Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (19 page)

Television footage of central Brixton looking like charred remains from the Blitz naturally jolted the country and, when transmitted across the world, helped convince countless more foreigners
that Thatcher’s experiment in reversing Britain’s decline was succeeding only in accelerating it. It was perhaps fortunate that law and order was in the hands of one of the prime
minister’s most emollient figures, the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, who rushed to appoint an inquiry. Chaired by a suitably independent figure, Lord Scarman, its primary task was to
analyse the law and order issues raised. Meanwhile, the Labour Party, while quick to denounce the violence, was
equally quick to declare that the riot had been caused by
unemployment – a link that Thatcher was understandably keen to dispute. In fact, both Conservative and Labour front benches downplayed the racial aspect in the Brixton riot, pointing out that
whites were also involved. Of those charged, 67 per cent were black. It thus fell to Enoch Powell on the political right, and black activist groups on the left, to try and place race back at the
centre of the debate.

Believing that Brixton was confirmatory evidence that his infamous 1968 prediction that there would be ‘rivers of blood’ if mass immigration continued, Powell seized his moment in
the Commons, pointedly asking Whitelaw: ‘In reflecting upon these events, will the Home Secretary and the government bear in mind, in view of the prospective future increase of the relevant
population, that they have seen nothing yet?’
²⁹
When the disturbances duly spread three months later, Powell again suggested that the
behaviour of black people was the defining issue, assuring a radio interviewer: ‘We have had deprivation, unemployment and all the rest for generations and people have not turned out to wreck
their own cities and to attack the police.’
³⁰
The issue of race – or racism – was also central to the case made by many of the
most outspoken community leaders. Formed to advise those charged during the riot, the Brixton Defence Committee included members from the Black Women’s Group, the Socialist Workers’
Party and Blacks Against State Harassment (BASH). It made it clear it would have nothing to do with Scarman and would not cooperate with the state in any way. After bitter internal wrangling, it
then expelled its white members, deciding it should be a blacks-only organization.

During what proved to be the long hot summer of trouble, only one riot could be demonstrably shown to have been, in the unambiguous sense of the term, a ‘race riot’. On 3 July, three
hundred white troublemakers, inspired by the National Front and its culturally related skinhead rock music scene, descended on Southall in west London, ostensibly to attend a gig by their band of
choice, The 4-Skins. Southall was home to thirty thousand Asians and had been the scene of violent anti-National Front scuffles in 1979 during which a protester, Blair Peach, had been killed
– it was widely rumoured as a result of police heavy-handedness. Rather than be taunted on their own doorstep, Southall’s Asian youth massed on the streets to attack the assembling
skinheads, who, outnumbered, turned and fled. The police intervened by trying to drive a wedge between the two groups, an action the Asians interpreted as being designed to protect the white
extremists from getting the kicking that would otherwise have been their fate. Instead, it was the police who took the brunt of the Asians’ fury, suffering over one hundred injuries. The pub
where The 4-Skins had been due to perform was burned to the ground.

Coincidentally, on the same evening in another part of the country, police in the run-down Liverpool district of Toxteth tried to apprehend a black man who they thought was
making off with a stolen motorbike. In fact, it was his own. The trouble began when his friends, trying to assist his escape, started pelting the police with stones. The following day, 4 July, as
more police poured into the area, they were met with a full-scale riot by mobs of black and white youths. There were more than bricks and bottles with which to contend. Among the stolen vehicles
driven straight at the police line were a fire engine, a milk float and a cement-mixer. As one police officer was carried out with a six-foot iron railing javelined into his head, the mob could be
heard above the shouts and the noise screaming ‘Stone the bastards.’ As the flames spread, it looked as if they would engulf the Princes Park geriatric hospital and its ninety-six
patients had to be swiftly evacuated. As at Brixton, eye-witnesses noted the brazen calmness with which looters operated under cover of the riot, turning up with shopping carts to facilitate their
supermarket sweep. ‘Refrigerators, dryers, you name it,’ reported one observer of the scene, ‘I even saw one lady hold up a piece of carpet and ask if anyone knew whether it was 6
ft by 4 ft.’
³¹

During the Sunday night, 5 July, 229 police officers were hospitalized by the injuries they sustained trying to regain control of Toxteth. By 2 a.m., the conclusion was reached that they could
not achieve it through conventional means. For the first time on Britain’s streets, the police resorted to using CS gas to clear a riot. Unsure and not properly trained in what they were
doing, they fired cartridges of the gas intended for penetrating doors rather than dispersing crowds, an error that resulted in five injuries. By Monday, Liverpool City Council was requesting that
troops be put on stand-by. The government refused. After four days, the police finally brought the situation under some semblance of control. But, in all, the force sustained eight hundred
casualties and made over seven hundred arrests. Over one hundred buildings had been destroyed.

While the battle of Toxteth was in full swing, troublemakers in other cities replicated the mayhem. A mixed black and white crowd a thousand strong gathered in Manchester’s Moss Side on 8
July and attacked a police station. It was not until 4 a.m. that they were dispersed, and they were back the next day. Having initially tried a softly-softly approach, Manchester police switched to
meet the aggression head-on, successfully breaking up the riots through the use of snatch squads jumping from fast-moving police vans – a tactic that had been used in Ulster – and
meeting violence with violence. By 11 July, they had regained control, making 241 arrests and suffering twenty-seven injuries. That weekend there were also major incidents in Battersea, Brixton,
Dalston, Streatham and Walthamstow in London, and across the country in Aldershot, Bedford, Birmingham’s Handsworth district,
Blackburn, Bolton, Cardiff, Chester, Derby,
Edinburgh, Ellesmere Port, Halifax, High Wycombe, Huddersfield, Leeds, Leicester, Luton, Newcastle, Nottingham, Portsmouth, Preston, Reading, Sheffield, Southampton, Stockport and Wolverhampton.
This involved a lot of copy-cat activity, the disturbances representing an excuse for self-centred hooliganism as well as coherent political protest. A fire-bomb was even thrown at a police car in
rural Cirencester. Yet some of the disturbances were the result of specific triggers. A heavy-handed attempt by police to find a bomb-making factory in Brixton succeeded only in ripping through
houses lived in by black people and sparking further street riots three months after they had first flared there, resulting in a further forty police injuries and 231 arrests. The scale of the
nationwide disorder put pressure on overcrowded prisons. Whitelaw proposed using army camps to hold those detained on charges. He also indicated that the police would be given armoured vehicles if
they requested them. The emergency tactics of Ulster’s security forces were now being visited upon the mainland.

On the night of 28 July, there was another riot in Toxteth, during which a police van accidentally ran over a disabled white man, the one fatality of the summer of chaos. It proved to be the
last rumble of unrest, the riots fizzling out as suddenly as they had ignited. The following day, Charles, Prince of Wales, married Lady Diana Spencer in St Paul’s Cathedral and a country
that was locked in recrimination and shame showed itself no less overcome with celebration and national pride. Twenty-eight million Britons – more than half the population – watched the
‘fairy-tale wedding’ (as it was billed) live on television. The worldwide viewing audience topped 750 million. In some towns and cities, neighbourhoods strewn with bricks and broken
bottles lay cheek by jowl with streets decked with red, white and blue bunting. Such was the paradox of Britain in the summer of 1981. Alternating between television images of a country engulfed in
patriotic pomp and violent circumstance, the rest of the world must have found it perplexing.

One thing became clear as the dust settled: a lot more planning had gone into making their Royal Highnesses’ wedding a happy day than had been expended in planning the riots. There had
been a fear that rabble-rousers had stirred up and orchestrated the violence. After Brixton’s first eruption in April, a gang of black men had taken one journalist, blindfolded on the
journey, to see the extent of their amateur bomb-making factory, assuring him: ‘There’s going to be a lot more, a big lot more, just tell ’em that. We ain’t kidding. We
goin’ burn ’em down, everythin’, everywhere.’
³²
Newspapers began trying to identify which known political militants had been
seen where in the days leading up to the trouble. The government’s decision to impose a one-month ban on all processions in London during July aimed at forestalling inflammatory
demonstrations and counter-marches
between the National Front and the Anti-Nazi League. Yet, while politically motivated activists may have joined the riots, neither
subsequent investigations nor the profile of those arrested suggested that known activists were a major presence or that there was any concerted and premeditated plan of attack. In that sense, the
trouble was spontaneous.

Societal problems, such as the erosion of the family unit and the diminishing role of discipline in schools, were suggested as causes. Of all the things the rioters lacked, respect for authority
was clearly the most evident. It was not just the prime minister who suggested the pernicious legacy of the permissive society. Even Lambeth’s Labour MP, John Fraser, suggested family
breakdown was among the main causes in Brixton. For most critics of the government, however, unemployment was a more obvious explanation. Sixty per cent of Toxteth’s black population was
thought to be unemployed; a figure of 70 per cent was posited for Moss Side’s black and Asian youth. The majority of those charged during the Brixton and Toxteth riots were unemployed at the
time of their arrest, although government ministers preferred to focus on the convictions of those who were in work or, indeed, still at school. As far as Roy Hattersley, Labour’s home
affairs spokesman, was concerned, there was obviously a link between unemployment, a lack of anything positive to do, and a descent into conflict. As he told the Commons on 16 July: ‘I repeat
that I do not believe that the principal cause of last week’s riots was the conduct of the police. It was the conditions of deprivation and despair in the decaying areas of our old
cities.’
³³
Those who sought to deny any causation looked callously out of touch. Nevertheless, deprivation struggled to provide a full
explanation. After all, unemployment levels were just as severe in areas like South Wales, Tyneside and Strathclyde, which were untouched by rioting. Far worse rates of unemployment and poverty in
the 1930s had not produced civil disorder. What the public believed can best be gauged from a nationwide opinion poll conducted by MORI in August. It found that 62 per cent of respondents thought
that unemployment had caused the riots, while 26 per cent thought race was the issue and 17 per cent blamed the behaviour of the police. Nevertheless, attributing the cause was not to be confused
with condoning the actions. An ORC poll for the
Guardian
showed overwhelming public sympathy for the police, not the rioters.
³⁴

While the search for the deep-seated reasons focused on socioeconomics, there was no escaping the reality that the spark for the fires of Brixton and Toxteth was not the closure of a particular
local workplace but specific police actions that local youths had interpreted as harassment. Indeed, an editorial in the Police Federation’s magazine went so far as to blame the resentment of
Brixton’s black youth on ‘the very success of the police measures against crime’.
³⁵
The realities were brought home to Michael
Heseltine,
the environment secretary, when he toured Liverpool in the aftermath of the Toxteth riots. Crime was clearly rife, yet those speaking for the local community often
blamed intrusive policing for the trouble. Relations between police and community were all but non-existent, making it difficult for police officers to identify suspects. Without meaningful inside
intelligence, they fell back on trying to find a black suspect by the almost random stopping and searching of black people. The targeting of a specific ethnic group could hardly have been a
blunter, or more grossly insensitive, tool of investigation. In response, some vocal community activists wanted the immediate abolition of the police’s stop-and-search powers – the
Brixton Defence Committee, for instance, wanted the whole area to be a no-go zone for the police. That was hardly practical. More significantly, the Labour Party was moving towards a policy of
bringing the police under far greater accountability. In May 1981, Labour gained control of the Greater London Council with Ken Livingstone, an articulate critic of the police, becoming the
city’s leader. His group won power in the capital with a programme that demanded that the Metropolitan Police be made directly accountable to the GLC and that the Special Patrol Group, the
Illegal Immigration Intelligence Unit and Special Branch should all be disbanded. These were not policies to which the Conservative government was likely to give its assent, but the way the
Tories’ popularity was sliding appeared to indicate that Livingstone’s residency at County Hall would last rather longer than Mrs Thatcher’s tenure on the other side of
Westminster Bridge.