Even at this early stage there were warnings that police harassment was stoking the flames of racial tension. In 1970 black protesters besieged the police station in Caledonian Road, Islington, while a year later repeated police raids on the Mangrove restaurant in Ladbroke Grove culminated in the embarrassment of the Mangrove Nine trial, where a white jury acquitted seven out of nine black activists accused of affray. Black protest often focused on the excessive zeal, to put it mildly, of the aggressive Special Patrol Group, a kind of force within the force, which was repeatedly sent into South London to target young black muggers. In 1975 the SPG stopped 14,000 people and arrested some 400, almost all of them young black men, in Lewisham alone. The tabloid press often hailed the SPG as the cutting edge of the modern force; to many Caribbean families, however, it was the epitome of white racism and police harassment. But black patience was not inexhaustible. As early as 1972 there were reports that local groups were forming self-defence associations, and representatives of the West Indian Standing Conference warned a parliamentary committee that unless the police ended their ‘systematic brutalization of black people’, there would be ‘blood on the streets of this country’. This was no exaggeration: two years later, scuffles at a fireworks display at Brockwell Park, Brixton, escalated into a pitched battle between white policemen and black youths, with allegations of brutality on both sides. Miraculously, nobody was seriously hurt, but it was a sign of things to come.39
While the harassment of ethnic minorities undoubtedly reflected the prejudice shared by many police officers, it also owed something to the intense pressure on them to crack down on public disorder. Police officers were told to keep an eye out for ‘coloured young men’ on the London Underground, for example, not just because their superiors had highly reactionary ideas about black criminality, but because almost every week the press were demanding a more aggressive approach to policing. The Heath years were a period of deep anxiety about law and order, not only because one corner of the United Kingdom seemed on the brink of civil war, but because so much of modern life seemed infected by the virus of public violence. What the Mirror called ‘AGGRO BRITAIN’ was more than fantasy: it seemed a genuine reflection of a world in which there was an armed bank robbery in London every six days, police estimated that 3,000 professional robbers were loose on the streets of the capital, and almost no major football match passed off without drunkenness, damage and disorder. The statistics in London alone made sobering reading. In 1968 the Metropolitan Police had reported 299,000 indictable crimes, but by 1971 the total had surged to 340,000, rising to 414,000 in 1974 and 567,000 in 1978. (It is worth noting, though, that these figures are still small compared with the peak in the early 1990s, when there were 945,000 offences a year.)40
Behind these figures lay an unsettling sense that the times were out of joint, that something had gone wrong, that the forces of violence and disorder were gaining the upper hand. ‘It was a year which began and ended in violence … the year of the international terrorist,’ The Times concluded gloomily at the end of 1972, looking back at the massacres in Londonderry and Munich, the American bombing of North Vietnam and a rash of terrorist atrocities in Italy, Israel, Japan and the United States, not to mention the domestic controversies of the miners’ strike, the collapse of Heath’s industrial relations plan and the furore over the Ugandan Asians. Amid this international lawlessness and domestic disarray, it was no wonder so many people thought the barbarians were at the gates, or that so many – the overwhelming majority, in fact – supported the return of the death penalty. ‘Violence has reached such a pitch’, recorded James Lees-Milne, in words that would undoubtedly have drawn approving nods from millions of his countrymen, ‘that only violence can restrain it. The thugs of this world cannot be checked by light sentences and comfortable cells, but by being executed, got rid of by the quickest, least offensive means, a prick in the arm and a gentle slipping away to God knows where.’41
Of all the symptoms of public disorder, one of the most frightening was the rise of mugging. The word first appeared in the British press in August 1972, when an elderly widower, Arthur Hills, was stabbed to death outside Waterloo station as he was going home from the theatre. It was, said the Mirror a few days later, ‘a frightening new strain of crime’, imported from the United States, where such atrocities were apparently endemic. Of course it was not really new at all: as a leading QC pointed out in The Times a few days later, mugging was almost exactly the same as the ‘garrotting’ that had obsessed Victorian headline writers a century before. But the word carried disturbing connotations. Since the late 1960s, British papers had reported with horror the surge in violent crime across the Atlantic, where American cities seemed to be sliding into a brutal cycle of decay, delinquency and disorder. Mugging was an American phenomenon, associated with the black gangs who supposedly controlled the mean streets of cities like New York, Chicago and Detroit, and British newspapers shuddered at the thought that it was coming east. ‘Britain seems to be edging too close for comfort to the American pattern of urban violence,’ lamented the Birmingham Evening Mail in March 1973 after a controversial mugging case in the city’s Handsworth neighbourhood. ‘I have seen what happens in America where muggings are rife,’ agreed Jill Knight, Edgbaston’s Conservative MP. ‘It is absolutely horrifying to know that in all the big American cities, there are areas where people dare not go after dark. I am extremely anxious that such a situation should never come to Britain.’42
Mugging was more than robbery with violence. As the tabloids saw it, mugging was alien, threatening, even subversive; it hinted at the dangers that lay beneath the surface of modern city life; above all, it was immediately associated with young black men. White criminals were rarely identified as muggers; black ones almost always were. And at a time when the economy was sliding into chaos, the government appeared powerless in the face of the unions and traditional expectations seemed to be undermined by feminism, permissiveness and social mobility, the press coverage of mugging – often described as a ‘disease’ or a ‘virus’ – quickly began to assume the proportions of a full-blown moral panic. By the late autumn of 1972, mugging was the word on everybody’s lips. Long articles explored ‘the making of a mugger’ or asked ‘why they go out mugging’, while editorials called for more police patrols, tougher prison sentences and what the Sunday Mirror melodramatically called an all-out ‘war’ on muggers. A typically blunt Sun editorial entitled ‘Taming the Muggers’ gives a sense of the tone:
What are the British people most concerned about now? Wages? Prices? Immigration? Pornography? People are talking about all of these things. But the Sun believes there is another issue which has everyone deeply worried and angry: VIOLENCE IN OUR STREETS … Nothing could be more utterly against our way of life, based on a common sense regard for law and order … If punitive jail sentences help to stop the violence – and nothing else has done – then they will not only prove to be the only way. They will, regrettably, be the RIGHT way. And the judges will have the backing of the public.
Indeed, with polls indicating that 70 per cent of people wanted the government to show greater urgency in the war on mugging and 90 per cent wanted tougher punishments for muggers, it was no suprise that judges, politicians and policemen alike were quick to take the hint. Local councils organized ‘anti-mugging patrols’ armed with walkie-talkies and guard dogs; the Metropolitan Police stationed extra men outside Underground stations; and the new Chief Inspector of Constabulary described mugging as his ‘highest priority’ and promised that his men would ‘stamp [it] out’. And by early November even Prince Philip had waded in, telling an audience at the Royal College of General Practitioners that ‘mugging and child-bashing were symptoms of unhealthy communities and a cure had to be found for the “disease” ’.43
As a group of cultural theorists at the University of Birmingham pointed out in a hugely influential study six years later, the furore over mugging was driven as much by sensationalist headlines and ra
cial prejudice as by a genuine increase in crime. It was no coincidence that the death of Arthur Hills, supposedly Britain’s first mugging, came just a week after Idi Amin had announced the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians and at a time when the papers were full of angry letters about the predicted ‘flood’ of penniless immigrants. If poor Mr Hills had died a few months earlier, his murder might well have been ignored. Coming when it did, it became a symbol of wider anxieties about crime and immigration. But as the Birmingham theorists saw it, the ‘moral panic’ about mugging had even deeper roots, stretching back to the aftermath of the Moors murders in 1965, when the newspapers had first taken aim at the so-called ‘permissive society’. This panic was under way, they argued, even ‘before there [were] any actual “muggings” to react to’, reflecting white middle-class unease at a time of social and economic change. Far from being a reaction to a terrifying epidemic on Britain’s streets, they thought, the mugging furore had actually been ‘constructed’ by an unholy alliance of journalists, judges, politicians and policemen as a ‘mechanism for the construction of an authoritarian backlash, a conservative backlash: what we call the slow build-up towards a “soft” law-and-order society’.44
In many ways this kind of analysis now feels almost as dated as platform shoes, the Ford Granada and the music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. There is no doubt that the mugging panic owed a great deal to wildly sensationalist press headlines, nor that it was fuelled by deeper popular anxieties about immigration, the decline of the inner cities and the plight of the economy. But the decisive factor was surely something the Birmingham theorists persistently downplayed: the genuine reality of rising crime. It is true that crime had been steadily rising for most of the century, and that the biggest increase actually came in the late 1950s. But it is not hard to see why so many people felt genuinely unsafe in the early 1970s. By far the most likely victims of crime, after all, lived in working-class neighbourhoods that had recently suffered enormous upheavals as planners tore down the Victorian slums and erected gigantic new tower blocks in their stead. Old friends and relatives had moved out, unfamiliar new groups were moving in, and the much-loved bulwarks of the neighbourhood – the corner shop, the pub, the cinema, even the church, the landmarks that had once represented community and stability – were disappearing. On television, respectable values seemed to be in retreat; in the shops, everyday prices had reached astronomical levels; in the headlines, all was doom and despair. And in this context – the context of derelict terraces and struggling factories, of concrete council flats sodden with rain and covered with graffiti, of empty churches and broken-down football grounds – it is no wonder that people became so frightened.
The crime figures themselves, meanwhile, leave no room for doubt. At the time the mugging panic began, the crime rate had increased by 5 per cent annually for the past seven years, while Home Office statistics showed violent crime increasing by a whopping 62 per cent between 1967 and 1971. And of course it did not stop there: as people moved away from the embrace of the traditional working-class neighbourhood, as the bonds of family and community frayed, as unskilled and manufacturing jobs dried up, as the old moral sanctions came into disrepute, so the appeal of crime became steadily greater. By 1974, every single category of crime was showing a significant annual increase: theft, for example, jumped by a staggering 71 per cent in London and 42 per cent overall. No doubt some of the apparent increase was down to changes in measurement, but not all of it. And while fashionable academics liked to dismiss popular fears of crime as middle-class ‘hysteria’ fanned by the sensationalist press, the fact remains that while there were 1.6 million serious crimes in England and Wales in 1970, there were almost 2.8 million ten years later. The victims were rarely affluent sociologists or well-paid journalists; they were the poor, the elderly, the downtrodden, the forgotten. Not even Britain’s best-loved street was safe: when Coronation Street’s Ernie Bishop was shot and killed by armed robbers in January 1978, the tabloids reacted as though the last bastion of innocence had been contaminated. ‘It mustn’t happen,’ insisted John Betjeman in the Mirror. But it did. And as thousands of the soap’s regular viewers would readily have testified, something like it was happening somewhere in Britain almost every day of the week.45
In many ways it was to Edward Heath’s credit that he never exploited the anxiety about rising crime for his own political ends. Unlike the majority of his own activists, he remained steadfastly opposed to the death penalty, not least because he had once commanded a firing squad during the war and never forgot what an awful experience it had been. Given how much attention the press paid to crime during his premiership, it is remarkable that he said virtually nothing about it at all. If anything, his first Home Secretary, Maudling, was even more liberal, even refusing to engage party members in debate about capital punishment because he found their views so distasteful. When Maudling’s financial corruption forced him out in the summer of 1972 – a time at which the press furore about crime was reaching boiling point – it is highly revealing that Heath replaced him with the even milder-mannered Robert Carr, whose liberal opinions cut little ice with ordinary Tory activists. The truth is that, as one historian remarks, Heath insisted on acting ‘as a national statesman and not merely as the leader of a political party’, which would make a nice epitaph for his entire career but also highlights his greatest weakness. For although Heath’s handling of immigration and race relations brought high marks from historians, it won him few friends among the Conservative rank and file. To many ordinary Tory members, as to Enoch Powell, it seemed part of a disturbing pattern. And as Heath seemed to move further to the centre, so others rushed to fill the space on the right.46
When the National Front was founded in 1967, there seemed little chance that it would ever attract more than a handful of supporters. The post-war decades had not been kind to the far right: tarred by association with the Nazis, the various fringe groups descended from the inter-war British Union of Fascists spent as much time fighting one another as they did winning support on the streets. Even Sir Oswald Mosley, the only figure on the far right with any national reputation, failed miserably to appeal to a mass electorate. Standing on an anti-immigration platform in Kensington North in 1959, he won just 2,621 votes, and when he stood in Shoreditch and Finsbury in 1966 he fared even worse, polling a pathetic 1,126 votes. Other leading figures on the far right were even less successful. Andrew Fountaine, a Norfolk landowner’s son who fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War and made a stir at Conservative party conferences in the late 1940s by condemning Labour as a party of ‘semi-alien mongrels and hermaphrodite communists’, pinned his hopes on the youth of the nation. ‘The man who can gain the allegiance of the Teddy Boys’, he grandly remarked, ‘can make himself ruler of England.’ But although Fountaine set up an ‘Aryan camp’ for boys on his Norfolk estate, Britain’s teenagers proved rather more interested in shopping and pop music than racism and street violence. Somehow it said it all that Fountaine could not even win the support of his own mother, who used to heckle him during his public meetings.
In 1967, Fountaine led his minuscule British National Party into a merger with two other far-right groups, the League of Empire Loyalists and the Racial Preservation Society, to create the embryonic National Front. Six months later a fourth group, the Greater Britain Movement, joined the fledgling organization, and its leader, John Tyndall, would become the National Front’s key figure during the 1970s. Tyndall was by any standards a deeply unappealing figure, a dedicated neo-Nazi who was briefly imprisoned in 1966 for illegal ownership of a gun and who made no secret of his extremist views. Among other things, he blamed the Holocaust on a ‘food shortage’, hoped to see ‘the whole democratic regime come crashing down’, promised to eliminate the ‘cancerous microbe’ of Jews in Britain, denounced mixed marriages and promised to expel the ‘droves of dark-skinned sub-racials’. Unfortunately for Tyndall, however – though not for anybody else – his appeal was strictly limited. His
Greater Britain Movement had just 138 members, which meant that it was smaller than many local working men’s clubs, and even the embryonic National Front had no more than 1,500 active members, most of whom came from Fountaine’s old BNP. To put this into context, if all the active members of the National Front in 1970 had lined up one Saturday afternoon at Walsall’s Fellows Park, they would be outnumbered more than three to one by people who had come to watch their local football team.47
In many ways the general election of 1970 confirmed the impression that the National Front was a pitiful fringe outfit, posing no threat to the established parties and no real danger to law and order. It managed to put up only ten candidates, all in areas of high immigration and working-class resentment where the NF was supposed to be strong. And with Enoch Powell attracting anti-immigration voters to the much more respectable bosom of the Conservative Party, the NF’s results were appalling: just 1.9 per cent in Cardiff, 2.3 per cent in Leicester, 4.7 per cent in Wolverhampton, 5.5 per cent in Deptford and 5.6 per cent in Islington. To most observers, therefore, it seemed that the NF had effectively missed the anti-immigration boat. And yet other election figures told a rather different story. In the local elections of 1969 the NF had made striking inroads into former Labour strongholds, attracting 12.5 per cent in Huddersfield, 10 per cent in Cardiff and 11.5 per cent in Wandsworth and West Ham. In the local elections of 1970, too, the NF did better than expected, winning 11 per cent in Huddersfield and coming second to the Tories in one Wolverhampton ward.
State of Emergency: the Way We Were Page 38