Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (18 page)

The spirit of hopelessness animating a large swathe of Britain’s youth was never more poignantly expressed than by The Specials, a multi-racial ‘ska’ band from Coventry, one of
the Midlands cities badly hit by the recession. ‘Ghost Town’ was written by the band’s leader, Jerry Dammers, after passing through Glasgow. The relentlessly gloomy, eerie pace
and slow reggae beat of the song were accompanied by lyrics that had all of punk’s sense of nihilism but with greater poignancy and descriptive power. Ironically, the fracturing of society it
described was being replicated within The Specials, the band members scarcely on speaking terms and on the verge of splitting up, their concerts marred by mindless audience violence.

The song was recorded with an accompanying wail, described by Dammers as being ‘supposed to sound a bit middle eastern, like a prophecy of doom’.
²⁰
The timing of its release could not have been more portentous,
for ‘Ghost Town’ hit number one in the charts on 11 July. That weekend,
Britain’s inner cities were engulfed in riots as the anger of the country’s youth spilled into an orgy of violence against police and property, with arson, looting and wholesale
destruction on an unprecedented scale.

Stone-throwing and street barricades had, of course, become wearily familiar reoccurrences since the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but, aside from the rising tide of
Saturday-afternoon football hooliganism, were far from the living memory of those on the mainland. The nearest thing to what became known as the ‘long hot summer’ of 1981 had been the
Nottingham and Notting Hill race riots of 1958. Yet, ugly though those outbreaks were, they had involved little wholesale destruction and, at Notting Hill, only 140 arrests. By comparison, the
riots of 1981 were national in scale, broader in cause, far more destructive in effect, and resulted in the arrests of three thousand people. The trouble in 1958 may have disturbed the
self-satisfaction of a complacent post-war Britain; that of 1981 seemed to portend a society in crisis and terminal decline.

The first tremors of what was to follow were felt in Bristol in April 1980. There, a drugs raid on the Black and White Café in the city’s run-down St Paul’s district triggered
a night of violent reprisals as the area’s mostly West Indian immigrant community fought running battles with the police. Relations between the police and Britain’s young immigrant
population took a further turn for the worse in January 1981 when thirteen black partygoers died in a fire in Deptford. Two months later, ten thousand protesters marched to register their
discontent with the perceived casual manner of the police investigation and anger at the Metropolitan Police’s insistence – probably correctly, as subsequent inquiries discovered
– that the tragedy was not the result of a racist arson attack. The march’s organizers refused to cooperate with the police, and the mood of recrimination among some of those who
marched from New Cross to central London was expressed by the throwing of bricks at constables and shop windows.

The anger towards the police felt by immigrant groups was not replicated in the country generally. Despite the periodic exposure of corruption and slipshod practices, the police enjoyed a high
reputation. An opinion poll in September 1980 recorded that 71 per cent of respondents thought the police did a good job, and a further 26 per cent thought they did a reasonable job. Only 3 per
cent thought they did a bad job. When asked to compare Britain with countries abroad, 83 per cent of those polled named the police as the first reason for taking pride in the country, far
outstripping the second reason, tolerance and politeness, at 54 per cent (there was a net negative response to every other comparison between Britain and abroad).
²¹
For her part, Thatcher had always made it clear that respect for the police was a central tenet of the good society. In the first two years of her government,
police officers’ basic pay rose by over 50 per cent in absolute terms, an increase particularly marked when placed alongside the squeeze on other areas of the public sector.

Most respondents to opinion polls did not consider themselves likely targets for police harassment. Here, their experience and expectations were markedly different from those of young black
people, who in some inner-city areas were disproportionately likely to be arrested on suspicion. A hangover from the vagrancy act of 1824, the ‘sus’ law allowed police to arrest anyone
they suspected might be about to commit an offence, thus making it possible for them to acquire a criminal record without actually having committed a verifiable crime. There was no jury to sift the
evidence, merely the say-so of two police officers and the judgement of a magistrate’s court, where – in a reversal of the usual presumption of innocence until proved guilty – the
defendant was expected to try to disprove the police officers’ suspicion (and, in most circumstances, it could hardly be more than a suspicion). Across large parts of the country the charge
was seldom brought, but it was still used in London and deployed disproportionately against black suspects (40 per cent of those arrested on suspicion by the Metropolitan Police in 1979 were black;
in Lambeth, the figure was 77 per cent), at rates that exceeded the level of reported black street crime.
²²
The government had decided to ditch the
‘sus’ law before the riots broke out, scrapping it in the criminal attempts act of 1981. Nevertheless, the damage was already done and police forces in high-crime areas continued to
exercise stop-and-search powers in ways that caused resentment among those who felt themselves picked on because of their colour. Down at the police station, the ordeal could be severe and, on
occasion, cross the line into torture. One means of wringing a confession out of a suspect involved forcing him to kneel with his toes against the interview-room skirting-board; pressure was then
applied, which would cause excruciating pain to his heels, until he was ready to talk. There were cases of Rastafarians being shorn of their dreadlocks, which would then be pinned up on the
noticeboard as a trophy.
²³

The situation was especially fraught in the London borough of Lambeth, where a quarter of the population (and 40 per cent of those under nineteen) were black. The epicentre of Lambeth’s
black population was Brixton, where over half of black sixteen-to nineteen-years-olds were registered for unemployment benefit. The recession of the early eighties tightened the knots of
joblessness and deprivation in Brixton, but did not create them. Rather, the area had experienced decades of relative decline. There were twelve thousand houses deemed unfit for habitation and
thousands more marked as sub-standard. Lambeth Council’s housing department had eighteen thousand households on its waiting list. Running through Brixton’s heart was an especially edgy
zone bisected by Railton Road and known to
locals as the ‘Front Line’. Many of its shops and houses were boarded up. Patchworks of corrugated iron masked
dilapidated premises and in the evening young people, mostly black, hung around waiting – not always for long – for something to happen.

Robbery and violent thefts rose by 38 per cent in London between 1976 and 1980, but in Brixton the increase was 138 per cent.
²⁴
It was a
spiralling crime wave, which – depending on your outlook – indicated either how ineffective policing was when it did not enjoy local support, or how even more unendurable life would
have been for the law-abiding but for the strong police presence in the neighbourhood. By the onset of 1981, ‘community policing’ was largely in abeyance, having broken down in 1978
when three black members of the Council for Community Relations in Lambeth who happened to be wearing sheepskin coats had been wrongly arrested by police who were looking for a suspect whose
principal description was that he was black and was wearing a sheepskin coat. Even without such provocations, part of the problem was that police officers resented the idea that they should discuss
their actions with those they regarded as self-appointed political activists who did not necessarily speak for the community they claimed to represent. Indeed, many of those activists did not want
to speak to the police: the leaders of almost fifty organizations representing ethnic minorities met in London and drew up a declaration instructing all black and Asian people to refuse to
cooperate with the police, either by joining the force, helping out in identity parades or accepting offers to join liaison schemes. Such was the complete breakdown in dialogue that some police
officers saw community leaders as more sympathetic to law-breakers than to the law-enforcers. When asked to explain why he had not forewarned community leaders about a decision to conduct a
stop-and-search swoop in Brixton, Commander Leonard Adams explained: ‘No good general ever declares his forces in a prelude to any kind of attack.’
²⁵

It was hardly a novel strategy. Coordinated stop-and-search swoops had been implemented in inner-city areas throughout the 1970s, with constabularies bringing the Special Patrol Group (SPG),
whose typically uncompromising and unapologetic attitude undermined any understanding among those stopped without due cause. In the Toxteth area of Liverpool, only 179 of the 3,482 people searched
between January and July 1981 were arrested.
²⁶
The plan to cut crime, especially mugging, in Brixton using plain-clothes policemen to stop and
search suspects was codidd Operation Swamp 81. The choice of title was certainly unfortunate. ‘Swamp’ referred to the all-out, comprehensive penetration of an area, but it had other
connotations for those who remembered a passing comment Margaret Thatcher had made in the course of a 1978 interview, when she mentioned the fear some communities had of being ‘swamped’
by mass immigration. Swamp 81
started on Monday, 6 April 1981, and by the following Friday, 943 people had been questioned. Of these, just over half were black – a high
figure, but not proof of explicit racial discrimination given the ethnic profile of Brixton’s youth. Of the 943 individuals who were stopped and searched, ninety-three were arrested and
seventy-five charged with minor offences. Only one suspect was accused of anything as major as robbery. As a means of targeting serious crime, the operation had clearly been a comprehensive
failure. For the 850 people stopped without cause, the intrusive behaviour of the police represented harassment.

Thus, when unseasonably hot weather encouraged large numbers of mostly black young people to mill about Brixton’s Front Line on Friday, 10 April, many were in no mood to fraternize with
the police. All it needed was a spark to turn surliness into something uglier, and it duly came that evening when two police officers observed a man running from other black assailants and rushed
to intervene. The man had a four-inch stab wound, but refused to answer police questions. A crowd gathered and, under the impression that the officers were hassling rather than helping the wounded
man, enveloped him and facilitated his getaway. Now surrounded by an angry throng, the police officers radioed for back-up. The wounded man was duly spotted by other officers, who treated his
life-threatening wound and called an ambulance. Yet, before it arrived, the crowd had again caught up with him, dragging him away and bundling him off to hospital in a passing car, amid shouts of
‘We will look after our own.’ The tension continued to mount in the course of the following twenty-four hours, during which an entirely false rumour was circulated that the wounded man
had died as a result of police obstruction.

During the Saturday, crowds of white as well as black youths thronged on to the streets of Brixton and shortly after 6 p.m. they began angrily encircling police officers who were busy
questioning a taxicab driver. Soon, bricks, stones and bottles were raining down on the police. For the first time in mainland Britain, petrol bombs were thrown. That the police had not foreseen
the course events would take was evident from the fact that initially they lacked the riot gear to tackle a crowd that quickly degenerated into a mob. The arrival of properly protected police
reinforcements did nothing to cower those who were by now determined on escalating the situation. Barricades were hastily strewn across Railton Road. A police van was set alight. A double-decker
bus found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Its conductor was assaulted and it was commandeered and driven at the police line. Properties began to be set on fire. This was not entirely
indiscriminate. For instance, a pub where black people had not felt welcome was burned to the ground, while the nearby anarchist bookshop, proudly displaying a poster supportive of the Bristol
rioters in its window, was left
untouched. A school on Effra Road was put to the torch. Fire engines and ambulances were prevented from reaching the burning buildings or
treating the injured.

As the rioting and arson attacks intensified, the widespread smashing of shop windows and looting commenced. While television footage and eye-witness testimony showed the majority of the rioters
to be black, the looters were more often white. Their opportunism was carried out with disturbing insouciance. One youth was observed breaking into a sports shop and unhurriedly trying on a
succession of trainers until he found a pair that suited him.
²⁷
As the police battled to regain control, a reporter from
The Times
captured
the scene:

Where the police found themselves under the most determined assault was in a street off Railton Road. Fearing that lives were in danger as the full fury of the mob closed in,
the chief superintendent on Effra Road radioed for urgent back-up: ‘We are getting a good hiding and we can’t hold out any longer.’ Sure enough, his line broke and the mob burst
through. Elsewhere, though, the police were beginning to gain the upper hand, progressing in a pincer movement from both ends of Railton Road to quell the epicentre of the insurrection. By 11 p.m.,
the strong arm of the law was back in control, but only fleetingly, for more trouble flared up on the Sunday and, less seriously, on the Monday as well, before finally petering out. In the space of
three days, 450 people had suffered injuries. More than two hundred vehicles had been damaged or destroyed, including four ambulances and nine fire engines. One hundred and forty-five buildings had
been damaged, twenty-eight of them wrecked by fire.