ABSTRACT
A friend of mine once wanted to be a parliamentary candidate in a constituency in the East End of London where from the 1980s until the rude shock of the second Iraq war about 60 per cent of Labour voters in national elections regularly came from the local Bangladeshi community. The community originates mostly from the region of Sylhet and has been present in the area of East London near to the docks for many decades. It can be most easily understood as largely the product of the last wave of postwar boom British Fordist migrant labour in the late 1960s that gave rise to the taxonomic shorthand BME to stand for the black and minority ethnic demographic that is most commonly used to describe the more visibly multicultural nature of twentieth-century Britain. 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.
