- The Observer,
- Sunday June 9, 2002
I recently travelled back to Glasgow and, as usual, ended up in the living room talking to my father. We sat watching the news as the country prepared for jubilee week. The programme showed footage of Sangatte, the refugee camp in Calais. Groups of asylum-seekers, clutching small bags of belongings, were jumping on to freight trains bound for Britain. My father sounded sad and, strangely to me, angry.
He described how, over 40 years in the UK, he felt he had added to the economy: both as a father and as an immigrant. This, despite waves of hysteria about people of colour. He mentioned Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech of 1968. To his generation, Powell's declaration was an anthem to an impending race war. He explained to me the circumstances that led to the rise of the National Front in the late Seventies. But neither manifestation of racism had upset him. He had expected it.
Blair and Blunkett, however, had stirred a deep rage. He described their language on 'swamping' asylum-seekers and ethnic minorities as horrific. It made him ashamed of the adopted homeland where he has spent the majority of his years. 'It's difficult to see how you belong,' he said. 'If you get called a racist name, there's little you can do about it. Maybe we will always be foreigners here.'
I can see his point. My father arrived penniless in this country in 1963. He was friendless and alone. He had already survived the long and bloody Hindu-Muslim clashes that marred his journey from India to Pakistan after Partition in 1947.
He found a home in Glasgow, a city that immediately held him in rapture for its proximity to the countryside. He took his first job selling household wares out of a suitcase - dishcloths and brushes - around Glasgow's estates. When he felt sufficiently secure, he revisited Pakistan to marry my mother and bring her back to Glasgow to raise a family.
I have never heard my father complain about those early, financially uncertain years. His work ethic (at one point, he held down a number of jobs) probably helped him absorb the pains of a foreign land.
He once described the cries of 'fuck off, you Paki' as the door to an inner-city flat was slammed shut by an elderly woman. He merely shrugged his shoulders and moved on to the next door.
That attitude allowed him to raise a family of four. He has seen three of us through university: the youngest is likely to start this year. He has everything Pakistan couldn't offer him: a home and stability. And in the process he has created jobs and stability for others.
Typical of immigrants of his generation, my father views Britain as a host nation. He envisages a day when people of colour are asked to leave. Not because of brute force, but through legislation. He has made preparations for that day. He won't resist. He wasn't born here.
We are different. I have realised it since my teenage years. I was born in Britain and, unlike him, consider myself Scottish. I can't and won't leave. So while my father has withstood the creeping influence of the British National Party, I resist it. My father's newly aroused anger is something I have felt for most of my life. Unlike him, I won't forgive racism. At 16, I fought a colleague at school who proudly told me a joke: 'Why did the Romans build straight roads? So Pakis couldn't build corner shops.'
Five years later, while I was walking home, a builder's van passed me on Shawlands Road. A window opened and the driver shouted: 'Paki bastard!'. I hurled a brick through his window.
Over the past year, I have travelled across Britain - Oldham, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, Dover, Glasgow and Edinburgh. I have interviewed racists and victims of race hate who have suffered both before and since 11 September.
I have listened to the stories of asylum-seekers - tales of joy, sadness and optimism - which remind me of those which my father told me throughout my childhood.
I try to understand all points of view. In Burnley recently, a white BNP voter called me 'Paki scum'. I said nothing and merely noted his outburst. But it left me wondering. As a teenager, I remember being stupefied by Thatcherism. She made it easy to hate her and the institutions she represented.
Blair and Blunkett, however, have managed something I had previously thought unfeasible. They have given birth to a new Britain: a colder, harsher and less forgiving country that even my father now fails to recognise.
Online comment: Rebecca Hickman of Save the Children on why the asylum bill denies children their rights. Plus asylum special report. www.observer.co.uk/comment
