by Andy McSmith
On 8–9 July, there was another major riot, in Moss Side, Manchester. There were others in Birmingham, Blackburn, Bradford, Derby, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Preston and Wolverhampton, all in early July. While the Brixton, Southall and Toxteth disturbances merit the description ‘race riots’, others did not. It was as if everybody who was young in an inner city wanted to join in. But after a few tumultuous days, it all seemed to fizzle out, in the quiet euphoria of the royal wedding, leaving the authorities to argue over what, if anything, the riots said about British politics. On 13 July, Margaret Thatcher visited Toxteth, saw the wreckage, but did not see anyone driven to desperation by joblessness and urban decay. She saw a pleasant enough city centre ruined by its feckless inhabitants. She recalled:
The housing there was by no means the worst in the city. I had been told that some of the young people got into trouble through boredom and not having enough to do. But you had only to look at the grounds around those houses with the grass untended, some of it waist high, and the litter, to see that this was a false analysis. They had plenty of constructive things to do if they wanted. Instead, I asked myself how people could live in such circumstances without trying to clear up the mess.24
A more famous reaction came from Norman Tebbit, the recently promoted employment secretary, in reply to a speaker at the Conservative annual conference who suggested that the riots might be linked to rising unemployment. Tebbit’s much-misquoted riposte was that his father had been unemployed in the 1930s, but ‘he didn’t riot, he got on his bike to look for work’. During the same session, Tebbit conceded that the figure of 3m unemployed was high, but ‘of course some of these three million are less keen to find work than others’.25
This was not the unanimous view of the cabinet. Michael Heseltine, the environment secretary, eight years younger than Thatcher, and her most formidable rival, feared that ‘there was a political menace in the relatively small scale disturbances which no responsible government could ignore’.26 He persuaded Thatcher to allow him to leave the running of his department to his junior while he spent two-and-a-half weeks in Liverpool, being the ‘Minister for Merseyside’, by night ensconced in the Port of Liverpool suite on the sixteenth floor of the Atlantic Tower Hotel, and by day in the offices of the Merseyside Urban Development Corporation. His visit included a tense two-hour meeting with the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee and other black leaders from Toxteth, and a bus tour with local business leaders. For the remainder of his time as the environment secretary, Heseltine aimed to visit the region once a week. His influence and restless energy helped push through several major construction projects in Liverpool and in Knowsley, including the building that now houses Granada Television and the 1980s housing in Stockbridge Village.
Lord Scarman, who was asked by the government to report on the causes of the Brixton riot, took the Heseltine view and made several recommendations to improve relations with the police, including positive discrimination. All this was ignored, but the government enshrined in legislation his more punitive recommendations, including the creation of a new offence of ‘disorderly conduct’, introduced in the 1986 Public Order Act, which was widely seen as an attempt to bring back the notorious ‘sus’ law under a new name. Under pressure, the government conceded that the law would be written in such a way that the police could arrest someone for ‘disorderly conduct’ only if they could identify a victim who was harassed or intimidated by the offender’s behaviour.27
There was one more outbreak of rioting, in 1985, which was also primarily about race. In August, police accidentally shot and killed a five-year-old boy in Birmingham. For two weeks, there was little local reaction until suddenly, in mid-September, as if for no reason, a riot flared in the Handsworth area where local youths fought the police and temporarily drove them out. In London, there was a forewarning of trouble in September when the police raided a house in Brixton, looking for an armed man, Michael Groce. They burst into an upstairs bedroom and shot his mother, Cherry Groce, paralysing her from the waist down. Youths surrounded Brixton police station and went on the rampage for several hours. Michael Groce helped calm them by saying: ‘Rioting is not going to get us anywhere. It is just going to make things go on longer. Just let it cool down now and leave it to the legal people.’28
Exactly a week after Mrs Groce was shot, the police stopped an unemployed twenty-four-year-old named Floyd Jarrett in a car in Tottenham, north London. They wrongly believed that the car was stolen and went to his parents’ home on the Broadwater Farm estate looking for stolen property. His mother, Cynthia, who weighed 20st, was prepared to cooperate, but an argument broke out after another of her sons arrived. An officer pushed Mrs Jarrett, who fell and died of a heart attack. On Sunday afternoon, 6 October 1985, her relatives led a peaceful protest march to Tottenham police station. That evening, there was a public meeting on Broadwater Farm, where Bernie Grant, who had taken office as leader of Haringey Council in April, pleaded for calm but was told, ominously, by someone in the audience that it was ‘too late for words’.29 By 9 p.m. Broadwater Farm was a dangerous place for any outsider, including journalists, two of whom were injured by shotgun pellets. It was especially dangerous for the police: one was shot and seriously injured and, twenty-five minutes later, at around 10.15 p.m., PC Keith Blakelock was surrounded and stabbed to death. While Tory MPs reacted by calling for the restoration of the death penalty, Bernie Grant, who had a notoriously quick temper, told a cheering crowd outside Tottenham town hall on the Tuesday morning: ‘The police were to blame for what happened on Sunday night and what they got was a bloody good hiding. There is no way I am going to condemn the actions of the youth on Sunday night.’30 That outburst immediately turned Grant into Britain’s most famous and most reviled black politician, though nothing in his later record suggested that he condoned violence. He empathised with Tottenham’s disaffected youth and must have been caught in the emotion of the moment.
Fifteen months after the Tottenham riot, six young men went on trial charged with Blakelock’s murder. The leader of the gang was alleged to be Winston Silcott, the child of Seventh Day Adventists from Montserrat, who was on bail at the time, charged with killing a boxer and reputed gangster named Tony Smith. The prosecution presented an atavistic story of rampaging hooligans attempting to cut off the police officer’s head to parade it on a pole. Three of the defendants were convicted, but their convictions were subsequently quashed when forensic evidence demonstrated that the police had tampered with the handwritten record of their interrogations, inserting the sections that condemned them.31 While the others were released, Silcott spent eighteen years in prison for the Smith killing, which he claimed was in self defence.
None of these riots weakened the Conservative government, and those who wanted to improve the circumstances of Britain’s ethnic minorities turned to more constructive methods than trashing the places where they lived. The Labour Party suddenly felt the presence of very determined young black activists, especially in London. Patricia Hewitt, the former general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties, who had become Neil Kinnock’s press secretary in 1983, was lobbied by a group of recently enlisted party members, including Sharon Atkin, a Lambeth councillor, and Diane Abbott. They persuaded her that the way to get around the reluctance of people of black and Asian descent to participate in meetings dominated by whites was for them to form separate black sections, which would be recognized as affiliated organizations entitled to be represented at every level of the party. Hewitt came close to persuading Neil Kinnock of the case, but the whole idea came up against a wall of opposition, not least from established leaders of the Asian communities who had already developed their own ways of operating, almost invisibly, within the party. Labour’s deputy leader, Roy Hattersley, became an outspoken opponent of black sections after being lobbied by Asians in his Birmingham constituency. Within a faction-ridden party, it was extremely difficult for anyone to broker a sensible compromise as the argument became more and m
ore heated and polarized.
In June 1985, a way through presented itself when the local party in the safe Labour seat of Brent South drew up a shortlist of potential parliamentary candidates, all of whom were from ethnic minorities. This opened the possibility that there would be a non-white MP in the next Parliament, for the first time in decades. But Brent South also had a black section, which the local party recognized as legitimate, but the national party did not. They were told by party officials that they could select from the shortlist they had drawn up, provided that no delegates from black sections took part in the selection meeting. This set off a furious argument within the black sections. A GLC councillor, Paul Boateng, the son of immigrants from Guyana, became the first black person selected for a safe Labour seat – and would go from there to become Britain’s first black cabinet minister – to the sound of a noisy protest meeting outside by Sharon Atkin and comrades from the black sections.32
After that breakthrough, Diane Abbott and Bernie Grant were also selected for safe Labour London seats, and Keith Vaz was selected for a winnable seat in Leicester. Even Sharon Atkin found a winnable seat in Nottingham East. In local government, some of those involved in black sections became council leaders in charge of multimillion pound budgets, including Grant in Haringey, and a twenty-seven-year-old woman, Merle Amory, who was briefly leader of Brent Council. When the leader of Lambeth Council, Ted Knight, and other councillors including Atkin, were barred from public office, the new council leader to emerge was Linda Bellos, an articulate convert from Poale Zion (Marxist Zionists) to the black sections, whom Knight and Atkin duly denounced for selling out to the ‘white Right’. In April 1987, as a general election loomed, black-section activists held a meeting in Birmingham, at which Atkin rashly accepted an invitation to speak. Under pressure from young blacks who accused her of selling out, she declared: ‘I don’t give a damn about Neil Kinnock and a racist Labour Party.’33 The comment was caught on camera. By that evening, Atkin was national news; within days, she was disqualified as a Labour candidate. The person loudest in her defence was Linda Bellos, who went on national news to say: ‘The Labour Party is racist . . . It does have within it practices and procedures and even individuals who adhere to and practice racism.’34 None of this improved Labour’s prospects in the 1987 election. There were two seats, in Lewisham and Nottingham, where the arithmetic suggested Labour would win but the black candidates lost, perhaps because of the Atkin affair. However, the bigger news was that for the first time since the 1920s, blacks and asians – Abbott, Boateng, Grant and Vaz – had made it to the House of Commons.
After the Brixton riots, a lawyer named Rudy Narayan was chosen to head a new Brixton Defence Committee, until the local youths decided that he was too much of an establishment figure and replaced him with the beat poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, who had arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1963 as an eleven-year-old boy. The poetry that Johnson began publishing early in the 1970s was highly political and drew a bleak picture of the lives of immigrants. Previously, he was known only to those who followed the London reggae scene or read the magazine Race Today, but the album he produced in 1981, of poems set to music, reached a bigger audience than before. Its title track was ‘Inglan is a Bitch’, about the experience of a fifty-five-year-old Jamaican turned on to the dole, who concludes: ‘Inglan is a bitch, dere’s no escapin’ it’. Another poem included in the collection was ‘New Crass Fire’ which alleged ‘di police dem plat an scheme canfuse an canceal’. His main poetry rival was Benjamin Zephaniah, who was brought up in Handsworth and first reached a white audience by persuading Alexei Sayle and other comedians to let him perform his poetry as part of their set. A poem called ‘Dis Policemen Keep on Kicking Me to Death’ always went down well.
Hanif Kureishi was the first major British-born writer to emerge from any of the ethnic communities. He was born in Bromley, south London, in 1954 to an English mother and a Pakistani immigrant. As the only Asian pupil at David Bowie’s old school, he was expected to show a sense of humour when he was called ‘Pakistani Pete’ or when his contemporaries talked about going Paki-bashing. Yet his works were joyously scandalous and bawdy. In 1985, he posted a film script to Stephen Frears, an established director who had never heard of Kureishi. Scripts sent in by post on spec are normally either ignored or rejected, but Frears read this one and loved it because it portrayed British Asians not as victims but as successful, corrupt and glamorous. He sold the idea to Channel 4 and made the film on a budget of just £600,000, intended just for television. However, it created such a sensation at the Edinburgh Film Festival in August 1985 that it went on release in cinemas around the world.
This was My Beautiful Laundrette, the story of an unlikely pair – one a Pakistani, the other a skinhead – who are also old lovers. They run a laundrette together, with Johnny’s thick-skulled old skinhead chums and Omar’s rich but not virtuous relatives hovering in the background. The critics, who had begun to despair of the British industry’s ability to produce a decent full-length film, were bowled over. ‘This marvellous comedy of interracial manners . . . has a richness of wit and conception one had despaired of seeing in British movies.’35
Whereas Linton Kwesi Johnson saw only social barriers that kept the black man down, Kureishi saw opportunities for adventure and self-advancement in the gaps between communities. The protagonist of his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, is subjected to gratuitous racist abuse by the father of a white girl, Helen, on whom he is paying a call. However, he manages to continue seeing her on the sly, even enlisting her help when he goes to meet a new arrival from India at the airport, in a borrowed car:
This was a delicious moment of revenge for me because the Rover belonged to Helen’s Dad, Hairy Back. Had he known that four Pakis were resting their black arses on his deep leather seats, ready to be driven by his daughter, who had only recently been fucked by one of them, he wouldn’t have been a contented man.36
Of all the ethnic and religious minorities, the one that was possibly the most inward-looking and least ‘visible’ in the early 1980s was Britain’s million or so Muslims. During the decade, there were three violent incidents involving terrorists who were Muslim, but they were not British Muslims. One of the strangest episodes opened on 30 April 1980, when a group of gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy in London and seized twenty-six hostages, including PC Trevor Lock and two BBC employees. The gunmen were Arabs from Iran (where Arabs were a subdued minority), who opposed Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary government. The Home Office went into its standard, slow procedure for negotiating with hostage-takers. Four hostages were released over the first three days, including a BBC employee, but by Monday, 5 May, which was a bank holiday, the gunmen were exhibiting symptoms of hysteria. They killed the Iranian press attaché, threw his body out of a window and threatened to blow up the building. By now, millions were watching the live television coverage, and less than half an hour later they saw thirty masked SAS men move into action. They heard the screams, the explosions and gun shots, and learnt that nineteen hostages had been rescued, although one had been killed and two injured in the shooting. Five of the six terrorists were killed, but one, Fowzi Nejad, cheated death by posing as a hostage. Nejad then spent twenty-eight years in British prisons; he was spared deportation to Iran, where he was likely to have been put to death.
Within four years, London was to witness another embassy under siege. On 17 April 1984, opponents of Colonel Gaddafi’s regime held a demonstration outside the Libyan People’s Bureau, watched by a couple of police officers (who happened to be informally engaged). PC Yvonne Fletcher’s original application to join the police had been rejected because she was below regulation height, but somehow she had talked her way in, and at five foot four inches she was probably the shortest officer in the country.37 When someone decided to open fire on the demonstrators from inside the building, one of the bullets found Fletcher and killed her, before her fiancé’s eyes. Eleven demonstrators were injured.
Armed police then surrounded the embassy, preventing anyone from leaving, while the Libyan government threatened retaliation on Britons all around the world if the building was stormed. For several tense days, the blue tarpaulin that sealed off Charles II Street was London’s oddest tourist attraction. The UK broke off diplomatic relations with Libya; the entire staff of the Libyan People’s Bureau – including Yvonne Fletcher’s unidentified murderer – left the country on 29–30 April, at the same time as the staff of the British embassy left Tripoli.
The worst terrorist incident on British soil occurred on 21 December 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down by a bomb, scattering debris across 850 square miles of southern Scotland, most of it on Lockerbie village. All 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground were killed, a combined death toll of 270. The names of the dead are inscribed on memorial in Dryfesdale cemetery in Lockerbie. The atrocity, inevitably, had political consequences that would last for decades. It helped finish the political career of the then transport secretary, Paul Channon, who made the mistake of flying off on holiday to Mustique for a Christmas break, leaving his deputy, Michael Portillo, to face biting questions in the Commons from Labour’s transport spokesman, John Prescott. After Christmas, the Scottish Labour MP Tam Dalyell was alarmed by what a police officer told him about American investigators crowding over the site of the accident. Dalyell became convinced that the crime had been committed by drug-runners from Lebanon or Syria, at the behest of the Iranian government, seeking revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US gunboat, which cost 350 lives. He also believed that the US authorities had known enough to tell senior personnel not to take Pan Am Flight 103, freeing up seats at the last minute for students wanting to get home for Christmas, including twenty-four-year-old Flora Swire, from Bromsgrove, who wanted to be with her American boyfriend.38