Reflecting on 43 years since ‘Southall Riots’
IN the current world we live in, it can be easy to forget just how much our parents and grandparents fought to have the freedoms we have today. Whether it was protests or fighting for their rights, the generation of the 1970s paved the way for us.
Saturday, April 23 marked 43 years since what is now referred to as ‘the Southall Riots’, the demonstration which started off as a peaceful protest against the National Front’s campaign meeting.
However, it resulted in the death of an anti-racist campaigner and school teacher, Blair Peach, due to police violence against protestors.
The National Front decided to host a meeting on that day in Southall Town Hall, an area known for its Asian community.
Thousands came together to join the demonstration against the racist group – and one of these demonstrators was Blair, a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Anti Nazi League (ANL).
Another reason the residents of Southall were so against the National Front was that their ideology had led to the murder of 18-year-old Gurdip Singh Chaggar, who was stabbed to death three years earlier on June 4, 1976. The engineering student had been killed by a racist gang while on his way to the cinema.
The Southall Youth Movement was formed after the incident to challenge the rise in attacks by members of the National Front and to give the community a voice. Rupinder Hardy, a business change consultant spoke to MyLondon about her dad, Gurmail Singh Bhere, who had attended the protest in 1979 when he was 42-years-old.
She said: “Standing up against racism during an age where so many brown and black were treated ‘less than’ and with hate. I was quite young, but my father was a fierce defender of those who didn’t or couldn’t stand up for themselves and as a proud Sikh man, it was ingrained in him to protect everyone, to treat everyone as equals, so the racism of the 70s and 80s did not sit well with him at all.”
Dr Onkar Sahota is a British Labour Party politician who has been the member of the London Assembly for Ealing and Hillingdon since 2012. He grew up in Southall and his home was just a few hundred yards away from where the killing of Gurdip happened.
He said: “I was at university at the time [and] we realised immediately it was a racially motivated attack.
“There was a human outcry about this, a young lad living in Southall who wore a turban, people were very angry about it.
“They wanted to feel safe, they wanted the police and community to do something about this… find the people responsible for it and for the law to take its full force.”
On April 23, 1979, protestors were not just protesting the public meeting of the National Front, which they had petitioned to cancel, but also the damage they had caused and their racist attacks.
During the day a confrontation eventually broke out and police began to use violence to suppress the protesters, hundreds of people were arrested with around three dozen injured.
Amid the altercation, campaigner Blair was hit on the head by a police officer, according to a later investigation. A 24-year-old witness, Parminder Atwal, took the injured teacher into his house and called an ambulance, according to the BBC.
Parminder said: “I saw a policeman hit a man on the head as he sat on the pavement. The man tried to get up, fell back and then reeled across the road to my house.”
Blair died in Ealing hospital that same night. The event triggered more mistrust between the Southall community and the police, a relationship which has still not been fully repaired.