Cochrane’s murder is one of the first recorded racially
motivated murders in the UK. Olden is an excellent journalist and, among other
things worked at the BBC. While there, he worked on the BBC programme Who
Killed My Brother? Broadcast in 2006, Which examined the Cochrane
Murder. Much of the book is influenced by that programme.
While working at the BBC, he gained access to material that
a layperson could only dream of. Olden supplemented his research with a
significant number of interviews. Many of the people interviewed were speaking
publically for the first time. They give a real sense of what it was like to
live in Notting Hill in 1959.
As part of his research for the book, Olden spent
significant time at the National Archive in Kew, London. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
he found out that the Labour government and police were more interested in
suppressing political opposition to the fascists and containing the riots in
London and Nottingham than solving a murder.
Olden points out that there are remarkable similarities
between the way that Kelso’s death was investigated and the investigation into the
murder of Stephen Lawrence. On April 22, 1993, 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence and
Duwayne Brooks were attacked by five racist white youths in Eltham, southeast
London. Stephen was stabbed to death. It was only in 2012 that two men were convicted
of Lawrence’s murder after a long and bitter campaign by his parents. It was only
a small measure of justice. Cochrane never did get justice. His murder remains
unsolved to this day.
During his time at the National Archives in London, it would
be fair to say that Olden would have been astonished to find that the National
Archives authorities would thwart his attempts to establish the truth behind
the Cochrane murder by refusing to release papers about the murder until 2044/54
on spurious grounds it ‘could put at risk certain law-enforcement matters,
including preventing or detecting crime, arresting or prosecuting offenders and
the proper administration of justice’. It was all the more galling because the
man named by Olden as the probable murderer was dead, but still, a state-led cover-up
was in place.
Only after a bitter and long campaign by members of
Cochrane’s surviving family and their lawyers did the Metropolitan police permit
the National Archives to release the files that were originally to be opened in
2054. Even a cursory look at the new files showed that this was a premeditated
murder by outright fascists. It would be naïve to think that after all this
time, the police will bring the family justice that can only be achieved by the
mobilisation of the one force that can achieve justice, and that is the working
class black and white.
While Olden’s book cannot be faulted as a piece of
journalism, Olden has no explanation as to what social, economic and political conditions
gave rise to the growth of Fascism in London and Nottingham at the time and also
how the fascists could be opposed and defeated. The only class that could have
opposed the racists and fascists was the working class. However, Olden believes
that the white working class was either passive or racist.
But as Cliff Slaughter explains so well in his article Race
Riots: the Socialist Answer,[1]“So
long as we look only at the surface of social life, so long as we try to deal
with each question separately as it arises, we shall continue to find ourselves
bewildered by events like the race riots. But they are no nine days’ wonder. Every
worker in the country must clearly understand this. Only if we can trace the
social roots of racial conflict shall we be able to weed them out and, with
them, those who profit from it. The starting point for the working class must
be unity and solidarity against the employers and their political
representatives—in the first place, the Tory Party. All the problems the
working class now faces—growing unemployment, the housing shortage, rent
increases, the rising cost of living, attacks on wages and working conditions,
and, above all, the threat of an H-bomb war—can be solved only by the unity and
determined action of the working class. It is no accident that the steady
growth of unemployment over the last year has been accompanied by an
insidiously growing campaign around the slogan ‘Keep Britain-White’.
Slaughter goes on to explain the nature of fascism: “Fascism
is a movement financed by big business which seeks support from the ‘middle
classes’ and the most backward workers. Fascism’s real aim is to provide a mass
basis for the smashing of workers’ organisations by a State machine which
permits no democratic rights and rules with the whip and the torture chamber. To
succeed, fascism must detach from the working class discontented elements who
can be persuaded that something other than big business is their real enemy.
This is why the fascists have recently returned to one of their favourite
themes—racialism. Fascists were prominent in the Notting Hill riots and will
cash in wherever they can on anti-coloured feelings. They will try to create a
mob ready to use violence and to attack any scapegoat rather than the workers’
real enemy.”
Murder in Notting Hill is a good book. As a piece of investigative
journalism, it is second to none. On the question of fascism, workers and youth
need to look elsewhere to understand its rise and how to defeat it. As the
great Marxist revolutionary and writer Leon Trotsky wrote, “Fascism comes only
when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the
fate of society.”[2]
