by A. N. Wilson
Lord Scarman began his report The Brixton Disorders 10–12 April 198110 with a candid account of what occurred: ‘During the weekend of 10–12 April (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) the British people watched with horror and incredulity an instant audio-visual presentation on their television sets of scenes of violence and disorder in their capital city, the like of which had not previously been seen in this century in Britain. In the centre of Brixton, a few hundred young people–most, but not all of them, black–attacked the police on the streets with stones, bricks, iron bars and petrol bombs, demonstrating to millions of their fellow citizens the fragile basis of the Queen’s peace. The petrol bomb was now used for the first time on the streets of Britain (the idea, no doubt, copied from the disturbances in Northern Ireland).’ While expressing gratitude that no one had been killed, his lordship reported to the Home Secretary that 279 policemen had been injured, 45 members of the public injured, many vehicles damaged, 28 buildings gutted by fire. It is easy to imagine the reaction of every previous age to such acts of violence and destruction. The 1st Duke of Wellington or the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury would have settled the disturbances by use of the military and the perpetrators, if they escaped with their lives, would have been punished with the utmost severity. Such would have been the reaction anywhere else in the world–in America, Russia, Japan. Whatever the reason for the riots might have been, the acts of destruction themselves would have been deemed intolerable. Yet according to Scarman, one of the most senior of the Queen’s judges, the fault for the riots lay, not with those who had stirred up the young hotheads, nor with the young men themselves who spent three days smashing windows, hurling bricks at police dogs, looting shops, and terrorising the peace-loving majority of their fellow citizens. Scarman did not go so far as to say that social conditions in Brixton excused the disorder; indeed he explicitly repudiated such a notion.11 However, he made it perfectly clear that if ‘social conditions’ did not excuse, they at any event went some way to explaining the riots. The other factor was what Scarman called the ‘policing problem’. Once again, in any other era or clime such a phrase would refer to a supposed inadequacy of police resources–not enough water cannon, inadequate coshes or handcuffs, insufficient fire-proof uniform to enable officers to apprehend those throwing petrol bombs in what Scarman acknowledged had been ‘a lively and prosperous place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’.12 For Scarman, however, the police ‘problems’ were ones of attitude. The young rioters were apparently expressing frustration at police ‘attitudes’.
No one would deny the data collected by Scarman in his report. The black young of Brixton were put upon by a racist police force. (And as Scarman told the Home Secretary, ‘racially prejudiced or discriminatory behaviour is not at present a specific offence under the Police Disciplinary Code’.13) Many of them lived in conditions which would make anyone feel like hurling a petrol bomb; 25.4 percent of the ethnic minority were unemployed. (Unemployment in the Brixton Employment Office stood at 13 percent at the time of the riots.) Brixton had few recreational or sports facilities. Through no choice of theirs, they had been brought up in constricted flats in ugly tower blocks, and forced to attend lousy schools, taught by inadequate teachers unable to find employment anywhere else. Thirty-seven percent of homeless households, waiting to be rehoused in substandard flats, were black.14 What made the Scarman report remarkable was the way in which, in its liberal, paternalistic way, it infantilised the black community, and especially the black criminals.
Critics of Thatcher–and Lord Scarman’s views of her are not difficult to conjecture–would say that the unemployment had come about as a direct result of her economic policies and that the job of the government was to improve the housing and living standards of all citizens. Thatcher, with a politician’s disingenuousness, refused to take any responsibility for the riots which swept the inner cities that summer–Brixton in April, Toxteth, in Liverpool, in July, Moss Side in Manchester and again in Brixton itself. Hugo Young, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, who was of a Scarmanite political complexion, recalled her saying, as she contemplated the looting at Toxteth, ‘Oh, those poor shopkeepers!’
Young wrote, ‘A lot of Margaret Thatcher’s character is expressed in that single phrase. It was a perfectly intelligible reaction. It just wasn’t the first response that most people might have made when they saw rioters and police in pitched battle, and watched the disintegration of a run-down city. Later, seeing looters walking away with armfuls of merchandise, they may have felt for the shopkeepers too.’ Young went on to remind his readers, yet again, of Thatcher’s origins in a small grocer’s shop, thereby implying that this was not merely where she still belonged, but also where her belief in the individual’s duty to obey the law belonged.
Were shopkeepers, property owners, employers, the propertied classes necessarily at war with the unemployed or the dispossessed or un-possessed? The conventions of ‘consensus’ suggested not. Britons were all ‘one nation’ and it was in the interests of the propertied to appease the unpropertied with welfare, decent housing, chances of employment. The doctrines of monetarism went counter to the consensus. If Thatcher were to have abandoned her commitments to sound money, the consequences would have been dire to the country. While the painful medicine went down, however, it was inevitable that the young unemployed and unskilled should suffer the most. These, given the demographic nature of modern Britain, were the blacks. While she aspired to make Britain imitate the American success story–unrestricted growth of capital; entrepreneurs being loved, not attacked, by the state; financial services the key to economic boom–she was obliged to replicate the woeful divisions observable in all American cities. While the investment banker and the corporate lawyer grew ever richer, the poor blacks imprisoned in their ghettoes of hopelessness grew angrier. Brixton and Toxteth were Bonfires of the Vanities. ‘The country briefly felt as though it was aflame.’15
Beleaguered shopkeepers deserved sympathy. So did the police who were caught in the crossfire of ideological battle. If angry, impoverished black boys setting fire to cities was one price to be paid for economic revival, it was not a price which the rich paid themselves. The police were the only representatives of government whom most poor people ever met. Post-Scarman, their jobs became more difficult. Section 66 of the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 laid down that ‘a constable may…stop, search and detain…any person who may be reasonably suspected of having or conveying in any manner anything stolen or unlawfully obtained’. By extension, it was considered reasonable to stop and search anyone likely to be in possession of illegal narcotics. Clearly such a law was of great inconvenience to the muggers, drug-pushers and petty thieves of Brixton, and it was easy to stir resentment against clumsy attempts to police the area. The ‘sus’ laws were also hated–so called because of section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824, ‘under which people can be arrested on suspicion that an offence is likely to be committed’.16
To an older generation, who had grown up in a culture of deference and whose males had done military service, the policeman had been a reassuring, admirable figure–‘the ideal male character.17
The bobby, the local policeman, was recognised by the law-abiding working class as one of their own. Questioned by a sociologist for a book published in 2003, members of a tenants’ association in south Manchester recalled ‘the old bobby with the old helmet’…‘they had authority and you respected that authority. Like I say, they’d clip you round the ear hole, and you took it.’ Another speaker in the same group made the point that the police were ‘ordinary normal people. It could have been your father, your uncle.18 Older Britons remembered the time when they knew the local constable by name. Another witness from south Manchester, born in 1950, remembered, ‘We had this respect for the police. And there was a fear of the police, and I think it was a healthy fear, because I think if anything it tended to give the police more authority. You would never deliberately be absolutely cheeky or foul-mouthed to a police
man. It just wasn’t going to work…And of course if you went running to mummy and daddy with the idea of that policeman has just told me off, or “I’ve been arrested because”, then you’re back to being punished again, you got a back hander.19 In those days, a backhander was a slap received from, rather than a bribe given to, a policeman.
As the 1950s had receded, the crime rate had soared, 430,085 notifiable offences in 1955 rising 70 percent to 743,713 in 1960: at this period public confidence in the police remained steady. As these figures grew at stratospheric rates, so public confidence in the police was dimmed. By 1970 the figure was 1.6 million. (In 1992, the level of increase in offences was greater than the total number of offences in 1950.) Between 1950 and 1993 thefts from motor vehicles increased twenty-eightfold, robberies forty-eightfold.20 The law-abiding public began to question the competence, while the criminal or criminalised blatantly flouted the authority of the police. There were a disturbing number of suspicious deaths among detainees in police custody or in gaol. In 1982, when the Greater London Council was under threat of abolition by Margaret Thatcher, a monitor group calling itself INQUEST was set up to ‘help friends and families of people who had died in police custody’. The death of Blair Peach, a schoolteacher in the largely Asian suburb of Southall on 23 April 1979, happened during a major clash between police and anti-fascist demonstrators. A strike by local Asian workers and shopkeepers had provoked an overreaction by the police–three thousand officers, the SPG, hoses, helicopters and riot gear. According to an anonymous pamphlet, Policing Against Black People, ‘the police, according to eye-witnesses, went berserk and vans were driven straight at crowds of people, people were hit on the head with truncheons, mounted police charged and long batons were used’.21 According to a Daily Telegraph reporter: ‘Nearly every demonstrator we saw had blood flowing from some sort of injury: some were doubled up in pain. Women and men were crying.’
Blair Peach, a schoolteacher, died after being chased down the road and hit on the head with a truncheon by unidentified members of the SPG. Members of the SPG went to the Peoples Unite Centre in 6 Park View Road, which was being used as a first-aid post. They kicked down the door used by the medical unit and ordered everyone to get out. All those inside were forced down the stairs to run a gauntlet of police wielding truncheons. Virtually every item in the building was smashed to pieces, including PA equipment worth thousands of pounds.Clarence Baker, a member of Peoples Unite, was rushed with a fractured skull to intensive care, where he remained for several days fighting for his life.
This, together with so much of the other reporting of the Southall disturbances, overlooked the fact that the protesters, including Blair Peach, had gone out of their way to attack the police. Three thousand demonstrators had used concrete, smoke bombs and metal chairs, a fact that the pamphleteer chose to ignore. The death of Blair Peach–if indeed he was killed by a volunteer policeman, as alleged–was a very unfortunate accident whereas the breakdown in law and order, the chaos in which his death occurred, with acts of arson, looting and mass destruction, had all been planned and orchestrated by the demonstrators. The police were now in danger of being able to do nothing right. Individuals or groups in such a position begin, very often, to behave erratically.
A case in point occurred on 5 October 1985 when Floyd Jarrett, a black man, was taken to Tottenham police station, wrongly suspected of handling a stolen vehicle and (a matter which was never proven) of handling stolen goods. The police decided to search the home of the suspect’s mother, Cynthia Jarrett. As the officers barged into the flat of this stout Jamaican lady, she was accidentally knocked over, and died of heart failure. A meeting was arranged at the West Indian Centre. The leader of Haringey Council, Bernie Grant, regarded by the readers of many newspapers as a dangerous agitator, was howled down when trying to address the Youth Association. He was said to be ‘too white minded’. The police arrived at the estate, Broadwater Farm, sensibly armed with riot uniforms. This in itself was deemed to be ‘provocative’ from a crowd agog to be provoked. The riots followed the by now familiar pattern. These were not ‘political’ demonstrations in any but the most extended sense of the term. ‘Many petrol bombs were thrown…’ Leonardo Leon, looking from the Rochford block over the Griffin Road area, saw, ‘People with bottles, then some people siphoning off fuel from cars, three or four people laughing, and putting cloth inside. There was a white cloth, a large piece, and they were tearing it apart and then putting it into the bottles, and throwing it. But of ten bottles they threw, one of them would actually light up and land in the road. All the others would just be nothing.’
This monstrous orgy of mindless violence, theft, vandalism and destruction was to claim a victim, the first policeman to be killed in a riot in Britain since Cold Bath Fields in 1833–when the National Political Union demonstrated for the ‘Rights of the People’ and the ‘aristocracy of the working classes’. The Broadwater riots did not display the aristocracy of any class. Someone–they never found out who–was firing a shotgun into the crowds. Basement car parks had been flooded with petrol to be set alight when the police entered. (The same people who did this would complain that the police had ‘provoked’ the riots by wearing protective clothing.) From the inferno of burning shops and flats, the police were forced to retreat. PC Keith Blakelock fell on a grass verge and was set upon by a group of fifty rioters. There were calls to cut off his head, which was very nearly done, as the young man was kicked, stabbed, punched and hacked to death. Three men, later pronounced educationally subnormal, were arrested for the killing. Bernie Grant pronounced that the police had received ‘a bloody good hiding’.22
20
Thatcher as Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher embodied all that Victorian progressives might have hoped for when they championed the worthy causes of economic liberalism, free trade, education for all regardless of class and gender. Whereas the socialists within the Labour Party wished to perpetuate the class struggle, and the Social Democrats wanted to keep the class divide merely to change the identities of its contestants, Thatcher’s revolution brought into being a Britain where class as such no longer mattered. Money mattered–it mattered more than it ever did. But all those very English things–things, paradoxically, which in her own person Thatcher almost parodied–deference, defining who you were by the way you spoke–as well as those non-Thatcherish things–a reverence for the past, romantic snobbery–were all blasted away by this very distinctive person, by far the most interesting Prime Minister of the post-Second World War years.
The times were ripe for her coming. In 1976, only a year after she became the party leader, the historian Robert Blake would say, ‘the post-war consensus is dead and… Butskellism is extinct. The particular form of welfare state which came into being in the late’forties and early’fifties is simply not viable any longer. It has been collapsing through its own contradictions for the last ten years, certainly for the last five.’
Blake went on to say that the British political world then (1976) divided between ‘those who wish to solve our ills by even more state intervention’. These he saw as ‘the Wedgwood Benns’ who would ‘lead us to a socialist slum of an East European “people’s democracy”, in which, however, well-intentioned the authors may be, freedom, as we know it will become extinct.1 and those–a much smaller number at this date–who believed that economic recovery–the prerequisite of any other form of recovery in those calamitous times–could only come about by diminishing bureaucracy, setting business free from government intervention, reducing taxes and making the notion of personal property–whether of those with modest means or of the rich–central to any other idea of law, public order and personal freedom.
Except to bigots this latter idea was by the end of our era accepted by almost all British politicians and a high proportion of the thinking adult population. Most British adults aspired, for example, to home-ownership.
Yet within Thatcher’s own party–and especially in her own
Shadow Cabinet during her first administration–the home truths had not sunk in. These oafish men went on imagining that ‘consensus’ and ‘corporatism’, which had proved themselves so disastrous throughout the Heath–Callaghan years, would somehow save them. Thatcher’s gender was seen as part of her ‘extremism’ in espousing an alternative which was subsequently adopted not only by all three British political parties, but throughout the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe where she continued to be a heroine long after her political fall in Britain. Whereas her admirers, in America, Poland, Russia, and Czechoslovakia, saw her as a courageous innovator, her detractors saw her in caricature sexist and snobbish stereotypes. Whatever reasons people had for disliking her policies–or indeed for liking them–were blown up into mythic proportions by her sex and class. On the day she resigned, Richard Ingrams placed in the window of his Wallingford bookshop a novel byP. D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Many of the jokes about her current during her premiership were primarily sex or sexist jokes, often recycled mother-in-law jokes in which she was seen as a ball-breaker. ‘We’ve all heard about the fellow who broke into the Queen’s bedroom, but have you heard about the fellow who broke into Margaret Thatcher’s bedroom? He has a new career as a very promising soprano.’…‘What does PMT stand for? Prime Minister Thatcher’… ‘Denis Thatcher went into a bookshop and asked the assistant, “Do you have a book called How to Control Your Wife?” “Our fiction section is upstairs, sir,” smiled the assistant’…‘After all those years of marriage, Denis Thatcher is finally developing an attachment for his wife–it fits over her mouth’… These are all from the Irish ‘comedian’ Des McHale.2 Paul Hogan, the Australian comic, just blatantly stated, ‘When I tell the folks back home that the Poms have got a Sheila as a prime minister they go hysterical.’ ‘Traditionally, politics has been a male preserve, and I think we did all find it difficult coming to terms with a woman leader’–so said a nonentity member of Thatcher’s first Cabinet, Jim Prior.3