With the British state and its population intensifying racist violence on racialised people, Sukant Chandan looks at the strategies employed by the state to keep targeted communities disunited and confused about the situation and the possible solutions required to ameliorare them.

Introduction: A New Era of Non-White Participation in British/English Nationalism

For those of who know the histories of racism in Britain in the post-Second World War period, we remember well that the British Union Jack and English St George’s Cross flags are symbols of aggressive and violent provocative colonialism and racism on British streets and against us and our families, but also represent and are leading symbols in greater levels of violence on the streets of Ireland, South Africa, Aden and Kenya amongst other places.

Some will hate you, pretend they love you now

Then behind they try to eliminate you

(Bob Marley, Who The Cap Fit, 1976)

These flags are the leading symbols of this global racist violence, so it is fascinating to see what is a new cultural and political development in the current visuals of African, Caribbean and Asian-heritage colonised non-white people literally dressing themselves up in these flags and joining far-right racist communities and their events. The levels of recruitment of colonised people led by the right-wing into Britishness that we are seeing is a new cultural wave.

Historically, it is the more liberal wings of the British state that have had more success in manipulating and forcing non-white people into Britishness or colonial assimilation and integration. Historically it is the process of leftist and liberal recruitment of non-white people into Britishness that has been the precondition for right-wing and the far-right Brits to be able to recruit large numbers of non-whites. But whether non-white people are in a liberal or right wing of colonialism, they are still embedded in the main problem: British colonialism. It is the left and liberals of British colonialism that have and continue to pool masses of non-whites into Britishness and in so doing become active participants in pushing the new British colonial racist offensive in Britain and across the world (most violently manifested in British wars on colonised lands).

In recent weeks we have seen non-white people’s community buildings being attacked by racists using the Union Jack. What was possibly less predictable was that the response of the non-white people who were attacked themselves raising the same British flag! This seems to be some kind of attempt to plead to the Brit colonialists that they should be accepted into the British club because they themselves choose to join the very thing that has a genocidal attitude towards them.

We are all witnessing the mass-based white supremacist racism and colonialism of the British population surge onto non-white colonised communities in a way that has not been seen for a long time, perhaps never before. Never before have the ‘whites’ been so openly hostile and aggressive. This British state-led racist offensive has two main characteristics: 1) “Empire 2.0” (British colonial civil service name for Brexit) or the great and seemingly victorious reset of the British Colonial project which could have only happened if 2) the British Colonial project successfully recruited non-whites into its project and, in so doing, destroyed all opposition to the British racist colonial state.

Racism is taking on an increasingly naked form, with the current Starmer administration using rhetoric and policies daily that cannot be distinguished from what is understood as ‘far-right’ tropes and discourses which basically seeks to construct a scapegoat in the ‘othered’ new non-white migrant (often additionally racialised as ‘Muslim’), whose scapegoating is presented as addressing the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the ‘British’ population. If we look into the histories of these ‘far-right’ narratives and policies, it is consistently the British state that has led it.

Roots of the Sellout

He’ll deny all of his brothers and sisters in Africa, in Asia, in the East, just to be a second-class American.

– Malcolm X, January 1963.

However confusing it might be to some, in the colonial circus and pantomime of the ‘culture war’ the masses of white Brits will see the ‘liberal’ wing of British people as an enemy that is in league with the non-white migrant and/or ‘Muslim invader’. And it is mostly this liberal wing of the British colonial state that has done the most efficient recruitment of non-white colonised people back into the very same project that is leading colonial and racist violence across the world – the British state and its various forms of Britishness.

The focus and critical explorations here will be on two major strategies of British colonial mass co-option and recruitment of non-whites into the British project around: 1) the state-led cultural categories of ‘British Asian’ and ‘Black British’, or simply some ‘new’ kind of non-white Britishness that is presented in such a way that it directly appears to give a ‘sense of belonging and home’ for non-white people and (not so) indirectly 2) the precondition to that inclusion is to fail colonised people globally and facilitate their demise. That’s what led Malcolm X to quip that this type of colonised person will accept a second-class position under the colonial state and culture and in the process will erase the entire non-western humanity that is under attack from the same genocidal racist community the sellout has chosen to join.

On April 3 1964 in Ohio, Malcolm X in a speech which has been since called ‘the Ballot or the Bullet’, urged us to be in unity with humanity and reject colonial assimilationism of any kind, it might be instructive here to replace the ‘American/Americanism’ with ‘British/Britishness’: “No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver – no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare. These 22 million victims are waking up. Their eyes are coming open. They’re beginning to see what they used to only look at. They’re becoming politically mature.”

At the time oppressed people globally had a relative tendency to unite and radicalise and engage in effective struggles compared with our times where we find non-white people in Britain are colonially divided so much so that they are being systematically targeted with little to no resistance such as the race riots of August 2024 and the racist offensive this summer. This wasn’t always the case and a very different picture was painted by the oppressed in England in August 2011.

August 2011 Uprising as Anti or Counter British/English

The August 2011 Black-led Black and poor youth uprising against racism and capitalism was a moment in which oppressed youth responded to a racist police killing in Tottenham of Mark Duggan and went on to rise up against capitalism and the police over a period of several days. Poor white youths engaged in direct actions against police and capitalism across the country which saw no racist incidents during the uprising. Their anger and action was towards the state and capitalism and in solidarity with communities oppressed by the same.

August 2011 was not a ‘British’ uprising, but arguably an anti-British one, one that contended with, rejected in many ways and pushed back notions of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Englishness’ by a cultural movement that has its roots in anti-colonial Jamaican and Caribbean-based sound-system and cultural practices of the oppressed: Grime, Dubstep, Road Rap and other grassroots sound-system cultures. The British state has successfully infiltrated and recruited non-white youth back into Britishness through these cultural genres and also through Drill, not least via its leading cultural colonial arm, the BBC, but also through naked racist policing. This cultural strategy is part of the political strategy that rewards the leading colonial agents with colonial largesse in the form of Orders and Members of the British Empire, funding, platforms and such.

Brexit. Empire 2.0

However, it was Brexit and the manner in which colonised people allowed themselves to be bamboozled that was the most stark example of this colonial divide and rule and effective outcomes for this colonial assimilation. In the realm of British colonial hegemony, a thing can be seen and defined by different sections of the population in different ways, but the social results of the dynamics always mean the refinement and strengthening of the colonial state and power. Brexit is such an example. Brexit was seen by masses of white Brits to mean the expulsion of all non-Brit, non-English migrants, be they from the rest of Europe or outside.

What was always going to happen was that the British state was going to remove some European migrants and instead bring in a lot more of the people from the colonies to supply the colonial service class that props-up the running of British society. As a result of this mass sellout to Britishness and the connected absence of any sensible guidance in non-white communities, many non-white people wrongly thought Brexit would work in their favour, believing that it was a move against other white European migrants in Britain. Some non-whites seemed to like being flattered as the ‘most preferred’ colonial service-class of wage-slaves, over the poor white workers from East Europe and other Europeans.

White Brits, having witnessed even more greater numbers of African and Asian labour from the colonies come to visibly run whole sections of British society (education, health, security, retail, transport), and are beside themselves and are trying to ‘get their Brexit done’ in the growing demand for mass deportations or ‘remigration’ of all non-whites. The Enoch Powell moment and its connected mass demands for a Ministry for Repatriation is back, this time with no resistance. As a formal project of the British state going forward, since 2016 Brexit Britain is ‘trying to get Brexit done’ which points in only one direction: an increasingly hostile state-led by a mass-based racist violent offensive against all non-white people.

What is our problem?

Speaking to Malcolm X’s point that some will accept a dehumanised status within the west if that means acquiescing to colonial genocide elsewhere, we see now the absence of any anti-colonial capacity in the greater numbers of non-white people trying to enter into forms of British colonial assimilation and integration that we have not seen previously. Malcolm X continues a critical assessment of that colonised person who falls into colonial assimilation by his internalisation of dehumanisation and inferiorisation.

“Also this type of so-called Negro, by being intoxicated over the white man, he never sees beyond the white man. He only can see himself here in America, on the American stage or the white stage, where the white man is in the majority, where the white man is the boss. So this type of Negro always feels like he’s outnumbered or he’s the underdog or he’s the minority. And it puts him in the role of a beggar—a cowardly, humble, Uncle Tomming beggar on anything that he says is—that should be his by right.”

– Malcolm X, January 23, 1963

Malcolm X frames the problem as one of a racist and colonial state and power that cannot be reformed but must be rejected in full and overturned through oppressed peoples’ struggles. This goes to the root of the entire conversation. What is the problem that we are facing and what are the possible solutions? Malcolm X talks about ‘Uncle Toms’, an explicit reference to those who sell out their fellow colonised and enslaved. The problem is the racist colonial system and power and those who maintain it. The solution is its destruction by any means necessary at the hands of those who are most exploited and oppressed (the ‘field slaves’ – Malcolm X, ‘the wretched’ – Fanon) by it to build a new society based on freedom of people and the land. Or, as leading radical Black Power pioneer Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) remarked in October 1966, “…we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy.”

Because of the particular histories of colonisation, displacement, enslavement and genocide, (not least by the Brits) the resistance to all this has included clear and ‘radical’ articulations of the problem and solutions by the oppressed in all of the Americas but especially in the contexts of the Caribbean and the USA. The different demographics and sophistication of colonial corruption in Britain has meant that there is, relative to the Caribbean and USA, an absence of clear anti-colonial voices. Instead there’s a constant preponderance of confusion-inducing and illusion peddling in the lie of the impossibility of the reformability of the colonial racist system into something that is not racist. Indulging in British reformism and integration does two interrelated things: on the one hand it erases the colonial reality and oppressed humanity in terms of colonial wars and resistance to it, and on the other hand it fails to attempt to define what the nature of the state, government and system it is that we are dealing with.

To use Malcolm X’s phrase, on the basis of genocidal violence and mental and cultural-genocide, the “Uncle Tom” peddles the illusion that somehow the colonial system is something ‘post-colonial’, or a system just ‘struggling’ with its imperialist past, and if only the system accepted the non-white assimilator then it could really be a better reformed system.  This results in such extreme colonial-borne irregularities such as overlooking one of the greatest anti-colonial revolts against Britain through the period of the 1960s-1990s: the Irish Revolution. This constant erasure of one of the most significant anti-colonial revolts should be central to understanding everything about Britain and its ongoing colonial wars or ‘humanitarian interventions’ in Afghanistan 2001 and Libya 2011 etc.

While nothing is ever totally clear-cut and without contradictions, the struggle against racism in the USA context has produced many clear thinkers and actors against the colonial state. A leading light in this community is Black Panther Party Field Marshall and Black Guerilla Family co-founder George Jackson. What is striking in such revolutionaries is their constant, frequent and clear depictions of the colonial system and culture that needs to be countered and destroyed. To quote George Jackson from his seminal prison writings collection ‘Blood in My Eye’, “As a slave, the social phenomenon that engages my whole consciousness is, of course, revolution.”

This opening clearly defines the system as the problem, the subject as the oppressed slave by the system in the form of George Jackson (himself advocating as a resistant representative of the oppressed peoples), and the process towards and the actual solution to the problem: revolution. George Jackson and others like him show that it’s not a complex intellectual endeavor to define and communicate the problem of the oppressed to oppressed peoples. This manner of clear, honest and direct definitions of the social relationship under the British state is something that is nearly always absent in so-called ‘radical’ voices in Britain.

What about the possibility of great radical voices in Britain that have existed against British racism and colonialism itself? Who has helped to warn and guide communities away from British colonial projects of co-option and corruption? Have they existed and to what effect? At this point it might be useful to return to the challenges of colonised peoples in Britain and those who present themselves as offering support and solutions to them in the realm of culture and politics. Colonised people migrated to the ‘heart of whiteness’ due to the economic needs of the British colonial centre, they were organised by the British government to become a new colonial class of non-whites to do jobs in Britain that were ‘beneath’ that of white Brits. ‘Wage-slavery’ is a Marxist concept which states simply that a powerless worker under capitalism is forced to work or die, he either sells his labour for a wage or he and his family will perish in a system of wage-slavery. Add to this the fact that the colonial state invites a whole demographic class to prop-up the British economy and society, so that perhaps the correct term in this sense is ‘colonial wage slavery’ in the colonial centre, in Britain.

While we have clear definitions from Malcolm X, George Jackson, Stokely etc of what the system is, what our position in it is, and how we get free: has anyone advocated similarly in Britain and been a part of organising oppressed communities in this regard? What we find in general is that most voices and campaigns have focused on incremental improvements to the collective status of dependent colonial wage-slaves. Before we go into some concrete examples of this, to return to George Jackson and his framing of these issues:

“The slave – and revolution: Born to a premature death, a menial, subsistence-wage worker, odd-job man, the cleaner, the caught, the man under hatches, without bail—that’s me, the colonial victim. Anyone who can pass the civil service examination today can kill me tomorrow. Anyone who passed the civil service examination yesterday can kill me today with complete immunity. I’ve lived with repression every moment of my life, a repression so formidable that any movement on my part can only bring relief, the respite of a small victory or the release of death. In every sense of the term, in every sense that’s real, I’m a slave to, and of, property.

Revolution within a modern industrial capitalist society can only mean the overthrow of all existing property relations and the destruction of all institutions that directly or indirectly support existing property relations. It must include the total suppression of all classes and individuals who endorse the present state of property relations or who stand to gain from it. Anything less than this is reform.”

Colonial service-class, or resistance?

It’s perhaps interesting to compare this framing and advocacy of George Jackon’s with that of Claudia Jones’. Claudia Jones is a significant person in the histories of anti-colonial socialist politics of the Caribbean, the USA and Britain. Seen as a radical threat in New York as she was a Harlem-based communist leader, the colonial state expelled her, and the Brits brought her to London. In London Jones became an anti-racism activist. She was well tuned-into global anti-colonial struggles and, along with her lover and comrade Indian-Punjabi Maoist Abhimanyu Manchanda, felt a close affinity to the anti-colonial resistance in Africa and Asia. However, like nearly all similar people of left, socialist and communist persuasions there was only an inclination towards making reformist demands within the system, to try and create conditions whereby colonial wage-slaves in Britain are treated less worse. There was never an advocacy that oppressed communities should engage in resistance and struggle to form independent-resistant communities to overturn the whole British system and replace it with anti-colonial communities entirely. Or at the very least support the global anti-colonial struggles and be the section of it active and resistant against the British colonial state while being in Britain.

In 1964 Claudia Jones sums-up the framing of oppressed people in Britain as demographically a worker-class propping up a colonial society for the colonisers:

“whether as tenants waging anti-discrimination struggles; clubbing together to purchase homes to house families the large majority of whom were separated for years until the necessary finances were raised: whether as workers fighting for the right to work, or to be upgraded: or as cultural workers engaged in the attempt to use their creative abilities on stage, screen or television, or to safeguard their children’s right to an equal education; or as professionals, students, or in business pursuits, the West Indian immigrant community has special problems, as a national minority. While the workers are heaviest hit, the disabilities cut across class lines.” (Claudia Jones, The Caribbean community in Britain, in Kwesi Owusu’s Black British Society and Culture, 1999)

In contrast to George Jackson, Claudia Jones does not define the nature of the state and society, and instead positions the community as a ‘minority’ to be treated better for the benefit of wider society. The question arises that despite Claudia Jones’ close associations with and support to global anti-colonial struggles, why did she become a reformist activist when in Britain? This might be rooted in part to the relative lack of anti-colonial assertiveness and combativeness of a lot of western left-wing cultures including that of the Moscow-aligned communist culture in which she was embedded. Stalin’s leadership towards these communist groups in the west including in Britain was to engage in colonial structures and elections, to not develop the independent grassroots resistance of the oppressed and to not advocate the dissolution and destruction of the British empire. A lot of people who come out of these communist traditions tend to integrate into the colonial state and structures and become some kind of bureaucrat or careerist.

As greater numbers of people from the former British colonies were brought to Britain to be a new colonial service-class, Indian and Pakistani workers were also starting to organise against racism in society, but were also doing so on the basis of accepting that they are exactly a source of cheap labour to be used for a racist society but on the basis of their discrimination and abuse of all kinds. They accepted that they are a colonial wage-slave class here. The Indian Workers Association (Great Britain) played this similar reformist role, however one figure associated with this community presented a counter-model to this colonial integration.  That was Shaheed Udham Singh.

Udham Singh dedicated his life to avenging the British massacre at Amritsar in 1919 by eliminating Michael O’Dwyer a British ruler of Punjab by shooting him in 1940 in London. Udham Singh had only come to the ‘west’ to exact justice for the oppressed against the colonialists, and he delivered. Udham Singh is deeply revered by Punjabis, Sikhs and North Indians as one of the greatest anti-colonial heroes, but his example didn’t change the general reformism of the political communities to which he is connected such as the IWA(GB)s. If an anti-colonial struggle is not built in communities, then the de facto reality and oppression is that the colonial state is the dominant force that increasingly exploits and oppresses.

The colonial state uses immigration policies and the political games around it to ensure that colonised people never become independent and collectivised on the basis of their common interests with other colonised peoples. A senior British government figure – a ‘senior whip’ –  raised this issue of managing different sections of colonised peoples’ migration into Britain on the explicit basis of who would be more subservient to British colonialism:

“Why should mainly loyal and hard-working Jamaicans be discriminated against when ten times that quantity of disloyal [sic] Southern Irish (some of them Sinn Feiners) come and go as they please?” (The 1951–1955 Conservative and Government Racialisation of Black Immigration, By Bob Carter, Clive Harris and Shirley Joshi, Quoted in Black British Culture and Society, Ed. Kwesi Owusu, 1999)

Here we can see the colonial ruling classes exploring how they can recruit colonised people into serving their interests on the basis of being ‘loyal’ to the British system. An interesting insight into the shifting strategies of British state colonial divide and rule and recruitment is through the ethnic categories as options for people participating in the census which takes place every decade or so. In the 1981 census, ethnic groups were identified according to where the head of the household was born, be it a country in the Caribbean, Africa or Asia etc. By the time of the 1991 census the categories change to, not where people were born but, if people are ‘Black-Caribbean, Black-African, Black-Other, Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Asian-other’. This is a subtle but profound formal de-linking of communities based in and connected to the homeland and peoples in the periphery to shift them to a self-identity connected to the colonial centre and those who reside in that colonially privileged place. By the time of the 2001 census the terms ‘Black British ‘, and ‘Asian British’ were introduced in the form as ethnic categories indicating the bureaucratic and cultural formalisation of identities explicitly tied to Britishness ie., contemporary British colonialism and racism.

Colonised Migrant youth cultures and Britishness

These ethnic and racialised categories introduced into colonised communities by the British authorities – here in the form of the census  – have its cultural and academic reflections. In British TV and media, in the academic institutions there, the British colonial state developed subjective voices from Caribbean, African and Asian colonised communities that constructed notions of Britishness and Britishness-forming onto migrant colonised youth in the colonial centre.

Self-identifying as ‘British’ or ‘English’ was not at all commonplace amongst non-white youth through the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s.The adoption of Hip-Hop, Reggae/Ragga, Jungle DnB by colonised youth in Britain shows that they were explicitly tying themselves to an anti-colonial Black Power militancy via Rastafari-centric anti-colonial, anti-British Reggae and Ragga. Rastafarianism is an African Christian Orthodox Church. Horace Campbell’s Rasta and Resistance (1985) brilliantly presents the Rastafari movement as an especially Jamaica-based youth autonomous-community building movement through cultural and social resistance to colonialism and racism. Bob Marley’s music is the most well known cultural form of this movement. Rasta sees ‘Babylon system’ and the ‘police’ being symbols of a system of colonial oppression that must be resisted in this particular Afrocentric spirituality that takes one further out of Britishness into a philosophical, justice and independence-oriented life and community. It has its own counter-cultural language which sits in Jamaican patois and adds to the already creative witticisms of the language of the oppressed. Hip-Hop is a similar anti-colonial grassroots movement borne out of young people in anti-colonial struggles of African and Native communities in the settler colonial entity known as the USA.

Take the likes of Jah Shaka and Joi Bangla. Aswad and Ragga Twins. Rebel MC Congo Natty and Original Nuttah UK Apache. No one was pushing Britishness or Englishness, everyone pushing a Jamaican-based outlaw rebel-culture –  the ‘raggamuffin’ and rude boy and rude gyal – heavy on Patois-chat and respect for Rastafari. Everyone openly celebrated Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey and named our community centres, and put their portraits up in the halls where we held our sound-system parties. And we all communicated through independent mass anti-British state communication systems and networks called Pirate Radio, which was ultimately destroyed by the British state and the BBC by the 2000s.

Despite the relative confusions and the trajectory of greater division and victories of the state, youth were still positively aware of militant anti-colonial struggles in Palestine, South Africa, Grenada (Maurice Bishop), the Caribbean (Walter Rodney), Africa – South Africa and Zimbabwe (Walter Rodney) and celebrating who we thought symbolised this strident and articulate anti-colonial Black radicalism in the figure of Louis Farrakhan but then especially Khalid Abdul Muhammad, Public Enemy (“supporters of Chesimard” Assata Shakur, lyric in Rebels Without a Pause, 1989) were the greatest music band in the world at the time, educating us in radical Black Power socialist politics. Chuck D in Public Enemy spoke to that when he declared the racists were against our majority presence on this earth in their 1990 album title: ‘Fear of a Black Planet’. This was of course not the whole picture, and as always is the case in the realm of cultural communities of music and arts, all kinds of problematic forms of Britishness and Englishness were growing. It is for this reason that the mass lived experiences of radical cultural communities and histories have to be revived and reasserted for new generations.

In 1987 Paul Gilroy correctly identifies a lot of aspects of this grassroots colonised Caribbean and Asian youth communities and cultures in his book  Aint no Black in the Union Jack:

“Black cultures form only some of the forces which contribute to the emergence of a black Britishness”, Gilroy continues: “cultural resources of the Afro-Caribbean communities provide a space in which whites are able to discover meaning in black histories” (p217)

Gilroy introduces a concept called ‘black Britishness’ and ‘black Britain in which he argues that Afro-Caribbean communities ‘provide a space’ in which whites are able to discover something that brings them together in something new which is ‘black Britain’. Gilroy then says that this “shared culture, overdetermined by its context of the urban crisis, mediates the relationship between the different ethnic groups that together comprise black Britain.”

It seems it is this ‘overdetermined context of the urban crisis’ that brings together the white Brit and colonised youth into a new ‘black Britain’? But it is not true that the urban crisis in which non-white youth were living was a leading or more powerful force for cohesion than what we understood as the oneness of our condition, oppression and resistance with the Irish, Palestinian, South African and Black and Native youth in the USA throwing rocks at racist white colonial police and militaries. As such we were not leaning into anything ‘black British’, but something counter to that along the lines of the Black Power culture in Hip-Hop and Rasta in Reggae which Gilroy explores. But Gilroy again chooses to lean into some kind of constructed ‘Britishness’ that wasn’t necessarily actually there amongst most youth, by highlighting Tim Westwood as a leading figure in this emergence of Asian and Black youth forming fusions of Hip-Hop and Reggae/Ragga (which would create Jungle by the end of the 1980s).

Tim Westwood and his facilitation into Hip-Hop communities is a good example of how British colonial-capitalism recruits and oppresses grassroots Black cultures which oppose British racism and the state. There is a constant class of people in grassroots culture who are capitalist-oriented, who want to use the people and their culture to enrich themselves at the community’s expense by often allying with British institutions, funding and frameworks. This class of the ‘sell-out’ compradors to the system often push ‘British’ identity because it is where they can make some money in a junior relationship to Britishness as power, as in money and platforms.

By 1987 Tim Westwood was chosen by British institutions in the media to be the gatekeeper for Hip-Hop. By the 1990s Westwood would take a leading role in the BBC in this regard, as the BBC was helping to end Pirate Radio and develop the colonially divisive cultural wings to deepen splits between Asians and Caribbean and African people by pushing BBC Asian Network and BBC 1Xtra in the early 2000s. More recently Tim Westwood has been under investigation for sexual harassment and assaults of young women at the height of his career, with many criticising the BBC for what appears to be a cover-up. The exploitation of humans and girls is a constant of capitalist-colonial systems and behaviour and cannot be separated from Britishness.

It is exactly through these dynamics of co-option and oppression that any kind of Britishness is imposed on the community, be it on colonised communities in Britain, or colonised communities in the periphery like in Gaza or Ireland. Anti-colonial youth cultures of Hip-Hop, Ragga and Jungle in Britain wasn’t practised at all to provide white kids with feelings of social and cultural inclusion in our spaces, rather it was a radical articulation of a universal struggle against colonialism and racism from our position in the colonial centre, like Malcolm X and Public Enemy were in the colonial centre, and we were quite conscious of our positioning as common to that of Malcolm X and KRS One (another pro Black Power radical and popular Hip Hop artist from New York’s Bronx).

Gilroy goes on to say “a political relationship between Afro-Caribbeans and Asians on which the future of black Britain may depend is being created in these cultural encounters.” Perhaps Gilroy was correct here, but in a much more devastating and negative way than what he may have intended to mean, speaking to what has happened to this point whereby these ‘British’ projects have resulted in a near total collapse of any ability for non-whites to give any meaningful response while they are targeted by a mass violent British racist campaign. All the OBE’s and MBE’s of the non-white colonial class that postured as left and radical have in sum total brought the community to its most vulnerable and weakest position.

Grassroots: Failed and Sold-Out to Britain since the 1980s

The period from 1979 to 1981 saw a lot of Asian and African youth-led uprisings against British racist society and authorities. It is often seen as a high point of struggle against racism. However the radical high point was arguably the late 1960s into the 1970s where the type of Black Power anti-colonial politics that even Malcolm X himself pushed in Asian, African and Caribbean communities in Britain had been defeated as a political possibility in terms of actually being adopted in struggles of non-white communities here. Both Obi Egbuna and Roy Sawh, early radical Black Power leaders in London, were both imprisoned under the 1965 Race Relations Act. Culturally, the children of migrants from British colonies were increasing in their numbers and confidence, their coming of age in the late 1970s in the 1980s was evidenced in-part by films like Babylon (1980) featuring Aswad and Jah Shaka, and the emerging Hip-Hop, Ragga and Jungle movements with Pirate Radio encompassing all.

At the same time, since the 1970’s the British authorities were encouraging people from non-white communities to become community bureaucrats for the state on the basis of taking funding and diverting and demobilising the grassroots. Often opportunists emerging out of the younger generations would talk a language of radicalism, posture against the older gatekeepers who were close to the authorities, to only then themselves become close to the authorities and their funding and directly help to fail the youth and grassroots in their own communities. This period saw a string of legal reforms to give a bit more space to non-white people in society, creating a whole new British colonial economy for non-white assimilation and integration into Britishness. This was of course necessary to ensure that the new generations of non-white youth are increasingly divided and divorced from any struggles of people against colonialism, and instead identify as English and British.

Whereas  Walter Rodney and Malcolm X kept tying non-white communities in Britain to the Caribbean, Asian and African-based militant anti-colonial peoples struggles, Stuart Hall in 1987 in his work Minimal Selves argues: “migration is a one-way trip, there is no ‘home’ to go back to“. This positioning is in total counter-opposition to those like Malcolm X, George Jackson, Fanon and others.

The entire anti-colonial culture exists to prioritise our solidarity and unity with actual oppressed people in their struggles against British, French, USA and other colonialisms, very much always ‘returning to’ and ‘going back’ to these revolutionary frameworks. Middle-class Jamaican-born Stuart Hall quotes his mother saying to him, “hope they don’t think you are one of those immigrants over there“, which is an interesting admission when exploring the following where he says:

“a new conception of ethnicity as a kind of counter to the old discourses of nationalism and national identity … The slow contradictory movement from ‘nationalism’ to ‘ethnicity’  as a source of identities is a part of a new politics. It is also part of the decline of the west’ – that immense process of historical relativisation which is just beginning to make the British, at least, just feel ‘marginally’ marginal.”

Did it look like in 1987 that the West was in decline? Even if it did, does that change the reality that a global system is still dominated by colonial-capitalism and its states and as such, the ongoing challenge remains the same? Hall says these new constructed ethnicities are part of something exciting and new. Non-migrant youth cultures in this period were not anything especially new, they were still explicitly tied to radical anti-colonial struggles especially those in Africa, the Caribbean and USA.

A non-white youth from a migrant background can often see in their own non-white anti-colonial heritage and ancestry something that directly informs who they are and how they act. Colonised migrants’ backgrounds aren’t necessarily a conservative drag on the youth. Instead of seeing a liberating radicalism in migrant heritage, what is often more promoted is that transformation into some kind of western-based thing is more dynamic, trendy and pioneering than re-formations in cultural mass expressions of contemporaneous anti-colonial realities of non-white youth in the British colonial centre.

One of filmmaker Gurinder Chandha’s first projects was a program backed by Third World Reels for Channel 4 broadcasted in 1989 called “I’m British, But…” which platforms a series of South Asian young people in different British cities and British-occupied Ireland/Belfast. The narrative of the programme is that they consider themselves ‘British’ and explore that in relation to racist exclusion and discrimination. South Asian youth music and culture which had fusion elements with Hip-Hop and Reggae was showcased on the program as well. As stated earlier, the erasure of Ireland is apparent in this work. One wouldn’t go to the heart of occupied Palestine and not mention the situation and struggle of the Palestinians, so why does this happen to Ireland and the Irish?

Putting this aside, like Gilroy and Hall, Chadha similarly tends to identify first and second generation colonised youth in Britain as naturally leaning towards something embedded in a ‘Britishness’, and that this Britishness can be reformed to be inclusive and hence the creation of ‘Black British’ and ‘Asian British / British Asian’. Once again, the very real historical and contemporary connections and relationship to a growing violent British racist and colonial state are erased and instead what is constructed is a special place for non-whites that is somehow positively defining a new Britishness based on the island of Britain but stripped of its history of oppression and resistance to it. Chadha further developed these themes in her popularly received films Bhaji on the Beach and Bend it Like Beckham. Not surprisingly, she received the Order of the British Empire from the British Queen in 2006 for her work in film.

Chadha grew up in a significant colonised community in Britain: Southall in west London. Since the 1960s this hitherto conservative white English area transformed into one dominated by migrants from the Indian side of Punjab (a border that the British imposed in 1947). Also, large communities of Pakistanis, other Indians and Afghans arrived and since the late 1980s, a considerable Somali community. Asian grassroots youth resistance in the 1970s and 1980s, to racist attacks and police in Southall was conducted by those who did not consider themselves to be and did not want to be English and British, and as such had no time for British structures and authorities. However, the British project also successfully defanged the radicalism of the youth from the early 1980s and as with other communities, the potentials of anti-colonial struggle of the youth ever since has been sabotaged and scuppered by the British collaborator class.

The ‘Southall Youth Movement’ claimed to represent a new generation of radical youth in Southall, but they were by 1981 doing what they criticised the elders for, for example in the IWA UK (a pro-Labour Party faction of the IWA, whereas IWAGB’s are generally not supportive of the Labour Party): taking British funding and positions to enrich themselves and their careers, and in so doing failing the community.

Whereas Malcolm X and George Jackson talk of a murderous racist system, some of these activists instead talks of a ‘mature democracy’ in Britain (Grover, ‘Palestine Action is part of Britain’s proud history of protest. Proscribing it is an assault on democracy’, 29 June 2025, The Guardian).  This concept infers that democracy has simply become diminished, giving the impression that there is some hope in parliament standing up’ to the home secretary.  Meanwhile Malcolm X reminds us that we are ‘victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.’ The colonial collaborator class versus the anti-colonial militant. The American and British versus the Mau Mau and George Jackson. This type of framing actually throws a light as to how the potential of an anti-colonial resurgence around Gaza and Palestine since October 2023 has failed and instead diverted us into dead-end British structures and processes.

Working inna de factories

Sometimes sweeping de floor

Unsung heroines an heroes

Yes they open de door

They came a long time ago

But now it seems we’ve arrived

(Asian Dub Foundation in New Way New Life, 2000)

Not so long before sweeping floors in Britain, our grandparents were being genocided in the colonies. No justice there, except Udham Singh’s small but profound contribution. So where had we arrived in 2000 after all the death and injury of being colonised, and the ongoing humiliations of serving Britain in extremely menial jobs because the ‘whites’ don’t want to do them? Did we just forget about the continuing supply of humans from the ‘third world’ into Britain to continue the colonial wage-slave class, what about their conditions and their rights as they continue to be oppressed by Britain and Britishness as they are targeted as ‘criminals’ arriving on ‘small boats’ and ‘migrant hotel’ residents soon to be thrown into concentration camps on army bases? When exactly on the timeline did we ‘arrive’ at some good place?

The only door that seems to keep opening are the vaults of racism and colonialism. And to remind everyone vengeance was visited on colonial Britain and Western domination in the early 2000s with the Second Intifada, the rise of open anti-colonial radical Chavez in 1999, the end of the British project that was Israel’s occupation of Lebanon.  But then the British wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, arrived along with all the racism necessary to deliver all this globally and in Britain itself. Colonised Muslim youth rose up against the rising far-right in the summer of 2001 in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham. All the while in this new Eldorado of Britishness, Stephen Lawrence’s killers were still being protected by Britain and the quest for justice was frustrated by those who pushed British structures over justice. In the early 2000s, the British state gave up on its moment of ‘multiculturalism’ of the 1980s into 1990s, but it was this project of British multiculturalism that laid the basis of the divisions and collapse of the anti-racist capacity of non-white communities in the late 1990s and 2000s.

By the 2000s African, Caribbean and Asian youth were still running and enjoying Pirate Radios, we were still Junglists pushing into the new Grime movement, but at the political level we were allowing ourselves to be divided along anti-Asian and anti-Muslim lines. We failed to unite with the Muslims under attack. We failed to stop the infiltration of white, British and English cultural power into our music and cultures, but culturally we were still relatively united and that unity saw its last hurrah in the graphic and spontaneous anti-colonial Uprising of August 2011 whose soundtracks were the music and cultures that we the grassroots made together. But the divisions between Black and Asian youth were a direct result of a long and successful British colonial state policy that increased the colonial sell-out class that was designed to deliver our failures and divisions. Because of these factors the grassroots youth have not been able to develop their united interests in a struggle against growing British racism since the 1980s.

Conclusion: Full Spectrum British Resurgence.

By 2000 in Frontlines and Backyards Stuart Hall says:

“Afro-Caribbeans and Asians were treated by the dominant society as so much alike that they could be subsumed and mobilized under a single political category. But today that is no longer the case. Today we have to recognize the complex internal cultural segmentation, the internal frontlines which cut through so-called Black British identity. And perhaps where these internal divisions are most acutely registered, where these lineaments of change are explored most vigorously concerns young people and their cultures.” (p136, in Black British Culture and Society, Ed Kwesi Owusu, 2000)

As the years and decades have moved-on from Malcolm X and Walter Rodney, and the resultant continuous victories of British racism and colonialism, we find ourselves in the violent stark form of exactly that. Caribbean, African, Asian and all non-white people are increasingly attacked everyday by racists and the racist state. Rather than what Hall is arguing that somehow the experience of Afro-Caribbeans and Asian youth is not one that unites them, we are clearly seeing a British racist offensive that is demanding more confidently the expulsion of entire non-white communities and as such ‘Afro-Caribbeans and Asians are being treated by the dominant society as so much alike.’ Although there is a commonality of experience of non-white youth under the growing intensity of this new British racist offensive, we are not seeing any counter response at the grassroots because of what this piece is trying to explore: the project of Britishness as the great racist colonial project against all non-white colonised people.

The very reason we have reached such a vulnerable place is down to how the British colonial project refines itself through co-option and recruitment through the frameworks of an apparently flexible and ‘diverse’ Britishness that has been exactly designed to produce a new vicious violent racist surge. The effectiveness of British racism is that it is able to achieve its aims from the deployment of a colonial political class that appears to be liberal and left and ‘anti-racist’.

As has been argued in the context of the Americas there is a diversity of radical and revolutionary anti-colonial voices and frameworks to draw upon. In the context of Britain there are hardly any. But anti-colonialism is anti-colonalism and it’s not a great challenge to appreciate James Connolly, Frantz Fanon and George Jackson to understand the British context. To attempt to push an anti-colonialism against the British state in Britain means contending with a seemingly endless supply of people on the left who push English and British nationalism.

Left-wing MP Zarah Sultanah dons the England football top and in so doing tries to repackage a leading colonial cultural symbol and institution of Britain as something good for us and the non-white children and girls. Why not raise an anti-racist symbol and cultural movement instead of an English nationalist one? England football tops and St Georges Cross’ are literally the uniform of those attacking, abusing and raping women in racist attacks currently. RMT Trade Union leader Eddie Dempsey is a campaigner for anti-immigration laws and supporter of Brexit, while another RMT leader Mick Lynch was reported as saying “English people should be allowed to be proud to be English in England”. It doesn’t matter what attempt at mitigating rhetoric and posturing one does after promoting a colonial Britishness and Englishness, as doing so only serves at best to confuse people into a sense of greater precarity and lack of self-confidence in the context of rising violent British racism.

The complex strategies of hegemony that the British state has employed and the connected and relatively less numbers of restless colonised peoples as compared to the USA, means that it is a lot more challenging to develop any consistent anti-racist and anti-colonial discourse in Britain let alone an actual struggle of communities. Cultures of resistance are eradicated and put in the colonial museum by means of two main British state-recruitment drives, 1) the invitation of millions of colonised people to the centre to run the society (security, retail, education, transport, health, care homes etc) for the British and the political culture of acceptance of the state and peddling illusions of reforms, and 2) the curation of a colonial class of ‘reformist’ collaborators who are promoted as the non-white community’s saviour and hope. History has already exposed the problematic nature of this entire colonial infrastructure as we can now more accurately see its outcome in that the British state and its population are openly intensifying racist violence onto everyone. Will this growing British terror result in any development of anti-colonial solutions to the growing pressures in our communities? Or will the colonialist and his class of compradors ensure that we remain confused and divided at the feet of the insurgent lynch-mob Brit?

Sukant Chandan is a London-based anti-colonial researcher and organiser since 1994. He is directly connected to the legacies of militant anti-colonial resistance of the Ghadar Party in Punjab and Mau-Mau Land and Freedom movement in Kenya. He is a co-founder of the Malcolm X Movement. Follow it on X @mxmovement.