‘We Are All Foreign Scum’

Alfie Hancox offers some lessons in solidarity against the law from Vietnam to Palestine

As mass demos against apartheid and genocidal neo-imperial war thronged the streets of central London, the governing Labour Party responded with a clampdown on protest and threats of deportation, while ceding ever more ground to right-wing racial populism. The year was 1968: the global year of protest, sparked off by the Vietnamese Tet Offensive and Prague Spring, which broke into the capitalist citadels of the Global North. Then, as now, the failure of liberal conscience to stem the tide of imperialist violence had underscored the need for militant solidarity across borders—and strategic unity against state repression at home. Faced with political and legal attacks on immigrants and international activists, anti-war protestors in Britain took up the radical slogan ‘We Are All Foreign Scum’.

In ‘68 and its aftermath, the state responded to a crisis of social consensus with exclusionary appeals to national belonging and citizenship, combined with a broad assault on civil liberties under the guise of stamping out the supposed irrationalist violence of internal subversives. Today, similar ruling class anxiety has attended the massive and diverse street demonstrations against the ongoing Gaza genocide, and British government complicity. As before, the sharp edge of lawfare has been trained on marginalised minorities and civil disobedients, while having wider ramifications for the rights of oppressed groups as well as workers. State repression has converged on Palestine Action, a condensate of the ‘enemy within’, with press and Home Office allusions to ‘foreign influence’, and the demonisation of progressive young politicians of immigrant, and particularly Muslim, backgrounds.

In examining an earlier phase of law-and-order offensive, this article suggests there are two models that can be followed on the left: on the one hand, acceptance of the ideological division between ‘moderate’ constitutional protest and illegitimate left-wing ‘extremism’, which ends up bolstering the ever-inflatable repressive rubric of national security, and on the other, an insurgent universalism, which recognises that liberation from systemic oppression and exploitation, at home and abroad, is inextricably bound together.

1968 and the ‘Enemy Within’

Decolonisation and the national liberation upsurge inspired mass protest in the heartlands of imperialism, buoying the variegated forces of ‘organised disorder’: feminists, squatters, peaceniks, and warriors for racial justice, who sought to upturn the oppressive social order of postwar Britain. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign mobilised 100,000 demonstrators in London in protest against American imperialism, but also against the Wilson Labour government’s diplomatic and logistical complicity in the genocidal invasion. The previous year’s Six-Day War had also encouraged belated attention on the British left to the Palestinian struggle, while Black resistance in southern Africa inspired direct action in Britain opposing white-minority rule and apartheid, with university occupations and physical attacks on the South African and Rhodesian embassies.

Faced with a growing crisis of social and political consensus, the state turned to the scapegoating of internal subversives: the years immediately following 1968, as Stuart Hall argued, saw the ‘birth of the law and order society’. Elite fears of domestic disorder took on heavily racialised contours, spurred on by the violently anti-immigrant demagogy of Enoch Powell—in response to which Labour had ‘steamrollered through Parliament’ the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Among the imperialist classes, global fear of communism merged with visions of the formerly colonised gaining the ‘whip hand’, abroad and at home, and ‘foreign agitators’ were scapegoated for social disorder. Social justice struggles in Britain were, indeed, enriched by émigré revolutionaries in exile from southern Africa, along with student activists from Michigan, Paris, and Berlin. Particular scorn was heaped on Tariq Ali, the Pakistan-born Marxist student leader and spokesperson for the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign.

Taking a lead from Powell, the national press lobbied for the expulsion of international ‘agents of subversion’. In Parliament, Tory MP Thomas Iremonger declared that ‘the British people are fed up with being trampled underfoot by foreign scum’: he was referring directly to members of the Socialist German Student Union (SDS), but Iremonger had also spent weeks attacking Ali. As is often the case, the Labour Party in government was swift to adopt the clothing of law and order. Labour chairman Bob Mellish telegrammed the home secretary Jim Callaghan, calling for Ali’s extradition to Pakistan. Callaghan responded by suggesting that Ali, as a Commonwealth citizen, could be ‘recommended for deportation by a court of law’ if arrested. Already the government had overseen the prosecution of British Black Power activists like Obi Egbuna, a Nigerian playwright—while the Powellite hate-lobby remained unscathed. Solidarity was not always forthcoming from the parliamentary left, which maintained a conscious distance from ‘street-fighting’ activism, and there was a notable silence at the time from Tony Benn. 

It was in this combined context of racial populism and legal persecution, as well as reformist antipathy, that student radicals took up the slogan ‘We Are All Foreign Scum’. They were inspired by the watchword of the Paris May, ‘We Are All German Jews’, in response to the Gaullist attacks on student radical Danny the Red (Daniel Cohn-Bendit). The slogan belonged to a time when the fight against systemic exploitation and oppression was held to be one struggle, and when the mental walls separating liberation in the imperial heartlands and the ‘Third World’ crumbled. One student activist from Leeds recalls that ‘Joining in the mass chant “We are all foreign scum” as we marched [in] support of the Vietcong seemed the perfect way to unite our anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics.’ Ali likewise remembers that ‘their solidarity was very moving’, and ‘provided a united front against the blatant racism of most of the tabloids and various Labour and Tory MPs.’

The slogan signalled a dramatic shift in activists’ approach to the law, away from the deferential appeals to ‘British justice’ used by earlier generations of anti-colonial agitators. Political identification with racialised outsiders did not mean ignoring the obvious gulf in experiences of oppression, but presented a challenge to the imperial borders that justified violence against those outsiders. As Jacques Rancière has said of the ’68er phrase ‘We are the wretched of the earth’: ‘We could not [literally] identify with those Algerians, but we could question our identification with the “French people” in whose name they had been murdered’. Today, the mantra ‘In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians’, expresses a similar refusal to identify with the murderous actions of imperialist states taken in the name of Western security and civilisation.

The Vietnam War, and the aggressive state response to civil disobedience, had laid a radical seedbed, producing for a generation of activists ‘a whole series of knock-on effects in their political consciousness which took them right to the heart of their own society’. ‘We Are All Foreign Scum’ posed a powerful emotional riposte to Powellite hate-mongering, and to exclusionary notions of citizenship. However, the state sought to delegitimise mass dissent by counterposing ‘agitational cliques bent on violence’ to the ‘silent majority’ in Britain, that was purportedly indifferent to the institutionalised violence of the state. Powell’s 1970 speech against the ‘enemy within’ signalled a declaration of war against all those held to be in conflict with the ‘national interest’.

If they come in the morning…

The state reaction to ’68 was wide reaching, with sweeping attacks on ‘violent’ dissent extrapolating from the global spectre of urban guerrillas and plane hijackings. The Evening Standard condemned ‘the violent activists of a revolution comprising workers, students, trade unionists, homosexuals, unemployed and women striving for liberation.’ If there is anything notable about protest movements within the Britain mainland, it is their extreme relative pacifism—even the misguided and isolated bombing campaign of the Angry Brigade restricted its targets to property, not people. But this has never put a stop to repression: as Ali has noted, the British ruling class ‘have always believed in the theory of “nipping all threats in the bud”’. State attacks on ‘extremism’ soon turned to industry, where the radical spirit of solidarity created by Vietnam ‘began to bring back to the workers’ movement its own insurgent traditions of militancy’.

Assessing the authoritarian lurch under the Conservative Heath government (1970–74), left-wing lawyer Stephen Sedley warned in a BBC programme that the dragging through the courts of ‘demonstrators, Black Power activists, squatters [and] students’ signalled a wider ‘trend towards politically motivated prosecutions’. Particularly notable was the widespread use of trespass laws—criminalising anti-apartheid activists who disrupted the Springboks tour—and conspiracy charges—which were soon used against striking dockworkers. A watershed came in the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, passed in response to the IRA, which dramatically enlarged the tools of mainland surveillance.

Responses to repression by those on the parliamentary left and ‘moderate’ labour officials who distanced themselves from boisterous street protest and civil disobedience proved counterproductive, since the elite-construed category of ‘extremists’ at variance with ruling class interests was ever widening. The rising political role of the police, ballooning apparatus of infiltration, new repertoires of repression, and collaboration with private security companies all impacted on the unions, weakening workers’ capacity to resist attacks on their rights and conditions. This entwining of repression highlights the relevance of the old union motto—often reneged upon in practice—that ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’, or James Baldwin’s words to Angela Davis, popularised in a contemporary pamphlet: ‘If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night’.

The necessity of strategic unity against the law was farsightedly argued by another radical lawyer, Steve Cohen, one of the future founders of No One Is Illegal. Cohen noted that the ruling class’s ability ‘to systematically pick off’ black and Irish militants ‘on the fringes of the labour movement’ with little resistance had given them the confidence ‘to hit the centre of that movement in the shape of, for instance, the Shrewsbury pickets’. Trade unions were slow to make the connection, due in no small measure to the prevalence of racism within their ranks, but eventually combined ‘Kill the Bill’ action was taken against the twinned punitive measures of the 1971 Industrial Relations and Immigration Acts. Police counterinsurgency methods honed within colonial contexts and against Britain’s racialised communities would, in the following decade, be used to defeat the Miners’ Strike.

A highpoint of solidarity came in the stunning win for black self-defence in the Bradford 12 trial: achieved by a broad campaign in the teeth of Thatcherite repression, at a time when the trade unions, dragged out of their complacency by black members, also gave support for successful anti-deportation campaigns. These victories were a vindication of the 1968er dictum that ‘Struggle decides, not the law’.

We are all Palestinian

The period of liberation struggle and state reaction inaugurated in 1968 contains lessons today for our response to Starmer’s law-and-order crusade. Palestine Action, for the British state, is a composite of social disorder: it presents an immediate challenge to imperialism, with support from sections of the trade unions, and is the direct action wing of a truly mass movement that signals the seepage (once again) of the anti-colonial front into fortress Europe—where the words ‘Free Palestine’ are permanently embedded in the urban landscape. Its proscription is an attempt to drive a wedge through the solidarity movement, and bolster an authoritarian clampdown with combined attacks on climate activists, feminists, BLM protestors, trans people, and workers that has gained steam since 2020. 

The current Crime and Policing Bill—building on the preceding Public Order and PCSC Acts—has, as Shanice McBean highlights, been met with a ‘deafening silence from NGOs, trade unions, left politicians, and left media’. It will be a critical mistake of the unions, then as now, to fail to make the connection between state attacks on left-wing ‘extremists’ and on the rights of workers and the socially marginalised.

While the government’s proscription of Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist group’ has been met with condemnation by a wide spectrum of ‘moderate’ opinion, this opposition has been tempered by complacent assumptions about the prior neutrality of the law. The Guardian’s editorial criticising the move shows it has not entirely lost its liberal reflex, but it coupled its protest with reassurance that ‘the law already has the tools to deal with Palestine Action’. On the left, John McDonnell has criticised the ‘inappropriate’ application of anti-terrorism laws: obscuring that these laws, from conception, are rooted in colonial counterinsurgency. Our approach should not be to give up the fight for hard won civil liberties, but certainly we should reject the authority of the state as adjudicator of legitimate dissent. David Renton’s Against the Law offers a timely reminder that ‘laws have just as often emerged to tame insurgent forces as they have done to satisfy their demands’. What we need are ‘instruments of popular power’ that refuse ‘submission to the limits of the law’.

This is also a moment of political opportunity, given the enormous public opposition to the genocide and, more specifically, support for Palestinian resistance, despite the sustained state and national media campaign of demonisation and revival of old colonial propaganda tropes. It is notable that suspended Labour MP and now prospective co-founder of a new left party, Zarah Sultana, in openly identifying with Palestine Action in the House of Commons, has headed a break with the deferential attitude that traditionally distinguishes the parliamentarist left during periods when Labour is the party of government. The return of Green left populism, the grassroots fightback in the unions against the pro-apartheid policies of Unite’s Sharon Graham, and the impending new party of left unity all provide openings to forge a broad alliance against imperialism abroad, and the crackdown on civil liberties and gutting of welfare at home. 

The coming period will be one of protracted struggle—requiring a patience lacking in the 1968 generation who had underestimated both the adaptability of capitalism in crisis times, and the real strength of right-wing authoritarian populism. It will also necessitate a diversity of tactics, overcoming the often-reciprocal sectarianism between advocates of direct action and conventional mass protest methods that hampered the ’68-era left. There will, though, be an important line struggle between reformists who tacitly accept the identification of state with ‘national interest’, and proponents of an insurgent universalism which recognises that liberation at home and abroad is bounded by the same system of capitalism and imperialism. Every dent in the infrastructure of war is a breach in the impersonal genocidal edifice—and in the unassailability of the state that stands between us and justice, equality and peace.