ABSTRACT
A friend of mine wants to be a parliamentary candidate in a constituency in the East End of London where about 60 per cent of the Labour vote in the last General Election came from the Bangladeshi community. The community originates from the region of Sylhet and has been present in the area of East London near to the docks for many decades but is largely the product of the last wave of post-war boom British Fordist migrant labour in the late 1960s. Or perhaps not. Given that this particular fraction of New Commonwealth settlement was deployed principally in the rag trade and in the restaurant and catering business—case studies in the flexible labour process—Sylheti settlement in the East End is perhaps better understood as the first British case of post-Fordist labour migration. Either way, the vagaries of both trades have contributed to an instability in the racialised labour market which paradoxically parallels the East End’s history of casualised labour, and almost normalises the ‘exceptional’ case of Bengali settlement.
