It’s a part of town I know well, Pollokshields. My friends Dave and Shona used to live on Albert Drive, which runs across Kenmure Street on Glasgow’s southside.
It’s an area that has been the hub of the local Indian community for as long as I can remember. I still have pals who live nearby, in Battlefield and Shawlands.
And at first, when I glanced at the photographs of hundreds of people surrounding a vehicle on Kenmure Street, I thought it was an ambulance. Then I looked closer and saw the words stamped along its side: “IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT.”
Not an ambulance then. Because ambulances tend to come to help people. This Home Office van was there on entirely different business – a raid to deport two Indian men, Lakhvir Singh and Sumit Sehdevi, on suspicion of immigration offences.
Well, as has been much pointed out in the last 48 hours, they picked the wrong city to mess with.
And that someone at the Home Office chose to mess with Glasgow’s Muslim community during Eid and in Nicola Sturgeon’s constituency on the very day new members of the Scottish Parliament were being sworn in raises some questions of its own…
Within hours, the Home Office van was surrounded by hundreds – then thousands – of protesters.
They held placards saying “NO ONE IS ILLEGAL” and “IMMIGRANTS WELCOME HERE” and “IF THIS IS TEAM UK, WE REJECT IT”.
They chanted that the people being arrested were their friends and neighbours. A man lay under the immigration van for eight hours, preventing it from moving. Blacks, whites and Asians came together in an area which, only recently, the BNP had been preposterously trying to claim had become a “no-go area” for non-Muslim people.
The right wing on social media wasted no time in trying to compare the protesters surrounding the van with the pack of lunatics Trump unleashed on the US Capitol in January.
The right, as is its way, had mistaken a community for a mob. By 5pm that evening, this community had won its battle and the two men were released.
And in our age of cruelty and bigotry – where the dilemma the Labour Party is increasingly struggling with seems to be “how do we appeal to Boris Johnson’s more racist supporters?” – it did this old, socialist heart good to see all this. To see a community standing up for its own people, and that its definition of “our own people” included immigrants and asylum seekers.
As anti-immigrant sentiment has risen in this country in the last six years, in the wake of Brexit, I’ve often found myself asking: just how racist is the UK? I sometimes try to imagine it in terms of a train track stretching from Glasgow to Castle Point in the south-east of England, with Glasgow being the least racist in this analogy and Castle Point (which voted Leave by a staggering 73 per cent) being the most.
The country as a whole is probably somewhere around Carlisle now. And we know what lies at the end of those train tracks: things like “dawn raids”.
The very phrase suggests darker times and places. And dare I risk invoking Godwin’s Law: the internet adage that says that the longer a discussion goes on, the greater the likelihood that someone will make a comparison to the Nazis? Yes, I think I do dare.
Because when the dawn raids on undesirables started happening in Germany in the 30s, the
membership of the Nazi party was only a couple of million, a tiny fraction of the population. But most of the population just stood there and watched as the vans pulled up outside the houses of their friends and neighbours.
Glasgow sent a powerful signal that it will not be going down that road.
As any southsider will tell you – there are no “Cs” in Pollokshields.
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