In the distance there were modern buildings and among them the older mill chimneys and factories with boarded-up windows. We passed Priestley Road. J. B. Priestley was born in Bradford, and in the early 1960s both John Braine and Alan Sillitoe set novels here. I wondered what the writing of the next fifteen years would be like. There were, I was to learn, stories in abundance to be told.

The previous day I had watched one of my favourite films, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s Billy Liar, also written in the early 1960s. Billy works for an undertaker and there is a scene in which Billy tries to seduce one of his old girlfriends in a graveyard. Now I passed that old graveyard. It was full of monstrous mausoleums, some with spires thirty feet high; others were works of architecture in themselves, with arches, urns and roofs. They dated from the late nineteenth century and contained the bones of the great mill barons and their families. In The Waste Land T. S. Eliot wrote of the ‘silk hat on a Bradford millionaire’. Now the mills and the millionaires had nearly disappeared. In the cemetery there were some white youths on a Youth Opportunity Scheme, hacking unenthusiastically at the weeds, clearing a path. This was the only work that could be found for them, doing up the cemetery.

I was staying in a house near the cemetery. The houses were of a good size, well-built with three bedrooms and lofts. Their front doors were open and the street was full of kids running in and out. Women constantly crossed the street and stood on each other’s doorsteps, talking. An old man with a stick walked along slowly. He stopped to pat a child who was crying so much I thought she would explode. He carried on patting her head, and she carried on crying, until finally he decided to enter the house and fetched the child’s young sister.

The houses were overcrowded — if you looked inside you would usually see five or six adults sitting in the front room — and there wasn’t much furniture: often the linoleum on the floor was torn and curling, and a bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling. The wallpaper was peeling from the walls.

Each house had a concrete yard at the back, where women and young female children were always hanging out the washing: the cleaning of clothes appeared never to stop. There was one man — his house was especially run-down — who had recently acquired a new car. He walked round and round it; he was proud of his car, and occasionally caressed it.

It was everything I imagined a Bradford working-class community would be like, except that there was one difference. Everyone I’d seen since I arrived was Pakistani. I had yet to see a white face.

The women covered their heads. And while the older ones wore jumpers and overcoats, underneath they, like the young girls, wore salwar kamiz, the Pakistani long tops over baggy trousers. If I ignored the dark Victorian buildings around me, I could imagine that everyone was back in their village in Pakistan.

*

That evening, Jane — the friend I was staying with — and I decided to go out. We walked back down the hill and into the centre of town. It looked like many other town centres in Britain. The subways under the roundabouts stank of urine; graffiti defaced them and lakes of rain-water gathered at the bottom of the stairs. There was a massive shopping centre with unnatural lighting; some kids were rollerskating through it, pursued by three pink-faced security guards in paramilitary outfits. The shops were also the same: Ryman’s, Smith’s, Dixons, the National Westminster Bank. I hadn’t become accustomed to Bradford and found myself making simple comparisons with London. The clothes people wore were shabby and old; they looked as if they’d been bought in jumble sales or second-hand shops. And their faces had an unhealthy aspect: some were malnourished.

As we crossed the city, I could see that some parts looked old-fashioned. They reminded me of my English grandfather and the Britain of my childhood: pigeon-keeping, greyhound racing, roast beef eating and pianos in pubs. Outside the centre, there were shops you’d rarely see in London now: drapers, iron-mongers, fish and chip shops that still used newspaper wrappers, barber’s shops with photographs in the window of men with Everly Brothers haircuts. And here, among all this, I also saw the Islamic Library and the Ambala Sweet Centre where you could buy spices: dhaniya, haldi, garam masala, and dhal and ladies’ fingers. There were Asian video shops where you could buy tapes of the songs of Master Sajjad, Nayyara, Alamgir, Nazeen and M. Ali Shahaiky.

Jane and I went to a bar. It was a cross between a pub and a night-club. At the entrance the bouncer laid his hands on my shoulders and told me I could not go in.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘You’re not wearing any trousers.’

I looked down at my legs in astonishment.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

‘No trousers,’ he said, ‘no entry.’

Jeans, it seems, were not acceptable.

We walked on to another place. This time we got in. It too was very smart and entirely white. The young men had dressed up in open-necked shirts, Topshop grey slacks and Ravel loafers. They stood around quietly in groups. The young women had also gone to a lot of trouble: some of them looked like models, in their extravagant dresses and high heels. But the women and the men were not talking to each other. We had a drink and left. Jane said she wanted me to see a working men’s club.

The working men’s club turned out to be near an estate, populated, like most Bradford estates, mostly by whites. The Asians tended to own their homes. They had difficulty acquiring council houses or flats, and were harassed and abused when they moved on to white estates.

The estate was scruffy: some of the flats were boarded up, rubbish blew about; the balconies looked as if they were about to crash off the side of the building. The club itself was in a large modern building. We weren’t members of course, but the man on the door agreed to let us in.

There were three large rooms. One was like a pub; another was a snooker room. In the largest room at least 150 people sat around tables in families. At one end was a stage. A white man in evening dress was banging furiously at a drum-kit. Another played the organ. The noise was unbearable.

At the bar, it was mostly elderly men. They sat beside each other. But they didn’t talk. They had drawn, pale faces and thin, narrow bodies that expanded dramatically at the stomach and then disappeared into the massive jutting band of their trousers. They had little legs. They wore suits, the men. They had dressed up for the evening.

Here there were no Asians either, and I wanted to go to an Asian bar, but it was getting late and the bars were closing, at ten-thirty as they do outside London. We got a taxi and drove across town. The streets got rougher and rougher. We left the main road and suddenly were in a leafy, almost suburban area. The houses here were large, occupied I imagined by clerks, insurance salesmen, business people. We stopped outside a detached three-storey house that seemed to be surrounded by an extraordinary amount of darkness and shadow. There was one light on, in the kitchen, and the woman inside was Sonia Sutcliffe, the wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, an ex-schoolteacher. I thought of Peter Sutcliffe telling his wife he was the Yorkshire Ripper. He had wanted to tell her himself; he insisted on it. Many of his victims had come from the surrounding area.

The surrounding area was mostly an Asian district and here the pubs stayed open late, sometimes until two in the morning. There were no trouser rules.

During the day in this part of town the Asian kids would be playing in the streets. The women, most of them uneducated, illiterate, unable to speak English, would talk in doorways as they did where I was staying.

It was around midnight, and men were only now leaving their houses — the women remaining behind with the children — and walking down the street to the pub. Jane said it stayed open late with police permission. It gave the police an opportunity to find out what was going on: their spies and informers could keep an eye on people. Wherever you went in Bradford, people talked about spies and informers: who was and who wasn’t. I’d never known anything like it, but then I’d never known any other city, except perhaps Karachi, in which politics was such a dominant part of daily life. Apparently there was money to be made working for the police and reporting what was going on: what the Asian militants were doing; what the racists were doing; who the journalists were talking to; what attacks or demonstrations were planned; what vigilante groups were being formed.

The pub was packed with Asian men and they still kept arriving. They knew each other and embraced enthusiastically. There were few women and all but three were white. Asian men and white women kissed in corners. As we squeezed in, Jane said she knew several white women who were having affairs with Asian men, affairs that had sometimes gone on for years. The men had married Pakistani women, often out of family pressure, and frequently the women were from the villages. The Asian women had a terrible time in Bradford.

The music was loud and some people were dancing, elbow to elbow, only able in the crush to shake their heads and shuffle their feet. There was a lot of very un-Islamic drinking. I noticed two Asian girls. They stood out, with their bright jewellery and pretty clothes. They were with Asian men. Their men looked inhibited and the girls left early. Jane, who was a journalist, recognised a number of prostitutes in the pub. She’d interviewed them at the time of the Ripper. One stood by Jane and kept pulling at her jumper. ‘Where did you get that jumper? How much was it?’ she kept saying. Jane said the prostitutes hadn’t stopped work during the time of the Ripper. They couldn’t afford to. Instead, they’d worked in pairs, one girl fucking the man, while the other stood by with a knife in her hand.

In 1993, when J. B. Priestley was preparing his English Journey, he found three Englands. There was guide-book England, of palaces and forests; nineteenth-century industrial England of factories and suburbs; and contemporary England of by-passes and suburbs. Now, half a century later, there is another England as well: the inner city.

In front of me, in this pub, there were five or six gay men and two lesbian couples. Three white kids wore black leather jackets and had mohicans: their mauve, red and yellow hair stood up straight for a good twelve inches and curved across their heads like a feather glued on its thin edge to a billiard ball. And there were the Asians. This was not one large solid community with a shared outlook, common beliefs and an established form of life; not Orwell’s ‘one family with the wrong members in control’. It was diverse, disparate, strikingly various.

Jane introduced me to a young Asian man, an activist and local political star from his time of being on trial as one of the Bradford Twelve. I was pleased to meet him. In 1981, a group of twelve youths, fearing a racial attack in the aftermath of the terrible assault on Asians by skinheads in Southall in London, had made a number of petrol bombs. But they were caught and charged under the Explosives Act with conspiracy — a charge normally intended for urban terrorists. It was eleven months before they were acquitted.

I greeted him enthusiastically. He, with less enthusiasm, asked me if I’d written a film called My Beautiful Laundrette. I said yes, I had, and he started to curse me: I was a fascist, a reactionary. He was shouting. Then he seemed to run out of words and pulled back to hit me. But just as he raised his fist, his companions grabbed his arm and dragged him away.

I said to Jane that I thought the next day we should do something less exhausting. We could visit a school.

*

I had heard that there was to be a ceremony for a new school that was opening, the Zakariya Girls School. The large community hall was already packed with three hundred Asian men when I arrived. Then someone took my arm, to eject me, I thought. But instead I was led to the front row, where I found myself sitting next to three white policemen and assorted white dignitaries, both women and men, in smart Sunday-school clothes.

On the high stage sat local councillors, a white Muslim in white turban and robes, and various Asian men. A white man was addressing the audience, the MP for Scarborough, Sir Michael Shaw. ‘You have come into our community,’ he was saying, ‘and you must become part of that community. All branches must lead to one trunk, which is the British way of life. We mustn’t retire to our own communities and shut ourselves out. Yet you have felt you needed schools of your own …’

The MP was followed by a man who appeared to be a homegrown Batley citizen. ‘As a practising Roman Catholic, I sympathise with you, having had a Catholic education myself,’ he said, and went on to say how good he thought the Islamic school would be.

Finally the man from the local mosque read some verses from the Koran. The local policemen cupped their hands and lowered their heads in true multicultural fashion. The other whites near me, frantically looking around at each other, quickly followed suit. Then Indian sweets were brought round, which the polite English ladies picked politely at.

I left the hall and walked up the hill towards the school. The policeman followed me, holding the hands of the six or seven Asian children that surrounded him.

Batley is outside Bradford, on the way to Leeds. It is a small town surrounded by countryside and hills. The view from the hill into the valley and then up into the hills was exquisite. In the town there was a large Asian community. The Zakariya Girls School had actually been started two years ago as a ‘pirate’ school, not having received approval from the Department of Education until an extension was built. Now it was finished. And today it became the first high school of its kind — an Islamic school for girls — to be officially registered under the Education Act. As a pirate school it had been a large, overcrowded old house on the top of a hill. Now, outside, was a new two-storey building. It was spacious, clean, modern.

I went in and looked around. Most of the books were on the Koran or Islam, on prayer or on the prophet Mohammed. The walls were covered with verses from the Koran. And despite its being a girls’ school there were no girls there and no Asian women, just the men and lots of little boys in green, blue and brown caps, running about.

The idea for the school had been the pop star Cat Stevens’s, and he had raised most of the money for it privately, it was said, from Saudi Arabia. Stevens, who had changed his name to Yusaf Islam, was quoted as saying that he had tried everything, running the gamut of international novelties to find spiritual satisfaction: materialism, sex, drugs, Buddhism, Christianity and finally Islam. I wondered if it was entirely arbitrary that he’d ended with Islam or whether perhaps today, the circumstances being slightly different, we could as easily have been at the opening of a Buddhist school.

Yusaf Islam was not at the school but his assistant, Ibrahim, was. Ibrahim was the white Muslim in the white robes with the white turban who spoke earlier. There was supposed to be a press conference, but nothing was happening; everything was disorganised. Ibrahim came and sat beside me. I asked him if he’d talk about the school. He was, he said, very keen; the school had been the result of so much effort and organisation, so much goodness. I looked at him. He seemed preternaturally good and calm.

Ibrahim was from Newcastle, and had a long ginger beard. (I remembered someone saying to me in Pakistan that the only growth industry in Islamic countries was in human hair on the face.) Ibrahim’s epiphany had occurred on a trip to South Africa. There, seeing black and white men praying together in a mosque, he decided to convert to Islam.

He told me about the way the school worked. The human face, for instance, or the face of any animate being, could not be represented at the school. And dancing would not be encouraged, nor the playing of musical instruments. Surely, he said, looking at me, his face full of conviction, the human voice was expressive enough? When I said this would probably rule out the possibility of the girls taking either art or music O-Levels, he nodded sadly and admitted that it would.

And modern literature? I asked.

He nodded sadly again and said it would be studied ‘in a critical light’.

I said I was glad to hear it. But what about science?

That was to be studied in a critical light too, since — and here he took a deep breath — he didn’t accept Darwinism or any theory of evolution because, well, because the presence of monkeys who hadn’t changed into men disproved it all.

I took another close look at him. He obviously believed these things. But why was he being so apologetic?

*

As I walked back down the hill I thought about the issues raised by the Zakariya Girls School. There were times, I thought, when to be accommodating you had to bend over backwards so far that you fell over. Since the mid-1960s the English liberal has seen the traditional hierarchies and divisions of British life challenged, if not destroyed. Assumptions of irrevocable, useful and moral differences — between classes, men and women, gays and straights, older and younger people, developed and under-developed societies — had changed for good. The commonly made distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ cultures had become suspect. It had become questionable philosophically to apply criteria of judgement available in one society to events in another: there could not be any independent or bridging method of evaluation. And it followed that we should be able, as a broad, humane and pluralistic society, to sustain a wide range of disparate groups living in their own way. And if one of these groups wanted halal meat, Islamic schools, anti-Darwinism and an intimate knowledge of the Koran for its girls, so be it. As it was, there had been Catholic schools and Jewish schools for years.

But Islamic schools like the one in Batley appeared to violate the principles of a liberal education, and the very ideas to which the school owed its existence. And because of the community’s religious beliefs, so important to its members, the future prospects for the girls were reduced. Was that the choice they had made? Did the Asian community really want this kind of separate education anyway? And if it did, how many wanted it? Or was it only a few earnest and repressed believers, all men, frightened of England and their daughters’ sexuality?

*

The house Delius was born in, in Bradford, was now the Council of Mosques, which looked after the interests of the Bradford Muslims. There are sixty thousand Muslims and thirty Muslim organisations in Bradford. Chowdhury Khan, the President of the Council, told me about the relations between men and women in Islam and the problem of girls’ schools.

He said there were no women in the Council because ‘we respect them too much’. I mentioned that I found this a little perplexing, but he ignored me, adding that this is also why women were not encouraged to have jobs or careers.

‘Women’s interests’, he said confidently, ‘are being looked after.’

‘And the girls’?

After the age of twelve, he said, women should not mix with men. That was why more single-sex schools were required in Bradford. The local council had agreed that this was desirable and would provide more single-sex schools when resources were available. He added that despite the Labour Manifesto, Neil Kinnock approved of this.

I said I doubted this.

Anyway, he continued, the local Labour Party was lobbying for more single-sex schools after having tried, in the 1960s, to provide mixed-sex schools. But — and this he emphasised — the Council of Mosques wanted single-sex schools not Islamic ones or racially segregated schools. He banged on his desk, No, no, no! No apartheid!

He wanted the state to understand that, while Muslim children would inevitably become Westernised — they were reconciled to that — they still wanted their children to learn about Islam at school, to learn subcontinental languages and be taught the history, politics and geography of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Surely, he added, the white British would be interested in this too. After all, the relations between England and the subcontinent had always been closer than those between Britain and France, say.

I found Chowdhury Khan to be a difficult and sometimes strange man. But his values, and the values of the Council he represented, are fairly straightforward. He believes in the preeminent value of the family and, for example, the importance of religion in establishing morality. He also believes in the innately inferior position of women. He dislikes liberalism in all its forms, and is an advocate of severe and vengeful retribution against law-breakers.

These are extremely conservative and traditional views. But they are also, isolated from the specifics of their subcontinental context, the values championed by Ray Honeyford, among others. There were a number of interesting ironies developing.

I sought out the younger, more militant section of the community. How did its members see their place in Britain?

*

When I was in my teens, in the mid-1960s, there was much talk of the ‘problems’ that kids of my colour and generation faced in Britain because of our racial mix or because our parents were immigrants. We didn’t know where we belonged, it was said; we were neither fish nor fowl. I remember reading that kind of thing in the newspaper. We were frequently referred to as ‘second-generation immigrants’ just so there was no mistake about our not really belonging in Britain. We were ‘Britain’s children without a home’. The phrase ‘caught between two cultures’ was a favourite. It was a little too triumphant for me. Anyway, this view was wrong. It has been easier for us than for our parents. For them Britain really had been a strange land and it must have been hard to feel part of a society if you had spent a good deal of your life elsewhere and intended to return: most immigrants from the Indian subcontinent came to Britain to make money and then go home. Most of the Pakistanis in Bradford had come from one specific district, Mirpur, because that was where the Bradford mill-owners happened to look for cheap labour twenty-five years ago. And many, once here, stayed for good; it was not possible to go back. Yet when they got older the immigrants found they hadn’t really made a place for themselves in Britain. They missed the old country. They’d always thought of Britain as a kind of long stopover rather than the final resting place it would turn out to be.

But for me and the others of my generation born here, Britain was always where we belonged, even when we were told — often in terms of racial abuse — that this was not so. Far from being a conflict of cultures, our lives seemed to synthesise disparate elements: the pub, the mosque, two or three languages, rock ’n’ roll, Indian films. Our extended family and our British individuality commingled.

*

Tariq was twenty-two. His office was bare in the modern style: there was a desk; there was a computer. The building was paid for by the EEC and Bradford Council. His job was to advise on the setting-up of businesses and on related legal matters. He also advised the Labour Party on its economic policy. In fact, although so young, Tariq had been active in politics for a number of years: at the age of sixteen, he had been chairman of the Asian Youth Movement, which was founded in 1978 after the National Front began marching on Bradford. But few of the other young men I’d met in Bradford had Tariq’s sense of direction or ambition, including the young activists known as the Bradford Twelve. Five years after their acquittal, most of them were, like Tariq, very active — fighting deportations, monitoring racist organisations, advising on multi-cultural education — but, like other young people in Bradford, they were unemployed. They hung around the pubs; their politics were obscure; they were ‘anti-fascist’ but it was difficult to know what they were for. Unlike their parents, who’d come here for a specific purpose, to make a life in the affluent West away from poverty and lack of opportunity, they, born here, had inherited only pointlessness and emptiness. The emptiness, that is, derived not from racial concerns but economic ones.

Tariq took me to a Pakistani café. Bradford was full of them. They were like English working men’s cafés, except the food was Pakistani, you ate with your fingers and there was always water on the table. The waiter spoke to us in Punjabi and Tariq replied. Then the waiter looked at me and asked a question. I looked vague, nodded stupidly and felt ashamed. Tariq realised I could only speak English.

How many languages did he speak?

Four: English, Malay, Urdu and Punjabi.

I told him about the school I’d visited.

Tariq was against Islamic schools. He thought they made it harder for Asian kids in Britain to get qualifications than in ordinary, mixed-race, mixed-sex schools. He said the people who wanted such schools were not representative; they just made a lot of noise and made the community look like it was made up of separatists, which it was not.

He wasn’t a separatist, he said. He wanted the integration of all into the society. But for him the problem of integration was adjacent to the problem of being poor in Britain: how could people feel themselves to be active participants in the life of a society when they were suffering all the wretchedness of bad housing, poor insulation and the indignity of having their gas and electricity disconnected; or when they were turning to loan sharks to pay their bills; or when they felt themselves being dissipated by unemployment; and when they weren’t being properly educated, because the resources for a proper education didn’t exist.

*

There was one Asian in Bradford it was crucial to talk to. He’d had political power. For a year he’d been mayor, and as Britain’s first Asian or black mayor he’d received much attention. He’d also had a terrible time.

I talked to Mohammed Ajeeb in the nineteenth-century town hall. The town hall was a monument to Bradford’s long-gone splendour and pride. Later I ran into him at Bradford’s superb Museum of Film, Television and Photography, where a huge photo of him and his wife was unveiled. Ajeeb is a tall, modest man, sincere, sometimes openly uncertain and highly regarded for his tenacity by the Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Ajeeb is careful in his conversation. He lacks the confident politician’s polish: from him, I heard no well-articulated banalities. He is from a small village in the Punjab. When we met at the Museum, we talked about the differences between us, and he admitted that it had been quite a feat for someone like him to have got so far in Britain. In Pakistan, with its petrified feudal system, he would never have been able to transcend his background.

During his time in office, a stand at the Valley Parade football ground had burned down, killing fifty-six people and injuring three hundred others. There was the Honeyford affair, about which he had been notoriously outspoken (‘I cannot see’, he said in a speech that contributed to Honeyford’s removal, ‘the unity of our great city being destroyed by one man’). As mayor, Ajeeb moved through areas of Bradford society to which he never had access before, and the racism he experienced, both explicit and covert, was of a viciousness he hadn’t anticipated. And it was relentless. His house was attacked, and he, as mayor, was forced to move; and at Grimsby Town football ground, when he presented a cheque to the families of those killed in the fire, the crowd abused him with racist slogans; finally, several thousand football supporters started chanting Honeyford’s name so loudly that Ajeeb was unable to complete his speech. He received sackfuls of hate mail and few letters of support.

Ajeeb said that no culture could remain static, neither British nor Pakistani. And while groups liked to cling to the old ways and there would be conflict, eventually different groups would intermingle. For him the important thing was that minorities secure political power for themselves. At the same time, he said that, although he wanted to become a Parliamentary candidate, no one would offer him a constituency where he could stand. This was, he thought, because he was Asian and the Labour Party feared that the white working class wouldn’t vote for him. He could stand as Parliamentary candidate only in a black area, which seemed fine to him for the time being; he was prepared to do that.

There were others who weren’t prepared to put up with the racism in the trade union movement and in the Labour Party itself in the way Ajeeb had. I met a middle-aged Indian man, a tax inspector, who had been in the Labour Party for at least ten years. He had offered to help canvass during the local council elections — on a white council estate. He was told that it wouldn’t be to the party’s advantage for him to help in a white area. He was so offended that he offered his services to the Tories. Although he hated Margaret Thatcher, he found the Tories welcomed him. He started to lecture on the subject of Asians in Britain to various Tory groups and Rotary Club dinners, until he found himself talking at the Wakefield Police College. At the Wakefield Police College he encountered the worst racists he had ever seen in his life.

He did not need to go into details. Only a few months before, at an anti-apartheid demonstration outside South Africa House in London, I’d been standing by a police line when a policeman started to talk to me. He spoke in a low voice, as if he were telling me about the traffic in Piccadilly. ‘You bastards,’ he said. ‘We hate you, we don’t want you here. Everything would be all right, there’d be none of this, if you pissed off home.’ And he went on like that, fixing me with a stare. ‘You wogs, you coons, you blacks, we hate you all.’

Ajeeb said that if there was anything he clung to when things became unbearable, it was the knowledge that the British electorate always rejected the far right. They had never voted in significant numbers for neo-fascist groups like the National Front and the British National Party. Even the so-called New Right, a prominent and noisy group of journalists, lecturers and intellectuals, had no great popular following. People knew what viciousness underlay their ideas, he said.

Some of the views of the New Right, Ajeeb believed, had much in common with proletarian far-right organisations like the National Front: its members held to the notion of white racial superiority, they believed in repatriation and they argued that the mixing of cultures would lead to the degeneration of British culture. Ajeeb argued that they used the rhetoric of ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ and ‘nationhood’ as a fig-leaf; in the end they wished to defend a mythical idea of white culture. Honeyford was associated with the New Right, and what he and people like him wanted, Ajeeb said, was for Asians to behave exactly like the whites. And if they didn’t do this, they should leave.

This movement known as the New Right is grouped around the Conservative Philosophy Group and the Salisbury Review, the magazine that published Honeyford’s article. The group is a loose affiliation of individuals with similar views. A number of them are graduates of Peterhouse, Cambridge. These include John Vincent, Professor of History at Bristol University, who writes a weekly column for the Sun; Colin Welch, a columnist for the Spectator.

Like a lot of people in Bradford, Ajeeb became agitated on the subject of the New Right and Honeyford’s relationship with it. But how important was it? What did the views of a few extremists really matter? So what if they wrote for influential papers? At least they weren’t on the street wearing boots. But the ideas expressed by Honeyford had split Bradford apart. These ideas were alive and active in the city, entering into arguments about education, housing, citizenship, health, food and politics. Bradford was a city in which ideas carried knives.

*

Ray Honeyford went to Bradford’s Drummond Middle School as Headmaster in January 1980. The children were aged between nine and thirteen. At the time the school was 50 per cent Asian. When he left last spring it was 95 per cent.

Honeyford is from a working-class background. He failed his exams for grammar school, and from the age of fifteen worked for ten years for a company that makes desiccated coconut. In his late twenties, he attended a two-year teacher-training course at Didsbury College, and later got further degrees from the universities of Lancaster and Manchester. He described himself as a Marxist, and was a member of the Labour Party. But all that changed when he began teaching at a mixed-race school. He submitted an unsolicited article to the Salisbury Review, and the article, entitled ‘Education and Race — An Alternative View’, was accepted.

The article is a polemic. It argues that the multi-racial policies endorsed by various members of the teaching establishment are damaging the English way of life, and that proper English people should resist these assaults on the ‘British traditions of understatement, civilised discourse and respect for reason’. It wasn’t too surprising that a polemic of this sort written by the headmaster of a school made up almost entirely of Asian children was seen to be controversial.

But the real problem wasn’t the polemic but the rhetorical asides and parentheticals. Honeyford mentions the ‘hysterical political temperament of the Indian subcontinent’, and describes Asians as ‘these people’ (in an earlier article, they are ‘settler children’). A Sikh is ‘half-educated and volatile’, and black intellectuals are ‘aggressive’. Honeyford then goes on to attack Pakistan itself, which in a curious non-sequitur seems to be responsible for British drug problems:

Pakistan is a country which cannot cope with democracy; under martial law since 1977, it is ruled by a military tyrant who, in the opinion of at least half his countrymen, had his predecessor judicially murdered. A country, moreover, which despite disproportionate western aid because of its important strategic position, remains for most of its people obstinately backward. Corruption at every level combines with unspeakable treatment not only of criminals, but of those who dare to question Islamic orthodoxy as interpreted by a despot. Even as I write, wounded dissidents are chained to hospital beds awaiting their fate. Pakistan, too, is the heroin capital of the world. (A fact which is now reflected in the drug problems of English cities with Asian populations.)

It is perhaps not unreasonable that some people felt the article was expressing more than merely an alternative view on matters of education.

Honeyford wrote a second piece for the Salisbury Review, equally ‘tolerant’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘civilised’, but this one was noticed by someone in Bradford’s education department, and then the trouble started — the protests, the boycott, the enormous publicity. A little research revealed that Honeyford’s asides were a feature of most of his freelance journalism, his most noteworthy being his reference in the Times Educational Supplement to an Asian parent who visited him wanting to talk about his child’s education: his accent, it seems, was ‘like that of Peter Sellers’s Indian doctor on an off day’.

The difficulty about the ‘Honeyford Affair’ was that it did not involve only Honeyford. His views are related to the much larger issue of what it is to be British, and what Britain should be in the future. And these views are, again, most clearly stated by the New Right, with which Honeyford closely identified himself. ‘He is’, Honeyford said of Roger Scruton, the high Tory editor of the Salisbury Review, ‘the most brilliant man I have ever met.’

It would be easy to exaggerate the influence of the New Right. It would be equally easy to dismiss it. But it is worth bearing in mind that shortly after Honeyford was dismissed, he was invited to 10 Downing Street to help advise Margaret Thatcher on Tory education policy. Thatcher has also attended New Right ‘think tanks’, organised by the Conservative Philosophy Group. So too have Paul Johnson, Tom Stoppard, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Enoch Powell.

The essential tenet of the New Right is expressed in the editorial of the first issue of the Salisbury Review, ‘the consciousness of nationhood is the highest form of political consciousness.’ For Maurice Cowling, Scruton’s tutor at Peterhouse in Cambridge, the consciousness of nationhood requires ‘a unity of national sentiment’. Honeyford’s less elegant phrase is the ‘unity notion of culture’. The real sense underlying these rather abstract phrases is expressed in the view the New Right holds of people who are British but not white: as Ajeeb pointed out, Asians are acceptable as long as they behave like whites; if not, they should leave. This explains why anti-racism and multi-racial policies in education are, for the New Right, so inflammatory: they erode the ‘consciousness of nationhood’. For Scruton, anti-racism is virtually treason. In 1985, he wrote that

Those who are concerned about racism in Britain, that call British society ‘racist’, have no genuine attachment to British customs and institutions, or any genuine allegiance to the Crown.

The implications are fascinating to contemplate. John Casey is a Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, and co-founded the Conservative Philosophy Group with Scruton. Four years ago, in a talk entitled ‘One Nation — The Politics of Race’, delivered to the same Conservative Philosophy Group attended by the Prime Minister, Casey proposed that the legal status of Britain’s black community be altered retroactively, ‘so that its members became guest workers … who would eventually, over a period of years, return to their countries of origin. The great majority of people’, Casey added, dissociating himself from the argument, ‘are actually or potentially hostile to the multi-racial society which all decent persons are supposed to accept.’

This ‘great majority’ excludes, I suppose, those who brought over the Afro-Caribbean and Asian workers — encouraged by the British government — to work in the mills, on the railways and in the hospitals. These are the same workers who, along with their children, are now part of the ‘immigrant and immigrant-descended population’ which, according to Casey, should be repatriated. It is strange how the meaning of the word ‘immigrant’ has changed. Americans, Australians, Italians, and Irish are not immigrants. It isn’t Rupert Murdoch, Clive James or Kiri Te Kanawa who will be on their way: it is black people.

*

There is a word you hear in Bradford all the time, in pubs, shops, discos, schools and on the streets. The word is ‘culture’. It is a word often used by the New Right, who frequently cite T. S. Eliot: that culture is a whole way of life, manifesting itself in the individual, in the group and in the society. It is everything we do and the particular way in which we do it. For Eliot culture ‘includes all the characteristic activities of the people: Derby Day, Henley regatta, Cowes, the Twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin-table, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century gothic churches and the music of Elgar’.

If one were compiling such a list today there would have to be numerous additions to the characteristic activities of the British people. They would include: yoga exercises, going to Indian restaurants, the music of Bob Marley, the novels of Salman Rushdie, Zen Buddhism, the Hare Krishna Temple, as well as the films of Sylvester Stallone, therapy, hamburgers, visits to gay bars, the dole office and the taking of drugs.

Merely by putting these two, rather arbitrary, lists side by side, it is possible to see the kinds of changes that have occurred in Britain since the end of the war. It is the first list, Eliot’s list, that represents the New Right’s vision of England. And for them unity can only be maintained by opposing those seen to be outside the culture. In an Oxbridge common-room, there is order, tradition, a settled way of doing things. Outside there is chaos: there are the barbarians and philistines.

Among all the talk of unity on the New Right, there is no sense of the vast differences in attitude, life-style and belief, or in class, race and sexual preference, that already exist in British society: the differences between those in work and those out of it; between those who have families and those who don’t; and, importantly, between those who live in the North and those in the South. Sometimes, especially in the poor white areas of Bradford where there is so much squalor, poverty and manifest desperation, I could have been in another country. This was not anything like the south of England.

And of course from the New Right’s talk of unity, we get no sense of the racism all black people face in Britain: the violence, abuse and discrimination in jobs, housing, policing and political life. In 1985 in Bradford there were 111 recorded incidents of racist attacks on Asians, and in the first three months of 1986 there were 79.

But how cold they are, these words: ‘in the first three months of 1986 there were 79’. They describe an Asian man being slashed in a pub by a white gang. Or they describe a Friday evening last April when a taxi company known to employ Asian drivers received a ‘block booking’ for six cabs to collect passengers at the Jack and Jill Nightclub. Mohammed Saeed was the first to arrive. He remembers nothing from then on until he woke seven hours later in the intensive care ward of the hospital. This is because when he arrived, his windscreen and side window were smashed and he drove into a wall. And because he was then dragged from the car, kicked and beaten on the head with iron bars, and left on the pavement unconscious. He was left there because by then the second taxi had arrived, but Mohammed Suleiman, seeing what lay ahead, reversed his car at high speed — but not before the twenty or thirty whites rushing towards him had succeeded in smashing his windows with chair legs and bats. His radio call, warning the other drivers, was received too late by Javed Iqbal. ‘I was’, he told the Guardian later, ‘bedridden for nearly a fortnight and I’ve still got double vision. I can’t go out on my own.’

Wild Women, Wild Men

When I saw them waiting beside their car, I said, ‘You must be freezing.’ It was cold and foggy, the first night of winter, and the two women had matching short skirts and skimpy tops; their legs were bare.

‘We wear what we like,’ Zarina said.

Zarina was the elder of the pair, at twenty-four. For her this wasn’t a job; it was an uprising, mutiny. She was the one with the talent for anarchy and unpredictability that made their show so wild. Qumar was nineteen and seemed more tired and wary. The work could disgust her. And unlike Zarina she did not enjoy the opportunity for mischief and disruption. Qumar had run away from home — her father was a barrister — and worked as a stripper on the Soho circuit, pretending to be Spanish. Zarina had worked as a kissogram. Neither had made much money until they identified themselves as Pakistani Muslims who stripped and did a lesbian double-act. They’d discovered a talent and an audience for it.

The atmosphere was febrile and overwrought. The two women’s behaviour was a cross between a pop star’s and a fugitive’s; they were excited by the notoriety, the money and the danger of what they did. They’d been written up in the Sport and the News of the World. They wanted me and others to write about them. But everything could get out of hand. The danger was real. It gave their lives an edge, but of the two of them only Qumar knew they were doomed. They had excluded themselves from their community and been condemned. And they hadn’t found a safe place among other men and women. Zarina’s temperament wouldn’t allow her to accept this, though she appeared to be the more nervous. Qumar just knew it would end badly but didn’t know how to stop it, perhaps because Zarina didn’t want it to stop. And Qumar was, I think, in love with Zarina.

We arrived — in Ealing. A frantic Asian man had been waiting in the drive of a house for two and a half hours. ‘Follow my car,’ he said. We did: Zarina started to panic.

‘We’re driving into Southall!’ she said. Southall is the heart of southern England’s Asian community, and the women had more enemies here than anywhere else. The Muslim butchers of Southall had threatened their lives and, according to Zarina, had recently murdered a Muslim prostitute by hacking her up and letting her bleed to death, halal style. There could be a butcher concealed in the crowd, Zarina said; and we didn’t have any security. It was true: in one car there was the driver and me, and in another there was a female Indian journalist, with two slight Pakistani lads who could have been students.

We came to a row of suburban semi-detached houses with gardens: the street was silent, frozen. If only the neighbours knew. We were greeted by a buoyant middle-aged Muslim man with a round, smiling face. He was clearly anxious but relieved to see us, as he had helped to arrange the evening. It was he, presumably, who had extracted the £30 a head, from which he would pay the girls and take his own cut.

He shook our hands and then, when the front door closed behind us, he snatched at Qumar’s arse, pulled her towards him and rubbed his crotch against her. She didn’t resist or flinch but she did look away, as if wishing she were somewhere else, as if this wasn’t her.

The house was not vulgar, only dingy and virtually bare, with white walls, grimy white plastic armchairs, a brown fraying carpet and a wall-mounted gas fire. The ground floor had been knocked into one long, narrow, over-lit room. This unelaborated space was where the women would perform. The upstairs rooms were rented to students.

The men, a third of them Sikh and the rest Muslim, had been waiting for hours and had been drinking. But the atmosphere was benign. No one seemed excited as they stood, many of them in suits and ties, eating chicken curry, black peas and rice from plastic plates. There was none of the aggression of the English lad.

Zarina was the first to dance. Her costume was green and gold, with bells strapped to her ankles; she had placed the big tape-player on the floor beside her. If it weren’t for the speed of the music and her jerky, almost inelegant movements, we might have been witnessing a cultural event at the Commonwealth Institute. But Zarina was tense, haughty, unsmiling. She feared Southall. The men stood inches from her, leaning against the wall. They could touch her when they wanted to. And from the moment she began they reached out to pinch or stroke her. But they didn’t know what Zarina might do in return.

At the end of the room stood a fifty-year-old six-foot Sikh, an ecstatic look on his face, swaying to the music, wiggling his hips at Zarina. Zarina, who was tiny but strong and fast, suddenly ran at the Sikh, threateningly, as if she were going to tackle him. She knocked into him, but he didn’t fall, and she then appeared to be climbing up him. She wrestled off his tweed jacket and threw it down. He complied. He was enjoying this. He pulled off his shirt and she dropped to her knees, jerking down his trousers and pants. His stomach fell out of his clothes — suddenly, like a suitcase falling off the top of a wardrobe. The tiny button of his penis shrank. Zarina wrapped her legs around his waist and beat her hands on his shoulders. The Sikh danced, and the others clapped and cheered. Then he plucked off his turban and threw it into the air, a balding man with his few strands of hair drawn into a frizzy bun.

Zarina was then grabbed from behind. It was the mild, buoyant man who had greeted us at the door. He pulled his trousers off and stood in his blue and white spotted boxer shorts. He began to gyrate against Zarina.

And then she was gone, slipping away as if greased from the bottom of the scrum, out of the door and upstairs to Qumar. The music ended, and the big Sikh, still naked, was putting his turban back on. Another Sikh looked at him disapprovingly; a younger one laughed. The men fetched more drinks. They were pleased and exhilarated, as if they’d survived a fight. The door-greeter walked around in his shorts and shoes.

After a break, Zarina and Qumar returned for another set, this time in black bra and pants. The music was even faster. I noticed that the door-greeter was in a strange state. He had been relaxed, even a little glazed, but now, as the women danced, he was rigid with excitement, chattering to the man next to him, and then to himself, until finally his words became a kind of chant. ‘We are hypocrite Muslims,’ he was saying. ‘We are hypocrite Muslims,’ — again and again, causing the man near him to move away.

Zarina’s assault on the Sikh and on some of the other, more reluctant men had broken that line that separated spectator from performer. The men had come to see the women. They hadn’t anticipated having their pants pulled around their ankles and their cocks revealed to other men. But it was Zarina’s intention to round on the men, not turn them on — to humiliate and frighten them. This was part of the act.

The confirmed spectators were now grouped in the kitchen behind a table: the others joined in on the floor. Qumar and Zarina removed their tops. The young and friendly man who owned the house was sitting next to me, exultant. He thought I was the women’s manager and he said in my ear: ‘They are fantastic, this is out of this world! I have never seen anything like this before — what a beef! Get me two more girls for Wednesday and four for Saturday.’ But things were getting out of hand. The centre of the room was starting to resemble a playground fight, a bundle, a children’s party. The landlord, panicking, was attempting to separate the men and the two women. He told me to help.

An older man, another Sikh, the oldest man in the room, had been sitting in an armchair from which he reached out occasionally to nip Zarina’s breasts. But now he was on the floor — I don’t know how — and Zarina was on his head, Qumar was squatting on his stomach with her hand inside his trousers. It didn’t seem like a game any more, and people were arguing. The landlord was saying to me, ‘This man, he’s a respectable man, he’s the richest man, one of the best known in Southall, he’s an old man …’ Zarina and Qumar were stripping him. Other men, having lost their tempers, were attempting to drag the women away.

The old man was helped to his feet. He was breathing heavily, as if about to have a seizure. He was trying to stop himself from crying. His turban had been dislodged and chicken curry and rice had been smeared over him, which he was trying to brush off.

There was still the final part of the show. For this, the men sat cross-legged on the floor to watch the women pretend to have sex with each other. One man got down on his knees as if he were checking his car exhaust-pipe — and peered up Zarina’s cunt. Beside me, the landlord was passing comment once more. Our Muslim girls don’t usually shave themselves, he said. He disapproved of the neatly trimmed black strip of hair over Zarina’s cunt.

The show lasted over two hours. ‘It wasn’t difficult,’ Qumar said. They were exhausted. They would ache and be covered in bruises. They did two shows a week.

Finishing the Job

It was time for an adventure; I’d been stifling indoors for three months, just writing, which can make you forget the world. I’d escape, go to Brighton where our governing party were having their annual conference. I wanted to see their faces. I’d get in amongst them. In four days perhaps a look, a word, anything, might help me steal a clue to what our leaders and their supporters were like. To learn that, I’d have to look them in the eye, smell them, be there. Anyhow, I was sick of seeing history on television. The camera was always aimed at the prepared centre of things: I inclined towards the edges, details, irrelevancies.

Friends said there should be a decompression chamber; the shock of arriving directly amongst them would jar. This seemed good advice. The decompressant would be the south London suburb of Bromley, where I was born and brought up. Bromley (once Macmillan’s constituency) was quintessential Thatcherland. Perched between London and Kent it was affluent, white, Jew-free, lower-middle-class England. If Margaret Thatcher had supporters this was where they lived and shopped.

Bromley had changed in the ten years since I’d fled to London. It was now a minor business centre: glass blocks, reflecting other glass blocks into oblivion, had been built around the High Street.

Walking past the houses of my childhood I noticed how, in an orgy of alteration they had been ‘done up’. One house had a new porch; another double-glazing, ‘Georgian’ windows or a new door with brass fittings. Kitchens had been extended, lofts converted, walls excised, garages inserted.

This ersatz creativity is truly the English passion. Look into the centre of the suburban soul and you see double-glazing. It was DIY they loved in Thatcherland, not self-improvement or culture or food, but property, bigger and better homes complete with every mod-con — the concrete display of hard-earned cash. Display was the game.

On the day I went back, a Saturday, there were manic shoppers in Bromley High Street. It was like edging through the centre of a carnival; it was like Christmas with the same desperation, as the shops were raped. But I was struck by something. These frantic crowds on heat for ‘nests’ of tables, these consumers who camped for two days outside Debenhams before the Christmas sales — they hadn’t voted for acid rain; they hadn’t voted for the police to punish the miners, or for unemployment, or for the SAS, or for the police to enter the BBC and confiscate programmes; they hadn’t voted for the closing down of hospitals. It was simpler than that. Thatcher, rising out of the ashes of the late 1970s unemployment and insecurity, had done this for the suburbs: she’d given them money and she’d freed them from the nightmare of a collective life they’d never wanted. She’d freed them for Do It Yourself.

In Brighton, up around the railway station where the Regency façade doesn’t extend, there were pubs barely altered since the 1930s. There were Christmas lights around the windows and kids with pink hair, sleeveless leather jackets and grown-out mohicans lying in fat ripped armchairs. In the afternoons the pubs, full of the unemployed, were like leisure centres.

Further down, as I walked towards the front, my first sight was of a police helicopter hovering over the beach, lifting what looked like a tin workman’s hut on to the concrete bunker of the conference centre itself. Nearby, an old man with horn-rimmed glasses was holding up a cardboard sign advertising Esperanto. Looking closer at this odd figure I realised he had been my maths teacher in Bromley. He gave me a leaflet which included a number of exercises to translate into Esperanto. (‘Use ballpen, write clearly,’ it instructed. Translate ‘the men sold cakes’ and ‘the teacher sees a boy’ and then ‘send this completed sheet with SAE for free correction’.)

There were police every ten yards and everyone staying in a hotel was interviewed by the police. Even the pier was patrolled; speed boats roared through the water; out to sea a Royal Navy minesweeper circled. Obviously the Tories didn’t want a bunch of Irishmen blowing them out of their beds again; but there was also a strong element of militaristic exhibitionism in all the security. Nevertheless the pier was flourishing. There were two Victorian-style restaurants with furniture in pastel shades and waitresses in Victorian costume. (As it happens, the pier is owned by the Labour council; the other pier, privately owned, is disintegrating in the sea like a drowning chandelier.)

On Tuesday morning I entered the conference hall. It smelled of woodshaving and paint. The organist was playing ‘An English Country Garden’. At the rear of the platform was a light blue wall which resembled an early 1960s BBC test card, consisting of three panels with three eyes in them: the centre eye had embossed on it ‘Leading Britain into the 1990s’. Squarely in the centre of the other two eyes were video screens on which were projected the speakers’ faces and ‘visual aids’: if there was talk of a butter mountain then we would see a cartoon of a mountain made out of butter. At the end of the platform was a Union Jack.

The press sat at six long tables below the edge of the platform along which were yards of fresh flowers. The photographers clustered around the journalists, their cameras on adjustable poles, with lenses as long and thick as marrows.

When I looked up I suddenly saw Thatcher in the flesh for the first time. She was ten yards away in a black two-piece with a wide white collar and white earrings. She looked softer than in her photographs. I could see that her throat and neck had gone; below the golden swept-back hair and mask of make-up she was loose, baggy and wrinkled.

I had spoken to Neil Kinnock on a few occasions and he said to me once that seeing Thatcher at the opening of Parliament last year she’d seemed worn out, withered, a shell. But today neither she nor her government seemed desiccated. Recently I’d been to a party attended by many of the Kinnock camp. They were not happy. It was Kinnock who had not grown in stature with the job; he was too strong to resign, too weak to win, they said; he also knew this. And there was a depressing thing I heard them say again and again about him: he couldn’t cope on television. They would be glad when he resigned after losing the next election. So there was no talk of policy now, just of television; and Thatcher appeared odious on television. Later, I spoke to one of Thatcher’s speechwriters, who said she was not exhausted in the least. Most leaders, he said, took power when they were old and tired. But Thatcher was only fifty-four when she took power in 1979.

There were hymns. The journalists, who had already attended three party conferences this year, were like irritable teenagers, and gazed boredly out at the sanitary, dead hall, only half-full. There were few old women in hats; there were many young people — some young men were without ties, in white T-shirts. The Tories were definitely becoming less patrician, more a mass party of the working class. The journalist next to me was reading a paperback which had a blurb saying: ‘David Profit is a coke dealer with a dream.’ Another young journalist in a smart suit and yellow socks giggled to himself as he scribbled. I went through the conference motions printed in the handbook. Most of them began with: ‘This conference congratulates the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ One motion, from Liverpool, stated that ‘The BBC does not always give fair and balanced views when reporting on Israel and South African affairs.’

Staring at Thatcher and considering her unexhausted and un-English sense of mission, I began to think of something which couldn’t possibly be said of any other successful British politician. It was that in some aspects of herself Thatcher embodied some of Nietzsche’s ideas. I mean the scorn for weakness, the basic belief in inequality and the passion for overcoming. Nietzsche, who hated free thinkers, humanitarians and socialism (which he saw as an ill-applied Christian ideal), also dismissed compassion: it sapped vitality and led to feebleness, dependency and decadence. Compassionate ones opposed the natural and impetuous urges of those sovereign ones, those ‘supermen’ who lived great lives beyond the begging fingers of mediocrities and failures.

So yes, as expected, there was complacency, indifference, triumphalism in the faces I examined as they sang ‘King of glory, king of peace, I will love thee’. But they were not a party rotten with the assumptions of power, slow, bored, eager to dispense a little late and guilty generosity. No, because Thatcher is a revolutionary in a democracy; and she is tireless and will not rest until England, Britain even, is made in her image. In that sense she has a totalitarian aspect. I’d often wondered why, after nearly ten years in power, and with negligible opposition and a cooperative media, the Conservatives were still so angry. It was, I could see now, looking at Thatcher, that there was not a scrap of liberalism in her; everything had to be as she wanted it; the job had to be finished.

At last the Mayor of Brighton, Patricia Hawkes, started to speak. There were banalities. Thatcher stared at her, blinking at a tremendous rate, as if Hawkes had started to read from the Kama Sutra. Later I realised Thatcher wasn’t listening at all; this was her serious and concentrating look. But Patricia Hawkes, a Labour mayor, had good courage. It was the sentence ‘power must bring responsibility and compassion’ that first had eyes opening and then widening in the hall of the Worker’s Party. Hawkes hit her stride as the audience listened carefully. ‘Think not just of those with wealth, but those living in bedsitting squalor, those waiting and hoping for a job, and our pensioners living close to the margin.’ Now they knew they’d been slapped in the face, squirted in the eye, in the opening minutes of their rally, their celebration of power. They jeered and brayed, they slow-handclapped and yelled and their anger was genuine. The giggling journalist beside me was ecstatic; he said it would be the only dissent all week, apart from when they’d abuse the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd. That did indeed seem likely: Hurd’s combination of brains, breeding and a refusal to vote for the reintroduction of hanging would not stimulate the dull palate of the Worker’s Party.

That evening I went off eagerly to my first fringe meeting, to be addressed by John Biffen. The room, which had a plaque on the wall saying ‘Paganini played here, 9 December 1831’, was full of men in dark woollen suits. Biffen, a mild-looking man, a doctor perhaps, disappointed the audience with his good sense. People attending the conference craved phrases to applaud or jeer; they wanted a Tom Jones concert, not a reading of ‘Dover Beach’. Later in the week I’d come and hear Enoch Powell in this room. Perhaps the temperature would rise then. Perhaps Wolverhampton’s clearest thinker would earn a plaque on the wall, too.

Biffen said that Kinnock reminded him of Gaitskell, heaving the Labour Party towards the centre of British politics. The left of the party would soon be irrelevant. The fact that Benn, Livingstone and Heffer opposed Kinnock was good publicity for him, this is how he would prove himself. What a shame, Biffen added, that the press caricatured the Labour Party, making it difficult for interested people to see it clear. Biffen then warned the audience: ‘We are a party which favours the up and running. But we do not want to be seen as the party which made a country fit for yuppies.’ People started to leave. He went on: ‘We have to be a thinking party. Where are we weak? The NHS is underfunded.’ Finally, after saying the Poll Tax wasn’t worth it in terms of social division, he talked of the Soviet Union, saying that in an altered politics of Europe, Russia would cease to be a global power and become more of a European one.

Next morning I went back to the conference hall. Outside were a middle-aged couple with a banner saying ‘Our children were murdered — bring back capital punishment’. To my pleasure, Cecil Parkinson was speaking. Clearly the Empress of Albion’s favourite son, when he performed the audience was enthusiastic, swooning with forgiveness. As Parkinson spoke I parked myself quickly in a spare seat beneath him and started to read, in this choice position, Sara Keays’s book concerning their … relationship. I almost wrote ‘affair’; but it lasted twelve years, as she repeats and repeats. The Empress had wanted to appoint him Foreign Secretary before the story broke; maybe he would become Chancellor even now.

As — above me — Parkinson announced the privatisation of coal, I was reading of how he and his cronies, in the struggle to survive, had publicly smeared Keays. Jeffrey Archer (who once asked a friend of mine if he thought he, Archer, would win the Nobel Prize for Literature), was then Deputy Chairman of the Party. He said of the anguished book, which Keays published herself: ‘Not one of the twenty-seven major publishing houses in Britain wanted to touch it.’

In 1983 Tebbit accused Keays of reneging on an undertaking that she wouldn’t publicly talk about Parkinson. In 1988 Tebbit and his ghostwriter Michael Trend, busying themselves in the highest form of self-reflection, autobiography, and learning quite quickly, I am sure, that collectively they lacked the essential gift of reflection, repeated this claim (in my uninterfered-with version), about an undertaking which was never made.

I read of how in 1981 Parkinson failed to tell the police where his car was parked when it was broken into outside his lover’s house. He also ensured that Keays, who’d been selected to stand as a candidate in Bermondsey, was stymied by him in her efforts to become an MP. Another time Parkinson rang Keays and accused her of trying to blackmail him into marrying her; he generally abused her. His wife was listening on the other line.

I wondered, as Parkinson pledged his commitment to nuclear energy, if any of this still mattered. Part of the failure of the Labour Party is its inability to mislead, to lie, practise treachery and be generally guileful. For a reason I cannot fathom, it appears to believe in honesty and plain speaking, democracy and fairness. But integral to the Tories’ vision of Britain, articulated by Peregrine Worsthorne later in this revealing week, was that a future ruling élite would dutifully have to be an example to the lower orders. The price of omnipotence would be purity.

It was becoming apparent that the Conservatives resented what they saw as Labour’s exclusive grip on the moral life. It wasn’t enough to have seemed to have generated wealth, the Empress wanted to be seen to be good; she wanted to be liked now, loved even. I could see an ethical edifice being constructed, but it would be difficult for the Empress to pull it off: the only thing I never saw beneath the golden hair, as I sat looking at her blinking away hour after hour, was the slightest hint or possibility of that vagrant quality — love.

After Parkinson I left the hall and walked along the front. I would take in something less taxing this lunchtime, something that might turn out to be a little weird. I chose the Union of Muslim Organisations.

In the meeting room, which was virtually empty, I sat next to an Indian who once owned five restaurants in Brighton, though he only had one now. His complaint was that the immigration laws made it impossible for him to get staff. He wouldn’t recruit British Asians, they were useless, the hours didn’t suit them; grateful, freshly arrived Bangladeshis were just the job. He was very worried for the future of the corner shop, he whispered, as the meeting started.

Douglas Hurd had failed to turn up, but he’d sent two men from the Home Office to represent him. Like many other Tory men they had pink faces, white shirts with pink stripes, and fat bellies. Here amongst mostly Asians, they were on their best behaviour, especially as the Imam of the local mosque, in white cap and beard, started to recite from the Koran. Another Englishman was carrying a piece of quiche on a plate; as the Imam chanted the verses the Englishman stood stock still like a living sculpture in the centre of the room.

Then Dr Pasha, the chairman, told the room that he and other Muslims considered themselves proudly British, that this was the noble mother country they looked up to, that being a Muslim didn’t conflict with being British. He set it up nicely; the men from the Home Office were listening happily. Then he came to the point. As Muslims were the second largest religious denomination in Britain the British government could surely give them more recognition. This applied especially to the law of blasphemy which should be invoked on their behalf. He’d written to the Home Secretary — at this Dr Pasha turned forcefully to the two Britishers — insisting that the film The Blood of Hussein be banned, and more importantly Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which was an attack on Islam, on the prophet himself! Why are those people fomenting hatred against us? cried Dr Pasha, his eyes burning into the pink faces of the men from the Home Office. Surely a religious attack on us is an attack on our beloved Home Secretary himself! Why are they not prosecuted for racism? The men from the Home Office lowered their eyes.

So the conference was warming up, certainly in the conference hall the speeches were emollient and predictable; the uninhibited face of Toryism was presented at the fringe meetings, I’d been told. But it had been restrained there too, so far. Until, after this hors d’oeuvre, I went to see Teresa Gorman speak.

The speakers at this meeting were in a fortunate position. After nine and a half years of Conservative rule there were few genuine enemies in power to rail against. The fortunate ones, those who could speak from experience, were those Conservatives actually in opposition — local politicians in Labour-controlled boroughs. There was, therefore, an excited sense of anticipation in this meeting: we would hear about life in the Red Republics, perhaps a microcosm of life under a Labour government.

It started off mildly enough, with a councillor speaking of young minds being inundated by left-wing propaganda. Gay literature was being smuggled into children’s homes. There were gays-only swimming lessons, he said; there were creatures of indeterminate sex running the town halls. The room grumbled its disapproval. Not only that, there were illegal encampments of gypsies all over Haringey who were being given support by Catholic nuns. As a result, gangs of youths were defecating in pensioners’ living rooms.

This talk of Red Faeces provoked howls and yelps of disgust; wild clapping followed. A man sitting in front of me in a filthy suit which appeared to be entirely composed of stains, removed what seemed to be a snotty gumshield from his mouth and started to eat his tie. Two delicate Indian women came in and sat down next to me.

Soon there was talk of ‘racist black shits who’d impregnated hundreds of white women’. Meanwhile garbage was piling up in the streets.

‘No, no, no!’ yelled the Worker’s Party.

But the room soon hushed for Teresa Gorman. When she spoke she insisted that cuts in local services which led to garbage piling up in the streets were not to be worried about: ‘We have a new way of looking at things. Until we get power we must try and enjoy the awfulness of socialism. We should encourage it! Wasn’t there a Chinese philosopher who said that when being raped you should lie back and enjoy it?’

The racism of the meeting surprised me. After all, there were scores of Asian families who shared Conservative values. Surely the Tories didn’t want to alienate blacks and Asians when potentially they could be a source of support? I’d thought that the hatred of homosexuals had, in general, supplanted blacks and Asians in Conservative demonology. Hadn’t Nigel Lawson said that being gay was ‘unfortunate’? I would find out. As I sat through this meeting I noticed that the next day there’d be a meeting of the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality. I’d go to that.

This meeting, which was in a hotel, was hard to find and when I turned up, the name of the meeting wasn’t printed on the notice board: coyly, there was only the initials CGHE. I went down some stairs, trudged through several corridors — under the whole damp hotel it seemed (perhaps this was the Channel Tunnel) — and emerged in a room full of chairs. The one man there, who wore glasses thick as welder’s goggles and had a hare-lip, was hunched in a corner and jumped in surprise as I came in. He handed me a magazine called Open Mind. I wondered if this was perhaps the party’s only out gay, which wouldn’t have surprised me: Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens wanted to recriminalize sexual relations between adult men; and Rhodes Boyson has remarked that the promotion of positive images of gays could be ‘the end of creation’.

In one article in the magazine, by ‘Westminster Watcher’, the writer commends the party: ‘Although some queer-bashing Conservative journalists behaved very badly during the last election, the party at the national level appealed to prejudice with only one poster and a few remarks: at the constituency level the record was worse.’ The paper’s editorial also refers to this homophobic election poster and remarks wistfully that it was designed by the Jewish brothers Saatchi and Saatchi who should know better than to persecute people. Elsewhere in the paper, the writers urge heterosexuals not to be afraid of the end-of-creationists: ‘Homosexuals are as much concerned as heterosexuals with maintaining institutions which contribute to the health and stability of society.’

Eventually a handful of men arrived; but they wouldn’t sit down, and waited at the back. It was quiet in the room; no one looked at anyone else.

The speaker told us that the Labour Party tried to exploit gays, that all local government gay centres and organisations should be privatised and that Section 28 was unlikely to do any damage to sensible activities.

The Worker’s Party was hugging its prejudices to itself; through them it defined itself; this was obviously not the time to expect it to relinquish them.

Later that night I was in a restaurant, at a table with various right-wing journalists and an MP. I started to talk to the MP about Enoch Powell, who I’d seen speak earlier in the day. Powell’s was the most crowded and exuberant meeting I’d been to in Brighton, and Powell had been introduced, by a one-eyed speaker, as a man proved consistently right, a man who was not only a statesman but a Prophet. The straight-backed Prophet said, in his spine-chilling and monotonous voice, that he had never left the Conservative Party, it had left him. And now, he said, to cheers and whistles, it appeared to be approaching him again.

Now, at dinner, the MP told me that the Prophet was his hero. Since the late 1950s the Prophet had supported the free market in all things (except immigration) and had even been denounced by Mosley’s Union Movement in 1968 for stealing its ideas. The MP was proud to be a racist. The woman sitting opposite the MP intervened. ‘By the way, I’m Jewish,’ she said. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, then, as a Jewess you should acknowledge that there are many races and your race is different to mine. The English are a provincial people uninterested in culture. And you Jews are a metropolitan people obsessed with it.’

Speaking of his admiration for the Prophet, the MP said that Powell was the living originator of Thatcherism, pre-dating Keith Joseph in his ideas and unlike Joseph able to by-pass Parliament and communicate directly with the working class. The Prophet’s time had come, but through Thatcher, who was a better politician.

This was interesting because the Prophet had this reconnection in common with another man frequently considered to have slipped beyond the boundaries of sanity: Peregrine Worsthorne, who would be speaking the next evening. However, for the remainder of this evening there would be the Spectator party. Perhaps it would be less ideologically taxing; perhaps there would be some ordinary people there.

But I didn’t locate them. As soon as I arrived a young Tory, looking like an estate agent, hurried over to me, adrenalin high, and said: ‘You don’t look like a typical mindless right-wing idiot. What are you doing here?’

‘Snooping around.’

‘What for?’

I searched for a reply.

I said: ‘I want to know what is going to energise this party. What it is they’re going to offer the electorate at the next couple of elections.’

‘Oh that’s easy. We’re going to privatise everything. That’s obvious. The Health Service will go eventually. That’ll take a long time.’

‘What else?’

‘There’s the environment. But Tories don’t really give a shit about that. The important thing is the moral mission. Authority, deference, respect, that’s what we want.’

What I saw in his face, and in the faces of his young friends who had also gathered around me to help explain the future, was power, arrogance, supreme confidence. None of them doubted for a moment that their party would win the next election. They could do whatever they wanted, and with the compliant media they now had, nothing could frustrate them. Why should the slightest scepticism, doubt, or lack of nerve affect them? Labour might huff and puff over the intricacies of its defence policy but it was all irrelevant; the Left handed Britain over to Thatcher long ago and, that night, it seemed unlikely they would win it back for a long time.

I left the drinks party thinking I’d never see that particular Tory ever again. But the next day, before I was to go and hear Peregrine Worsthorne perform at a fringe meeting and talk about authority, discipline and its relation to the servant problem, I did see the Tory again, much to my surprise.

There was a demonstration across the road from the conference centre, a place now referred to as the Island, or the Island of the Mighty. About a thousand people, most of them young, had gathered; in their tight jeans and knitted sweaters and DMs, most of them, boys and girls alike, with long hair, they chanted and waved a variety of banners for ‘Troops Out’ and ‘Stop Animal Experiments’. In the crowd I noticed an older man with a handpainted sign, carefully done: on it he’d painted two words, one beneath the other: She Lies. As I was looking at the demonstration I glanced across the road and there he was, the Tory with the soul and suit of an estate agent.

He was leaning as far as he could over the crash barrier outside the hall, looking towards the demonstration. And he had extracted his wallet from his inside pocket; he was waving it at the kids, who were virtually his contemporaries, waving and screaming. Around him, other Tories, bored with the conference, too, or emerging from a debate, quickly returned to the hall to collect Union Jacks which, in a mass, they fluttered and poked at the kids.

As the demonstration dispersed, I noticed an old couple with a banner saying ‘Justice for Pensioners’. As a group of Tories walked past them, one of the group, no spring chicken himself, chucked a handful of change at the pensioner’s feet.

For Worsthorne the hall was full. Tonight it was an upmarket crowd, with Lord Weidenfeld, Paul Johnson and the editor of the Spectator in the audience. The tone of the evening was exultancy in the fact that Worsthorne, unlike most of the cabinet, had the guts to articulate those things which others would only admit in whispers. Earlier there had been, for example, Lawson’s ‘I am in favour of wealth being passed from generation to generation,’ and Baker’s talk of the ‘civilising mission’ and ‘discipline’. But nothing like this, nothing so plain, so gloriously reactionary.

Worsthorne’s argument was that England’s egalitarian age had now, thank God, finally passed. The moment of its passing was the crushing of the miners’ strike — a historic victory for the Tories. Britain would be, once more, a country in which wealth — property — would be inherited. This passing of new wealth to children would no longer be a privilege entirely of the very rich. Many of those who passed on this wealth would be yuppies; they would be vulgar, which was not surprising in the age of the common man where there were no established criteria for behaviour. In a few generations these people would gain noble values. But with the restoration of strict hierarchy the ruling class would once more exercise a civilising influence on the lower orders. Others would want to imitate them in manners, speech, education. The freshly re-established and confident ruling class would be the custodians of values and institutions.

The woman in front of me was trembling with excitement at this. ‘He’s right, he’s right!’ she repeated. ‘Bring back snobbery!’

After he finished his lecture and responded to questions, Worsthorne talked of the importance of the middle class having servants. Not ‘helps’ which were usually other middle-class people — the middle class merely educating each other — but lower-class people who would be cooks, gardeners, butlers, and would find working in great houses a civilising influence.

That night, as I strolled through Brighton and saw the kids skateboarding in the deserted shopping centre — most of Brighton seemed deserted for the conference, as people had gone away to avoid it — I thought of them polishing pepperpots in the houses of the cabinet, some of whose children were heroin addicts. But I didn’t want to think about any of this. Drinking now, I collapsed in one of the older hotels and watched Tories meeting in the bar before they went off to Thatcher’s birthday party.

One woman wore a light blue sparkling mohair jumper; a man in evening dress wore trousers far too short and scruffy day shoes; another woman wore a turquoise sequined dress with a great Marks and Spencer overcoat on top. The young people wore cheap clothes and had cheap haircuts; they were brittle and gauche. I could see that for people like Worsthorne a Tory meritocracy wasn’t enough. You didn’t want the overthrow of egalitarianism, a new economic dynamic, the primacy of the market, the entire Thatcher miracle itself merely giving birth to a reinvigorated ruling class composed of Norman Tebbits, the kind of people who took out their wallets in public and thought Burke was a term of abuse. No; the Tory Party had barely started on its road to reestablishing former inequalities. Money wasn’t enough; next would come a confident, rich establishment with power and influence and even better — authority, served by a respectful working class. At least in the hysterical, forced, undiluted atmosphere at the party conference that was the idea.

Tonight, how would I celebrate Thatcher’s birthday? I hadn’t been invited to the ball; I’d go to the Zap Club instead, which promised Frenzee and pure wild Acid House.

I walked past the crowds of police towards the beach. At random, cars were being stopped and searched. Brighton’s Zap Club was apparently well known in London. The kids would go to Brighton on the last train and return home early in the morning on the milk train. The club was on the edge of the beach, in two tunnels bored under the road, neither of them much bigger than railway carriages. In the entrance was a small shop selling badges, T-shirts, paper fans. Further in, under fluorescent lighting, the people dancing wore white, some of the men with red scarves over their heads. Other men had long curly hair, which looked permed, and they wore vividly patterned shorts like American tourists. (In fact the whole style originated in Ibiza and other Spanish holiday resorts where you dress lightly and brightly.)

The long passages inside the tunnels were painted like terracotta Egyptian friezes, on the floor were stencilled emblems from the 1960s — the word ‘love’ was prominent.

The dancers were young, around sixteen or seventeen, and not one of them would have seen the Pink Fairies at the Roundhouse in 1968 from where their light-show had been lifted. As I leaned against a wall drinking, it seemed that this was more of a parody of the 1960s than a real impulse connected with rebellion. The 1960s and its liberations were blown to bits but its fripperies had reemerged as style, as mere dressing-up. Nonetheless, few of the kids looked as if they’d willingly endure a spell in Peregrine Worsthorne’s house listening to him discuss the hideous spectacle of people sprawling on the Northern line with their legs apart.

The next day Thatcher’s fans took their seats early for the Empress’s big speech. They had their Thatcher mugs, spoons, thimbles, teacosies and photographs in their laps. I’d been in and out of the hall all week but most of the audience had been there all along, listening to speeches for about thirty hours. Now the front bank of seats was occupied ninety minutes before Thatcher was due to start. The blue flags, the Union Jacks were unfurled; some people held up Thatcher/Bush posters. There was jigging and dancing in the aisles. ‘Jerusalem’ was sung. I must have heard the phrase ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ at least three times a day in the past week.

The cabinet marched on to the platform. Thatcher was introduced. A curtain moved; she and Denis came on; the crystal voice of the Empress began. She recited her speechwriter’s jokes without smiling, as if she were reading from the Critique of Pure Reason. There was some Dickens, everyone belonged to them now: ‘Fog, fog everywhere.’ I’d heard that America’s finest speechwriter had been flown in to assist. The Empress’s speeches were cobbled together like American films, by four or five people. There was much baby-language. ‘All elections matter. But some matter more than others.’ ‘We are all too young to put our feet up.’ ‘Yes, our children can travel to see the treasures and wonders of the world.’

None of it mattered to the fans. It was the old familiar songs they liked best. They chanted: ‘Ten more years.’

On the way out I heard one woman lamenting to another: ‘I wish there’d been balloons. Next year they’ll have balloons because I’m going to write to them about it. Thousands of balloons, falling all over us.’

Eight Arms to Hold You

One day at school — an all-boys comprehensive on the border between London and Kent — our music teacher told us that John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t actually write those famous Beatles songs we loved so much.

It was 1968 and I was thirteen. For the first time in music appreciation class we were to listen to the Beatles — ‘She’s Leaving Home’, with the bass turned off. The previous week, after some Brahms, we’d been allowed to hear a Frank Zappa record, again bassless. For Mr Hogg, our music and religious instruction teacher, the bass guitar ‘obscured’ the music. But hearing anything by the Beatles at school was uplifting, an act so unusually liberal it was confusing.

Mr Hogg prised open the lid of the school ‘stereophonic equipment’, which was kept in a big, dark wooden box and wheeled around the premises by the much-abused war-wounded caretaker. Hogg put on ‘She’s Leaving Home’ without introduction, but as soon as it began he started his Beatles analysis.

What he said was devastating, though it was put simply, as if he were stating the obvious. These were the facts: Lennon and McCartney could not possibly have written the songs ascribed to them; it was a con — we should not be taken in by the ‘Beatles’, they were only front-men.

Those of us who weren’t irritated by his prattling through the tune were giggling. Certainly, for a change, most of us were listening to teacher. I was perplexed. Why would anyone want to think anything so ludicrous? What was really behind this idea?

‘Who did write the Beatles’ songs, then, sir?’ someone asked bravely. And Paul McCartney sang:

We struggled hard all our lives to get by,

She’s leaving home after living alone,

For so many years.

Mr Hogg told us that Brian Epstein and George Martin wrote the Lennon/McCartney songs. The Fabs only played on the records — if they did anything at all. (Hogg doubted whether their hands had actually touched the instruments.) ‘Real musicians were playing on those records,’ he said. Then he put the record back in its famous sleeve and changed the subject.

But I worried about Hogg’s theory for days; on several occasions I was tempted to buttonhole him in the corridor and discuss it further. The more I dwelt on it alone, the more it revealed. The Mopheads couldn’t even read music — how could they be geniuses?

It was unbearable to Mr Hogg that four young men without significant education could be the bearers of such talent and critical acclaim. But then Hogg had a somewhat holy attitude to culture. ‘He’s cultured,’ he’d say of someone, the antonym of ‘He’s common.’ Culture, even popular culture — folk-singing, for instance — was something you put on a special face for, after years of wearisome study. Culture involved a particular twitching of the nose, a faraway look (into the sublime), and a fruity pursing of the lips. Hogg knew. There was, too, a sartorial vocabulary of knowingness, with leather patches sewn on to the elbows of shiny, rancid jackets.

Obviously this was not something the Beatles had been born into. Nor had they acquired it in any recognised academy or university. No, in their early twenties, the Fabs made culture again and again, seemingly without effort, even as they mugged and winked at the cameras like schoolboys.

Sitting in my bedroom listening to the Beatles on a Grundig reel-to-reel tape-recorder, I began to see that to admit to the Beatles’ genius would devastate Hogg. It would take too much else away with it. The songs that were so perfect and about recognisable common feelings — ‘She Loves You’, ‘Please, Please Me’, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ — were all written by Brian Epstein and George Martin because the Beatles were only boys like us: ignorant, bad-mannered and rude; boys who’d never, in a just world, do anything interesting with their lives. This implicit belief, or form of contempt, was not abstract. We felt and sometimes recognised — and Hogg’s attitude towards the Beatles exemplified this — that our teachers had no respect for us as people capable of learning, of finding the world compelling and wanting to know it.

The Beatles would also be difficult for Hogg to swallow because for him there was a hierarchy among the arts. At the top were stationed classical music and poetry, beside the literary novel and great painting. In the middle would be not-so-good examples of these forms. At the bottom of the list, and scarcely considered art forms at all, were films (‘the pictures’), television and, finally, the most derided — pop music.

But in that post-modern dawn — the late 1960s — I like to think that Hogg was starting to experience cultural vertigo — which was why he worried about the Beatles in the first place. He thought he knew what culture was, what counted in history, what had weight, and what you needed to know to be educated. These things were not relative, not a question of taste or decision. Notions of objectivity did exist; there were criteria and Hogg knew what the criteria were. Or at least he thought he did. But that particular form of certainty, of intellectual authority, along with many other forms of authority, was shifting. People didn’t know where they were any more.

Not that you could ignore the Beatles even if you wanted to. Those rockers in suits were unique in English popular music, bigger than anyone had been before. What a pleasure it was to swing past Buckingham Palace in the bus knowing the Queen was indoors, in her slippers, watching her favourite film, Yellow Submarine, and humming along to ‘Eleanor Rigby’. (‘All the lonely people …’)

The Beatles couldn’t be as easily dismissed as the Rolling Stones, who often seemed like an ersatz American group, especially when Mick Jagger started to sing with an American accent. But the Beatles’ music was supernaturally beautiful and it was English music. In it you could hear cheeky music-hall songs and send-ups, pub ballads and, more importantly, hymns. The Fabs had the voices and looks of choirboys, and their talent was so broad they could do anything — love songs, comic songs, kids’ songs and sing-alongs for football crowds (at White Hart Lane, Tottenham Hotspur’s ground, we sang: ‘Here, there and every-fucking-where, Jimmy Greaves, Jimmy Greaves’). They could do rock ’n’ roll too, though they tended to parody it, having mastered it early on.

*

One lunchtime in the school library, not long after the incident with Hogg, I came across a copy of Life magazine which included hefty extracts from Hunter Davies’s biography of the Beatles, the first major book about them and their childhood. It was soon stolen from the library and passed around the school, a contemporary ‘Lives of the Saints’. (On the curriculum we were required to read Gerald Durrell and C. S. Forester, but we had our own books, which we discussed, just as we exchanged and discussed records. We liked Candy, Lord of the Flies, James Bond, Mervyn Peake, and Sex Manners for Men, among other things.)

Finally my parents bought the biography for my birthday. It was the first hardback I possessed and, pretending to be sick, I took the day off school to read it, with long breaks between chapters to prolong the pleasure. But The Beatles didn’t satisfy me as I’d imagined it would. It wasn’t like listening to Revolver, for instance, after which you felt satisfied and uplifted. The book disturbed and intoxicated me; it made me feel restless and dissatisfied with my life. After reading about the Beatles’ achievements I began to think I didn’t expect enough of myself, that none of us at school did really. In two years we’d start work; soon after that we’d get married and buy a small house nearby. The form of life was decided before it was properly begun.

To my surprise it turned out that the Fabs were lower-middle-class provincial boys; neither rich nor poor, their music didn’t come out of hardship and nor were they culturally privileged. Lennon was rough, but it wasn’t poverty that made him hard-edged. The Liverpool Institute, attended by Paul and George, was a good grammar school. McCartney’s father had been well enough off for Paul and his brother Michael to have piano lessons. Later, his father bought him a guitar.

*

We had no life guides or role models among politicians, military types or religious figures, or even film stars for that matter, as our parents did. Footballers and pop stars were the revered figures of my generation and the Beatles, more than anyone, were exemplary for countless young people. If coming from the wrong class restricts your sense of what you can be, then none of us thought we’d become doctors, lawyers, scientists, politicians. We were scheduled to be clerks, civil servants, insurance managers and travel agents.

Not that leading some kind of creative life was entirely impossible. In the mid-1960s the media was starting to grow. There was a demand for designers, graphic artists and the like. In our art lessons we designed toothpaste boxes and record sleeves to prepare for the possibility of going to art school. Now, these were very highly regarded among the kids; they were known to be anarchic places, the sources of British pop art, numerous pop groups and the generators of such luminaries as Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, Ray Davies and John Lennon. Along with the Royal Court and the drama corridor of the BBC, the art schools were the most important post-war British cultural institution, and some lucky kids escaped into them. Once, I ran away from school to spend the day at the local art college. In the corridors where they sat cross-legged on the floor, the kids had dishevelled hair and paint-splattered clothes. A band was rehearsing in the dining hall. They liked being there so much they stayed till midnight. Round the back entrance there were condoms in the grass.

But these kids were destined to be commercial artists, which was, at least, ‘proper work’. Commercial art was OK but anything that veered too closely towards pure art caused embarrassment; it was pretentious. Even education fell into this trap. When, later, I went to college, our neighbours would turn in their furry slippers and housecoats to stare and tut-tut to each other as I walked down the street in my Army-surplus greatcoat, carrying a pile of library books. I like to think it was the books rather than the coat they were objecting to — the idea that they were financing my uselessness through their taxes. Surely nurturing my brain could be of no possible benefit to the world; it would only render me more argumentative — create an intelligentsia and you’re only producing criticism for the future.

(For some reason I’ve been long under the impression that this hatred for education is a specifically English tendency. I’ve never imagined the Scots, Irish or Welsh, and certainly no immigrant group, hating the idea of elevation through the mind in quite the same way. Anyhow, it would be a couple of decades before the combined neighbours of south-east England could take their revenge on education via their collective embodiment — Thatcher.)

I could, then, at least have been training to be an apprentice. But, unfortunately for the neighbours, we had seen A Hard Day’s Night at Bromley Odeon. Along with our mothers, we screamed all through it, fingers stuck in our ears. And afterwards we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, where to go, how to exorcise this passion the Beatles had stoked up. The ordinary wasn’t enough; we couldn’t accept only the everyday now! We desired ecstasy, the extraordinary, magnificence — today!

For most, this pleasure lasted only a few hours and then faded. But for others it opened a door to the sort of life that might, one day, be lived. And so the Beatles came to represent opportunity and possibility. They were careers officers, a myth for us to live by, a light for us to follow.

How could this be? How was it that of all the groups to emerge from that great pop period the Beatles were the most dangerous, the most threatening, the most subversive? Until they met Dylan and, later, dropped acid, the Beatles wore matching suits and wrote harmless love songs offering little ambiguity and no call to rebellion. They lacked Elvis’s sexuality, Dylan’s introspection and Jagger’s surly danger. And yet … and yet — this is the thing — everything about the Beatles represented pleasure, and for the provincial and suburban young pleasure was only the outcome and justification of work. Pleasure was work’s reward and it occurred only at weekends and after work.

But when you looked at A Hard Day’s Night or Help!, it was clear that those four boys were having the time of their life: the films radiated freedom and good times. In them there was no sign of the long, slow accumulation of security and status, the year-after-year movement towards satisfaction, that we were expected to ask of life. Without conscience, duty or concern for the future, everything about the Beatles spoke of enjoyment, abandon and attention to the needs of the self. The Beatles became heroes to the young because they were not deferential: no authority had broken their spirit; they were confident and funny; they answered back; no one put them down. It was this independence, creativity and earning-power that worried Hogg about the Beatles. Their naive hedonism and dazzling accomplishments were too paradoxical. For Hogg to wholeheartedly approve of them was like saying crime paid. But to dismiss the new world of the 1960s was to admit to being old and out of touch.

There was one final strategy that the defenders of the straight world developed at this time. It was a common stand-by of the neighbours. They argued that the talent of such groups was shallow. The easy money would soon be spent, squandered on objects the groups would be too jejune to appreciate. These musicians couldn’t think about the future. What fools they were to forfeit the possibility of a secure job for the pleasure of having teenagers worship them for six months.

This sneering ‘anyone-can-do-it’ attitude to the Beatles wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Anyone could have a group — and they did. But it was obvious from early on that the Beatles were not a two-hit group like the Merseybeats or Freddie and the Dreamers. And around the time that Hogg was worrying about the authorship of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and turning down the bass on ‘She’s Leaving Home’, just as he was getting himself used to them, the Beatles were doing something that had never been done before. They were writing songs about drugs, songs that could be fully comprehended only by people who took drugs, songs designed to be enjoyed all the more if you were stoned when you listened to them.

And Paul McCartney had admitted to using drugs, specifically LSD. This news was very shocking then. For me, the only association that drugs conjured up was of skinny Chinese junkies in squalid opium dens and morphine addicts in B movies; there had also been the wife in Long Day’s Journey into Night. What were the Mopheads doing to themselves? Where were they taking us?

*

On Peter Blake’s cover for Sgt Pepper, between Sir Robert Peel and Terry Southern, is an ex-Etonian novelist mentioned in Remembrance of Things Past and considered by Proust to be a genius — Aldous Huxley. Huxley first took mescalin in 1953, twelve years before the Beatles used LSD. He took psychedelic drugs eleven times, including on his death bed, when his wife injected him with LSD. During his first trip Huxley felt himself turning into four bamboo chair legs. As the folds of his grey flannel trousers became ‘charged with is-ness’ the world became a compelling, unpredictable, living and breathing organism. In this transfigured universe Huxley realised both his fear of and need for the ‘marvellous’; one of the soul’s principal appetites was for ‘transcendence’. In an alienated, routine world ruled by habit, the urge for escape, for euphoria, for heightened sensation, could not be denied.

Despite his enthusiasm for LSD, when Huxley took psilocybin with Timothy Leary at Harvard he was alarmed by Leary’s ideas about the wider use of psychedelic drugs. He thought Leary was an ‘ass’ and felt that LSD, if it were to be widely tried at all, should be given to the cultural élite — to artists, psychologists, philosophers and writers. It was important that psychedelic drugs be used seriously, primarily as aids to contemplation. Certainly they changed nothing in the world, being ‘incompatible with action and even with the will to action’. Huxley was especially nervous about the aphrodisiac qualities of LSD and wrote to Leary: ‘I strongly urge you not to let the sexual cat out of the bag. We’ve stirred up enough trouble suggesting that drugs can stimulate aesthetic and religious experience.’

But there was nothing Huxley could do to keep the ‘cat’ in the bag. In 1961 Leary gave LSD to Allen Ginsberg, who became convinced the drug contained the possibilities for political change. Four years later the Beatles met Ginsberg through Bob Dylan. At his own birthday party Ginsberg was naked apart from a pair of underpants on his head and a ‘do not disturb’ sign tied to his penis. Later, Lennon was to learn a lot from Ginsberg’s style of self-exhibition as protest, but on this occasion he shrank from Ginsberg, saying: ‘You don’t do that in front of the birds!’

Throughout the second half of the 1960s the Beatles functioned as that rare but necessary and important channel, popularisers of esoteric ideas — about mysticism, about different forms of political involvement and about drugs. Many of these ideas originated with Huxley. The Beatles could seduce the world partly because of their innocence. They were, basically, good boys who became bad boys. And when they became bad boys, they took a lot of people with them.

Lennon claimed to have ‘tripped’ hundreds of times, and he was just the sort to become interested in unusual states of mind. LSD creates euphoria and suspends inhibition; it may make us aware of life’s intense flavour. In the tripper’s escalation of awareness, the memory is stimulated too. Lennon knew the source of his art was the past, and his acid songs were full of melancholy, self-examination and regret. It’s no surprise that Sgt Pepper, which at one time was to include ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’, was originally intended to be an album of songs about Lennon and McCartney’s Liverpool childhood.

Soon the Beatles started to wear clothes designed to be read by people who were stoned. God knows how much ‘is-ness’ Huxley would have felt had he seen John Lennon in 1967, when he was reportedly wearing a green flower-patterned shirt, red cord trousers, yellow socks and a sporran in which he carried his loose change and keys. These weren’t the cheap but hip adaptations of work clothes that young males had worn since the late 1940s — Levi jackets and jeans, sneakers, work boots or DMs, baseball caps, leather jackets — democratic styles practical for work. The Beatles had rejected this conception of work. Like Baudelairean dandies they could afford to dress ironically and effeminately, for each other, for fun, beyond the constraints of the ordinary. Stepping out into that struggling post-war world steeped in memories of recent devastation and fear — the war was closer to them than Sgt Pepper is to me today — wearing shimmering bandsman’s outfits, crushed velvet, peach-coloured silk and long hair, their clothes were gloriously non-functional, identifying their creativity and the pleasures of drug-taking.

By 1966 the Beatles behaved as if they spoke directly to the whole world. This was not a mistake: they were at the centre of life for millions of young people in the West. And certainly they’re the only mere pop group you could remove from history and suggest that culturally, without them, things would have been significantly different. All this meant that what they did was influential and important. At this time, before people were aware of the power of the media, the social changes the Beatles sanctioned had happened practically before anyone noticed. Musicians have always been involved with drugs, but the Beatles were the first to parade their particular drug-use — marijuana and LSD — publicly and without shame. They never claimed, as musicians do now — when found out — that drugs were a ‘problem’ for them. And unlike the Rolling Stones, they were never humiliated for drug-taking or turned into outlaws. There’s a story that at a bust at Keith Richard’s house in 1967, before the police went in they waited for George Harrison to leave. The Beatles made taking drugs seem an enjoyable, fashionable and liberating experience: like them, you would see and feel in ways you hadn’t imagined possible. Their endorsement, far more than that of any other group or individual, removed drugs from their sub-cultural, avant-garde and generally squalid associations, making them part of mainstream youth activity. Since then, illegal drugs have accompanied music, fashion and dance as part of what it is to be young in the West.

*

Allen Ginsberg called the Beatles ‘the paradigm of the age’, and they were indeed condemned to live out their period in all its foolishness, extremity and commendable idealism. Countless preoccupations of the time were expressed through the Fabs. Even Apple Corps was a characteristic 1960s notion: an attempt to run a business venture in an informal, creative and non-materialistic way.

Whatever they did and however it went wrong, the Beatles were always on top of things musically, and perhaps it is this, paradoxically, that made their end inevitable. The loss of control that psychedelic drugs can involve, the political anger of the 1960s and its anti-authoritarian violence, the foolishness and inauthenticity of being pop stars at all, rarely violates the highly finished surface of their music. Songs like ‘Revolution’ and ‘Helter Skelter’ attempt to express unstructured or deeply felt passions, but the Beatles are too controlled to let their music fray. It never felt as though the band was going to disintegrate through sheer force of feeling, as with Hendrix, the Who or the Velvet Underground. Their ability was so extensive that all madness could be contained within a song. Even ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘I Am the Walrus’ are finally engineered and controlled. The exception is ‘Revolution No.9’, which Lennon had to fight to keep on the White Album; he wanted to smash through the organisation and accomplished form of his pop music. But Lennon had to leave the Beatles to continue in that direction and it wasn’t until his first solo album that he was able to strip away the Beatle frippery for the raw feeling he was after.

At least, Lennon wanted to do this. In the 1970s, the liberation tendencies of the 1960s bifurcated into two streams — hedonism, self-aggrandisement and decay, represented by the Stones; and serious politics and self-exploration, represented by Lennon. He continued to be actively involved in the obsessions of the time, both as initiate and leader, which is what makes him the central cultural figure of the age, as Brecht was, for instance, in the 1930s and 1940s.

But to continue to develop Lennon had to leave the containment of the Beatles and move to America. He had to break up the Beatles to lead an interesting life.

*

I heard a tape the other day of a John Lennon interview. What struck me, what took me back irresistibly, was realising how much I loved his voice and how inextricably bound up it was with my own growing up. It was a voice I must have heard almost every day for years, on television, radio or record. It was more exceptional then than it is now, not being the voice of the BBC or of southern England, or of a politician; it was neither emollient nor instructing, it was direct and very hip. It pleased without trying to. Lennon’s voice continues to intrigue me, and not just for nostalgic reasons, perhaps because of the range of what it says. It’s a strong but cruel and harsh voice; not one you’d want to hear putting you down. It’s naughty, vastly melancholic and knowing too, full of self-doubt, self-confidence and humour. It’s expressive, charming and sensual; there’s little concealment in it, as there is in George Harrison’s voice, for example. It is aggressive and combative but the violence in it is attractive since it seems to emerge out of a passionate involvement with the world. It’s the voice of someone who is alive in both feeling and mind; it comes from someone who has understood their own experience and knows their value.

The only other public voice I know that represents so much, that seems to have spoken relentlessly to me for years, bringing with it a whole view of life — though from the dark side — is that of Margaret Thatcher. When she made her ‘St Francis of Assisi’ speech outside 10 Downing Street after winning the 1979 General Election, I laughed aloud at the voice alone. It was impenetrable to me that anyone could have voted for a sound that was so cold, so pompous, so clearly insincere, ridiculous and generally absurd.

In this same voice, and speaking of her childhood, Thatcher once said that she felt that ‘To pursue pleasure for its own sake was wrong’.

In retrospect it isn’t surprising that the 1980s mélange of liberal economics and Thatcher’s pre-war Methodist priggishness would embody a reaction to the pleasure-seeking of the 1960s and 1970s, as if people felt ashamed, guilty and angry about having gone too far, as if they’d enjoyed themselves too much. The greatest surprise was had by the Left — the ideological left rather than the pragmatic Labour Party — which believed it had, during the 1970s, made immeasurable progress since Sgt Pepper, penetrating the media and the Labour Party, the universities and the law, fanning out and reinforcing itself in various organizations like the gay, black and women’s movements. The 1960s was a romantic period and Lennon a great romantic hero, both as poet and political icon. Few thought that what he represented would all end so quickly and easily, that the Left would simply hand over the moral advantage and their established positions in the country as if they hadn’t fought for them initially.

Thatcher’s trope against feeling was a resurrection of control, a repudiation of the sensual, of self-indulgence in any form, self-exploration and the messiness of non-productive creativity, often specifically targeted against the ‘permissive’ 1960s. Thatcher’s colleague Norman Tebbit characterised this suburban view of the Beatle period with excellent vehemence, calling it: ‘The insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of that third-rate decade, the 60s.’

The amusing thing is that Thatcher’s attempt to convert Britain to an American-style business-based society has failed. It is not something that could possibly have taken in such a complacent and divided land, especially one lacking a self-help culture. Only the immigrants in Britain have it: they have much to fight for and much to gain through being entrepreneurial. But it’s as if no one else can be bothered — they’re too mature to fall for such ideas.

Ironically, the glory, or, let us say, the substantial achievement of Britain in its ungracious decline, has been its art. There is here a tradition of culture dissent (or argument or cussedness) caused by the disaffections and resentments endemic in a class-bound society, which fed the best fiction of the 1960s, the theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, and the cinema of the early 1980s. But principally and more prolifically, reaching a worldwide audience and being innovative and challenging, there is the production of pop music — the richest cultural form of post-war Britain. Ryszard Kapuscinski in Shah of Shahs quotes a Tehran carpet salesman: ‘What have we given the world? We have given poetry, the miniature, and carpets. As you can see, these are all useless things from the productive viewpoint. But it is through such things that we have expressed our true selves.’

The Beatles are the godhead of British pop, the hallmark of excellence in song-writing and, as importantly, in the interweaving of music and life. They set the agenda for what was possible in pop music after them. And Lennon, especially, in refusing to be a career pop star and dissociating himself from the politics of his time, saw, in the 1970s, pop becoming explicitly involved in social issues. In 1976 Eric Clapton interrupted a concert he was giving in Birmingham to make a speech in support of Enoch Powell. The incident led to the setting up of Rock Against Racism. Using pop music as an instrument of solidarity, as resistance and propaganda, it was an effective movement against the National Front at a time when official politics — the Labour Party — were incapable of taking direct action around immediate street issues. And punk too, of course, emerged partly out of the unemployment, enervation and directionlessness of the mid-1970s.

During the 1980s, Thatcherism discredited such disinterested and unprofitable professions as teaching, and yet failed, as I’ve said, to implant a forging culture of self-help. Today, as then, few British people believe that nothing will be denied them if only they work hard enough, as many Americans, for instance, appear to believe. Most British know for a fact that, whatever they do, they can’t crash through the constraints of the class system and all the prejudices and instincts for exclusion that it contains. But pop music is the one area in which this belief in mobility, reward and opportunity does exist.

Fortunately the British school system can be incompetent, liberal and so lacking in self-belief that it lacks the conviction to crush the creativity of young people, which does, therefore, continue to flourish in the interstices of authority, in the school corridor and after four o’clock, as it were. The crucial thing is to have education that doesn’t stamp out the desire to learn, that attempts to educate while the instincts of young people — which desire to be stimulated but in very particular things, like sport, pop music and television — flower in spite of the teacher’s requirement to educate. The sort of education that Thatcherism needed as a base — hard-line, conformist, medicinal, providing soldiers for the trenches of business wars and not education for its own sake — is actually against the tone or feeling of an England that is not naturally competitive, not being desperate enough, though desperate conditions were beginning to be created.

*

Since Hogg first played ‘She’s Leaving Home’, the media has expanded unimaginably, but pop music remains one area accessible to all, both for spectators and, especially, for participants. The cinema is too expensive, the novel too refined and exclusive, the theatre too poor and middle-class, and television too complicated and rigid. Music is simpler to get into. And pop musicians never have to ask themselves — in the way that writers, for instance, constantly have to — who is my audience, who am I writing for and what am I trying to say? It is art for their own sakes, and art which connects with a substantial audience hungry for a new product, an audience which is, by now, soaked in the history of pop music and is sophisticated, responsive and knowledgeable.

And so there has been in Britain since the mid-1960s a stream of fantastically accomplished music, encompassing punk and New Wave, northern soul, reggae, hip-hop, rap, acid jazz and house. The Left, in its puritanical way, has frequently dismissed pop as capitalist pap, preferring folk and other ‘traditional’ music. But it is pop that has spoken of ordinary experience with far more precision, real knowledge and wit than, say, British fiction of the equivalent period. And you can’t dance to fiction.

In the 1980s, during Thatcher’s ‘permanent revolution’, there was much talk of identity, race, nationality, history and, naturally, culture. But pop music, which has bound young people together more than anything else, was usually left out. But this tradition of joyous and lively music created by young people from state schools, kids from whom little was expected, has made a form of self-awareness, entertainment and effective criticism that deserves to be acknowledged and applauded but never institutionalised. But then that is up to the bands and doesn’t look like happening, pop music being a rebellious form in itself if it is to be any good. And the Beatles, the most likely candidates ever for institutionalisation, finally repudiated that particular death through the good sense of John Lennon, who gave back his MBE, climbed inside a white bag and wrote ‘Cold Turkey’.

The Word and the Bomb

Most of the English writers I grew up reading were fascinated by the British Empire and the colonial idea, and they didn’t hesitate to take it as their subject. E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, J. R. Ackerley, George Orwell and Anthony Burgess all tackled this area and its numerous implications in one way or another, for most of their writing lives.

As a young man, living in the London suburbs with an Indian father and English mother, I wanted to read works set in England, works that might help make sense of my own situation. Racism was real to me; the Empire was not. I liked Colin MacInnes and E. R. Braithwaite, whose To Sir with Love so moved me when I read it under the desk at school. But where were the British equivalents of the black American writers: James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison? Who was noting the profound and permanent alterations to British life which had begun with the Empire and had now, as it were, come home?

Oddly, most modern British writers have been reluctant to similarly engage with such subjects at home. Questions of race, immigration, identity, Islam — the whole range of issues which so preoccupy us these days — have been absent from the work of my white contempories, even as a new generation of British writers has developed, following the lead of V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie.

Most writers would say, quite rightly, that their subjects choose them; that they are interested in whatever they are interested in for reasons they cannot explain, and that writing is an experiment which takes you where it has to. The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising. Jo Shapcott puts it nicely in her poem ‘The Mad Cow Talks Back’: ‘My brain’s like the hive: constant little murmurs from its cells/saying this is the way, this is the way to go.’

In the post-war period, race — and now religion — have become subjects around which we discuss what is most important to us as individuals and as a society, and what scares us about others. Race is a reason to think about free speech and ‘hate’ speech; about integration, or what we have to be in order for society to work, and about the notion of the ‘stranger’. We use the idea of race to think about education, and what we assume our children should know; about national identity: whether we need an identity at all, and what such an idea means; about sexuality, and the sexual attitudes and powers we ascribe to others, as well as our place in the world as a nation, and what our values are. We think, too, through the often mystifying topic of multiculturalism, about how mixed and mixed-up we are, so much so that we find it disconcerting for others to be multiple, and even worse, for us to be so, too. And because our politicians are so limited in what they can say and think, we need artists, intellectuals and academics to keep our cultural conversation going, to help us orient ourselves.

Yet a curious sort of literary apartheid has developed, with the latest ‘post-colonial’ generation exploring the racial and religious transformation of post-war Britain, while the rest leave the subject alone. When British television, cinema and theatre saw it as their duty to explore these issues — and the strangeness of the silence which often surrounded them — British writers of the generation following Graham Greene seemed scared of getting it wrong, of not understanding, even as they complained of having nothing ‘important’ to write about, envying American writers for having more compelling subjects.

Not that this apartheid was entirely innocent. Salman Rushdie, in a 1983 essay entitled ‘Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist’, describes the attempt of the literature business to exclude certain writers, shoving them to the periphery under the patronising term ‘Commonwealth writers’. The idea here is to keep writing in English pure, to change the terms of English literature ‘into something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist’.

It isn’t as though race is a new subject in Britain. Sukhdev Sandhu, in his comprehensive study London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, quotes a correspondent for The Times in 1867: ‘There is hardly such a thing as a pure Englishman in this island. In place of the rather vulgarised and very inaccurate phrase, “Anglo-Saxon”, our national denomination, to be strictly correct, would be a composite of a dozen national titles.’

If, for E. M. Forster, the Empire was about power rather than mixing, its effect was permanently to alienate and separate people from one another. At the end of A Passage to India, the Englishman Fielding and his Muslim friend Aziz are out riding. Forster writes: ‘Socially they had no meeting place. Would he today defy all his own people for the sake of a stray Indian? Aziz was a memento, a trophy, they were proud of each other, yet they must inevitably part.’ Aziz himself cries, ‘Clear out, all you Turtons and Burtons.’ And, ‘We shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea!’

George Orwell takes a scalpel to this subject, telling us that political domination can only lead to humiliation, on both sides. In his essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, the opening line of which is, ‘In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me,’ Orwell draws an uncompromising picture of how this humiliation works. Sent to kill a rogue elephant, a crowd of ‘two thousand’ begins to follows him, fascinated by how the Englishman will act. He feels himself to be ‘an absurd puppet’; all that the natives want to do — ‘the sneering yellow faces’ — is laugh at him. But how could they respond otherwise? Later, writing about Kipling, he says, ‘He does not see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited.’

It is clear, in both Forster and Orwell, that the ‘coloured’ man is always inferior to the Englishman. He is not worth as much; he never will be. When it comes to character as well as colour, the white man is the gold standard. However, Orwell also saw that the Empire — and I guess he’d have applied this to immigration — was primarily economic. This was how countries enriched themselves. If the Empire wasn’t supposed to be a moral crusade with the aim of making everyone alike, the only way to do it was to be ruthless — not half-hearted, as he was when called upon to dispose of the elephant. If the elephant is the Empire and Orwell the representative Englishman, he has to remove something that cannot easily be got rid of. And the elephant is with us still.

During my childhood and youth, differences in British society were always based around class and the conflicts they gave rise to. The Labour Party grew out of such clashes; its existence was based on them. But technology and consumerism became our gods. Now people are not even divided over politics, as there is only one party, and the opposition is fragmented, disorganised and without passion or direction. The real differences in Britain today are not political, or even based on class, but are arranged around race and religion, with their history of exploitation, humiliation and political helplessness.

Forster’s Aziz got his wish: the British left the subcontinent. But in the vacuum following this hurried departure, there was political failure and dictatorship. Who, there, was seriously addressing the needs of the poor? For me, visiting Pakistan in the early 1980s, it was bewildering to hear older people wishing that Britain still ruled. Pakistan was becoming a theocracy and no one knew how to stop it. The Americans had been afraid of the Left, and hadn’t noticed the significance of the mosques.

One of the most significant reasons for the rise of Islamic extremism in the Third World is the presence of financial and political corruption, along with the lack of free speech, and the failure to make a space for even the mildest political dissent. Pakistan, for instance, was a country constantly on the verge of collapse. My family in Karachi, along with most of the other middle-class families, hoarded their money in the West ‘just in case’, and educated their children in Britain and the US.

If the political class and the wealthy stole money, promoted their relatives — my Uncle Omar, a journalist in Pakistan, called it ‘the son-in-law also rises’ culture — and ensured that they had a route out, political dissent for those who did not have such privileges became organised around the mosque and the outspoken clerics there. As with many revolutions, the route to freedom from oppression also became the route to more oppression, to a familiar tyranny — that of the ‘just’ as opposed to that of the ‘unjust’.

Young British Asians, the committed Muslims of My Son the Fanatic and The Black Album, were aware of this corruption at home and often felt guilty that they were in a better situation in the West. Corruption in their parents’ land was also an injustice they wanted to repair.

The downfall of the Shah and the Iranian revolution of 1979, followed by a religious dictatorship, showed, at least, the effectiveness of Islam in fomenting political change. However, most people in the West became aware of the force and determination of radical Islam during the period of the fatwa against Rushdie, in 1989. Young Muslims told me that although they didn’t succeed in either suppressing The Satanic Verses or eliminating its author, they were aware of how powerful their disapproval could be, and what energy they could create when organised. The Muslim writer Shabbir Akhtar admitted in Be Careful with Muhammad that, ‘The Rushdie affair is, in the last analysis, admittedly about fanaticism on behalf of God.’

These young men were highly politicised and passionate. Believing they had unique access to virtue — and virtue was to be had only through submission to God — they were prepared to give up their lives for a cause. Forgetting how zealous we had once been about our own description of equality — socialism — we could only be shocked by their commitment and solidarity, and by their hatred of injustice, as well as their determination to bring about social change. We had not seen religious revolutionaries for a long time. Apart from liberation theology in South America — the church being used as an outlet for Left opposition — the only significant religion we saw for a long time was the soft New Age, as well as other right-wing cults, like the Moonies. Even Martin Luther King was considered by us to be a black leader rather than a religious one.

For us, religious commitment, particularly if it was political too, entailed not emancipation but a rejection of the Enlightenment and of modernity. How could we begin to deal with it? You respect people who are different, but how do you live with people who are so different that — among other things — they lock up their wives?

For young religious radicals, extreme Islam worked in many ways. It kept them out of trouble, for a start, and provided some pride. They weren’t drinking, taking drugs, or getting into trouble like some of their white contemporaries. At the same time, they were able to be rebels. Being more fervent Muslims than their parents — and even condemning their parents — kept them within the Muslim fold, but enabled them to be transgressive at the same time. It’s a difficult trick, to be simultaneously disobedient and conformist, but joining a cult or political organisation can fit both needs. The puritanical young can defy their fathers, but keep to the law of the ultimate Father. They are good, virtuous children, while rebelling.

Not that these young people are either representative or anything like the majority of Muslims in Britain. Earlier this year, making a short television documentary, I took a camera around the country and interviewed numerous Indian waiters. Having eaten in Indian restaurants all my life, I was fascinated by what these normally silent and unnoticed figures might say. To me, Indian restaurants with their sitar music, flocked wallpaper and pictures of the Taj Mahal on the wall, reproduced the colonial experience in this country for the ordinary person; the experience, of course, was ‘Disneyfied’, made bland and acceptable for the British, while retaining some of its charm.

Most of these waiters were keen on their work; feeding others was important for them. They had worked hard, and either they, or their families, had endured a traumatic transplantation to find a place in this country. They were Muslims; they prayed; they went to the mosque. But, as Shabbir Akhtar says, ‘For most Muslims, Islam is a “Friday religion”.’ The Islam they wanted was not incompatible with the West. The waiters wanted their children — boys and girls alike — to be well-educated; they required a health service, housing and a democratic political structure. They were not segregated; they were important, well-known and respected in their town. They had multiple identities: being British, Bengali, and Welsh too. They were truly multicultural.

However, one of the waiters said to me recently, indicating his arm, his skin, his colour, ‘Now they are blaming us all.’ He wanted me to know he saw the present danger as a resurgence of racism, this time aimed specifically at Muslims. The idea might be to root out extremists, but a whole community may end up becoming stigmatised. One of the waiters mentioned his fear that rather than embodying the ‘immigrant dream’ of wealth, individuality and respect, they would become the permanent scapegoats of British society, as the blacks have become in the US. I have heard calls among the British for the re-installation of Englishness, as though there has been too much multiculturalism, rather than not enough. This wish for rigid, exclusive identities mirrors extreme Islam itself; it is an attempt to counter fundamentalism with more fundamentalism. This is a form of shame, when it is our excesses we should celebrate. We have been beset by bogeys before — Papists, communists, pornography — without losing our minds.

Not that monoculturalism can work now: the world is too mixed. But there is the possibility of many new conflicts. After everything immigrants and their families have contributed to this country, the years of work and the racism faced, the war in Iraq, which Blair thought he could prosecute without cost or social division here, has brought more fragmentation. If Blair’s ‘third way’ implies consensus and the end of antagonism, our literature will sharpen and map differences. ‘Over-integration’, the erasing of racial and religious differences, can become coercive or even fascistic. It can give rise to more racism, anger and resentment.

Edward Said wrote of the way Western writers constructed the East: the Orient as a convenient and simplistic fabrication, often as an obscene fantasy. Not that this is a fair picture of the work of writers like Forster or Orwell, who, from the inside, offered devastating critiques of their own class. Not that fantasies don’t go both ways. Among Muslims, there has been a reverse Orientalism, or ‘Occidentalism’, at work. Many of the fundamentalists I met, indeed many Muslims, were keen to see the West as corrupt and over-sexualised; there was ‘too much freedom’. The West could seem chaotic, over-individualistic; the family was less important, or constantly mutating. These Muslims refused to look at Western culture and science, or the institutions which can only flourish in a relatively free atmosphere, preferring to see the inevitable underside: addiction, divorce, social breakdown.

In the light of such deliberate mutual incomprehension, we might ask ourselves what the use of writing is. However, you might as well ask what the use of speaking or telling stories is. Edward Said identified useful writing as ‘speaking the truth to power’. The attacks on Rushdie show us, at least, that the Word is dangerous, and that independent and critical thought is more important than ever. In an age of propaganda, political simplicities and violence, our stories are crucial. Apart from the fact that the political has to be constantly interrogated, it is in such stories — which are conversations with ourselves — that we can speak of, include and generate more complex and difficult selves. It is when the talking and writing stops, when the attempt is to suppress human inconsistency by virtue, that evil takes place in the silence. The antidote to puritanism isn’t licentiousness, but recognition of what goes on inside human beings. Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind, but a live culture is an exploration, and represents our endless curiosity about our own strangeness and impossible sexuality: wisdom is more important than doctrine; doubt more important than certainty. Fundamentalism implies the failure of our most significant attribute, our imagination. In the fundamentalist scheme there is only one imaginer — God. The rest of us are his servants.

The freedom to speak is not only our privilege, but is essential to the oppressed, unheard and marginalised of the Third World, as they struggle to keep their humanity alive in conditions far worse than here. To retreat into a citadel of ‘Englishness’, to refuse to link up or identify with them, is to deliver them over to superstition and poverty of the imagination.

The Rushdie case remains instructive. In the end it is Islam itself which suffers from the repudiation of more sensual and dissident ideas of itself. Shabbir Akhtar — and his like — cannot understand that by leaving out, or attempting to suppress, so much of themselves, by parting company from an essential component of their own heritage, they are losing access to a source of enjoyment, energy and understanding. Radical Islam, then, far from looking like a new revolutionary movement, has come to rather resemble other totalitarian systems like Catholicism and communism, neither of which — under the rule of dull old men — could see the value of obscenity.

Immorality and blasphemy require protection. The roll-call of the censored is an account of our civilisation. If Islam is incapable of making any significant contribution to culture and knowledge, it is because extreme puritanism and censoriousness can only lead to a paranoia which will cause it to become more violent and unable to speak for those it is intended to serve. That which we seek to exclude returns to haunt us.

Fear Eats the Soul

In 1974 the renowned and often notorious young German director Rainer Fassbinder made a simple and relatively small film set mostly in a Munich bar and an apartment. This modest but resonant piece concerns the relationship between a late-middle-aged cleaning woman, Emmi, and Ali, a Moroccan immigrant she meets and dances with in a bar near her flat after a thunderstorm.

I can’t have seen Fear Eats the Soul until the early 1980s, when I suspect that though it might be quite different in its details, it reminded me of the relationship between my parents. (The film could easily have been set in any British town.) Although Britain and other European countries were changing rapidly in terms of their racial identity, I wasn’t aware of any other films about European racism or ‘integration’, and this film seemed to be saying something important and necessary.

Fassbinder was an extremely imaginative artist with his own somewhat peculiar preoccupations; however, there are few directors as aware of their time and place as him. He was born at the end of the war and became obsessed with its consequences, making films with women at the centre of them. (He had many relationships with actresses, as well as with men.) Fassbinder resembles Brecht in his ability to combine political analysis with a passion for understanding women. Like Brecht he wanted to see the centre from the position of the outsider; that way he could speak the forbidden. The dignified presence of El Hedi ben Salem as Ali — a lover of Fassbinder, who hanged himself in a French prison just before the director’s last film, Querelle, was released — can only remind us of how few black and Asian actors appeared in the great European cinema of the 60s and 70s.

Fear Eats the Soul is not over-aestheticised; the camera barely moves and the actors are often impassive. Nor is Fassbinder much interested in the psychology of the characters. It is their social situation which compels him. Haunted by the recent past, the 1970s were certainly violent and disruptive in Germany. Early on in the film Emmi admits that she and her mother were both in the Nazi party. Nonetheless, she likes Ali instantly and he spends the night in her flat. (Usually he shares a room with six other ‘guestworkers’.) ‘Come on,’ Emmi says to Ali on the stairs. ‘We’re all forever saying “but”. And everything stays the same.’

‘Arabs with Germans not good,’ Ali warns her. ‘Arabs not human in Germany.’ What Fassbinder then explores is the traumatic impact of this disconcerting love on those around the couple, including her children. Emmi’s neighbours and friends even begin to suspect her of not being one of them; they point out that her name — Kurowski — sounds foreign. Her workmates say of the ‘Gastarbeiters’, ‘dirty pigs the lot of them. The way they live. Whole families in a single room. All they’re after is money. The women who go with them are whores.’

Ali is dignified, impeccably polite and good-looking, though he is no saint. He also appears somewhat isolated, if not lonely. As as a ‘guestworker’ he is not a German citizen and seems stranded far from home. We never see he and Emmi making love, but they like to talk. Fassbinder might have been known for his exploration of sexuality and its instability, but this is a love story. These two people really like one another.

When Emmi and Ali marry and move in together Emmi is isolated by her colleagues and neighbours. The local grocer won’t serve Ali because, he claims, he doesn’t speak German. The neighbours call the police when Ali plays cards with some friends. Someone says, ‘Four Arabs in her apartment. You know what they’re like. Bombs and all that.’

At their wedding lunch the couple are alone while being stared at by strangers, eating in the Munich restaurant Hitler used to frequent.

At this point Fassbinder moves the story on. When Ali and Emmi return from their honeymoon attitudes moderate. Her children can use Emmi as their babysitter; the grocer welcomes Ali: he has been made aware of their mutual dependence now he is afraid of losing customers to the expanding supermarkets. ‘In business,’ he says, ‘you have to hide your aversions.’ Emmi’s colleagues take up with her again when they find another victim to bully, this time a Yugoslav woman. Not only that, her female friends begin to find Ali attractive, even feeling his muscles.

Towards the end of the film, after a confused and persecuted Ali sleeps with a girl from the bar, Emmi goes to some trouble to win him back, insisting their love is more important than any minor transgression. Then, when Ali falls ill with a perforated stomach ulcer, she takes him to hospital where he is left in the care of a doctor — Fassbinder’s father was a doctor — who informs her that Ali will have to return because his ulcer won’t get better. The doctor has seen this before with other immigrants: their lives are so difficult they fall ill repeatedly.

The notion of integration is one that is discussed constantly in Europe today, and the character of Ali perfectly illustrates the difficulties and double-binds it involves. The language used against him is the familiar vocabulary of the racist, whether the victim is a Jew, Negro or Muslim, and it involves the most important things: money, sexuality, disease and social status. Considering their envy of this Arab man is, at least, a way for those around him to be reminded of what matters most to them — if only in inverted fantasy.

The immigrant should work but not belong; he mustn’t forget his place as an outsider. If he ‘integrates’ too much he is accused of taking over, or of fracturing the organic unity of the existing society. If he keeps his distance he is living in a ghetto, thus creating social disintegration. In the end he is indigestible, and Ali represents in his sick body the contradictions of the society he now inhabits.

There are no Black Shirts, political parties, marches, or any mention of the holocaust in Fear Eats the Soul. The hatred is deliberately low-level; it is simple everyday bourgeois racism. Fassbinder is showing us that fascism starts at the bottom, rather than being imposed from above. It is not the authorities who harass Ali, it is his neighbours. And although Fassbinder is too pure an artist to become didactic, he is reminding us that Europe has been through this before and that this is how it might start again.

The society which Ali has moved into is shown by Fassbinder to be stagnant, if not decadent. Emmi’s children are cruel towards her, indolent and envious, and without motivation or desire. Seemingly traumatised by the past, they are numb and uninterested in their mother’s passion for Ali. Their souls have been devoured by hatred, and Fassbinder cannot find much about their way of life which is valuable or alive.

Ali as the alien, scapegoat or awful Thing — he is both a question and a provocation — appears to occupy an empty place, a position that almost any outsider could be put in. (Jews were often referred to as ‘the Negroes of Europe’.) Ali is not hated because he is in reality dirty, over-sexualised and ambitious etc. He is considered to have these qualities because he is an immigrant. That is what the immigrant has been made into.

Perhaps if the host community can focus their hate on Ali, he at least absolves those around him from hating one another. His presence seems to create some kind of unity. This is not unlike the son Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s great story Metamorphosis. The gain of Gregor becoming an insect is that his horrible transformation creates accord and, eventually, happiness and freedom in the family. The last line of Metamorphosis runs, ‘And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet and stretched her young body.’

But Ali also reminds those around him that although they don’t want anything to change, they might require a catalyst. In this regard Ali represents the future; there will be more like him, and deeper difficulties. How will these Others be absorbed, and how will everyone have to change in order to make a productive life possible? What sort of society can be made from these elements?

In 1989, fifteen years after Fear Eats the Soul, when the Berlin Wall came down and communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, a fatwah was placed on the life of Salman Rushdie.

There is no Muslim community in Fear Eats the Soul, only a group of Moroccan buddies in inhospitable territory. But by 1989 in Britain the Muslim community was becoming a force; they were no longer innocent like Ali, but active and persecutory themselves. Quickly they were able to pass around information about The Satanic Verses, organise for the book to be burned in Bolton and Bradford, and put pressure on both the publishers Penguin and the British government to have it banned.

There’s no reason to think the Muslim community would be any more cohesive than any other. However, there was one issue which briefly brought these believers together. It wasn’t inequality, discrimination or hatred which created this organisation, but an insult. And it wasn’t the host community they were attacking, but another Muslim, a highly regarded writer. The community was a community because of its underlying religion. Being an immigrant wasn’t an identity, or enough of one, except for others. The ‘deviant’ Rushdie created a brief unity.

The Satanic Verses begins with a terrorist attack on an aeroplane, and this explosion presages the explosion of identities Rushdie explores in the book. As Rushdie himself put it, ‘How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?’

The super-acceleration of the world in the 80s; migration and metamorphosis: if you can’t go home again because both you and home have already changed, you can at least remake yourself in the new place although it rejects you. But you’ll be different to your parents, and most likely far from what they wanted you to be. You might feel you have betrayed them, but that the way to return is via religion.

Amongst other things, The Satanic Verses is a celebration of fragmentation, hybridity and breakdown, psychosis by another name. This is a painful mad state which might require the reintroduction of limits. The authorites are called in when there is too much enjoyment; they re-establish order and renunciation over the vortex of obscene enjoyment. One cure they might offer could be the safety of certainty, knowledge of the absolute truth; the certainty of the very religion Rushdie, as an artist, can’t help being sceptical about.

If novelists and the religious are envious and fascinated by one another it is because religions and literature approach the same subject, knowledge of the world and how to live in it as sexual and dying beings. Like literature, religions are a form of myth, a creative function of the human imagination; Mohammed, Jesus and the Virgin Mary can resemble characters in a drama, and we can argue about their virtues and failings as we would with anyone else.

Religions are, among other things, a form of explanation, of story telling and order making. As with literature, these stories are, then, useful delusions. But where religions seek to eradicate conflicts, installing some notion of ultimate harmony, literature sustains conflicts as arguments worth having. The Satanic Verses is concerned with the necessity of doubt in this process, returning religious myths and narratives to man as objects of creativity and of enquiry. All texts, like all lives, are endlessly open to interpretation, satire, slander, idealisation. Religions, like the novel, are mankind’s dream and a high form of useful play. God is man’s greatest creation, as well as his worst. Man is more creative than God.

But if forms of worship are man-made, they can be modified by man; they can be reinvented, according to need. But where literature is critical — Baal in The Satanic Verses states, ‘a poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point out frauds, take sides, start arguments’ — religions, called ‘sacred’, require obedience and often silence. If religion is man at his most creative, it is also him at his most authoritarian. Not that you can under-estimate the pleasures of obedience.

Nietzsche writes, ‘What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake; we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate — and immediately forget we have done so.’ As Fassbinder points out, we fictionalise the immigrant, turning him into the monster of our imagining. At times he is an oppressed or greedy immigrant, and at another a revolutionary fascist, a proto-bomber hating the West, wanting to change it into his own idealised image.

We can frighten ourselves, taking these stories literally. But myths are imperative: nothing is still, migration and metamorphosis are our destiny, a passage to death. We live in fantasy, hallucination and imagination. The self cannot be mastered or contained; parts of it are always liable to sheer off and fly about, looking for a character to inhabit.

Newness in the World: An Introduction to The Black Album

It was in the summer of 2008 that I suggested to Jatinder Verma that we attempt a theatrical dramatisation of my second novel The Black Album.

The Black Album was a novel I had begun to think about in 1991, not long after the publication of my first book, The Buddha of Suburbia. Unlike that story, which I’d been trying to tell in numerous versions since I first decided to become a writer, aged fourteen, The Black Album was more or less contemporary, a ‘state of Britain’ narrative not unlike the ones I’d grown up watching, in the theatre and on TV.

Around the time of its original publication in 1993, and after the BBC film of The Buddha of Suburbia, there had been talk of filming The Black Album. But instead of returning to something I’d just written and was relieved to have done with, it seemed easier to write a new piece, with similar themes. This was a film, My Son the Fanatic starring Rachel Griffiths and Om Puri.

However, as the twentieth anniversary of the fatwa was approaching, and with The Black Album set in 1988/9 and concentrating on a small group of fundamentalists, both Jatinder and I thought that my pre-7/7 novel might shed some light on some of the things which had happened since.

Not that I had read the novel since writing it; and if I felt hesitant — as I did — to see it revived in another form, it was because I was anxious that in the present mood, after the bombings and atrocities, it might, at times, seem a little frivolous. But the young radical Muslims I came to know at the time did appear to me to be both serious and intelligent, as well as naïve, impressionable and half-mad, and my account of their activities and language reflected what I learned in mosques and colleges. The novel records the kind of debates they had. And it wasn’t as though the subject of liberalism and its relation to extreme religion had gone away.

It was debate and ideological confrontation that Jatinder and I had in mind when we sat down to work on the translation from prose to play. The novel, which has a thriller-like structure, is a sprawl of many scenes in numerous locations: pubs, a Further Education College, a mosque, clubs, parties, a boarding house, cafes, Deedee’s house and the street. As it was impossible in the theatre to retain this particular sense of late 80s London, we had to create longer scenes and concentrate on the important and even dangerous arguments between the characters as they interrogated Islam, liberalism, consumer capitalism, as well as the place and meaning of literature and the way in which it might be critical of religion.

The first draft was too much like a film and would have been unwieldly to stage. Jatinder reminded me that we had to be ruthless. He also reminded me, with his persistence and imagination, how much I’ve learned about editing from the film and theatre directors I’ve worked with. If we were to create big parts for actors in scenes set in small rooms, we needed to turn prose into fervent talk, having the conversation carry the piece. We had to ensure the actors had sufficient material to see their parts clearly. Each scene had to be shaped. The piece had to work for those who hadn’t read the book.

It was this we worked on over a number of drafts, and it was the usual business of writing: cutting, condensing, expanding, developing, and trying material in different places until the story moved forward naturally. I was particularly keen to keep the humour and banter of students and their often adolescent attitudes, particularly towards sexuality. This was, after all, one of their most significant terrors: that the excitement the West offered would not only be too much for them, but for everyone.

Nevertheless, the matter was deadly serious. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie in February 1989 had re-ignited my concern about the rise of Islamic radicalism, something I’d first become aware of while in Pakistan in 1982, where I was writing My Beautiful Laundrette. But for me that wasn’t the whole story. Much else of interest was happening around the end of the 80s: the music of Prince; the collapse of communism and the ‘velvet revolution’; the rise of the new dance music along with the use of a revelatory new drug, Ecstasy; Tiananmen Square; Madonna using Catholic imagery in Like a Prayer; and post-modernism, ‘mashups’ and the celebration of hybridity — of exchange and creative contamination — which is partly the subject of The Satanic Verses.

This was also the period, or so I like to think, when Britain became aware that it was changing, or, in effect, had already changed from a monocultural to a multi-racial society, and had realised, at last, that there was no going back. This wasn’t a mere confrontation with simple racism, the kind of thing I’d grown up with, which was usually referred to as ‘the colour problem’. (When I was a young man it was taken for granted that to be black or Asian was to be inferior to the white man. And not for any particular reason. It was just the case: a fact.)

No, it was much more. Almost blindly, in the post-war period, a huge, unprecedented social experiment had been taking place in Britain. The project was to turn — out of the end of the Empire and on the basis of mass immigration — a predominantly white society into a racially mixed one, thus forming a new notion of what Britain was.

And now was the time for this to be evaluated. The fatwa in 1989, and the debate and arguments it stimulated, seemed to make this clear. Was it not significant that many of these discussions were about language? The Iranian condemnation of a writer had, after all, been aimed at his words. What, then, was the relation between free speech and respect? What could and could not be said in a liberal society? How would different groups in this new society relate — or rather, speak — to one another?

The coercive force of language was something I had long been aware of. As a mixed-race child growing up in a white suburb, the debased language used about immigrants and their families had helped fix and limit my identity. My early attempts to write now seem like an attempt to undo this stasis, to create a more fluid and complicated self through storytelling. One of the uses of literature is that it will enable individuals to enlarge their sense of self — their vocabulary, the store of ideas they use to think about themselves.

In the 1970s, many of us became aware, via the scrutiny of the gay, feminist and Black movements, of the power that language exerted. If the country was to change — excluding fewer people — so did the discourse, and why not? Language, which implicitly carried numerous meanings, developed all the time; if it was never still it could be revised, coaxed in other directions. There were terms applied to certain groups which were reductive, stupid, humiliating, oppressive. (Children, of course, are described constantly by their parents in ways which are both narrowing and liberating — and they have a good idea of what it is to live in an authoritarian world. It wasn’t for nothing that I had been fascinated in my late teens by Wittgenstein’s apophthegm, ‘The meaning of a word is its use.’)

If there were to be better words the language had to be policed in some way, the bad words being replaced by the good. This, of course, became known as Political Correctness, where language was forced to follow the — usually Leftist — political line. Inevitably there was a backlash, as this form of political control seemed not only harsh and censorious but sometimes ludicrous and irrelevant.

Liberals were in a tricky position, having to argue both for linguistic protectionism in some areas and for freedom in others. So that when some Muslims began to speak of ‘respect’ for their religion and the ‘insult’ of The Satanic Verses the idea of free speech and its necessity and extension was always presented as the conclusive argument. Criticism was essential in any society. This could be said, but not that. But how would this be decided, and by whom?

The Marxists, too, were finding the issue of the fatwa difficult. It was only partly a coincidence that Islamic fundamentalism came to the West in the year that that other great cause, Marxist-communism, disappeared. The character of the stuttering socialist teacher in The Black Album — Deedee Osgood’s husband Brownlow — was partly inspired by some of the strange convolutions of the disintegrating Left at the time.

At a conference in Amsterdam in 1989 I remember arguing with John Berger, who was insisting that complaints about the Satanic Verses were justified, as they came from the downtrodden proletariat. Why, he said, would he want to support a privileged middle-class artist who was — supposedly — attacking the deepest beliefs of an otherwise exploited and humiliated Muslim working class? This seemed to me to be an eccentric and perverse point of view, particularly from a writer who had previously valued freedom, and when it was obvious that the opportunity to dissent, to be critical of leaders and authorities — and to be free of censorship — was necessary for anyone to live a good life, as the many writers, critics and journalists in prison in Muslim countries would no doubt attest.

To struggle my way through this thicket of fine distinctions, difficult debates and violent outcomes, I invented the story of Shahid, a somewhat lost and uncertain Asian kid from Kent — whose father has recently died — and who joins up, at college, with a band of similar-minded anti-racists. The story develops with Shahid discovering that the group are going further than anti-racist activism. They are beginning to organise themselves not only around the attack on Rushdie, but as Islamo-fascists who believe themselves to be in possession of the truth.

This is a big intellectual leap. As puritanical truth-possessors, Riaz’s group and those they identify with, have powerful, imperialistic ideas of how the world should be and what it should be purged of. Soon, believing the West has sunk into a stew of decadence, consumerism and celebrity obsession — a not untypical fantasy about the West, corresponding to a not-unsimilar fantasy of the West about the sensual East, as Edward Said has argued — they believe it is their duty to bring about a new, pure world. They want to awaken benighted people to the reality of their situation. To do this they insist on a complete dominance of people’s private lives, and of female sexuality in particular.

Some of these attitudes were familiar to me, as I grew up in the 60s and 70s, when the desire for revolution, for violent change, for the cleansing of exploitative capitalists and a more moral world, was part of our style. Almost everyone I knew had wanted, and worked in some way to bring about, not only the modification of capitalism, but its overthrow. For us, from D. H. Lawrence to William Burroughs and The Sex Pistols, blasphemy and dissent was a blessed thing, kicking open the door to the future, bringing new knowledge, freedom and ways of living. The credo was: be proud of your blasphemy, these vile idols have been worshipped for too long! The point was to be disrespectful, to piss on the sacred. As Guy Debord wrote, ‘Where there was fire, we carried petrol.’

But there was, mixed in with this liberation rhetoric, as in all revolutions — either of the left or right — a strong element of puritanism and self-hatred. There was a desire for the masochism of obedience and self-punishment, something not only illustrated by the Taliban, but by all revolutionary movements which are inevitably bloated with the egotism of self-righteousness and in love with self-sacrifice. This concerns not only the erotics of the ‘revolutionary moment’, the ecstasy of a break with the past and the fantasy of renewal, but also the human penchant for living in authoritarian societies and intransigent systems, where safety and the firm constraint of the leader is preferable to liberal doubt, uncertainty and change. As Georges Bataille reminds us in an essay written in 1957, ‘Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him.’

Riaz, the solemn, earnest and clever leader of the small group which Shahid joins, understands that hatred of the Other is an effective way of keeping his group not only together but moving forward. To do this, he has to create an effective paranoia. He must ensure that the image and idea of the Other is sufficiently horrible and dangerous to make it worth being afraid of. The former colonialistic Western Other, having helped rush the East into premature modernity, must have no virtues. Just as the West has generated fantasies and misapprehensions of the East for its own purposes, the East — this time stationed in the West — will do the same, ensuring not only a comprehensive misunderstanding between the two sides, but a complete disjunction which occludes complexity.

Of course, for some Muslims this disjunction is there from the start. To be bereft of religion is to be bereft of human value. Almost unknowingly, Muslims who believe this are making a significant sacrifice by forfeiting the importance of seeing others, and of course themselves, as being completely human. In Karachi, I recall, people were both curious and amazed when I said I was an atheist. ‘So when you die,’ said one of my cousins, ‘you’ll be all dressed up with nowhere to go?’ At the same time Islamic societies, far from being ‘spiritual’, are — because of years of deprivation — among the most materialistic on earth. Shopping and the mosque have no trouble in getting along together.

Some of the attitudes among the kids I talked to for The Black Album reminded me of Nietzche’s analysis of the origins of religion, in particular his idea that religion — and Nietzche was referring to Christianity — was the aggression of the weak, of the victim or oppressed. These attacks on the West, and the religion they were supposed to protect, were in fact a form of highly organised resentment or bitterness, developed out of colonialism, racism and envy. The violent criticism of Rushdie, an exceptionally gifted artist of whom the community should have been proud, was in fact a hatred of talent and of the exceptional, a kind of forced equalisation from a religion which had not only become culturally and intellectual mediocre, but which was looking to the far past for a solution to contemporary difficulties.

Towards the end of The Black Album, with the help of his lecturer and soon-to-be girlfriend Deedee Osgood, Shahid understands that he has to withdraw from this group in order to establish himself on his own terms at last. This isn’t easy, as the group has provided him with support, friendship and direction. It also doesn’t want to let him go.

He gets out, in part, by beginning to discover the exuberance of his own sexuality and creativity. ‘How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?’ asks Salman Rushdie, relevantly, at the beginning of The Satanic Verses.

It is also no accident that British and American pop, as exemplified for Shahid by Prince’s intelligent, sensual and prolific creativity, is in a particularly lively phase. The clubs and parties Deedee takes Shahid to represent a continuing form of the youthful celebration that Britain has enjoyed since the 60s. If religions are among man’s most important and finest creation — with God perhaps being his greatest idea of all — Shahid also learns how corrupt and stultifying these concepts can become if they fetishise obedience, if they are not renewed and re-thought. Like language itself, they can become decadent, and newness and vigour doesn’t have an easy time. If blasphemy is as old as God, it is as necessary, because religion and blasphemy are made for one another. Without blasphemy religion has no potency or meaning. If there’s nothing like a useful provocation to start a good conversation, this can only be to the advantage of religion.

It turns out that Shahid is one of the lucky ones, strong enough to find out — after flirting with extreme religion — that he’d rather affect the world as an artist rather than as an activist. The others in his group are not so intelligent or objective; or perhaps they are just more passionate for political change. Whatever the reasons — and it is probably too late for psychological explanations — something had begun to stir in the late 80s, which has had a profound effect on our world, and which we are still trying to come to terms with.

Back to the Borderline

It was with some trepidation that I looked again at Borderline, a play I wrote in 1981. The Royal Court Theatre — where it was originally presented — wanted to mount a reading of it, as part of the celebrations to mark fifty Years of that theatre. My father was alive in 1981, and sat enthusiastically through many performances, laughing at everything, particularly at the character of the father, who rather resembled him. Now, twenty years later, two of my sons, aged twelve, were present. I couldn’t help wondering what it would mean to them — or indeed to anyone, now.

The original director Max Stafford-Clark, whose idea the play was, had worked often with Joint Stock, a touring company started by David Hare and Bill Gaskill with the intention of getting political theatre out of London. The company played in schools, community centres and gyms around the country. We would cast the play, do the research in Southall — an immigrant area of west London — and then I would write it. It would then tour, playing finally at the Royal Court. This was political theatre, emerging from the turbulent radical intensities of the 1970s. The idea was to show the community through its differences: different ages, political outlooks, and different hopes for the future, interweaving numerous characters and points of view.

At that time, getting a writing gig with Joint Stock was, as Max would say, ‘very high status’. I was in my mid-twenties, living with my social worker girlfriend in a low-rent council flat next to a railway line in Barons Court, west London. I can’t have been making a living as a writer; I must have been on the dole. So far I had written only two full-length plays, and many unpublished novels. There were very few Asian or Afro-Caribbean writers, actors or directors who made a living from their work. Why did I think I’d be any different?

I was extremely nervous about the whole thing, and with good reason. It was, as far as I knew, the first play by an Asian to be produced on the main stage at the Royal Court, a theatre known for its innovation and daring. The only other black playwright I knew was Mustapha Matura, whose work I’d admired. But his work was poetic; he was no social documentarian.

For me the Joint Stock process had been frantic, if not hair-raising. The actors and theatres had been hired; everything was in place, but the play had not been written, not a word of it, and we were to start rehearsing in six weeks. I was just beginning to find out whether I could be a writer or not, trying to find a subject, characters, and words for them to say. I was already learning a lot from the directors I worked with, and from the actors: as they began to speak, the clumsiness of the lines was obvious. Fortunately, I was hard-working then, with a fierce ambition.

The play did get written. It also got re-written. This, I saw, was when the real work began. If I’d had too ‘pure’ a view of the artist, I was soon to learn that aesthetic fastidiousness wasn’t a helpful attitude. Max was severe and precise, sending me into a dressing room with instructions to write a scene about so-and-so, with certain characters in it. I re-wrote as we rehearsed; I re-wrote as we played it around the country; I re-wrote it when we opened at the Royal Court, and even after that. This was the first time I’d worked in such a way and it was an important proficiency to develop; it came in handy two years later when I worked with Stephen Frears on My Beautiful Laundrette, and was required to re-write on set.

I was also ambivalent about the journalistic process. I was full of material already; I had hardly touched on my own experience as a British Asian kid. Why were we interviewing strangers in order to generate material? Yet as we began to talk with people I found these conversations were not chatter; they were serious — some taking place over a number of days — and always moving. I was fascinated to hear strangers talk. It was something like a crude psychoanalysis, as one only had to a ask a simple question to be drawn into a whirlpool of memories, impressions, fears, terrors. (Max’s father, David Stafford-Clark, had written several interesting books about Freud.) I was shocked by how much people revealed of themselves, and how much they wanted to be known, to be understood. The community was close and supportive, but the cost of this was inhibition and constraint.

Most of the actors who took part in this year’s rehearsed reading of Borderline were younger than ten when the Southall riots took place. One of them, who had appeared in Michael Winterbottom’s ‘Guantanamo Bay’ film, had been arrested and held under the Anti-Terrorism act at Heathrow a few days before, on his way back from the Berlin Film Festival, where the movie won the Silver Bear.

The actors required a quick history lesson. We played The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ and The Jam’s ‘That’s Entertainment’. We mentioned monetarism, Norman Tebbit, the Falklands, the miners’ strike, and rioting in Brixton, Bristol, Liverpool — and Southall, a suburban Asian area in west London, not far from Heathrow airport, where many Asians worked.

When I was approached by Max with the subject for Borderline, Southall had recently become the focus of discontent and violence. Racism was a daily occurrence for most Asians in Britain. But the characters in the play refer often to the possibility of an ‘invasion’, something they were afraid of and disturbed by, as it had already happened. In April 1979 the police allowed the fascist National Front to hold a meeting in Asian Southall. Two weeks earlier the residents met with the Labour Home Secretary Merlyn Rees to ask him to ban the Front’s meeting. On the day before the march, five thousand people went to Ealing Town Hall in support of banning the National Front’s meeting, handing in a petition signed by ten thousand residents. Local factories also agreed to strike in protest. Rees refused to give way. It was a question of free speech, even for fascists.

During the protest which followed the fascist meeting, organised by the Asians themselves along with the Anti-Nazi League — a front for the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party — the police on horses attacked the crowds; vans were driven at them. Blair Peach, a young left-wing teacher, was struck and killed by the notorious SPG (The Special Patrol Group), a shadowy police/army group whose job, it was commonly said, was to beat people up. Many older Asian people, who still respected the police and the British legal system, were shocked and disillusioned by the number of injuries and the unrestrained violence of the police. Meanwhile the media represented the riots as an ‘attack on the police’.

In June 1979, when the lockers of the SPG were searched, one officer was found to be in possession of Nazi regalia, bayonets and leather-covered sticks. But no officer was prosecuted.

This, then, partly explains the atmosphere of paranoia and fear in which the play’s events take place. This is why the arguments the characters have, about how to proceed socially and politically, are so important to them. They are thinking all the time about the kind of Britain in which they are living, and the kind of country the young will inherit and seek to re-make.

To my surprise, looking at the play again after twenty years, I was not startled either by the naivety of the piece, or by the nature of my personal preoccupations then. Obviously it had dated, but in noteworthy ways. What did strike me was how little talk of religion there was among the characters. The unifying ideology of that time and place was socialism, with feminist groups like the Southall Black Sisters, as well as some anarchist and separatist groups, also contributing to the debate. The play itself was written out of the 1970s and at each stage the question would have to be asked: how does this scene, or these lines, further the cause, not only of the play, but of the social movement we are pursuing? What are we saying, about Asians, women, the working class: how do we push the argument along?

By the 1990s political theatre was dead. It had come to seem crude as a device for explaining the world, or for bringing news from unexplored parts of the country. But in this age of mendacity, deception and violence, there is the need, once again, for public debate about contemporary issues. Political theatre can be quick, immediate and adapted to changing circumstances, unlike most films.

Ten years after the Southall riots, in 1989 — the year communism died in Europe — there was another significant demonstration by Asians, this time in Hyde Park, central London. It was not about racial attacks, unemployment or indeed any of the concerns shown in Borderline. It was a demonstration against the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satantic Verses, and Muslims had travelled from all over the country to protest.

In Borderline Amina’s young lover Haroon wants to leave the area to become a lawyer. But why would he want to join the white world which so clearly hates them? He also intends to write a novel. This ambition is met with much scorn. Not only is it considered self-indulgent, there are other concerns. Will he be critical of them? Will it separate him from the community? Will he not only leave his own community — and his childhood — but what will they look like through his eyes? How will they appear? For his part, Haroon criticises the community for its narrowness. Unsurprisingly, the ‘attacks’ and ‘invasions’ have contributed to making them inward looking and over-insular. He accuses them of having a village mentality while they consider him a sell-out.

But why would any novel be considered dangerous? Why would a community, still embattled and with much to fight for — yet making progress in Britain — turn on one of their own, a writer they could be proud of? What ideology entailed such a hatred of artists? What had changed in those ten years?

In Borderline the father Amjad refuses to let his wife Banoo speak. This is not only because he, as a patriarch, is in charge of speaking in the family, but because he is afraid of what she will say, and what it will do to him. Speaking is dangerous; it changes things. To hear her would be an acknowledgement of others’ freedom. It might entail having to hear Amina, his daughter, too. This form of control is recognised by some of the other characters. Susan, the white journalist in the play, befriends the young girl Amina and gives her books to read, encouraging her to hear other voices, consider other positions and points of view. If the community is cut off by racism, it is also beginning to isolate itself from important ideas. Later, when we attempted to take the piece to Southall, the Youth Movement portrayed in the play refused to allow it: they threatened to burn down the hall in which we wanted to perform the piece.

In 1978, Michel Foucault, sponsored by the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, visited Iran for the first time. For him capitalism had failed; totalitarian communism didn’t appeal either. However, the events in Iran ‘offered a new hope’; he began to speak of ‘political spirituality’ as an antidote not only to corruption in most Muslim countries, but to increasing materialism everywhere. Banoo, the isolated and distressed mother in the play, referring to her husband’s efforts — thirty years of work in a bakery — speaks of the ‘emptiness’ of washing machines, televisions, vacuum cleaners. For her something nourishing is missing, though she doesn’t know what it is. At the end of the play, when her husband has died, she returns to Pakistan.

At the anti-Rushdie demonstration in Hyde Park in 1989, a group of Asian female demonstrators — perhaps from a group not unlike the Southall Black Sisters — who were carrying placards saying ‘Women Against Fundamentalism’, were attacked by Muslim men. As these dissident voices were suppressed, as secular and socialist Asian voices were discouraged across the community, a range of new issues emerged, many to do with the idea of speaking, books, writing, words, and the place of the artist and intellectual as critic.

During the ten years between the Southall riot and the demonstration against The Satanic Verses, Islam imposed an identity and solidarity on a besieged community. Radical Islam came to mean rebellion, purity, integrity. But it was also a trap. Once this ideology had been adopted — and political conversations could only take place within its terms — it entailed numerous constraints, locking the community in, as well as divorcing it from possible sources of creativity: dissidence, criticism, sexuality. Its authoritarianism, stifling to those within, and appearing fascistic to those without, rejected the very liberalism the community required in order to flourish in the modern world. It was tragic: what protected the community came to tyrannise it.

The Arduous Conversation Will Continue

We no longer know what it is to be religious, and haven’t for a while. During the past two hundred years sensible people in the West have contested our religions until they lack significant content and force. These religions now ask little of anyone and, quite rightly, play little part in our politics.

The truly religious, following the logic of submission to political and moral ideals, and to the arbitrary will of God, are terrifying to us and almost incomprehensible. To us ‘belief ’ is dangerous and we don’t like to think we have much of it.

Confronted by this, it takes a while for our ‘liberalism’ to organise itself into opposition and for us to consider the price we might have to pay for it. We also have little idea of what it is to burn with a sense of injustice and oppression, and what it is to give our lives for a cause, to be so desperate or earnest. We think of these acts as mad, random and criminal, rather than as part of a recognisable exchange of violences.

The burning sense of injustice that many young people feel as they enter the adult world of double standards and dishonesty shocks those of us who are more knowing and cynical. We find this commendable in young people but also embarrassing. Consumer society has already traded its moral ideals for other satisfactions, and one of the things we wish to export, masquerading as ‘freedom and democracy’, is that very consumerism, though we keep silent about its consequences: addiction, alienation, fragmentation.

We like to believe we are free to speak about everything, but we are reluctant to consider our own deaths, as well as the meaning of murder. Terrible acts of violence in our own neighbourhood — not unlike terrible acts of violence which are ‘outsourced’, usually taking place in the poorest parts of the Third World — disrupt the smooth idea of ‘virtual’ war that we have adopted to conquer the consideration of death.

‘Virtual’ wars are conflicts in which one can kill others without either witnessing their deaths or having to take moral responsibility for them. The Iraq war, we were told, would be quick and few people would die. It is as though we believed that by pressing a button and eliminating others far away we would not experience any guilt or suffering — on our side.

By bullying and cajoling the media, governments can conceal this part of any war, but only for a while. If we think of children being corrupted by video games — imitation violence making them immune to actual violence — this is something that has happened to our politicians. Modern Western politicians believe we can murder real others in faraway places without the same thing happening to us, and without any physical or moral suffering on our part.

This is a dangerous idea. The only way out is to condemn all violence or to recognise that violence is a useful and important moral option in the world. Despite our self-deception, we are quite aware of how necessary it is, at times, to kill others to achieve our own ends and to protect ourselves. If we take this position we cannot pretend it is morally easy and seek to evade the consequences.

We were dragged into this illegal and depressing war by many lies and much dissembling. A substantial proportion of us were opposed to it. During wars ordinary citizens feel they lack information and moral orientation while governments act decisively and with brutality.

Governments may be representative but they and the people are not the same. In our disillusionment, it is crucial that we remind ourselves of this. States behave in ways that would shame an individual. Governments persuade individuals to behave in ways that individuals know are morally wrong. Therefore governments do not speak for us; we have our own voices, however muffled they may seem. If communities are not to be corrupted by the government, the only patriotism possible is one that refuses the banality of taking either side, and continues the arduous conversation. That is why we have literature, the theatre, newspapers — a culture, in other words.

War debases our intelligence and derides what we have called ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’ and ‘freedom’. If it is true that we have entered a spiral of violence, repression and despair that will take years to unravel, our only hope is moral honesty about what we have brought about.

And not only us. If we need to ensure that what we call ‘civilisation’ retains its own critical position towards violence, religious groups have to purge themselves of their own intolerant and deeply authoritarian aspects.

The body-hatred and terror of sexuality that characterise most religions can lead people not only to cover their bodies in shame but to think of themselves as human bombs. This criticism on both sides is the only way to temper an inevitable legacy of bitterness, hatred and conflict.

The Carnival of Culture, 28 July 2005

Recently a friend sent me an article which he thought I’d find interesting, as it was an attempt to sustain a non-violent version of Islam, one in which meddling and manipulative clerics had no authority. Without the requirement of intermediaries, no one could come between you and God. The clerics were seen here as political figures, rather than the best interpreters of Islam. If these fanatics and fundamentalists had twisted the word of God for their own political ends, why shouldn’t the Koran be reclaimed and reinterpreted by the better intentioned? This, the writer stated, was the only way for Islam to go.

In the early 1990s, after my first visit to Pakistan, where I’d had a taste of what it was like to live in a (more or less) theocratic state; after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and, finally, the death of my father, I began to visit various London mosques. Perhaps I was trying to find something of my father there, but I was also beginning to research what became The Black Album, a novel which concerned a group of students, young radical Muslims in west London, who burn The Satanic Verses and, later, attack a bookshop. A film I wrote for the BBC, My Son the Fanatic, about a young man who becomes a fundamentalist while his father falls in love with a prostitute, also emerged from this material.

I believed that questions of race, identity and culture were the major issues post-colonial Europe had to face, and that intergenerational conflict was where these conflicts were being played out. The British-born children of immigrants were not only more religious and politically radical than their parents — whose priority had been to establish themselves in the new country — but they despised their parents’ moderation and desire to ‘compromise’ with Britain. To them this seemed weak.

My father was an Indian Muslim who didn’t care for Islam; his childhood hadn’t been much improved by a strict schooling, and teachers with sticks. Towards the end of his life he preferred Buddhism to Islam, as there was less aggression and punishment in it. (‘And altogether less religion,’ as he put it.) He had also become disillusioned with the political version of Islam, which my father’s school friend, Zulfi Bhutto — who the liberal classes thought would become a democratic and secular leader in the new Pakistan — was introducing to Pakistan.

The mosques I visited, in Whitechapel and Shepherd’s Bush, were nothing like any church I’d attended. The scenes, to me, were extraordinary, and I was eager to capture them in my novel. There would be passionate orators haranguing a group of people sitting on the floor. One demagogue would replace another, of course, but the ‘preaching’ went on continuously, as listeners of all races came and went. I doubt whether you’d see anything like this now, but there would be diatribes against the West, Jews, and — their favourite subject — homosexuals. In my naivety I wondered whether, at the end of his speech, the speaker might take questions or engage in some sort of dialogue with his audience. But there was nothing like this. Most of the audience for this sort of thing were, I noticed, under thirty years old.

I had the good sense to see what good material this was, and took notes, until, one afternoon, I was recognised, and four strong men picked me up and carried me out on to the street, telling me never to return.

Sometimes I would be invited to the homes of these young ‘fundamentalists’. One of them had a similar background to my own: his mother was English, his father a Muslim, and he’d been brought up in a quiet suburb. Now he was married to a woman from the Yemen who spoke no English. Bringing us tea, she came into the room backwards, and bent over too, out of respect for the men. The men would talk to me of ‘going to train’ in various places, but they seemed so weedy and polite I couldn’t believe they’d want to kill anyone.

What did disturb me was this. These men believed they had access to the Truth, as stated in the Koran. There could be no doubt — or even much dispute about moral, social and political problems — because God had the answers. Therefore, for them, to argue with the Truth was like trying to disagree with the facts of geometry. For them the source of all virtue and vice was the pleasure and displeasure of Allah. To be a responsible human being was to submit to this. As the Muslim writer Shabbir Akhtar put it in his book A Faith for All Seasons, ‘Allah is the subject of faith and loving obedience, not of rational inquiry or purely discursive thought. Unaided human reason is inferior in status to the gift of faith. Indeed, reason is useful only in so far as it finds a use in the larger service of faith.’

I found these sessions so intellectually stultifying and claustrophobic that at the end I’d rush into the nearest pub and drink rapidly, wanting to reassure myself I was still in England.

It is not only in the mosques but also in so-called ‘faith schools’ that such ideas are propagated. The Blair government, while attempting to rid us of radical clerics, has pledged to set up more of these schools, as though a ‘moderate’ closed system is completely different to an ‘extreme’ one. This might suit Blair and Bush. A benighted, ignorant enemy, riddled with superstition, incapable of independent thought, and terrified of criticism, is easily patronised.

Wittgenstein compared ideas to tools, which you can use for different ends. Some open the world up. The idea that you can do everything with one tool is ridiculous. Without adequate intellectual tools and the ability to think freely, too many Muslims are incapable of establishing a critical culture which goes beyond a stifling Islamic paradigm. As the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan states, ‘Muslims now need, more than ever, to be self-critical. That means educating young Muslims in more than religious formalism.’

If the idea of multiculturalism makes some people vertiginous, monoculturalism — of whatever sort — is much worse. Political and social systems have to define themselves in terms of what they exclude, and conservative Islam is leaving out a lot. In New York recently, a Turkish woman told me that Islam was denying its own erotic heritage, as shown in the Arabian Nights, The Perfumed Garden, and the tales of Hamza. Indeed, the Arabic scholar Robert Irwin states, of the Arabian Nights, ‘In the modern Middle East, with certain exceptions, the Nights is not regarded by Arab intellectuals as literature at all.’

It is not only sexuality which is being excluded here, but the whole carnival of culture which comes from human desire. Our stories, dreams, poems, drawings, enable us to experience ourselves as strange to ourselves. It is also where we think of how we should live.

You can’t ask people to give up their religion; that would be absurd. Religions may be illusions, and they may betray infantile wishes in their desire for certainty, but these are important and profound illusions. But they will modify as they come into contact with other ideas. This is what an effective multiculturalism is: not a superficial exchange of festivals and food, but a robust and committed exchange of ideas — a conflict which is worth enduring, rather than a war.

When it comes to teaching the young, we have the human duty to inform them that there is more than one book in the world, and more than one voice, and that if they wish to have their voices heard by others, everyone else is entitled to the same thing. These children deserve better than an education which comes from liberal guilt.

Humouring the State: The PEN/Pinter Prize Lecture, 2010

I would like to thank PEN and the judges, and say what a huge pleasure and honour it is for me to receive this prize.

Harold Pinter is a writer I have enjoyed and loved since I was a teenager, coming up from Bromley on the train to queue for tickets to see, several times, Gielgud and Richardson in No Man’s Land. And I’d read, while waiting on the station, the famous 1966 Pinter interview in the Paris Review, where he states clearly the writer’s task, ‘One tries to get the thing … true.’

Before this I had seen The Caretaker somewhere, and, to my surprise — having heard that Pinter was a difficult, if not opaque writer — laughed as much as if I’d been at a farce.

Harold Pinter is well-known for his mastery at representing the unfortunate preoccupations of the twentieth century — terror, paranoia, persecution — both domestically and, later in his career, in larger politics. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that Pinter is a comic writer, and a devil with the mad insult. This is from The Homecoming: ‘He brings a filthy scrubber off the street … I’ve never had a whore under this roof before. Ever since your mother died.’

Pinter brilliantly understands how wit and humour can be used as a medium of humiliation and degradation, to destroy the victim’s defences and turn the individual into nothing. But he is also aware of how language as wit can be used to attack authority, to undermine power and pomposity, to subvert.

In Milan Kundera’s 1967 masterpiece, The Joke, set in the 1950s, the young Czech protagonist is arrested and imprisoned for sending a postcard to his girlfriend. ‘Optimism is the opium of the people!’ it says — a relatively mild joke but one that becomes a suicide note, and a kind of self-sacrifice. ‘A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!’

In 1980, Milan Kundera told Philip Roth, ‘I learned the value of humour during the time of Stalinist terror. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humour was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humour.’

It is a stretch to think of a great writer who isn’t also comic: Gogol, Dostoevsky Proust, Kafka, Beckett and so on are, at times, what Roth calls sit-down comedians. Jokes undo knots and undermine dictators. The powerful may have many attributes, but a sense of humour is never one of them.

Writing, then, is playful, a form of loose collaborative excitement, creating, with the reader, a shared experience of pleasure. Writers are, from one point of view, as I like to explain to my writing students, in show business. They must entertain, and give good value, otherwise there is nothing going on between reader and writer. From another point of view writers are scrupulous critics. Comedy and wit, which combine both, are ways of seeing into, and seeing through.

It’s a serious and necessary business, amusement, and you can tell how serious it is by the number of journalists and writers who are in prison around the world, as well as by the attempts there are, as PEN would confirm, to shut writers up, to censor and impede them, always a sure sign that a writer, somewhere, is doing her job and that she has some authority in a cynical world.

Let’s remind ourselves: words are very dangerous, they are dynamite. Jokes can’t start a revolution, but they can loosen the bricks in the wall. A joke introduces a little anarchy into the world, a bit of disruption. It tests the limits; it pushes them.

In Pakistan, when Zulfikar Bhutto first began to compromise with the Islamists, my father, his brothers and other liberal friends referred to this as ‘the great leap backwards’. They liked to say the country was being ‘sodomised’ by religion, a line I later used in My Beautiful Laundrette. Their political impotence and sense of helplessness led them to make jokes continuously, even as the situation worsened. At least humour represents love, a promiscuous combining of elements, which will help form solidarity among dissenters.

Behind this idea is partly the modernist notion of the writer as devil, as dangerous, as a rebel. But I have come to think that it is insufficient; more is required. It is almost adolescent as a view: humour as the revenge and refuge of the powerless, the last stand of the already defeated, giggling as they go down.

My father was born and brought up in India under British rule. There was some equality there, he liked to say. As a child he was beaten by Catholic nuns as well as by the Maulvis who instructed children on the Koran.

The racial ideas my father faced, in India, under colonialism, and in Britain, when he first came here in the early 50s, were of a kind which have mostly been driven out now, as Britain’s aggressively self-important sense of itself has declined. However, it might be useful to remind ourselves of these notions.

As an Indian my father was always uncomfortably aware that he was considered inferior; that he was less of a man than the other men who ruled. It was part of the general attitude of the time, and not only in Britain. Whites were superior as human beings to what were known as ‘the coloured races’. My father and his family despised and mocked their British masters, while wanting to be like them. The English gentleman was their ideal. This class of Indian also wanted to be recognised as an equal by the master who despised them. It was an impossibly ambivalent position to be in, and no one was satisfied.

As the son of an Indian father and English mother, I didn’t want to be like the English, I was already English, almost. But I became aware that I represented some sort of problem for the English, because they kept asking me who I was, where I fitted in, where I belonged and how long I’d be staying, not difficulties which my father, an Indian, had had. I was asked these questions so often I began to lose my bearings. What was I doing to the neighbours to make them so philosophical?

And so, as a teenager, I began to write. I wrote for my life. The idea of having an identity by calling myself ‘a writer’ suddenly seemed both consolidating and liberating, like a Cartesian assertion of existence. Critics sometimes like to characterise me as an autobiographical writer, and I like to reply that all writing is as autobiographical as a dream, in which every element both does and doesn’t belong to the dreamer, and is somehow beyond them. ‘Who’s there?’, the first line of Hamlet, is the question writers ask themselves when they sit down to write, perhaps in the hope, one day, of finding out. But there are multitudes there.

I was aware that I did want to speak of the experience of my family and myself. This seemed necessary and important for my survival. It was something of an epiphany as I sat at my typewriter every day, after school, and found I had my own words, however clumsy and derivative. Those of us like me were not, then, merely subject to the denigrations and descriptions of others. We could talk back. Writing would be a message to the world outside my family, and outside the suburbs. I would inform people what was going on, what life in the new Britain — a Britain unknowingly transforming itself for ever — was like for us. This was not writing as a form of defence, but, for me, as a way of situating myself fully in the alien world, an attempt to work out a place in it — writing as an attempted solution to various internal and external conflicts.

Through my Indian family, I became aware, as a young man, of this very full form of speaking, the novel. The British writers I admired, Forster, Orwell, Greene, Waugh, had all put colonialism, and what dominion does to people, at the centre of their work. Indeed, Forster regrets, at the end of Passage to India, that certain kinds of free and equal relationships will not be possible while one consciousness dominates another. And J. G. Farrell wrote, ‘The loss of the British Empire is the only interesting thing that happened in my adult life.’

Not that some of these attitudes don’t remain. A friend said to me recently, ‘Surely you have to acknowledge that people like your father only wanted to come here because of the peace, prosperity and high level of civilisation we have made.’ It should go without saying, of course, that the economic prosperity and creativity of the West has always been partly based on colonialism and immigration. If there has been a failure to acknowledge this — and even to despise and attack those whose labour made, and continues to make, this prosperity and freedom possible — it is the hatred of the Master for those he depends on; hatred for the necessary subaltern without whom nothing good happens. This is partly because the subaltern is hardly noticed; he is only a quarter present, almost invisible, glimpsed from the corner of the eye.

But how then might he or she be seen? First there would have to be a political presence, of course. Margaret Thatcher, as we know, revived nationalist sentiment by attempting to resuscitate war-time versions of English patriotism. She was an exclusionist who didn’t want too much ‘difference’ or ‘otherness’. The early-to-mid 1980s in Britain, when I was working in the theatre and had begun to write films, were a rough time for minorities. The defining struggle of the less deferential Second Generation against prejudice and police discrimination and brutality, was at its height. Out of this came civil unrest, and riots in Brixton, Bristol and Birmingham.

It had begun to occur to people that immigrants and their children were here for good, and Britain had changed for ever. There was a reluctance to accept this, and, at the same time, a demand, from people who felt disenfranchised and ghettoised, for recognition, as well as for just and equal treatment. Multiculturalism and identity politics were a good idea, a form of self-protection, when social cohesion, under Thatcher, was breaking up, and racism was unchecked. It seemed, for a time, that not only that the idea of Britishness, but Britain itself would disintegrate under these pressures.

Multiculturalism reminded us that there are certain attributes which can’t be subtracted from people without asking them to forfeit their links to the past, and to others in the future. Numerous groups had begun to explore their own history — often a history of persecution — and tried to determine how they were made in relation to it. Where once there had been silence, and the pressure of a majority culture, multiculturalism (or a counter-history), celebrated difference, multiplicity and pluralism within the same place. After all, the wish to wipe out another’s history and culture is a form of genocide, and what is repressed is always more compelling than the sanctioned story.

When culture is only an extension of power, if it is an official culture, if you like, one can see how a joke can expose suppression. It shouldn’t be forgotten that along with the superiority of the white man went the superiority of his culture, which was, for a long time, monolithic. If we can recall how difficult it was for the cinema to be taken seriously as an art form, and then pop, we ought to have an idea of how much that cultural dominance can exclude in other areas, of how people can be dispossessed of knowledge, a particularly cruel form of authority. As Kundera also reminded us, ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’

But I can also recall, in the mid-80s, being told by an Afro-Caribbean acquaintance that ideas like socialism, feminism and liberalism were no good for blacks and Asians. They were white people’s ideas, and since the whites hated us and it would be rational for us to hate them back, we had to repudiate all their ideas. According to him, the only way forward was for us to re-connect with our history, as if what was called ‘our history’ had nothing to do with anyone else’s. This is similar to something a cousin of mine — but not an uncle — once said to me: ‘Since we are Muslims, we have to create here in Pakistan, only a Muslim not a Western society,’ with the Koran, of all things, providing the blueprint for the future.

It’s not difficult to see here that once attributes and differences become fetishised — if the subject becomes a series of idiosyncrasies or typical marks, and even begins to believe that this is what he really is — then the possibility of creative collaboration and renewal is cancelled. Marginalisation and alienation become permanent. Among the many good reasons for immigration, at least one is to ensure the free circulation of people, ideas and culture, for that is how, as Rushdie puts it in The Satanic Verses, ‘newness is brought into the world’.

But if multiculturalism becomes the gated-community of the minority, if it becomes another monoculturalism, that which was once protective becomes a prison. Identities become traps, rather than temporary accommodations between selves and the outside world. When it comes to a description of what a human being is, and what she might need to lead a fulfilling life, multiculturalism, while it once opened the door to other narratives, has come to seem inadequate and reductive, and, for its supposed beneficiaries, has closed off the rest of the world.

The finest poetry, novels and plays might be a good place to look when we require new paradigms for both criticising and understanding the world. Works of art, which describe and re-describe experience until we grasp its complexity, can liberate us from the static points of view that multiculturalism seems to generate. Great works of art are different to one another, but they are almost always concerned with the individual and her struggle with the majority view.

Universal values, particularly those of freedom and equality, are the basis of any minority community having a presence at all. If diversity and pluralism are to mean anything, they have to apply to a knowledge of a range of religions as solutions to human helplessness, as well as knowledge of ideas of atheism, secularism and doubt, and their place in a liberal, developing society. For instance, a universal value would be the use of education as a force for emancipation, for critical and objective evaluation, rather than for religious indoctrination.

As we all know, there’s been some hard thinking on these difficult issues, particularly in the period since the fatwa on Salman Rushdie in 1989, which was a turning point for both literature and liberalism. This attack on a book, an author, freedom of expression and a literary culture, has left nothing the same.

But what of the desire to censor and control? What does it really mean? Sigmund Freud insists that although we have a fantasy of maintaining a reign of authority over ourselves, the truth is that each day, and, in particular, each night, our real life passes in a chaos of fumblings, bumblings, bingeings, forgettings, fantastic uprisings, wild dreams and delinquent fantasies, a comedy of errors and idiocies. Our lives are more like a Laurel and Hardy film than they are like a Stalinist state.

A mere joke can remind us, therefore, that the authoritarian regime can never succeed. As with the mischievous postcard in Kundera’s novel, the imp of truth escapes. Kundera’s novel will last longer than the regime it attacked. The forced empire of the self — the imperious ego — is always in danger of being undermined; the creative is never far away, since the disowned and the repressed inevitably return. The system creates dissidents, and the dissident speaks suppressed parts of the authority, parts which eventually have to be returned to him — as a reminder of the human.

Sometimes this is the writer’s work, even if he or she would repudiate the political labelling. Rushdie, Pamuk, Mafouz, Kundera and Pinter himself have all, at times, represented something honest in the State, and have been attacked, on occasions violently, for telling the truth.

A comedian can only make people laugh, whereas a good writer should have a wide palette and be able to intrigue, upset, shock and excite — transporting us from mood to mood in the same piece. Nevertheless, a joke is a marvellous moment of liberation, while being a reminder of constraint. Laughter is a recognition that something has to be freer.

Free speaking and writing are always difficult because they are always under threat. This guarantees their authenticity. In his Paris Review interview, Pinter notes the following, ‘The speech only seems funny. The man in question is actually fighting for his life.’ And if we are not fighting for our own lives, and by extension, others’ lives, what are we doing?