ID Code: TA09

3/2

Year:

2005

Helen Goodway writes a marvellous account of Bedi as a libertarian Marxian who had the qualities of innocence, honesty and lack of vindictive judgement. If as Marx suggests, ‘Man makes his own history; but only in the circumstances that surround him’, what is most remarkable is that he managed to maintain these values when most of us on the left succumbed to some kind of sectarianism or backsliding that went against the values we set out to promote.

It was the best of times, 1967-79
We started well enough. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote; ‘Bliss was it to be alive and to be young was very heaven’ to describe how he felt at the start of the French Revolution (1789). My generation were hippies in the middle of worldwide revolution. In 1968 students brought down De Gaulle in France, Jan Palak set fire to himself in defiance of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Indian Railway Workers lead the largest strike in history, the Vietnam War rumbled on but the U.S.A. was not the unbeatable ‘Great Satan’. Apart from the Vietnamese people, the U.S. government faced a real anti-war movement including draft dodgers and the Weathermen at home and demonstrations like Grosvenor Square (March 17, 1969) abroad. Woodstock and campus sit-ins convinced us peaceful revolution was inevitable. Our revolution wouldn’t just be about wealth and power but also about attitudes. No more war! Ban the Bomb! Down with Racism! Sexism! Homophobia! We want the World, and we want it now! were our slogans All we had to do was legalise cannabis and form communes to organise a better society in the future. This was not just the dream of a few but common to a whole swathe of young people when I became a student at Bradford Tech in 1967, where I met Mo and Faiz. I can’t remember specifically meeting people, but over the years there was just a crowd of us who knew each other. Our friendships were social but became more political over the years. Even in 1968 racists were organising the Bradford Campaign to Stop Immigration and from 1974 until about 1982 the National Front was busy in Bradford. With this fascist organisation came more attacks, particularly on blacks, but also on gays, Trades Unionists and anybody else the fascists didn’t like, including me. In fighting back for what we considered justice we faced what we regarded as political arrests by the police. We organised campaigns to raise money and awareness for the defendants and we organised different ways to fight back.

We put our ideas of self-organisation into practice. Faizal Mehmood, Jani Rashid and Anne Thomson formed the print co-operative, Ujale, which in turn published a magazine of the same name and in which Bedi and Farooqi were heavily involved. Their premises were at the bottom of Hallfield Road. Next-door was the headquarters of the print union SOGAT (later the GPMU). At the top of Hallfield Road, virtually on Lumb Lane, were the premises of the Asian Youth Movement, (formed in 1976). Round the corner, on Westgate, was Textile Hall, home to Bradford Trades’ Union Council and Checkpoint, a base for the African Caribbean Community. Tenants’ workers and unemployed groups sprang up, including Bradford Black, the 1 in 12, Gay, Women’s and Lesbian groups. There was also strong independent organisation amongst the working-class, especially in the engineering industry. Bradford was strong in solidarity action with the miners, the Grunswick Workers and in defence of its own jobs at local factories, such as International Harvesters, Bairds, Metal Box, and Aire Valley Yarns. These informal networks over-lapped and lent support and solidarity to each other. In the late 1970s and early 80s, visiting Westgate and Hallfield Road might mean a meeting to organise the latest defence campaign, checking whether the leaflets were ready or going to Friday disco to Free Nelson Mandela. Often, at either Ujale or the AYM the TV would be on and a group of anywhere from 3 to 20 people would be having a chat. It is from these informal chats there, or sometimes in the local pubs, I best remember Bedi. Of course not every conversation was world shattering and sometimes there were fierce personal agendas. The subject was as likely to be the test match or local politics as the nature of human existence, and yet, throughout these discussions, particularly when Bedi was there, there was an attempt to rationalise and humanise the world and our place with-in it. We needed these discussions because circumstances were changing and thereby changing us.