How often are we to see our police forces attacked for the fun and the hell of it by teenage black, yellow and white skinheads, tinheads and yobs before the country’s weight is put behind its police?
How long are we expected to endure mindless young hooligans and vicious young vandals terrorising housing estates, marauding buses and trains, bullying their way along the pavements before the powers that be stop feeling sorry for thugs and start making our cities safe again?
The headline, a scream of anguish, said it all: ‘HOW MUCH MORE MUST WE TAKE?’37
For the Prime Minister, as for so many people, the summer’s riots came as a terrible shock. ‘Oh, those poor shopkeepers!’ Mrs Thatcher exclaimed when she saw the pictures of the devastation in Toxteth. To her critics, her words perfectly captured her instinctive sympathy with the property-owning classes. And while a more emollient politician might have found the right words to heal the wounds, she seemed incapable of striking the right note. When she addressed the nation in a party political broadcast on 8 July, her banal pieties about the importance of obeying the law were widely mocked, even by her allies, as completely inadequate. ‘Her tone is too strident and defensive to meet the needs of a fearful society,’ said The Times. She seemed ‘strained, tired and over-wrought’, agreed the Observer. And a brief trip to Liverpool five days later was a public relations disaster, an angry crowd bombarding her car with toilet rolls and tomatoes. The symbolism was awful. This was not a commanding Prime Minister arriving to take charge. This was an uncertain, beleaguered woman, reeling from crisis to crisis, unable to get out of her car without people screaming abuse.38
In the meantime, Britain was struggling to come to terms with the legacy of destruction. Riots were supposed to happen in other countries, in Paris, Rome, Los Angeles or Detroit. They did not happen in Britain. So the chaos in Brixton, Toxteth, Southall and Moss Side seemed not just an attack on all the old assumptions, but a symptom of a dreadful sickness at the heart of modern British society. ‘People are bound to ask what is happening to our country,’ lamented the Express. ‘Having been one of the most law-abiding countries in the world – a byword for stability, order, and decency – are we changing into something else?’ And in The Times, David Watt agreed that ‘we have lost, or at least mislaid, some of our collective sense of assured national identity’, with society disintegrating into ‘a collection of pressure groups, social classes, regional groupings, economic vested interests – and races’. ‘What’, he wondered, ‘has become of our national pride?’39
Here, then, was more proof that Britain was trapped in a terrible spiral of national decline. But now it was clear that the disease was as much moral as it was economic, the symptoms bloodied policemen, burned-out cars and looted shops. ‘WHERE ARE WE GOING?’ asked a heartfelt Times leader on Monday 13th:
The riots of the past week are a severe blow to British self-esteem. They are a living testimony to a collapse of morale in one section of the community – and they have been damaging to the confidence of the country as a whole. One of the qualities upon which we have been accustomed to pride ourselves as British people has been the orderliness of our way of life. We may no longer have an Empire. We may no longer be the workshop of the world. We may even have difficulty in paying our way. But this is still one of the most pleasant countries in which to live, a comfortable society renowned for tolerance and gentleness. Now that too seems to have been exposed as a false dream.
A few weeks later, the paper ran a round-up of some of the incidents across Britain one Saturday in August. At a protest march in Toxteth, two policemen had been hospitalized with stab wounds; in Sheffield, three policemen had been injured in a city-centre brawl with ‘500 youths, mostly black’; in Llandudno, four policemen had been hurt after fighting as hundreds of youngsters left a disco. Violence, violence everywhere. No wonder Kenneth Williams thought it was ‘getting a more barbaric world in every way, compared with the world I knew in my youth’. And as Paul Theroux travelled along the coast in the spring of 1982, he was struck by the alienation, the graffiti, the sense of looming physical threat. ‘England – perhaps the whole of Britain,’ he wrote, ‘was changing into a poorer, more violent place.’40
There was, of course, another way of looking at all this. Punch-ups on a Saturday night would have come as no surprise to people a hundred years earlier. And in an international context the riots in Brixton and Toxteth were hardly exceptional. In the 1960s and 1970s hundreds of people had been killed and thousands injured in riots in the United States. Yet, in Britain’s days of rage, not one person died. In some ways, then, the fact that people were so shocked was actually a testament to the remarkable orderliness of British life. But that, of course, was not how people saw it at the time. Indeed, as the summer wore on the headlines became ever more hysterical: ‘Orgy of Fire and Fury’, ‘Britain in Turmoil’, ‘Riot Frenzy’. Perhaps the most powerful was the front page of the Sun on 6 July, which featured a striking image of policemen huddled behind riot shields in Toxteth. ‘To Think This Is England’, lamented the headline. For more on the ‘Fury in the Ghetto’, the paper urged readers to ‘see pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7’.41
Even before the first stones were thrown, fears of crime had already been running high. ‘In the public mind, at least, violence in Britain, especially among the young, has reached intolerable levels, and the statistical evidence shows that most forms of violent crime are increasing, in some cases dramatically,’ began a long feature in The Times in the summer of 1980. In the last quarter of a century, the annual total of recorded offences had risen from 438,000 to 2½ million, while in just a decade the annual total of violent offences had more than doubled. There were more cases of wife-battering and child abuse, more reports of vandalism and criminal damage, even more assaults on policemen. What these figures did not show, said The Times, was the ‘sheer horror and cruelty of some of the offences’. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children warned that with rising unemployment and family breakdown, they were seeing far more shocking cases of neglect and child-beating. And after studying hundreds of instances of violent crime, the group Victims of Violence had found ‘endless cases where helpless, often elderly victims of robberies, burglaries and random attacks have been subjected to such brutal treatment that they live constantly in fear’.
What on earth was going on? The director of education at the University of Exeter told The Times that the problem was a ‘time bomb’ of unemployed youngsters, who were ‘likely to turn to vandalism or street gangs unless their predicament is tackled’. By contrast, a criminology professor at Edinburgh thought the causes were cultural rather than economic, blaming the ‘decline in accepted common values and accepted attitudes to authority’. Either way, said the Observer, violence ‘has seemed to be increasing’:
Most people over 35 can recall some moment – the casual beating up of a neighbour on the street in broad daylight, a suburban mother robbed and terrorised by her own son, the intermittently decipherable words of a punk lyric heard on the car radio – when it occurred to them that violence in our society might be not a departure from the norm, but the norm itself.42
Against this background, many people saw the riots in Brixton and Toxteth as proof that society was falling apart. For more conservative observers, the riots confirmed everything they had been saying for years about permissiveness, immorality and the decline of the family. Rioting was a ‘law and order’ issue, insisted Mrs Thatcher, who thought the chief cause was ‘a weakening of authority in many respects of life over many, many years’. Other Conservative MPs invoked a favourite scapegoat, the state of Britain’s schools. Ian Lloyd blamed the ‘seditious sociological claptrap that is passed on in our schools as education’, while the marvellously whiskered Rhodes Boyson, himself a former headmaster, considered that the riots were the inevitable result of ‘destroy[ing] the authority of the headmaster and his staff’.
Merseyside’s Chief Constable, Kenneth Oxford, blamed moder
n parents, who had lost sight of ‘basic civilized discipline’ and ought to have made sure that ‘these kids are home and in their beds at midnight and not heaving bricks at policemen or in shop windows and going on an uncivilized rampage’. Mary Whitehouse, not unsurprisingly, blamed the BBC, warning that its news coverage ‘creates excitement, teaches techniques and encourages imitation’. The columnist Ronald Butt blamed the race relations industry, from more established groups that merely harped on the ‘disadvantage of the immigrants’, to ‘much less reputable local bodies which fuel discontent instead of calming it’. And to complete the set, the Tory backbencher Sir Ronald Bell told readers of the Sunday Express that the blame lay with the politicians, many of them ‘self-styled progressives’ who had allowed so many immigrants to come in the first place. ‘Their duty’, he said, ‘was to safeguard the nation, but over 20 years the nation has been betrayed.’43
On the left, the obvious culprit was Mrs Thatcher herself. Arguing that the rioters had been motivated by anger at unemployment, Michael Foot insisted that Liverpool was a ‘monument to Thatcherism’. Edward Heath, too, thought the key issue was jobs. ‘If you have a half a million people hanging around on the streets all day, you will have a massive increase in juvenile crime,’ he explained. ‘Of course you will get racial tension when you have young blacks with less chance of getting jobs.’ And Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, Roy Hattersley, was in no doubt. Leading the attack in the Commons, he insisted that the riots had not been caused by racial prejudice or police harassment, but by ‘social and economic circumstances’. ‘I repeat that I do not believe that the principal cause of last week’s riots was the conduct of the police,’ he told MPs on 16 July. ‘It was the conditions of deprivation and despair in the decaying areas of our old cities – areas in which the Brixton and Toxteth riots took place, and areas from which the skinhead invaders of Southall came.’44
On the face of it, the link with unemployment seemed undeniable. Areas like Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side all suffered from punishing youth unemployment rates. Bristol City Council’s chief executive told The Times that the root cause of the St Paul’s disturbances was ‘resentment over high unemployment’, and even suggested that the district’s problems could be fixed with just 200 extra jobs. And when Willie Whitelaw talked to councillors in Liverpool after the Toxteth riots, they were, he reported, ‘unanimous in agreeing that the underlying cause of the problems in Liverpool 8 was the extremely high level of unemployment in that district, particularly among black people’.45
Yet there was an obvious flaw in the argument that the riots were caused by high unemployment. If the real problem was the lack of jobs, then why were there no riots in Consett and Corby, which had been utterly devastated by steel closures? Why were there no riots in struggling areas such as South Wales or the north-east of England, where unemployment was cripplingly high? On top of that, there was no historical evidence that unemployment inevitably led to urban rioting. Indeed, although some people were outraged when Norman Tebbit told the Tory faithful that his unemployed father ‘didn’t riot’ but ‘got on his bike and looked for work’, he had a point. For if there really were a straightforward link between unemployment and rioting, why had there been no riots during the Depression, when times had been so much harder? As Frank Johnson mischievously asked readers of The Times: ‘Who can forget the burning down of Jarrow in 1930?’46
Among the public, however, most people bought the argument that unemployment, rather than police harassment or institutionalized racism, was the principal cause. Even the teenagers at a south London school near to Brixton generally agreed with Roy Hattersley’s diagnosis. The fundamental cause of the riots, wrote 13-year-old Primrose, who was black, was that ‘people don’t have enough money and are out of a job. They don’t even give the people a chance.’ As it happened, she thought Space Invaders might represent a useful solution. The council, she explained, had tried to keep people off the streets ‘by building a place which has Space Invaders and one-arm bandits, etc., but what’s the use of building it if they haven’t the money to play the game. They should try building some which you don’t have to put money into them. That way they won’t have so much trouble.’47
The opinion polls told a similar story. A survey for the Evening Standard found that 40 per cent of Londoners blamed the riots on unemployment, with 22 per cent mentioning ‘blacks’ behaviour’ and 18 per cent ‘racialism’, while only 13 per cent blamed the police. When Gallup’s pollsters asked about the general increase in violent crime, most people blamed a general breakdown in ‘respect for authority’, followed by unemployment, softer laws and poor parenting. Asked whether they blamed white or black people for the riots, most blamed black people. Asked whether they sympathized with the police or the rioters, the overwhelming majority chose the police. And when Gallup invited them to name the most pressing social problems of the day, 83 per cent mentioned violent crime, 71 per cent teenage crime, 63 per cent drug-taking and 57 per cent ‘coloured immigrants’. Racism and police harassment barely featured at all; but ‘coloured immigrants’ did. It is worth emphasizing that most people were more likely to accept black neighbours, colleagues and friends than ever before. Even so, when millions of white Britons thought about black and Asian people in the abstract, they did not think of them as friends. They thought of them as a problem.48
The irony of all these efforts to discover what lay behind the riots was that there was clearly no single cause. In many cases, the most important factor was clearly the bad blood between the police and black residents. But no two situations were exactly the same. In Southall, for example, the key issue was the police’s failure to protect the Asian community from racist attacks. As for the copycat riots in the days after Toxteth, the only common factor, as the Observer pointed out, was simply the presence of a lot of ‘bored teenagers’ who had seen the news footage on television and fancied ‘an evening’s smashing and burning’. Were they deprived and downtrodden, angry and alienated? Probably not. It was obvious to most witnesses that the rioters in West Yorkshire, the West Midlands and elsewhere were ‘thoroughly enjoying themselves’. To put it crudely, rioting was fun.49
The idea of rioting being fun horrified many observers, from those on the right who shuddered at the prospect of lawless anarchy to those on the left who wrung their hands at the plight of the inner cities. And yet for many participants the riots were neither a shriek of rage nor a cry for help. The Observer’s northern correspondent Michael Nally, who had seen the fighting in Moss Side at first hand, thought only a few of the rioters were genuinely motivated by anger about jobs or the police. ‘Many, if not most,’ he wrote, ‘were out either for kicks, emboldened by the excitement, drink and drugs, or to commit crimes.’ This tallied with what other youngsters told the Sunday Times’s Ian Jack as he travelled across the country that summer. When Jack asked what they had made of the riots, most said simply that they were ‘daft’ or a ‘laugh’. Rioting, said an apprentice miner from Yorkshire, was ‘just like gang-fighting really. You’ve got one set of lads chucking bricks at another set of lads who’re wearing a daft uniform and they’re chucking bricks back at you.’
On the fringes of the fighting in Moss Side, Michael Nally encountered two white men wearing anti-Thatcher badges. They told him that the riots were ‘all about’ jobs and police harassment. But a girl nearby told a different story. The men with badges were ‘Commies’, only there to sell their newspapers. ‘No one’s taking much notice of them,’ she added contemptuously. Also on the fringes was a 17-year-old black youth, ‘high on the excitement and eager to join the fighting’. He told Nally that he had greatly enjoyed laying siege to the police station the night before: ‘We had the bastards in there shitting themselves.’ But he was not unemployed. He worked in a shop and generally minded his own business. At this point a friend of his, who was white, appeared and threatened Nally with a ‘short wooden shaft’. ‘You bugger off, you, and write what the hell you like,’ he said
angrily. ‘Say it’s all political or something. That’ll explain it. What the fuck would you do if you lived here?’50
*
Lord Scarman published his report on the Brixton riots on 25 November. He called it a ‘major challenge to the nation’, and it made the front page of every newspaper except the Sun. The fundamental cause of the riots, Scarman concluded, was the simmering tension between the Metropolitan Police and the area’s black residents. The police must recruit more black and Asian officers, make racial prejudice a sackable offence and emphasize ‘community policing’ instead of the self-conscious toughness seen in places like Brixton. Beyond that, with ‘racial disadvantage’ becoming an ‘endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society’, the government should seriously consider positive discrimination in education and employment. Unless black youngsters were given a stake in society they would drift towards the lawless margins. ‘So it is the nation’s choice,’ said the next day’s Mirror. ‘Either act on Scarman or put it on the shelf with countless others. But if we decide on the shelf it will not be dust that this report gathers. It will be blood.’51
Although the government promised to implement Scarman’s recommendations, change was slow. As the handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence showed twelve years later, the culture of the Metropolitan Police remained defiantly unreconstructed, while the judge’s call for positive discrimination never bore fruit. And while the hard left condemned the report as a whitewash, the most striking rejoinder came from the conservative Salisbury Group, which commissioned a rival report on what it called the ‘real’ victims of the riots, the ‘elderly white people of Lambeth’. Its author, the young Charles Moore, duly trudged around the borough talking to people who felt embattled by social and cultural change. As might have been predicted, they tended not to be fans of their black neighbours. ‘We did make a terrible mistake letting them in,’ some said:
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