Tottenham could be the bleak face of London's future. I don't mean the Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur. Nor Tottenham Court Road with which every subcontinental must be familiar. It was where Madan Lal Dhingra practised shooting for the deadly mission he had set himself, and where generations of Indian students lived in grubby digs as lodgings were called. From its 196 Tottenham Court Road showroom, Heal's furnished the stately Faridkot House in what is now Delhi's Copernicus Marg, and no doubt other princely mansions as well.
The Tottenham I am speaking of is where a 17-year-old girl was killed on Easter Monday, earning London the distinction of being an even more murderous city than New York. If statistics define London as the world's crime capital, it is because of such areas infested with gangs, guns, heroin, dysfunctional families, jobless youths, unmarried teenage mothers, and protection rackets. There are other such pockets in East and South London but Tottenham is one of the worst. It is also Europe's most ethnically-diverse area whose residents speak up to 300 languages. It has the highest unemployment rate in London and the eighth highest in the United Kingdom.
Yet, I was unaware of Tottenham's existence a bare eight miles north of Charing Cross until 2011 when the district exploded in riots after the police shot and killed a 29-year-old man of mixed descent with gangland connections, sparking protests by hundreds of local residents. The horrendous memory of looted shops, ransacked offices and even a post office burned down lingers as we learnt last year when we were invited to lunch with the judges at the nearby Wood Green county court. Our hosts advised my wife not to wear any jewellery on the short walk from the Underground station to the courthouse.
Actually, the legacy of violence goes back much farther to the drama in 1909 that history books call the Tottenham Outrage. It concerned two armed robbers of Russian extraction who held up a factory wages clerk, hijacked a tram and tried to escape, hotly pursued by the police in another tram, until they shot themselves rather than be captured. Before that they had shot dead a 10-year-old boy and a police officer. The murder of another police officer in 1985 (possibly instigated by the previous week's race riots in Brixton) further underlined the tension between local black youths and the largely white police.
Race - Disraeli's ultimate reality - remains the smouldering fuse trail. London has suffered skinheads and 'Paki'-bashing; it might yet see Bangladeshis on the rampage if Theresa May's government goes back on its implicit commitment to give South Asians preference in entry over European Union citizens. Already accused of embroidering and exaggerating the evidence in the Skripal poisoning case in order to blame the Russians, Boris Johnson, May's ebullient foreign secretary, is suspected of bad faith in this too. According to leaders of Britain's £4.3 billion curry industry, he and his boss lured them to vote Leave with the assurance that Brexit would make it simpler to import chefs from South Asia. They reckoned without what the French have long called " La perfide Albion". Blood is thicker than water. Colour unites. If yesterday's Saxe-Coburg-Gotha can pass off as today's Windsor, Poles, Serbs and other Europeans flooding Britain under the EU's flag of convenience can look forward to soon being accepted as being as English as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
It's in times of distress that identity politics surges up to overwhelm other factors. May's reforms have reduced the police force and those that remain avoid too many stop-and-search operations for fear of alienating people. Instead of a buoyant economy, assured jobs and soaring exports, Britain faces uncertainty over the fate of GKN, its third-largest engineering company, employing 59,000 staff. Once-formidable names like Metropolitan-Vickers, Ferranti, Parsons, English Electric and British Thomson-Houston have gone. Luckily, morality has no meaning in a nation of shopkeepers. Otherwise, Britain would have faced even greater hardship by losing the distinction of being the world's second-biggest arms exporter since the main buyers are West Asia's most repressive monarchies.
Tottenham aggravates and highlights features that are common to other urban centres. There were vagrants huddled in grimy bedding and blankets in the thin cold rain all round Windsor Castle this week, waiting to be rounded up and evicted (where?) so as not to offend the sensibilities of guests at Prince Harry's wedding on May 19. Schoolteachers complain of having to wash children's clothes and lend their parents money because of increased poverty at certain levels. A poll claimed that children aged between four and seven suffer from mental problems rooted in anxiety and panic attacks. While about five million people draw special benefits (the old dole), about the same number now also pay the highest income tax.
Tottenham's ethnic mix includes one of the oldest and largest Afro-Caribbean groups - Jamaicans who were among the earliest arrivals in the 1950s. They were followed by Ghanaians and Nigerians, South Asians, and, over the years, Vietnamese, Filipinos and Zimbabweans. The ethnic composition according to the 2011 census was 22.3 per cent white British, 27.7 per cent other white (read EU), 10.7 per cent Asian, 26.7 per cent black and 12.6 per cent other (read coloured/ mixed).
Ideally, this should be a recipe for success. A veteran British diplomat with an Asian wife of mixed Chinese-Malay descent told me once that his grown-up children didn't think of themselves as English, Chinese or Malay. He boasted they took pride in the new inclusive definition of Londoner which covered all races, colours, religions and languages. But as May deals the final fatal blows to Clement Attlee's welfare state, such blissful integration succumbs to the pulls and pressures of class and race. Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets in East London, for instance, have become notorious for electoral bribery, forgery and ballot tampering. When Lutfur Rahman, the disgraced former mayor, was removed from office in 2015 and banned from contesting elections for five years on account of "corrupt and illegal" practices, he founded a new party called Aspire. Its representative, naturally another Bangladeshi, is now contesting the mayoralty. Such benami politics thrive on South Asian style vote banks.
Another whiff of South Asia was available last year when Tareq Haddad reported in the International Business Times under the heading "Millionaire peer claimed over £40,000 in expenses from House of Lords simply for showing up" that "in spite of attending the house 136 times between 2015 and 2016, earning £40,080 in the process, Paul [Lord Paul of Marylebone with an estimated family fortune of £740 million] made three verbal contributions to debates and only voted on two pieces of legislation" yet claimed the daily allowance of £300 for attending. A former deputy Speaker of the House of Lords, Swraj Paul, was suspended for four months in 2010 after it emerged he misclaimed £38,000 of expenses. Haddad added, "Responding to the Sunday Times' request for comment regarding his most recent expenses claims, Paul said his expenses were 'more than representative' of the work he had done in parliament. There was no evidence of wrongdoing or illegality."
Perhaps some migrants - Europeans especially - do transform themselves into hardworking, peaceable Londoners. But like South Asians, many West Indians and Africans also appear to take their original values and ethics with them. No wonder the organizers of the current Commonwealth Games in Australia's Gold Coast confused England with The Gambia, listing the former as an African country with a population of two million and its capital at Banjul. An insulted Gambia might again stalk out of the Commonwealth which it only recently rejoined after a five-year absence. But Theresa May can only welcome all such diversions. Even the Skripal tragedy sent her flagging personal rating soaring.
