It will be a real shame if this ridiculously expensive book fails to ensure publication of a cheaper version for readers with more modest finances, especially in the Bengali community, whose relationship with the East End of London, stretching back hundreds of years, is analysed so well here.
Georgie Wemyss, a resident of Tower Hamlets, is married to a Bengali Muslim. She examines events in the early 1990s to graphically illustrate how attitudes shaped hundreds of years ago affected them. Which, conveniently for those in charge, continues to block the working class unity needed, by people of all colours, to improve conditions there.
She examines why Britain joined the Americans in celebrating in 2007 the arrival 400 years before in Virginia of a handful of colonists while ignoring more important events in Britain’s commercial history 200 years later, including the opening of the East India Docks in 1806, when 20,000 celebrated new facilities to help Britain exploit the Indian sub-continent – a process begun when Elizabeth I granted the East India Company a charter in 1600. Among the exploited were the Lascars – seamen from India, China and East Africa who sailed in the Merchant and Royal Navy and without whom both would have been crippled. Not that anyone in authority cared, even when many were callously discarded in London. Instead of succour and support, and a right to stay, they faced discrimination. In an early forerunner to Britain’s first Immigration Act of 1905 Parliament passed an act in 1848 prohibiting settlement for people it admitted had the right to call themselves British citizens.
It is this grudging acceptance by the ruling class and the middle classes that service them, accompanied by an unwillingness to recognise the role played by people from Asia in building Britain, that still permeates the often poisonous politics of east London today. So when Bengali families apply for larger family units on the Isle of Dogs they face claims that they have no connection with the area, and should stay in overcrowded Brick Lane. Then when Bengali youths organise to protest about a vicious racist attack on Quddus Ali during the BNP campaign that culminated in the election of Derek Beackon as the party’s first councillor in 1993, the police brutally over-react against what they described as “outsiders.” As if!
