Here we go again... Conservative shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick laments ‘not seeing another white face’ in Handsworth in Birmingham. What is wrong with these people? It was in Birmingham that Enoch Powell made his infamously racist Rivers of Blood speech in 1968, and nearby in Smethwick where 'Britain's most racist election' took place in 1964, prompting a visit to the area by Malcolm X shortly before he was murdered.
The message is always the same - 'too many' black or brown faces in one place is a problem, the sub text that only white faces really belong.
So yes once again this great 1978 track, and indeed album, is painfully topical: 'Handsworth Revolution' by Birmingham reggae band Steel Pulse.
'Handsworth means us the Black people,
we're talking now...
Babylon is falling
It was foolish to build it on the sand
Handsworth shall stand, firm, like Jah rock
Fighting back
We once beggars are now choosers
No, no intention to be losers
Striving forward with ambition
And if it takes ammunition
We rebel in Handsworth revolution'
Seeing Steel Pulse in Llandudno 1980
Steel Pulse were stalwarts of Rock Against Racism gigs and festivals in the late 1970s, I saw them in Llandudno in north Wales in 1980 playing at the Labour Party Young Socialists conference - an early gig for me as I was still at sixth form. The LPYS was dominated at the time by 'Militant' trotskyists and indeed I was semi-recruited to them for a short time at that conference where it was revealed to me that they were a 'secret' organisation infiltrating the Labour Party, the Revolutionary Socialist League. Yes I sold their paper for a little while outside Luton Arndale Centre by Don Miller's bakers but I found them politically turgid and soon moved on. But the cultural programme at that conference was quite eye opening and a bit more interesting than speeches from Militant leaders Ted Grant and Peter Taaffe - 7:84 Theatre Company performing their play 'Sus' and also in the Astra Theatre, Steel Pulse, donning white hoods to perform 'Ku Klux Klan' and singing of revolution in Handsworth...
'Forward Ever, and Backward Never'
