VOX PUB IV

Andrew Gimson discovers that,

whatever party leaders say, race is an election issue

The final Vox Pub report is from Basildon, one of the Conservative seats in Essex which Labour hoped to win.

'OPINION POLLS have supplanted the itinerant journalist,' the secretary-general of Gallup International, Norman Webb, claimed in a letter to last Saturday's Inde- pendent Magazine. The polls, he assured us, 'inform people about what other peo- ple think'.

Perhaps they do, if you ask the right questions. On the morning the letter appeared, the news bulletins led with Sir Nicholas Fairbairn's claim that a Labour government would allow this country to be 'swamped' by immigrants. Other Conser- vative politicians hurried to condemn what Sir Nicholas had said, while Neil Kinnock asserted: 'The kind of gutter language that's used isn't fitting for anyone standing for a democratic party.'

But many voters agree with Sir Nicholas. In three of the four Vox Pub reports pub- lished during this election campaign, race has emerged, to my surprise, as the issue about which people feel most strongly. The pubs of Kilburn, Cheltenham and Basildon may, of course, be unrepresentative of the country as a whole, so I hope Gallup will undertake to tell us 'what other people think'.

The Sherwood Bar is opposite Basildon railway station. These are some remarks made to Vox Pub on the last Friday night before the election,by a group of men most of whom were in their twenties:

The Tories had a go and they've shagged it up.'

'Enoch Powell's the man to bring back. The only problem with this country is the blacks.'

'I've already been in the Daily Mail.' (Basildon has been much visited by jour- nalists in search of 'Essex man'. He exists, but is seldom reported in all his glory — or infamy.)

'Neil Kinnock is a f—ing Communist.' `He will not win the election because he's Welsh.'

'We hate the Welsh.'

`No we don't. They're white men the same as we are.'

'They've got their own f—ing language. That's the difference. They don't like us and we don't like them.'

'We're English. We want to be able to stand up for ourselves. I go and watch the England football team because I'm proud to be English. You don't realise how much English pride there is in this country. A hell of a lot.'

`I'm Labour but I still think we should stem the immigration.'

'What did the Europeans do in the war? Legged it, didn't they?'

`I think Labour should win it because we need a change. Unless John Major gives me a ring tomorrow and gets me a job.' (From a man unemployed for two years, who used to earn £400 a week fixing win- dows in new offices.) 'It's only four years if Labour are shit.'

`Kinnock is a prick. Put that down. I don't want f—ing Kinnock, but anyone'll do me as long as it isn't the Conservatives.'

'I f—ing hate the f—ing poll tax but I'll still vote Labour.' (Some blamed the poll tax on the local, Labour-controlled council rather than on the Conservatives, and some were uncertain whom to blame.) 'If Labour win I'm leaving the country. I'll apply for a job at Ford's in Germany.'

`F—ing one-man room I've got, the size of your toilet, and I'm paying the same poll tax as someone down the road with a man- sion.' (Said by a man in the army who blamed the poll tax on the Conservatives. He resented paying the tax while he was away `fighting for this country', though it emerged that he had not done any fighting himself.) 'What they done to Maggie Thatcher is f—ing out of order.'

`Don't talk posh. I don't like that. Come outside and I'll stuff your head up your arse.' (Said to me by an older man who had spent three years in prison. He was restrained by some of the others and left.) 'I'm not racist but when it comes down to my children speaking Asian in the schools.

'How can we be expected to learn their f—ing language when they're in our f—ing country?

'A bloke said to me his son had to eat Indian meals every day of the week.' (At a school, it was alleged, in West Ham.)

'The next world war is gong to be between Islam and the rest of the world.'

If forced to guess which way Basildon will go, I would say that Labour will over- turn the Conservative majority of 2,649. But the main impression given by these Essex Cockneys was one of angry bewil- derment.

I walked across the market-place to the Strings Piano Bar, next to Raquel's Dis- cotheque. The barmaid showed me a pic- ture of herself on holiday in Tenerife and urged me to mention how friendly the bar staff are, which is true. At about nine o'clock, when the bar had become busier, I approached a group of young men.

'You've got to get your f—ing hair sorted out,' one of them said in an enraged voice. 'And your f—ing shirt as well.'

'I wouldn't try talking to him,' someone else said, but by that stage there seemed no way of avoiding a conversation.

The angry man went on at some length about my appearance. He was suspicious of my story that I was working for The Spectator and reckoned I would get `done'. A small audience had gathered.

'Do you know Jeffrey?' he demanded. `Jeffrey who?'

`Jeffrey Bernard.'

I said Jeff was the most brilliant writer I had ever met, and from then on, because the man enjoys reading Jeff, there was no trouble. My new companion intimated, however, that my notebook had better stay in my pocket.

He said I needed to understand that Basildon was the old East End. Everyone had moved out of London to get away from the blacks, whom they loathed. At times he sounded like a dispossessed Afrikaner or Palestinian, forced tb leave his native land and full of unappeasable resentment. A Paki had tried moving into his road in Basildon and they smashed his windows every night. A group of ten blacks came into Raquel's Discotheque and four of them got `done'.

Would I like to see Raquel's with him? I accepted the offer, though he kept shaking his head over my appearance and suggest- ing I would be lucky to get out alive.

This seemed to be an exaggeration. The club was guarded by a posse of bouncers, but once inside he admitted we had come on a disappointingly 'quiet' night. There were large numbers of girls, mostly with other girls, and rather fewer men, one or two of them black.

My guide had been talking for effect, to impress on me his toughness, rather as I used to exaggerate the rigours of boarding school. The genuinely tough man, like the genuine war hero, seldom brags.

But when due allowance is made for bragging, I don't think the racism I found while researching this series of articles was superficial. Because racism is a subject more often raised by journalists on the Left, whose eagerness to apportion blame can make them too tiresome to read, let alone believe, journalists on the Right may have overlooked how racist the British are.

Or perhaps most politicians and com- mentators on the Right agree with Sir Nicholas, but choose not to say so. In polite society, race has become as indecent a sub- ject as sex once was, and references to it have to be made in tones of outraged prud- ery. The unremarkable fact that people tend to care most for their own race can hardly be mentioned.

I do not hold that a `get it out in the open' approach is always the best way to cope with matters which touch our deep emotions, but I do wonder if our inability to talk freely about race has prevented us from knowing what we are really like. My impression is that our race relations indus- try exists on sufferance, and would only have to intrude a little more to provoke a furious reaction from the British of native descent. But perhaps everyone closely involved with policy in this area knows this, so they think, in the English way, that it does not need saying.