Why does England riot? There are “complex political, social and economic factors”, of course, most notably industrial decline and unemployment. But the problems are greatly exacerbated by outside agitators, by irresponsible reporting in the media, and by the widespread belief that policing was partisan and unequally applied. Those, at least, were the conclusions of Lord Scarman’s Report into the spate of riots that broke out in Brixton, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and elsewhere in the spring and summer of 1981. Plus ça change. And with England erupting once again over the past fortnight, it is revealing to compare this unrest (which seems, hopefully, to be over) with the violence of the past. As ever, British rioting has come along with its own scapegoats, hyperbole – and missed opportunities for reform.
Back in 1981, too, there were politicians keen to exploit the unrest, even to celebrate it. “The street fighting was excellent, but could have been (and hopefully, in future, will be) better organized,” said the editorial in London Labour Briefing, a publication associated with the left of Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn and Ted Knight. The latter was the leader of Lambeth Council, which included Brixton, a district that he said was “under an army of occupation”, with police using the “same apparatus of surveillance that one sees in concentration camps”.
We saw something very similar on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham in 1985, with the disturbances in which PC Keith Blakelock became the first British police officer killed in a riot for over a hundred years. Bernie Grant, leader of the local council, attracted a great deal of hostility after he was misquoted as saying at a public rally: “The police got a bloody good hiding” (he actually said “the youth think they gave the police a bloody good hiding”). Either way, Grant was denounced by left and right, and earned the nickname “Barmie Bernie” in the press.
From the other side, Kenneth Newman, chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was quick to criticise “leftwing infiltrators”. The Daily Express went further, discovering the presence in north London of “street-fighting experts trained in Moscow and Libya” and “a hand-picked death squad hell-bent on bloodshed”. This, however, turned out to be fake news, the work of notorious Fleet Street hoaxer Michael “Rocky” Ryan, who’d managed to get dozens of such fictitious stories in British newspapers over the years. (The secret, he explained, was simply to “tell them what they want to hear”.)
Today, of course, what the mainstream media want to hear is that it’s all the fault of social media outlets – the same ones, as it happens, that have stolen their status as custodians of the news. And while the maelstrom of online discourse may have swept up many gullible citizens, this isn’t an entirely new claim either. At the turn of this century, there was a wave of anti-globalisation protests, including one in London on May Day 2000 that turned into a riot. A McDonald’s restaurant 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 was keen to note that the demonstration was “largely organised on the internet” – the first time the internet had been indicted for civil unrest.
By the time of the English riots in 2011, social media was firmly identified as a problem. Not all of it, though: Twitter was then seen as a force for good. It helped “mobilise clean-up operations and report on the trouble”, approved the Guardian, “with mainstream journalists frequently using Twitter to make up-to-the-minute reports”. The evil in those days came from BlackBerry Messenger, “the cheapest social network, and the one used by legions of disaffected youth”. Ultimately, though, all the talk of outside interference and media, social or otherwise, is largely irrelevant. Lines of communication and misinformation may change, but not the essential elements. The Gordon Riots of 1780 lasted for a week and only ended when the army was called in, shooting hundreds of anti-Catholic demonstrators. That unrest was far more serious than anything seen in the social media age, but it predated even The Times.
Then as now, rioting represented a social problem: a breakdown in democracy, a feeling in a minority section of society that it’s been overlooked, left behind, its voice unheard. However inarticulately, rioting expresses underlying, unresolved problems and discontent. And – regrettably – it does attract attention. As Bernie Grant pointed out in 1985, politicians had ignored places 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.”
This was true, but it didn’t mean that lessons were learnt. There was another inquiry following Broadwater Farm, this time conducted by Lord Gifford. It suggested that, despite the Scarman Report’s recommendations for policing reforms, little had changed – 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, similarly concluded that Scarman had still not been fully implemented. And Macpherson did finally make a difference, finding that the Metropolitan Police – and, by implication, other forces – were “institutionally racist”. (Scarman had looked at the claim in 1981, and concluded that it was “totally and unequivocally” untrue.) The wheels of justice can grind exceedingly slow, even when greased with rioting.
Political reform can be even slower however. Michael Heseltine was one of the few in the Thatcher government to heed the warnings of 1981, arguing for the government to address the impact of economic and industrial decline. His cabinet colleague, Norman Tebbit, on the other hand, 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, famously, “he didn’t riot, he got on his bike and looked for work”. In this dispute, Thatcher’s own instincts lay far more with Tebbit – riots were a moral, not social, issue. Yet Heseltine was ultimately allowed to go ahead with interventionist policies that did make a difference, particularly in the regeneration of Liverpool.
Likewise, Thatcher’s home secretary, William Whitelaw, was permitted to adopt a more conciliatory tone than she would have used. “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, and it was he who appointed Lord Scarman, a mostly liberal judge, to lead the enquiry. The public perception of Whitelaw was that he was a bumbling buffoon, but he was not a man given to panic. 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.”
That masterly refusal to over-react, and the lack of knee-jerk legislation, rushed through Parliament in search of a headline, is not likely to be emulated by our current generation of politicians. The government’s first response, quite properly, is the restoration of order, complete with Keir Starmer’s soundbite about “the full force of the law”. Thereafter comes the question of changing those laws, and the signs are not good. There is much talk of “toughening up” the Online Safety Act, while school are to educate children about how to spot “fake news”. This is essentially a rehash of the Thatcher-Tebbit line of morality (albeit of a more fashionable, left-leaning stripe). The social dimension is downplayed, as it was following the 2001 riots in Bradford, Leeds and elsewhere, the events to which the last fortnight bears clearest comparison. Maybe this focus will change in the coming weeks and months. If not, the underlying problems will undoubtedly recur as the wheels of justice continue their slow grind.
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