Arzu addresses Andy Burnham about the poem V, which he claims has affected him deeply, and asks why then he has failed to discuss the disunited state of the nation, or call out the epidemic of racism.
Apparently V by Tony Harrison (1985) had a profound effect on you. Your degree in English Literature, it seems, will make you a more empathetic leader. Your studies having opened vistas into the human psyche. The lawyers and PPE managers before you could not see. Apparently.
It turns out, Andy, that we are the same age and went to the same university. Studied the same subject. At the same time. We didn’t know each other. I doubt our paths crossed even, except perhaps we may have sat in the same lecture hall. Sometimes. That is if either of us went to any lectures. I neither confirm nor deny this.
So let me go back to our A-Levels and the broadcast of Tony Harrison’s V for the first time (1987). I read it again just now. I cried. The graveyard in Leeds seemed live. It is Britain of 1985 and 2026. It is then and now. Where skin(head)s have vandalised the gravestones with expletives, racist slurs and ‘United’ in ‘honour’ of their, then, much failing team. Except of course, united is exactly what Britain isn’t. And that is why, today, tears fell.
As a teenager, V wasn’t enough for me. Strange.
Such surrounds as graffitied graves in Holbeck were also what (white) (working class) North London looked like. Those vistas were real then. Memories now.
The visual assault has receded, as fast as I (and you and Harrison, let’s you and I not pretend) raced away from our (working class) ‘roots’. They were replaced. Not with unity, but with the news that in third place, behind you (whose party only wants to charge asylum seekers £10,000) and the Reform candidate (whose party only wants to scrap indefinite leave to remain alongside stopping the boats, (il)legal immigration), the Restore candidate, whose party wants to reverse mass migration and hold asylum seekers in tented camps on an island. Until they can be deported. Third place. 7% of the vote.
By the way, the graffiti hasn’t disappeared. It now adorns the walls of pro-Palestine organisations every time your party members decide a public dressing down of standing against genocide is a good call.
The prospects (still) really aren’t too grand.
V didn’t resound then because, without realising it. I still had. Hope. I believed one day, the force of words would make everyone see what racism – what pure hate – was doing to the country. That (dis)united would be the problem solved. And with that sight, a better society would unfold.
Instead I see now that racism is the structure that defines our institutions and racialises (and victimises) this disunited nation. Not even Harrison’s words could save us from what has come. And they were of the strongest. I see that. Now.
V was disgusted at the hopelessness, and the hopeless venting their hate in words to the dead, about the living. C words, F words, P words, N words. In the ‘shocked’ response of MPs when the poem was set to be broadcast in 1987, it is the first two that provoked the call for the recording to be banned from the airwaves. Yes banned. Do you remember that? It is important to this story. Especially if, as it seems, you will be in charge of it, for at least, according to your speech on Monday, a decade.
The racism V decried was contextualised as the grievance of whiteness alienated.
I wanted it to tell my story, not that of (he I thought was) the perpetrator of my pain. With spray can obliterating me from class solidarity and country, telling his story albeit with disdain, just did the same.
And while we’re at it. Why should Mr. Patel not having a chat with the poet’s / Harrison’s / narrator’s (select at will or insert other author (what is one anyway?)) dad be more important than the violence – verbal, non-verbal, violent, ‘non-violent’ but visceral at every turn – that ‘Mr. Patel’, the ‘Kashmir Muslim Club’, the Black the Hindu/Sikh and me, live and feel at every turn of head away from us assuming we can’t or worse, that we won’t, or worse still, that we should and must, speak to them?
I get it now. That turn of head is what the state does. To all of us racialised white / black / poor and God help us Muslim. The (dis)united is both racism reproduced and malign and cynical scapegoating. And worse, an ideology in itself of what this nation is, drip fed to those it also deems inferior, but useful in perpetuating this nightmare nonetheless.
I am at an age where hope in this system is all but gone. Can it be saved? I feel the dread, the disgust and despair of a Britain broken beyond anything interred in Beeston, memorialised in obscenities by those provoked to the obscene. A white working class that was as victimised by the racist state – hiding its deficiencies in its colonial mantras inverted. Before our ‘inferiority’ made white working classness, something other than the lowest. Now class and / dressed as culture wars, claims we have more, we have moved, we have mobilised. Upwards. The cause of their decline.
You and your predecessors, you could have stopped this with a word (or near enough). Because I see it now. It was never the poet’s father, or even the skinheads generating this hate. It was always the institutions – the law, the media, and the political class into which you have mobilised upwards – against whom the grievance should be pitted – who ensured we stayed apart.
I listened to you on Monday before last, setting out your ten-year plan. I was hoping – V reread, aforementioned tears shed – to hear Harrison in there. Noticeable only by absence. Absent small v. Absent (dis)united. Maybe your answer is that you spoke to all, but as you addressed growth for every postcode and not the postcode pogroms against (those perceived to be) Muslims the week before, that would be a very poor show.
Harrison asks why should it be that the minoritized be the target of the jobless and hopeless aerosolling grievance across the memories of the dead. He asks a(n imagined) skin why, to give him a space to be heard. He gets nothing but redirected contempt, himself now the foe. United this nation wasn’t. United it still isn’t. Neglecting to mention that, is neglect. Or worse.
I haven’t forgotten the ban. I will keep repeating it. You know the one called for by MPs, of which class you now belong. The ban? Yes, in 1987, you will have remembered that surely? When Channel 4 recorded it. Check Hansard, or the BBC. Why hasn’t there been a deradicalization program for those demanding V be taken, removed from the schedule?
Will you set about one now?
I ask, because you inherit one of the most oppressive regimes when it comes to freedom of expression – political, religious, you name it. You name it terrorism actually. Or the soon to be national security threat. Proscribe and demonise. Demonise and proscribe.
I am not going to lie, this is pretty personal. The organisation I helped found gets a lot of this. Our paths in life, yours and mine Andy, are not that dissimilar. I think you can see exactly what I mean. The ban them brigade still line the benches, but unlike the days of V, they can actually do so now. That’s the party legacy you inherit. Provide materiel to the Israelis, get applauded. “Cut off water to Gaza”, get elected. Protest that and get 14 years.
It’s not a small thing, this disunited stuff. Ignoring it will not make it go away. But you already know that, you have already seen that in Stockport, pretty much face to face. Disunited is not the fault of the masses, or the minoritized they set ablaze. You saw it then when you read V, and you see it now, but somehow don’t want to say its name.
Until you can say you see it – the racism – that is the British state, we will be getting nowhere (still). And it’s going to have to be me v you, Andy Burnham. Small v.
Harrison in exasperation asks his imagined skin, if he’s so proud of what he’s done to sign his name. It’s his, and that’s the thing Andy. We can’t escape what we know and what we’ve seen. And we have seen the same things. Andy. If it’s any consolation, I worry too, that in your signature to this (not so) great vision of Britain, I will find mine written there too.
The failure of words and action, shared in blame. I guess maybe we are, in that at least, united.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. Follow her on X and Instagram @arzumerali. Find her writing on arzumerali.com.
Images:
European Committee of the Regions CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Rwendland CC 4.0
Scottish Government CC 2.0
