Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Even so, Britain was a long way from being colour-blind. In the press, black and Asian Britons were almost completely invisible, except in stories about crime or racism. Partly this was a question of numbers. As the journalist Martin Kettle wrote in 1981, there was an obvious contrast with the situation across the Atlantic, where most major American cities had large black populations. No British city, not even London, was remotely comparable. As a result, the immigrant population’s political clout was non-existent. There were no black and Asian MPs, judges, vice-chancellors, chairmen or chief executives. Even in youth clubs they struggled to be accepted. In September 1980 Birmingham’s youth officer complained that community centres were barring black teenagers on the grounds of ‘being too noisy’ and ‘liking too much reggae’. Effectively they remained outsiders, peering through a door that was at best only slightly ajar.

  Twenty, even ten years earlier, many people would have considered this entirely unremarkable. But now they were beginning to notice that, in everything from housing to education, black Britons lagged far behind their white counterparts. On arrival, most had started out at the very bottom of the ladder. Yet thirty years on, most were still there, apparently stuck forever. Among the white male population, only 60 per cent of the workforce were in blue-collar, manual jobs. Among West Indians and Pakistanis, however, the figure was 92 per cent – and that was when they had jobs at all.7

  While few places in the early 1980s were free from the shadow of unemployment, the outlook for black and Asian Britons was exceptionally bleak. In the capital, the unemployment rate for young black people was three times higher than the rate for whites. In many run-down inner-city areas, black jobless rates were at least 50 per cent. In Moss Side, Manchester, only three out of ten young black men were working, while in Handsworth, Birmingham, a survey of 500 homeless youngsters found that all but a dozen were black. ‘West Indians feel, and have reason to feel, that the prospects of ever breaking out of this trap are worst for them,’ explained the Very Reverend Basil Moss, who chaired Birmingham’s Community Relations Council. Indeed, Moss was ‘astonished that, the negative social factors being what they are, so many young unemployed blacks are cheerful, patient, responsible and law-abiding. I often wonder if I would behave as cheerfully and responsibly at that age under such circumstances.’8

  The gap was not just economic. More than thirty years after the Empire Windrush had docked at Tilbury, old prejudices still died hard. An apparently trivial example was the Robertson’s golliwog, which had appeared on the firm’s marmalade and jam jars since 1930. Not surprisingly, many people found it offensive, and over time the firm had reacted by tweaking his eyes and adjusting his name to ‘golly’. But when, in the spring of 1980, the firm launched a range of ‘table mats, badges, pens, bags, pendants, aprons, oven mitts, egg cups, spoons and even thermometers’ promoting ‘Fifty Golden Years of Robertson’s Golly’, many black Britons were outraged. ‘It is perpetuating an image, a caricature of black people which is counterproductive and distasteful, considering the multiracial nature of our society,’ said Basil Manning, a Lewisham community worker and spokesman for the National Committee on Racism in Children’s Books. Mr Manning already had one victory under his belt. After Boots had launched a range of golliwog bath sponges in December 1979, he had sent the managing director a parable in which children were given golliwogs for Christmas and grew into adults who marched through London shouting, ‘Wogs out!’ To their credit, Boots dropped the sponges. But Robertson’s were less accommodating: not until the beginning of the next century did they ditch the golly.9

  Would it be fair to describe Margaret Thatcher’s Britain as a racist country? Perhaps not. Yet as Paul Theroux travelled the land in 1982, he regularly saw racist graffiti. ‘NAZIS ARE THE MASTER RACE’, read a scrawl in Margate, while graffiti in St Ives, Cornwall, proclaimed, ‘Wogs ought to be hit about the head with the utmost severity’, and ‘Niggers run amok in London – St Ives next!’ As an outsider, Theroux noticed that people’s everyday language reflected their unconscious prejudices. If a black runner won a race against foreign opponents, he was English. But ‘if he lost, he was “coloured”. If he cheated, he was “West Indian”.’ And because Theroux was an outsider, people sometimes dropped their guard and said what they really thought. In Middlesbrough he was looking at the grim economic news in the local paper when a ‘respectable-looking’ man called Mr Strawby struck up a conversation with him. The reason things were so miserable, Mr Strawby explained, was ‘the blacks … We whites are the original inhabitants of this coontry [sic], but they make all the laws in favour of the blacks. That’s why it’s all gone bad.’10

  The truth is that, at the turn of the 1980s, you did not have to look far to find examples of racism: sometimes casual, almost unthinking, but sometimes charged with hatred and resentment. ‘Everywhere you see these aimless wogs,’ recorded the actor Kenneth Williams one stifling summer’s day. ‘In the park loads of ’em with scruffy families adding to an air of dereliction and desuetude. [Enoch] Powell was right, they should have stopped immigration years ago – all it’s done has [sic] imported alien cultures and poverty.’

  Born in 1926, Williams – who once blacked, or at least browned, up to play the Khasi of Khalabar – was famously misanthropic. Yet when The Times conducted a large survey of young people in 1981, many were just as prejudiced. ‘I think they’re over-protected,’ said 17-year-old Linda from Newcastle. ‘They shouldn’t be allowed in, at least not to start businesses.’ Local councils had been ‘scared’ into giving them jobs, agreed 19-year-old Steve from Croydon. ‘You get a bunch of coons walking in, “We’re unemployed, we want a job,” and they say No, and then they say it’s racial discrimination.’ And most strikingly of all, 26 per cent wanted to see compulsory repatriation, with a further 18 per cent backing subsidies to encourage people to return home. So, in total, as The Times pointed out, almost half wanted to ‘send them home’.11

  ‘Yeah, we got coloured geezers, sambos and all that, but we all take the piss,’ one working-class teenager, who had just joined the British Army, remarked in 1981. ‘I mean last month we pretended to be the Ku Klux Klan. We put pillow-cases over our heads and went around the barracks at night moaning and wailing and telling them all that Maggie Thatcher was going to kick ’em all out. But everybody gets the piss taken out of them, they know it’s only a joke like.’ But sometimes there was not even the pretence of humour. It was the ‘blackies’ who really ran the country, teenagers on a Sunderland council estate told Jeremy Seabrook. ‘They should all be shipped out, all the blackies, then there’d be jobs for our own people.’ And when Seabrook talked to three unemployed Birmingham teenagers, they told him black people were poised ‘to take over this country … There’s more black people than there is white.’ Britain, one said, was ‘becoming the dustbin of the world, all the shit of Pakistan that’s not wanted comes over here, sucking our life-blood, bringing the plague back and taking our jobs’.12

  Of course people had always said prejudiced things. Yet over time the tone had changed. Racism had always been a legacy of Empire, fuelled by an unthinking sense of superiority. But by the 1980s it had a more obviously bitter, aggressive edge, sharpened by a sense of national decline, shot through with victimhood and resentment. And all the time the temperature was rising. In the summer of 1981, the anti-racist paper Searchlight reported an arson attack on a disabled Sikh woman in Leeds, the petrol bombing of an Asian shop in Ilford, arson attacks on two Asian shops in Bolton, the petrol bombing of a black family in Reading – and this is merely a sample. In Coventry, where Satnam Singh Gill was killed by skinheads in a shopping centre and Ami Dharry was murdered while buying fish and chips, the bishop’s adviser on race relations warned that working-class white men were ‘looking for scapegoats’. And in Oldham the community relations officer, Keith Bradford, warned that racial tensions were reaching pressure-cooker levels. In this deeply depressed industrial town, recent months had seen young Asians stone
d in the streets, National Front slogans daubed on walls, garden gates set on fire and petrol bombs thrown at Bengali temples. Given the economic situation, Bradford told The Times, an explosion was inevitable. ‘I can see piles of brick and rubble from here,’ he said. ‘Where there are broken bricks lying around you can be pretty sure that there will soon be people ready to pick them up and throw them at somebody.’13

  In an ideal world, black and Asian Britons would have trusted the police to protect them from harassment. But this was not an ideal world. For one thing, the police were glaringly unrepresentative, especially in the inner cities. Of some 117,000 officers in England and Wales in 1981, just 286 were black or Asian. And when the filmmaker Roger Graef interviewed dozens of policemen and women, black and Asian officers told some hair-raising tales. ‘An ethnic officer joining this job should anticipate a hard time,’ said one, whose parents had come from India. ‘Everybody calls us “wogs, coons, groids”,’ said a young Met WPC. A northern detective constable remembered hearing a colleague who was a Muslim (‘I think he’s Iranian. I’m not really sure’) being told why he did not get any tea, like the others: ‘You’re a fucking nigger. Make your own tea.’ And a young black constable said that, off duty, he had been stopped in his Ford Cortina ‘many times’ by white policemen, who only dropped their aggressive tone when he showed them his warrant card. ‘The police force is ultra right wing,’ he said sadly, ‘no doubt about it.’14

  Why were the police so racist? The obvious explanation is that because many officers came from the self-consciously respectable working classes they were keen to distinguish themselves from ‘unrespectable’ elements, with immigrants seen as the lowest of the low. A report by the Policy Studies Institute in 1983 found that the force’s ‘canteen culture’ involved endless jokes about ‘nignogs, spooks, sooties, spades, coons [and] monkeys’. Some officers did not bother to deny that they were prejudiced. ‘You know why there aren’t more black coppers?’ asked a Home Counties detective sergeant. ‘They’re too fucking lazy, that’s why … And I don’t think they’ve got the brain power for it either.’ A Met inspector told Roger Graef that he often thought back to Enoch Powell’s speeches in the late 1960s. ‘The black population of this country do not want to be part of this country,’ he said. ‘What the hell do we do with people who can’t read and write? They don’t want a job, they don’t want a house, they just want to wreck everything. We think being British is the greatest thing in the world. They think being British is shit.’ And even young recruits were often intensely prejudiced. Most ‘niggers’, said one probationary constable, were ‘just dirty, smelly backward people who will never change in a month of Sundays’. ‘The country is being taken over slowly but surely by coloured immigrants,’ said another: ‘if we continue like this there will be no white people left.’15

  Not unreasonably, then, many immigrant communities saw the police as the enemy. As early as 1972, black activists warned a Commons committee that there would be ‘blood on the streets’ unless the police cleaned up their act. In particular, black Londoners were convinced that the Met was abusing the so-called ‘sus’ (‘suspected person’) laws, which, under the Vagrancy Act of 1824, empowered officers to arrest people whom they believed to be loitering with ‘intent to commit an arrestable offence’. Nationwide, about four out of ten people arrested on ‘sus’ were black, rising to almost eight out of ten in south London. For young black men growing up in the capital, recalled the brothers Mike and Trevor Phillips, ‘the police were a natural hazard, like poisonous snakes, or attack dogs off the leash. You walked past them with care because you knew that if anything happened you would be questioned and searched or arrested.’ The criminologist John Benyon recounted the story of Mark Bravo, who bought a motorbike after turning 16 in 1982. According to his mother’s journal, in one two-week period Mark was stopped four times on 2 April, once on 4 April, twice on 5 April, seven times on 7 April, twice on 8 April, twice on 9 April and five times on 14 April. Not once had he done anything wrong.16

  Slowly but steadily, frustration rose. In the New Statesman, Mike Phillips warned of a ‘siege mentality in the inner cities, especially among the black community’. With young black men taking refuge in reggae and Rastafarianism, many observers detected a growing sense of separateness, of alienation, of anger. In ‘Sonny’s Lettah’ (1979), the dub reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson imagines a boy writing to his mother from Brixton Prison, having been charged with murder after fighting back against the racist policemen who attacked his little brother. ‘I can’t take no more of that / No, I can’t take no more of that,’ sings the hero at the end of the low-budget, X-rated film Babylon (1980), as the police are smashing down the doors to break up his reggae gig. And in March 1980 the Commission for Racial Equality explicitly warned that, such was the tension between the police and young black men, ‘we could well see an eruption such as we have seen in America in the past’.17

  Two weeks later came the first explosion. The setting was St Paul’s, Bristol, a typical inner-city mixture of dilapidated terraced streets, boarded-up shops and bleak council high-rises. St Paul’s had a reputation as a hotbed of prostitution, drugs and petty crime: black residents themselves, who accounted for about half the area’s population, called it ‘the Jungle’. The trouble began on the afternoon of 2 April, when the police raided the Black and White Café, arresting the owner for cannabis possession and confiscating large quantities of illegal alcohol. The café was packed with young men drinking, playing cards and listening to reggae, who did not take well to the arrival of almost forty officers. A crowd gathered; a man claimed the police had ripped his trousers; a bottle was thrown, then a barrage of bricks and stones. The shadows lengthened, and the momentum built. Two police cars were turned over, and one was set on fire. The crowd attacked a breakdown van; then they set more cars on fire, broke into local shops and set light to a branch of Lloyds Bank. At last, just before 7.30, the Chief Constable arrived on the scene, realized his men were overrun and withdrew them for their own safety. For more than three hours, the mob looted and burned to their hearts’ content. Only by about 11 p.m., when the police returned in force, did the chaos die down.18

  Nobody died in the St Paul’s riot. Even so, with twenty-two officers badly injured, twenty-one buildings burned and some £150,000 worth of goods stolen, it was clearly more than just a rowdy evening out in Bristol. The national papers played it up for all it was worth: ‘MOB FURY!’ roared the Mirror. ‘MOB ON RAMPAGE’, agreed the Express. And even at the time many observers saw St Paul’s as a warning. The local Labour MP, Arthur Palmer, pointed out that Bristol was not the only city with an alienated black population packed into a ‘narrow enclave of streets’. ‘Time’, he wrote sternly, ‘is running short.’ The causes, agreed the Sun, lay in the ‘squalor and deprivation of decayed urban centres, in empty lives, and lack of work and opportunity. These same conditions exist on a far greater scale in other cities: Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and London itself.’ Even the Police Federation’s parliamentary spokesman, Eldon Griffiths, thought St Paul’s might be ‘the first of many’ riots in the years ahead. ‘WHICH CITY WILL BE NEXT AFTER BRISTOL?’ asked the Sunday Express. Almost exactly a year later, it learned the answer.19

  ‘In the benign April sunshine’, began a long feature in the Observer in April 1981, ‘Rattray Road is a pleasant street of substantial mid-Victorian terraced houses.’ To the casual visitor, it looked like a street on the up, with plenty of new cars, middle-aged men setting off to work and elderly women passing the time of day. The birds sang, the builders drank their tea in their vans, the decorators and window-cleaners climbed their ladders. There was even, the paper said, a hint of gentrification: ‘Rattray Road could be near the centre of any large English city, and a lot of people would be glad to live there.’

  But Rattray Road was not just anywhere. ‘Eight days ago’, the paper went on, ‘the roofs reflected the orange glow of flames, and the noise of riot and rage filled the sm
oke-tainted air. Youths with petrol bombs chased down side streets, and police armed with riot shields and snatched-up dustbin lids chased them back again.’ Now, as children played on their bikes in the spring sunshine, it all seemed so hard to imagine. But then ‘the harsh clatter of a helicopter’s rotorblades broke the illusion … The front line was under observation.’ The Observer made it sound like Belfast. In fact, this was Brixton.20

  At the turn of the 1980s, few places better encapsulated the problems of the inner city than this scruffy corner of Lambeth, south London. About a quarter of Brixton’s residents were black, rising to about half of those under 16. Housing conditions were awful, and the waiting list for council flats was some 18,000 names long. The jobs picture, meanwhile, was horrific. In the borough as a whole, careers offices had just one vacancy for every forty-four registered teenagers. But many young people were too demoralized even to register. Most observers reckoned that black unemployment, which had risen threefold since the beginning of the recession, was three times higher than for whites. Indeed, although an official report later suggested that at least half of Brixton’s black male teenagers were out of work, the true figure was probably much higher.21

  To outsiders, Brixton was associated with one thing above all: crime. The Metropolitan Police called it ‘unique in terms of its violent street crime’, while the great modern historian of London, Jerry White, describes it as ‘the capital’s capital of street robbery’. The Met’s figures showed that in the last four years of the 1970s the figures for mugging and pickpocketing had gone up by 38 per cent in London as a whole, but by 66 per cent in Lambeth and by a staggering 138 per cent in Brixton. The epicentre was Railton Road, known locally as the ‘Front Line’, surrounded by abandoned and boarded-up houses. To white visitors, Railton Road often seemed a threatening place: a world of ‘shebeens, gambling dens and cannabis dealing’, where groups of young black men loitered ‘for want of anything better to do’. Even locals admitted they felt unsafe there. With mounting unemployment, said a spokesman for the local youth centre, ‘crime has become more commonplace and more acceptable. This is a vicious circle to which there is no present end in sight.’22