Death of Blair Peach

Clement Blair Peach (25 March 1946 – 24 April 1979) was a New Zealand teacher who was killed during an anti-racism demonstration in Southall, London, England.

Clement Blair Peach was born in Napier, New Zealand, on 25 March 1946, to Clement and Janet Peach.

He was one of three brothers, the others being Roy and Philip; the former was a solicitor and led the family's legal campaign after Blair's death.

Blair was schooled at Colenso College, then studied education and psychology at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he co-edited the Argot literary magazine with his flatmate Dennis List and David Rutherford.

During his studies Peach visited Britain and liked the country.

After graduating he was employed in several temporary jobs, but was turned down for compulsory military training for having an "unsuitable character".

As a result of the population transfers after the 1947 partition of India over ten million people were impoverished.

From the late 1950s a significant number of them relocated.

Many Sikhs and Hindus left the subcontinent to settle in Greater London, particularly Southall, where shortages of workers at factories, and the employment prospects at nearby Heathrow Airport meant jobs were easily obtainable.

During local elections of the 1960s anti-immigration rhetoric was used by some candidates, successfully in many cases.

Smaller right-wing parties used immigration as a platform on which to stand, including in Southall.

In the local elections of May 1964, the anti-immigration British National Party (BNP) polled 15 per cent of the vote in Southall; in the general election that October the BNP leader, John Bean, received 9.1 per cent in the Southall constituency.

Some of the early arrivals found work at the R. Woolf and Co Rubber factory; by 1965 all the lower level workers were from Poland or the Indian subcontinent.

Racial discrimination in the workplace was common; 85 per cent of those Asian workers who had been given entry into the UK on the basis of their education or training, were only employed in unskilled or semi-skilled roles.

Kennetta Hammond Perry, in her history of post-war immigration, identifies the reasons as being "in part because of perceptions about their level of competence and stereotypes about their ability to speak English".

Indian workers also faced discrimination from the white-dominated trade unions, and so formed their own organisation, the Indian Workers' Association (IWA).

Bean won 7.4 per cent of the vote at the 1966 general election.

He emigrated to Britain in 1969 and was soon employed as a teacher at the Phoenix special needs school in Bow, East London.

In 1970 he entered a long-term relationship with Celia Stubbs; they had first met in New Zealand in 1963 when she was visiting the country.

Peach helped raise Stubbs's two daughters from her previous relationship, and the couple regarded each other as husband and wife.

Peach was politically active and joined the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), Socialist Teachers' Association and the local branch of the National Union of Teachers.

He was also a committed opponent of racism and was active in the Anti-Nazi League.

The BNP's successor, the National Front, recorded 4.4 per cent of the vote at the 1970 general election.

He had been arrested previously when campaigning on political issues, and in 1974 he was charged with threatening behaviour after challenging a local publican's refusal to serve black customers; he was acquitted.

In June 1976 the racist murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar in Southall—outside the offices of the IWA—led to the former chairman of the National Front, John Kingsley Read, stating "one down, a million to go".

Chaggar's murder led to the formation of the Southall Youth Movement (SYM) to challenge the rise in racism and attacks from the National Front.

Rioting in the area took place between police and Asian youths and members of Peoples Unite, a similar group to the SYM, but consisting of young Afro-Caribbeans.

A campaigner and activist against the far right, in April 1979 Peach took part in an Anti-Nazi League demonstration in Southall against a National Front election meeting in the town hall and was hit on the head, probably by a member of the Special Patrol Group (SPG), a specialist unit within the Metropolitan Police Service.

He died in hospital that night.

An investigation by Commander John Cass of the Metropolitan Police's Complaints Investigation Bureau concluded that Peach had been killed by one of six SPG officers, and others had preserved their silence to obstruct his investigation.

The report was not released to the public, but was available to John Burton, the coroner who conducted the inquest; excerpts from a leaked copy were also published in The Leveller and The Sunday Times in early 1980.

In May 1980 the jury in the inquest arrived at a verdict of death by misadventure, although press and some pressure groups—notably the National Council for Civil Liberties—expressed concern that no clear answers had been provided, and at the way Burton conducted the inquest.

Celia Stubbs, Peach's partner, campaigned for the Cass report to be released and for a full public inquiry.

An inquiry was rejected, but in 1989 the Metropolitan Police paid £75,000 compensation to Peach's family.

Since Peach's death the Metropolitan Police have been involved in a series of incidents and poorly conducted investigations—the 1993 Murder of Stephen Lawrence, the Death of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005, the botched 2006 Forest Gate raid and the death of Tomlinson—all of which tarnished the image of the service.

Peach's death has been remembered in the music of The Pop Group, Ralph McTell and Linton Kwesi Johnson; the National Union of Teachers set up the Blair Peach Award for work for equality and diversity issues and a school in Southall is named after him.

In 2009 Ian Tomlinson died after he was struck from behind by a member of the Territorial Support Group, the SPG's successor organisation; the parallels in the deaths proved to be the catalyst in the release of the Cass report to the public.

The Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, released the report and supporting documentation.

He also offered an official apology to Peach's family.

The policing of the demonstration in Southall damaged community relations in the area.