This is in part a diary and stream of consciousness about my visit to the UK in the summer of 2024, when white racists tried to murder Muslim, Black and brown people en masse. This is me processing my thoughts…

As a Londoner living in the Netherlands, I love to return home to the UK for the summer. It’s become an annual ritual of walking hills, eating patties and mum’s curry and spending time with friends and family. I always feel a certain level of relaxation being in the UK, more seen. More me. I miss the streets, the corner shops, the integrated multiculturalism of where I grew up (please read on for the caveats). People get my jokes, understand my cadence. No one on the streets questions who I am or whether I belong (unlike in the Netherlands). That is my experience as a Londoner, in London at least. 

Our grand tour of the UK is a tour of our friends’ empty houses. We started off in Hastings, home to my dear friend David. In a pile of books on the floor by the bookcase, I pick up ‘My Battle of Hastings’ by Xiaolu Guo. Xiaolu chronicles her move to Hastings and her endeavours to immerse herself in the history of the area. The whole text weaves her experience of being an immigrant from China with her research of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which details the arrival of the Saxons and the Norman conquests. She observes how ideas of ‘Englishness’ and ‘Britishness’ are postulated in the mainstream media, whilst she herself attempts to cultivate a sense of belonging. One of the anecdotes that stands out is an exchange she had with a builder fitting her new windows which descended into a violently racist diatribe:

Those immigrants, what are they going to do here? I mean, really, shit, where are we going to put them? Better lock your door when you go down for a pint. If it was up to me, if I was the Border Police, I’d shoot them right on the boat. And I have done that actually, with my mates and others when I served in the army in Gibraltar! We shot them, on the sea, really, those Africans! They wouldn’t tell you about it, but we did that in Gibraltar…

I shut the book. Ugh, I remembered how I never really felt comfortable outside of London, there’s always a comment, a look, a mimic, the pressure to prove that I’m as English as you mate. I put it out of my mind and consider whether I should let my husband put the kids to bed so that I can go to a dub-reggae night in a pub. I go to the pub to an almost empty dance floor, with exactly 7 people 40 years old or older shuffling around to a mediocre Drum and Bass set. One man, a trooper, was heroically doing the classic DnB (toe-heel-step) move, in 5 second bursts, before getting tired. The rest of us lurched enthusiastically. As watered down as this whole moment felt, I was still grateful I’m old enough to have experienced the birth and rise of Jungle and DnB. Even though it pangs me that the feelings of unity and togetherness that came from raving (that was drawn from the Rastafarian influence in ragga and reggae) is lost in a culture of narcissism and hyperindividualism. These are my dancefloor thoughts. A woman comes up to me and asks if I’m alone- then hugs me and tells me that she’s here for me if I need her. Maybe not everything is lost. But I am tired and I go home in time to have an early night. 

Sunday 4th

Sunday started off gloriously. We walked with my old friend Jamie along the cliffside of Fairlight, taking in the deep azure of the sea. The day was filled with no phone signal, giggles, tired legs and hangry children calmed only by ice cream. I relax on the sofa and reminisce not only on the beautiful day, but the former life me and Jamie shared ramping up and down the streets of Peckham, in squat parties and community spaces. I remember this phase of my life as a jumble of profound insights on hilltops overlooking the city, toilet humour, and doused in Mount Gay rum and ginger beer. Most of the familiar faces and spaces from that era are now dispersed and destroyed by gentrification. Look at us now, sober, sensible, aware of our joint cartilage. I resume my phone addiction and get texts from friends asking if I’m ok. 

Hello? How are you….its terrifying

I google and my heart drops. Muslims being violently targeted. Black men being violently targeted. An Asian family being pulled out of a car by violent racist thugs. I’m overwhelmed and my thoughts erupt. Am I safe? Thank god my parents are away right now. I want to run, I want to hide, I want to fight. I’m feeling things I can’t describe except for the burning in my chest. Anger, sadness and shock hit my body all at once. My head feels the weight of an onslaught of thoughts of my parents’ sacrifices, their first cold winter with no central heating, the racist violence my dad received as a bus conductor. A heaviness. A tsunami of grief courses through every fibre of my being. Its indescribable

Now I’m not naive, I understand the machinations of this are years in the making. The Tories have been very strategic in creating a hostile environment, and the current Labour Government are chasing their tails doing the same. The Murdochracy churning out islamophobia in almost every single newspaper are relishing the targets they put on our backs. Poverty and desperation fueled by austerity is framed as immigrants thieving resources. But I’m grieving the safety I once felt, as a child, in Tottenham, nestled in my orthodox Jewish community, within a Jamaican and South Asian community and in my predominantly Black, Brown and Turkish school. And even then this safety was relative to the not so historic spectre of gangs of National Front thugs paki-bashing in and around the area. It says a lot when racists have coined and popularised the term ‘paki-bashing’. But I felt safe in Tottenham because I knew if the NF tried it, they would get mash up. 

I guess the feeling that I’m grappling at is that I thought we were safer than we are now. Naively, perhaps stupidly, despite all the racism and islamophobia being continuously drip fed and flooded into every mainstream media outlet, there was a little kernel of me that still believed that we are safer than we are. 

I text my friend Mahtab to see if he’s ok. I tell him that I’m looking at a book of his photography that I found nestled in David’s bookcase. It grounds me. Mahtab is an artist, and one of his bodies of work includes a series of portraits called ‘You get me?’. In this he creates beautiful humanising portraits of Muslim men. I was moved by this as I have never seen people who look like my dad photographed like this before. Human, soft, real, defiant, vulnerable. 

Embedded in the back cover of this book are headlines embossed in gold taken from right wing papers who have spent decades constructing the Muslim as a savage animal, and Islam inherently ‘incompatible’ with ‘British Values’:

Here are just a small selection:

MUSLIM THUGS BURN POPPIES Sickening scenes on British streets Daily Star, 12th November 2010 

CHRISTMAS IS BANNED: it offends muslims daily express 2nd nov 2005

PM: UK MUSLIMS HELPING JIHADIS Communities must stop ‘quietly condoning’ pages of in-depth analysis Telegraph & Argus, 9th July 2001

BBC PUT MUSLIMS BEFORE YOU Daily Star, 14th October 2008

Now Muslims demand: GIVE US FULL SHARIA LAW Daily Express, 15th October 2009 

1 in 5 British Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis The Sun, 23rd November 2015

BRITS KIDS FORCED TO EAT HALAL SCHOOL DINNERS Daily Star, 6th August 2010 

AL-QAEDA CORRIE THREAT The Sun, 9th December 2010 How big brand shops and

Tuesday 6th

A telegram message from the EDL is being widely circulated of planned violent attacks on Wednesday 7th. It lists around 30 seemingly random addresses all over the country.  I find out later that they are the addresses of immigration lawyers. Hastings is on the list, in fact an address that is only a 4 min walk from the house that I am sitting in with my husband and children. Am I safe? Am I literally safe? Friends are telling me to pack up, leave Hastings and come to the safety of London. Floors, sofas, spare beds are offered in abundance. Lock your car doors! Do I even leave the house now that these racists have been emboldened?

We’re in a fish and chip shop and I’m eyeing people up. I fix my gaze at randoms and wonder, are you a racist? Are you a racist? A kindly white elderly gentleman strikes up a conversation with me and my kids. He balances on his walking stick, as he strokes my daughters hair with his free unsteady hand. “There’s another riot planned, make sure you stay at home.” 

As I was feeling dejected and alienated, an ally popped into the fray. D, the downstairs neighbour and friend of David, messaged me. There is an anti-fascist march tomorrow, a 5 minute walk from our door- she tells me. Half the street are going and we can go together. Suddenly I had comrades in Hastings. I went to her house and had a cup of tea and as we chatted I realised I was in the company of a seasoned anti-fascist. Someone who actually took shifts to keep a lookout for Nazis in south Germany in the 1980s. She’s married to V, who currently works in a centre for asylum seekers and refugees. This centre is also a food bank that had to board up its windows because of the threat of these violent racists. Unsafe people who have been through unimaginable trauma, now are made to be even more unsafe. And vulnerable people have no access to food. The damage keeps ricocheting. Yet, D and V’s friendliness and camaraderie works magic on my nervous system. I still wonder about not leaving the house on Wednesday. 

Wednesday 7th

The thought of containing two spinning tornadoes (children) in my friends’ house filled with breakables is well…not happening. I’ll take my chances with the fash. On the day of the planned ‘protests’, we decided to go for a walk by the Seven Sisters. It was a blissful blue sky day, with the dark cloud of another fascist pogrom on the horizon. Another beautiful walk, with too tired children unsatisfied with their levels of ice cream, punctuated by collective awe at the cliffs and again, the jewel blue sea. We plan to get home before the fascists have agreed to assemble, we lock our car doors, and we plan to go to elsewhere if there are any fash around on our street.

The anti-fash demonstration was huge for Hastings. It was heartwarming, and necessary. 600 people, mostly white, turned up. At one point 2-3 fascists staggered up drunk and unstable and tried to approach the crowd. The crowd quickly turned their “we are black, white, muslim and we’re jew” chant to “fuck off! fuck off!” and surged forward to eject the drunkard fash from the vicinity. My heart was warmed by their anger and defiance. Speakers said that this is the true face of Britain. And to a certain extent it’s true, I have encountered defiant anti-racist activism in many shapes and forms throughout my life. That being said, racists are also the true face of Britain. There is no ‘one’ Britain, there are multiple Britain’s existing, interweaving and colliding all at once. And the most violent, nationalistic and narcissistic ideologies that permeate this society are fed, nourished and shaped by the tools of the establishment and foreign agents who openly align with neo-Nazi ideology.  There are more of us, but they are better funded and resourced. 

Saturday 10th

I’m relieved when we leave Hastings for the safety of London. I enter my parents house and the first thing I do is run up the stairs and go straight to my old bedroom for no reason I can think of. As I do, I’m thinking that this house, this safety, these memories won’t last forever. 

The next few days everything I see and do is through the prism of the ideologies fuelling the race pogroms. Everything feels so stingingly relevant.  We watched the Paddington Bear film as a family, and I wonder how many people take its pro-immigrant message as evidence of the media being captured by the ‘metropolitan elite’:

Mrs Brown says that in London everyone is different and that means anyone can fit it.

I continue to be trolled wherever I go. The local Tesco sells naan breads for the toaster, made by Warburtons- bread makers who donated money to the Tories. It reminds me of a comedy sketch from the 1980s by Rowan Atkinson performing as a racist Tory anti-immigrant politician: 

Now a lot of immigrants are Indians and Pakistani’s for instance and I like curry, but now that we got the recipe is there really any need for them to stay?

I stood in the bread aisle stony eyed for 10 minutes weighing up the necessity of satire, yet its use as a cover for racism. This joke was supposed to be a punching up- ‘look how racist they are’ jab. But it’s just turned into another example of parody-turned reality. I then start to spin out about Atkinson’s support of Boris Johnson’s joke about niqabi women looking like letterboxes. This precipitated a sharp increase of street violence against muslim women. Then I realised I am always in a state of analysing the impact of words on material reality, and formulating questions for people to interrogate their assumptions, and providing receipts for the consequences of hate speech. This is just a day in the life, a survival strategy of a brown muslim in an ever increasingly Islamophobic Europe. 

In the evening I go to see a play called Bangers with my dear childhood friend, a sister, Yvette.  A brilliant play which sifts through friendship, estrangement from a father who still loves her and abuses of power all to the backdrop of Garage Music and the power of club experiences. It ended with a mini DJ set of garage bangers and me and Yvette chair danced and sang every word. London has given birth to so much, because of us immigrants.

After the play, we did what any self-respecting middle aged parents out for a night would do- we sat under some fluorescent lights and ate bougie fried chicken on Kingsland High Road, our old stomping ground. Everything is so scintillatingly relevant. Around us were groups of young people, perhaps two or three tables of different groups with Black, White, Turkish and Asian members just sitting around and eating food. Just hanging out, just existing, just being. 

I walk past Bash the Fash stickers heading towards the bus stop.

On the bus home going through Stokey, through the window I gaze upon our orthodox Jewish brothers and sisters living their life. Just like our Muslim brothers and sisters in the community further up the hill. I think of the Muslim Jewish Forum in the late 1990-2000s and the strong relationship between the communities. My heart is heavy with Palestine and the psychopathic acceleration of genocide. I also worry about how zionist narratives permeate these community relations (even though many of the Jewisn folks in this community are anti-zionist, and more of which another time). I normally balk at the phrase ‘existence is resistance’ for myself, as someone who holds privilege as a British Passport holder and can afford a mortgage (in another country, obvs). But today I think our co-existence is resistance.

Wednesday 14th

I met up with my old friend Jeremy, a lifelong activist in the group Workers’ Power. We went to an exhibition in the British Library called Beyond the Bassline: 500 years of Black British Music. A salient theme of this exhibition was black music in the 1960-80s as a mode of resistance against capitalism and racism; music to resist babylon.

Black music was revolutionary in its mission, message and purpose. This is not only in the lyrics, in the healing of the bass sound, but also in creating spaces where people can come together. It felt affirming to see evidence of Rock Against Racism festivals, in posters with the slogan ‘Black and white unite’. I’ve chanted this slogan “black and white unite and fight, together we are dynamite!” (half heartfelt and half scoffing at the cheesiness) many times at anti-NF demos. I’ve often argued that Jungle music, and its roots of reggae music and rastafarianism made London a nicer and safer place, and ameliorated some of the effects of Thatcher’s proclamations that ‘there is no such things as society’. 

The exhibition is rich with display material and text and also soundscapes with little to no gallery text. I talk about how some knowledge can never be understood in books or analysis but needs to be felt. He reminds me that I got him to speak in a church for an art event on spirituality- I only have very vague memories of this. He tells me that he described being on the dancefloor as a form of spiritual communion. I couldn’t agree with him more. We engage in politics because we want this feeling of abundance and togetherness that we can find on the dancefloor. We engage in politics with the promise that one day we don’t have to. Because we all want to be free. 

I come away from the exhibition reinvigorated and with a bit more purpose. We need to remember our solidarity across identity and racial divides. We need to challenge the misappropriation of identity politics to build rigorous, joyful and inclusive visions for the future. Very nebulous and needs a PhD’s worth of unpacking, but there you are. And I am sure the next few pieces I write will at least touch on this. But right now I’m just thought streaming.

This week has reminded me how much I have to navigate white supremacy. I have always had to assert my right to existence, my claim to this land. At the same time, my intercultural and intracultural lived reality has always defied ideologies of separation. My very being is defiance against these race pogroms, because I actively embrace all that I am and all who have shaped me. Because of the machinations of fate forged by colonial violence, I’m irrevocably British and I’m English. I can never be anything else. My Englishness is forged by Islam, Cockney, Jamaican culture, Gujerati culture, with a deep sense of recognition for the Jewish culture I grew up amidst. It’s in the blends and the in-betweens, I find myself.  I am fluid and I’m coherent. I move between worlds, with integrity I shape shift, I shape worlds, we make worlds and I stay coherent. And even though I permanently live in The Netherlands with full Dutch citizenship, I’m irrepressibly English. 

Monday 19th

We left my parents house in Tottenham to go to Sussex. And as we were loading the car a young neighbour, an orthodox Jewish girl perhaps no older than 8, struck up a conversation with me. She eyed me with curiosity as she kept asking questions about where we were going, whether we had snacks for the journey, whether we liked roller coasters (she reaaaallly liked roller coasters). I told her we lived in Holland and she beamed with enthusiasm “wooooowwwwwww.” Her wow transported me back to being a 7 year girl imagining someone else’s life, and projecting grand fantasies into this imagining. As we left, she said “May God above bless your journey!” and waved her arm to accentuate the blessing with a flourish. It was so heartfelt and sincere, it lifted my heart and after a week of racial violence and offered me some healing.

I have so much more to say, but will save that for future writings.