Why does England riot? There are “complex political, social and economic factors” at work, most notably industrial decline and unemployment, exacerbated by irresponsible reporting and the widespread belief that policing is partisan. These were the conclusions of Leslie Scarman’s report into the riots in Brixton, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and elsewhere in the spring and summer of 1981. But he could have been writing about August 2024. England has again descended into violence – and this summer’s riots have come with their own scapegoats, hyperbole and missed opportunities for reform.
During the riots of 1981 – a series of racially aggravated clashes between black English youth and police – some politicians were keen to exploit and even celebrate unrest. “The street fighting was excellent, but could have been (and hopefully, will be) better organised,” said an editorial in London Labour Briefing, a party publication associated with the left of Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn and Ted Knight. Knight was the leader of Lambeth Council, which included Brixton, a district that he described as “under an army of occupation” due to the police response to the riots, with law enforcement using the “same apparatus of surveillance that one sees in concentration camps”.
The rhetoric around the 1985 Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham, triggered by the death of a black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, during a police search, was similarly inflammatory. During this night of violence, PC Keith Blakelock became the first British police officer killed in a riot for more than a hundred years. Bernie Grant, then the leader of the local council, attracted hostility after he was misquoted as saying: “The police got a bloody good hiding.” (He actually said: “The youth think they gave the police a bloody good hiding.”) Either way, he was denounced by left and right, and earned the nickname “Barmie Bernie” in the press.
The police had their own defenders. Kenneth Newman, chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, claimed there were “left-wing infiltrators” at work in Broadwater. The Daily Express went further, reporting “street-fighting experts trained in Moscow and Libya” and “a hand-picked death squad hell-bent on bloodshed” were among the rioters. This turned out to be fake news, the work of the notorious Fleet Street hoaxer Michael “Rocky” Ryan, who snuck dozens of fictitious stories into newspapers over the years. (The secret, he explained, was to “tell them what they want to hear”.)
Today, the media wants to hear that the rioting is the fault of social media – platforms infringing on their status as sole custodians of the news. This isn’t a new claim. At the turn of the century there was a wave of anti-globalisation protests, including one in London on May Day in 2000 that turned into a riot. A McDonald’s was wrecked, shops looted, the Cenotaph defaced and the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square adorned with a strip of turf, giving him a grass Mohican. (“This Was Their Vilest Hour” ran a Daily Mirror headline.) The Sun noted the protest was “largely organised on the internet” – the first time the medium was indicted for fuelling civil unrest.
By the time of the London riots in 2011, social media was widely blamed. Twitter, though, was seen as a force for good. It helped “mobilise clean-up operations and report on the trouble”, approved the Guardian. The evil in those days came from BlackBerry Messenger. In 2024 Elon Musk’s X is the network under suspicion.
Changes in the lines of communication and misinformation veil a deeper social truth about unrest. The anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, for instance, lasted for a week and only ended when the army was called in, shooting hundreds of demonstrators. They were far more serious than anything seen in the social media age, but predated even the Times newspaper.
Rioting represents a social problem: a breakdown in democracy, a feeling among a societal minority that it has been overlooked. Rioting inarticulately expresses underlying discontent – and draws attention to it. As Bernie Grant pointed out in 1985, politicians had ignored areas like Broadwater Farm for years: “Had it not been for the disturbances, they would never have heard of the estate and never have visited Tottenham.”
But greater attention on deprived communities did not result in meaningful change. The inquiry into the Broadwater Farm riots, conducted by Anthony Gifford, suggested little had changed since 1981, despite the Scarman report’s recommendations for policing reforms. There was still “racialism in the response of the rank and file of police”. The Macpherson Report in 1999 on the murder of Stephen Lawrence concluded that Scarman’s recommendations had still not been fully implemented. The Macpherson Report did mark some progress with its acknowledgement that the Metropolitan Police were “institutionally racist” (Scarman had considered the claim in 1981 and concluded it was “totally and unequivocally” untrue). The wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow.
Political reform can be even slower. Michael Heseltine was one of few MPs in Thatcher’s government to heed the warnings of 1981, arguing for the state to address the impact of economic and industrial decline. But his cabinet colleague Norman Tebbit was impatient with the idea that rioting was in any way related to mass unemployment. His own father had been unemployed in the 1930s, and “he didn’t riot, he got on his bike and looked for work”. Thatcher’s instincts were closer to Tebbit’s – riots were a moral not a social issue. Yet Heseltine was allowed to implement interventionist policies that did make a difference, particularly in Liverpool.
Thatcher’s home secretary William Whitelaw also adopted a more conciliatory tone than the prime minister. “We must develop policies designed to promote the mutual tolerance and understanding upon which the whole future of a free democratic society depends,” he told the Commons. It was Whitelaw who appointed Scarman, a largely liberal judge, to lead the enquiry. The public perception of Whitelaw was that he was a bumbling buffoon, but he resisted pressure to be more draconian, and later said: “The thing I am proudest of is that I managed to handle the riots in 1981 without being forced to take more repressive measures.”
This summer, the Labour government’s first response, rightly, was the restoration of order: Keir Starmer promised that those taking part in the riots would face “the full force of the law”. But Whitelaw’s refusal to overreact or push knee-jerk legislation through parliament seems unlikely to be emulated. There is talk of “toughening up” the Online Safety Act, and schools will have to teach children how to spot “fake news”. This is a rehash of the Thatcher-Tebbit line on morality, albeit a more fashionable, left-leaning one. The social dimension has again been downplayed. Unless Starmer and his government can find an intelligent way of interpreting this latest unrest, this phase of English rioting will not end in 2024.
Alwyn Turner is a historian and the author of “Little Englanders” and “All in it Together”
[See also: Is cocaine driving the British riots?]
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This article appears in the 14 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, England Undone