Handsworth residents slam Robert Jenrick’s racist lies about their community

He wants to feed a racist myth that says migrants are incompatible with “white society”

People in the Handsworth area of Birmingham have reacted with fury to Tory Robert Jenrick’s attack on their community as being “like a ghetto”.

Jenrick said when he went there recently, he didn’t see “another white face.” The would-be party leader doubled down on his earlier attacks on Tuesday, saying the area showed a wider problem of “parallel communities.”

Jenrick had gone even further at an internal party event in March. There, he described the suburb as “as close as I’ve come to a slum in this country.

“But the other thing I noticed there was that it was one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to. In fact, in the hour and a half I was filming news there I didn’t see another white face.”

Jenrick’s description has enraged local people. “I was really disgusted by what he said,” Raghib told Socialist Worker. “I think he wants to create more hysteria about racism.”

A former shop steward at Rover Solihull car plant, Raghib has lived in Handsworth for more than three decades. He knows the area is poor and he knows why.

“It’s racism. Services here are non-existent,” he says. “That’s always the case in areas where black people are the majority—and by black, I mean Asian, African and African Caribbean.

“It’s a crucial factor in how black areas are treated. And that’s what I have been struggling against all my life in this country. Our areas are totally neglected. When you try to get any service here, you can’t get an answer.”

Jenrick had come to make a video that depicted Handsworth as a litter-strewn “ghetto.” But Raghib says instead, it is an area in which, despite its problems, people live together in relative harmony.

“I am of Pakistani origin, and I know all my neighbours,” he says. “I’ve got a West Indian woman living two doors away. I’ve got a white man living next door. There is a Pakistani next door to him. And there is a white woman a few doors down.

“I talk to them all. And that is actually the richness of the area.”

Raghib says racist attitudes among some white people led them to leave Handsworth as its ethnic composition changed in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

“We did not push the white people out of the area,” he says. “They decided to move out. It was their decision not to send their children to the local schools where there were quite a number of Asian and Afro-Caribbean children.”

Janine is a socialist and campaigner who has lived in Handsworth for over two decades and feels similarly to Raghib.

“It’s a very mixed community, and that’s the main reason I like living here,” she said.

“You’ve got the long-standing African Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani and Vietnamese communities. And you’ve got people from Africa, from Eastern Europe, you know, from all over the world really. That’s what makes it good.

“I’ve lived here very happily alongside my neighbours, and I’ve not experienced any problems.”

Janine is scathing about Jenrick’s attack. “He’s really saying, places like Handsworth are horrible places to live because black and brown people live there,” she says.

“And he’s implying that these are ‘no-go areas for white people.’ Jenrick thinks that the poverty of this and similar neighbourhoods is somehow also the fault of black and brown people.”

Handsworth is, by any measure, poor. It ranks as one of the most deprived areas in England—and it’s getting worse.

Almost half of all children there live below or around the poverty line.

“There is far more street homelessness than there used to be,” says Janine . “We’ve had central government cut billions of pounds from the city council’s budget over the past decade.

“We are now really seeing the accumulative effect of austerity. On Sundays, one of the local Sikh Gurdwaras runs a soup kitchen. And there’s always a massive queue of people trying to get food. That’s a symbol of the poverty here, but it’s also a symbol of the community.”

Jenrick is using Handsworth to paint a picture of self-segregating ethnic minorities that wallow in their separateness. He wants to feed a racist myth that says migrants are incompatible with “white society.”

But that’s a million miles from the truth of multicultural Handsworth.

For real-world segregation, Jenrick could look a lot closer to home. In Newark, Nottinghamshire, the 2021 census reports whole wards where just one ethnic group dominates. Sturton is 98 percent white. Muskham is 96 percent white. Collingham is 96 percent white.

Of course, the Tory leader in waiting doesn’t think exclusively white neighbourhoods exhibit “a failure to integrate.” Especially not when they are all in his constituency.

‘The racist process of “othering” people is constant’

“Birmingham is incredibly mixed. It’s a global-majority city,” says Jagwant Johal, from the Birmingham Race Impact Group. “The 2021 census showed that 51.4 percent of people who live here are from an ethnic minority origin, and it’s said that almost 200 languages are spoken.”

But Jagwant stresses that the multiracial city is a result of decades of struggle, including riots against racism in 1981 and 1985. Jagwant explained that his father, Avtar, was in the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA). He invited the anti‑racist Malcolm X to come to nearby Smethwick from the United States in 1965.

He said, “Dad was a labourer in the foundries and spent his time getting people into unions and fighting for workers’ rights. Housing was a big issue in Birmingham. In the late 1960s, the city council tried to impose a scheme that discriminated against ethnic minorities. It also had a spatial policy that meant each family of colour had to be separated by at least ten places housing white people.”

Jagwant says the IWA and others had to fight to win even basic housing for black and brown people.

“But the IWA always said this isn’t a singular fight—it was a fight of race and class. And that you had to win working class people to be on your side,” he says. “During the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, the IWA joined the picket lines. And I remember as a teenager, there’d often be five or six miners—flying pickets—in sleeping bags in our lounge.”

Jagwant is determined to resist Jenrick’s racism and to keep the spirit of solidarity alive today.

“The process of ‘othering’ people is constant,” he says. “We have to show continually that the working class’s problems don’t result from the presence of migrants and ethnic minorities here.”