CHJPTER SEVEN Reconstructing Socialist Criminology 7.1 the Riots
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- 533 - CHJPTER SEVEN Reconstructing Socialist Criminology 7.1 The Riots of 1981 The most serious problem to confront the Thatcher Government in the first 2½ years of its project of social and economic construction emerged, in the event, from the underclass rather than from the organised Labour Movement. The serious but localised riots of 1980 in Brixton and Bristol - which had been authoritatively explained as resulting from conditions peculiar to particular neighbourhoods - were followed in July 1981 by a series of major disturbances in Southall, Toxteth, Brixton (on several separate occasions), Moss Side, and elsewhere. Massive amounts of property damage and looting occurred and large numbers of police and the public were injured. On 13 July, the Nerseyside Police became the first force in mainland Britain to make use of rubber bullets and CS gas on civilians, and, in the same week, the Government announced that army camps would be used to house those who received prison sentences as a result of the riots. The Government also announced its intention to investigate the possibility of legislating for a new Riot Act and generally proclaimed its support for more aggressive police responses in any future situation where there was "a threat to public order". In July and in August, further outbreaks of street violence occurred sporadically in Liverpool and in other British cities. These were authoritatively explained as "copycat riots", requiring the firm and deterrent response from the authorities. On 29 July, in Liverpool, 22 year old David Moore, crippled in one leg, died after being pinned against a wall by a Police Land-rover, after Merseyside Police had adopted the method of clearing crowds used by the RUC in Belfast (of driving vans at and through the people on the street) . As in Ireland, and as over the question of soccer - 534 - violence at home, the social violence of the inner-city under-class was to be met with the force of intensified penal discipline. But the riots in English cities were clearly rather more alarming for the popular press than even the troubles in Ireland or the "aggro" of the soccer grounds. The rioters had been seen to be white and black, and adult as well as youthful. They were normal residents of the English inner city, which was obviously in an abnormally depressed and distraught condition. They were not untypical of the readership of the English popular press itself. So the Daily Star, which had urged its readers to vote for the Tory Party in 1979, now responded to Margaret Thatcher's moral denunciations of the riots with the angry headline "Work, not Talk, is the Answer" (Daily Star, 7 July 1981). Nearly all editorial writers in the popular press supported some reversal of the Government's policy of cutting public expenditure, especially insofar as these policies affected the inner city. Margaret Thatcher spoke of the riots as her most difficult ten days in office, and, although community leaders in Toxteth and Manchester deplored the Government's complete failure to understand the resentments which fuelled the attacks of property and police, it seemed as if the events of the summer were going to force some mitigation of the unremitting monetarism of the Thatcher Government. A fundamental assumption in British society - that the underclass will acquiesce in the housing, the work and the social facilities it is offered, as well as in the place it is assigned in the class structure - was obviously at risk. Whether or not a reversal in Government policy does occur, the riots unambiguously achieved one other object. They decisively challenged the claim made by the radical right leadership of the Conservative Party to be offering out a politics of social order. Two years into the Thatcher Government, the fallacies in the "philosophical" assumptions of the radical right were more and more plain to see. The - 535 - The freeing of the market forces has resulted in a widespread sense of hopelessness and anger among large sections of the population, who were now experiencing a level of unemployment and poverty far beyond their previous expectations. The social relations that resulted from Government policies of cuts in public expenditure, so far from being those of a disciplined individualism, had taken the form of collective insubordination in the inner city, militant self-defence by the beleaguered black communities (against police harassment and racist organisations alike), and, most ominously of all, the collective violence engaged in by skiriheads and other poor whites against their Asian or West Indian neighbours. Each of these developments has a lengthy history, going back at least until the 1960's, but it was not until the late 1970's, and the moment of Thatcher's Election victory in 1979, that the desperation of a divided and dislocated under-class spilled over into violence on the streets. In the course of the Election campaign itself, on 23 April 1979, the Asian population in their thousands attempted to prevent the holding of a meeting of the National Front in the centre of their community by a massive peaceful sit-down; they were rewarded for their efforts with 347 arrests and a violent attack by the Special Patrol Group of the Metropolitan Police. The significance of the events in Southall on 3 July 1981 (a massive attack on the Hambrough Tavern) is clear: the Asian Youth Movement acted independently both of the police and their more moderate elders in order to remove a racist presence (a Skinhead band that attracts fascist support) from their community. Throughout 1979 and 1980, popular organisations in Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool and other major cities had forced the liberal press, and some television programmes, to pay critical attention to police practices, especially in the inner city and in areas of South London. Particular anger was directed at the use by police of ancient legal statutes to arrest young - 536 - blacks, in particular, on suspicion, and at the inflexible enforcement of the criminal law on drugs and alcohol in raids on West Indian social clubs and parties. Few of these complaints, however, found a place in the popular press, which continued to advocate uncritical support for the "British bobby". In 1980 and 1981, popular frustrations at the indifference of the media and officialdom, and the continuing harassment by the police, gave rise to the riots which occurred in Bristol, Brixton and Moss Side. And once again, in the course of the Scarman Inquiry into the Brixton riot, and during Mr. Heseltine 'S three -wedc investigation into the background to the troubles in Liverpool, leaders of the black community insisted that the central topic in these enquiries must be the question of police harassment and police racism. The evidence presented by the Metropolitan Police to the Scarmari Inquiry in explanation of their so-called "Swamp 81" campaign of 8th to 11 April in south London, when police swamped the areas around Brixton with a view to controlling the level of burglaries and "footpad crime", indicates why the community leaders are so concerned. In the course of the four days' work, the four specially established "Swamp 81" squads, comprising 114 police officers, made 2,101 stops and arrested 116 people, 72 of whom were residents of Brixton. Some 24 people of the people arrested were charged with offences connected with theft or burglary. But the vast bulk of those arrested were charged with carrying threatening weapons (screwdrivers, penknives and combs) (17 people), obstruction of or assault on a police officer (7 people) and a variety of drunk and disorderly and drugs offences and driving offences (10 people). (Anning, 1981). The police campaign had mainly "netted" - and therefore further alienated - ordinary and typical members of the local West Indian community. And whilst the campaign had been unsuccessful in identifying and controlling "muggers", it had nonetheless had the effect of producing further public evidence of the generalised criminality of the local black population. It is also clear that - 537 - the "stops" and "arrests" involved in this campaign (and in the policing of the riots in Moss Side and elsewhere) were also accompanied by significant amounts of racial harassment and verbal racist taunts on the part of individual police officers. It was little wonder that local community leaders and the ethnic press insisted that the question of police racism was central to the inquiries into the riots. Police racism was not, however, a favourite topic for the popular press. For the leader-writers and news journalists on these papers, the riots were primarily to be interpreted as an effect of the overwhelming deprivation in inner city areas. The looting that occurred in some of the riots enabled the press to present events as examples of individualism at work but in an undisciplined fashion. According to a youth interviewed by Jeremy Seabrook, people were "shopping without money". (Seabrook, 1981). This interest in consumer goods was hardly surprising. It had been in the name of such individual consumerism that the major transformation of Britain's urban centres had occurred through the post-war period. But this prioritisation of the interests of some possessive individuals over the social communities in which most individuals lived had massively prejudiced the possibility of social order in these areas (and also in the privatised council estates to which many were removed). Housing policies have continued to pursue the goal of providing individual privacy and possession, without reference to the communal traditions which sustained these neighbourhoods; and employment and social policy has continued to work to the advantage of the already-employed individual wage-earner, to the detriment of women, blacks and young people in the working class, who were thereby excluded from the consumer economy.