Soon the red blood will be boiling,
And blue blood will be dead.
UB40, ‘Little by Little’ (1980)
STEVE RAMSEY: I come from a place where, unless you’re suffering from severe brain damage, you don’t talk to the Old Bill.
Ray Jenkins, Juliet Bravo (1981)
Thatcher has been stimulating attitudes which lead logically to fascism. City democracy – which is as relevant today as in Greece 2,500 years ago – and a healthy community politics are a bulwark against it.
David Blunkett (1983)
As the recession of the early 1980s dragged on, there was little enough to bring cheer to the nation. Perhaps the one big exception was the wedding on 29 July 1981 of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, closing the book – as it seemed at the time – on who would marry the man claimed by gossip columnists to be the world’s most eligible bachelor. In the years since 1976, when Charles had left the Royal Navy, the media had been obsessed with his alleged love-life, and a succession of young women from the British aristocracy and from the diminished ranks of Europe’s royal families were paraded through the pages of the popular press as prospective, or sometimes actual, fiancées. The front-runner was for a long while assumed to be Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, though the most significant proved to be Lady Sarah Spencer, whose younger sister would ultimately achieve the honour of providing the House of Windsor with a future heir.
It was the first wedding of a Prince of Wales in over a century, and it was a hugely popular event. He was thirty-three years old and the heir to the throne of the United Kingdom, she was twenty and the daughter of the 8th Earl Spencer; as the Archbishop of Canterbury said in his address, ‘Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made’. The media leapt gleefully at his image, though they might have done well to note his qualifying statement that this was an inadequate approach to life ‘because fairy stories regard marriage as an anti-climax after the romance of courtship’. So, of course, it was to prove, and Runcie, who knew the couple, was later to admit that ‘it was an arranged marriage’.
At the time, however, few were expressing such doubts and even fewer were permitted to make them public. The media was overjoyed to welcome such a photogenic and glamorous addition to the royal family, so clearly a step up from Princess Anne’s choice of Captain Mark Phillips, while workers in memorabilia firms were amongst the few who were putting in extra shifts that summer. It seemed as though the entire world was temporarily infatuated with the new princess, none more so than the American heavy metal star, Ted Nugent: ‘I’d drag my dick through a mile of broken glass just to wank off in her shadow,’ he declared. In a more conventional tribute, the country’s leading pop group, Adam and the Ants, celebrated by releasing a single titled ‘Prince Charming’ and, capitalizing on the huge television audience for the wedding, the BBC issued an album of their coverage; both records went to No. 1 in their respective charts.
Even so, there were a few discordant elements to be heard beneath the carefully arranged mood music. Anne’s wedding in November 1973 had coincided with the declaration of a state of emergency, amidst a fuel crisis that would soon bring down the government of Edward Heath; this time Charles’s wedding came in the same month as major riots in many towns and cities. Neither nuptial was thus entirely sprinkled with fairy dust, but the key difference was that where the power cuts and the emergency restrictions of the Heath government had been endured by the entire country, duke and dustman alike, the uprisings of the summer of 1981 provided no such sense of unity; rather they revealed that this was a divided nation, despite the enthusiastic embrace of the fantasy wedding by most of the population.
Amongst the dissident voices was that of King Juan Carlos of Spain, who objected to the fact that the couple’s honeymoon on the royal yacht Britannia was scheduled to include a high-profile stopover in the disputed territory of Gibraltar. Despite the Queen’s annoyance at his attitude (‘After all, it’s my son, my yacht and my dockyard,’ she insisted), he turned down an invitation to attend the wedding. So too did Barbara Cartland, the romantic novelist and step-grandmother of the bride, on the grounds that it was ‘common to cry in public’, and the Reverend Ian Paisley, because ‘I’m a plain man and I don’t particularly enjoy pomp and ceremony’. None of these attracted a great deal of coverage, nor even did the London Borough of Lambeth’s message of congratulations, which expressed the hope ‘that the common problems of newlyweds – unemployment, housing waiting lists, high mortgage rates and soaring inflation – do not detract from their future happiness’. Instead the media focused for its spoilsport stories on Ken Livingstone, the recently elected leader of the Greater London Council (GLC), who refused to take up his allocated seat in St Paul’s Cathedral, and instead spent the day greeting supporters of republican prisoners in Northern Ireland: a thousand black balloons were released by demonstrators at County Hall to mark the moment.
The attacks directed at Livingstone, as a minor theme within the media excitement over the occasion, were not without precedent. He had been exciting suspicion in some quarters ever since the Labour Party had won the GLC elections in May 1981, and had immediately followed their victory by deposing the current leader of the Labour group, Andrew McIntosh, in favour of the more left-wing Livingstone. The event was presented as a political coup – ‘His victory means full-steam-ahead red-blooded socialism for London,’ warned the Sun – but it was hardly unexpected; the Daily Telegraph had pointed out the week before: ‘If Labour is put in control of County Hall next week, it will almost certainly be led by Mr Ken Livingstone.’ For precisely that reason, the BBC had sent its cameras along to Livingstone’s own count on election night, while back in the studio Robert Mckenzie concluded: ‘my analysis of the people elected tonight shows that if the left-wing want to, they have got the votes to get rid of Mr McIntosh and put in Mr Livingstone.’
It was an exciting moment for the left, coming in the midst of Tony Benn’s bid to become deputy leader of the Labour Party, and at a time when Margaret Thatcher was at her lowest ebb in terms of popularity. On closer examination, however, the voting figures for that round of local elections were less encouraging than they might have seemed at first glance. Despite successes in Manchester, Liverpool, the West Midlands, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire (the latter taken by Labour for the first time), the psephologist Ivor Crewe warned that the swing simply wasn’t strong enough: ‘If London again proves to represent the nation,’ he wrote, ‘Labour is in serious trouble.’ The turnout for the GLC election was 44.5 per cent, with Labour taking 42 per cent of the vote, a couple of points ahead of the Conservatives; it had therefore won the support of just 18.5 per cent of the electorate, and even then, of the fifty Labour councillors that were elected, Livingstone reckoned only twenty-two were on the left of the party. Had the newly launched SDP been sufficiently organized to contest the election, the result would have been very different indeed, and would probably have produced an Alliance administration. In their absence, the left, despite being in a minority, proved themselves ferociously well organized and ended up not only with the leadership but with every one of the major offices in the new administration. On this somewhat slender base, Livingstone was determined to build a new style of local government, overtly political in its desire to change society, rather than merely to provide services, putting an end to what he contemptuously dismissed as ‘old white men coming along to general management committees and talking about rubbish collection’.
By the time Livingstone came to power in London, the pattern had already been set in terms of press coverage of left-wing council leaders. In 1980 the Daily Mail had thundered against the Walsall council led by former print worker Brian Powell (‘This little Kremlin in the heart of England’), inaugurating a period when local authorities were regularly denounced for daring to challenge the establishment. By 1981 the conflict between local and national governments was sufficiently high on the public agenda to warrant the commissioning of United Kingdom in the BBC’s Play for Today strand in 1981. Written by Jim Allen and starring Colin Welland and Ricky Tomlinson, it told the story of a council refusing to implement Whitehall-directed cuts and coming under attack from the police. ‘Who would say that it could not happen here?’ wondered the reviewer for The Times, while Allen was even more bullish in interviews than in the play itself. ‘You can predict with absolute certainty there’s going to be more riots,’ he was reported as saying. ‘But I don’t like the way the riots have been going – just wild and indiscriminate. There’s got to be direction. The councils should be organizing the people.’
What distinguished the GLC from the likes of Walsall was, first, the fact that it was in power in London, in full view of the media, and, second, that Livingstone was a gifted communicator and self-publicist, possessing a mischievous sense of humour that continually wrong-footed his opponents. He was also the recipient, willing or otherwise, of increased press attention when Tony Benn was hospitalized in June 1981 with what was diagnosed as Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Although Benn was discharged after two weeks, there was a temporary reluctance in Fleet Street to resume the more vicious level of attacks and, as Livingstone recognized, ‘I was the next best thing to run as a sort of end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it.’ The two men had already been linked by press and public alike: Paul Johnson called Livingstone ‘the poor man’s Benn’, while a graffito in London proclaimed: ‘Ken Livingstone is John the Baptist to Tony Benn’s Jesus’. Now they became virtually synonymous as leftist bogeymen, though still with the GLC leader seen as the junior member of the team – few recognized at the time that his influence was to be more profound than that of Benn.
As the press campaign against him gathered force, Livingstone claimed that Conservative Central Office was touting stories around Fleet Street about his allegedly deviant sexual practices, even if there was little consistency to the stories: they included both his supposed predilection for schoolgirls and his presence at an orgy where ‘he was buggered by six men in succession’. Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of the Sun, sent reporters to dig out some dirt on the man and was furious with the lack of results: ‘Fucking newts!’ he exploded. ‘All you can find is newts?’ In fact, Livingstone kept not newts but salamanders, as he had already made clear in an interview with The Times: ‘I feed them on slugs and woodlice. They just live under a stone, come out at night and are highly poisonous,’ he explained disarmingly. ‘People say I identify with my pets.’ The reality was that the worst crime that could have been laid at his door, on a personal level, was a lamentable dress sense that stooped so low as to include safari suits, but for some reason this evaded Fleet Street’s normal fascination with left-wing fashion.
In terms of his policies, too, the charge sheet was not quite as long as was claimed, since much of what Livingstone represented, however controversial at the time, came to be seen as conventional political wisdom. He argued that the domestic rates should be abolished and replaced by a local income tax, a policy adopted a decade later by the Liberal Democrats; he suggested that loitering in public lavatories in the hope of entrapping homosexual men was no job for a police officer; and he ensured that the first item from the manifesto to be implemented was free travel on public transport for pensioners.
This last was a curtain-raiser to the central policy on which Labour had been elected in London: a pledge to reduce fares on public transport by 25 per cent, following similar initiatives in Sheffield and elsewhere in the country. (An initial proposal to abolish fares altogether had been popular in some sections of the party, but had foundered on opposition from the trade unions, unwilling to lose the jobs of ticket collectors and bus conductors.) In the event, the policy, known as Fares Fair, was implemented alongside a complete restructuring of the fares structure, introducing the concept of a simplified zonal system – previously each journey had been individually priced – and the result was even stronger than the manifesto pledge, with a 32 per cent cut in fares. The funding for this was to be raised by a supplementary rate demand right across London, a development that aroused considerable indignation in Bromley, a borough in south-east London that was not served by London Underground. Why, the Conservative council in Bromley, wondered – with some justification – should their residents be expected to subsidize cheap transport for tourists and for those living in the central London boroughs? Advised that there was a possibility of the supplementary rate being illegal, the council took the GLC to court, and promptly lost. On appeal, however, the verdict of the lower court was overturned, and the GLC then appealed to the House of Lords where, to their and most commentators’ surprise, five Law Lords ruled unanimously in December 1981 that the policy was indeed illegal. The fact that it had been a key commitment in the manifesto – where the supplementary rate had also been trailed – was ruled to have no legal significance. Nor did the song ‘Give Us Back Our Cheap Fares’ by the country’s leading girl group Bananarama, released as the b-side of their hit ‘Really Saying Something’ (1982), manage to get the decision reversed.
There were many who felt that the Law Lords’ verdict was politically motivated, inspired by a wish on the part of the establishment to teach Livingstone a lesson. For he was by then attracting the most hostile coverage he was ever to receive, though the central cause for complaint was not his fares policy but his call for negotiations with the IRA and Sinn Fein as the only way to achieve a peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland. And that remained the greatest of all political taboos in Westminster and Fleet Street.
Terrorist attacks on mainland Britain were much reduced from their peak years, while in Northern Ireland the level of republican violence was also decreasing: 1980 saw fifty people killed by the IRA, around a fifth of the numbers killed in 1972, the worst year of the conflict. But the explosion in October 1981 of a nail bomb near the Chelsea barracks of the Irish Guards, killing two civilians, brought the nightmare back into public consciousness. It was in these circumstances that a speech by Livingstone to the Tory Reform Group at Cambridge University came to dominate the headlines. His comments that the IRA were not ‘just criminals or psychopaths’ failed to win over the leader-writers: ‘The conscience of the whole country is affronted by his remarks,’ said the Daily Express; ‘he is certainly not fit to run Britain’s capital city,’ decided the Daily Mail; while the Sun gave up half its front page to a photograph of Livingstone, accompanied by the headline THIS DAMN FOOL SAYS THE BOMBERS AREN’T CRIMINALS, and a description of him as ‘the most odious man in Britain’. (In the interests of balance, the other half of the front page was a story headed TORIES ON THE ROCKS, with a poll showing that only 44 per cent of Conservative voters still backed Thatcher.) Even other Labour members of the GLC were by now becoming impatient with Livingstone’s ability to generate negative publicity; apart from anything else, there was no obvious reason why he should have been addressing Tory undergraduates at Cambridge in the first place.
Livingstone wrote to The Times to clarify his position in purely practical terms: ‘The point I was trying to make is that to seek to crush the IRA as if they were simply criminals or lunatics will not work. It is the policy that has been tried for generations and still the killing persists.’ The terrorists were politically motivated, so that ‘if one is caught others come forward to take his place’. He also insisted that ‘I abhor all violence’. The protestations of pragmatism and pacifism, however, were a little disingenuous, for Livingstone also had a more straightforward political motive: ‘I have been consistently in favour of withdrawal from Ireland,’ he declared elsewhere. ‘It is in fact the last colonial war.’ Support for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland was far from uncommon amongst the public, but it was seldom expressed by leading politicians, and certainly not with an anti-imperialist argument. He had gone further in a radio interview on the British Forces Broadcasting Service, coming close to an incitement to mutiny: ‘What I would say to everyone who’s got arms in Northern Ireland, whether they are in the British Army or the IRA, is to put those arms down and go back to your home.’ It was this political position, as much as his comments about criminals, that was largely at the root of the press attacks. Nonetheless the use of the word ‘criminals’ was carefully chosen and very heavily loaded in 1981, for it alluded to the issue that had provoked the hunger strike by prisoners in the H-blocks of the Maze jail near Lisburn, a campaign whose first fatality had come just two days before the GLC elections.
The IRA had used the tactic of the hunger strike before, most notably with the sisters Marian and Dolours Price, convicted in 1973 of planting car bombs in London, who had demanded the right to be transferred to a prison in Northern Ireland. After a 200-day campaign (the length reflecting the fact that they were force-fed), they had won their demand. Their success, although it came with personal consequences for Dolours Price, who was to develop anorexia, established that it was a weapon that could again be deployed.
More recently the hunger strike had, somewhat unexpectedly, been adopted by the Plaid Cymru politician, Gwynfor Evans, who announced in May 1980 that he would be fasting to death, starting in the autumn, unless the government honoured its pre-election promise to set up a Welsh-language television channel. Along with more than two thousand others, he was already refusing to pay his TV licence in protest, and there had also been attacks on television transmitters, but it was the threat of a former MP killing himself that brought home the passions aroused by the cause, even if some were unsympathetic: ‘Gwynfor Evans can only die once,’ argued Delwyn Williams, Conservative MP for Montgomery. ‘If this government or any other government gives in to a threat of suicide by this foolish old man, what will be the next cause he threatens to die for?’ The government didn’t agree, and in September approved the introduction of the channel, to Evans’ delight: ‘This is the biggest victory we have ever won for the Welsh language. It will go far to secure the future for the language.’ And, despite initial reservations, William Whitelaw, the home secretary who made the decision to go ahead with Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C), himself came round to approving: ‘This channel has been a great success and for once I have reason to be glad that I bowed to pressure, not a usual experience.’ S4C became best known for its children’s series, including SuperTed, the first British animation to be screened on the Disney Channel in America, and Sam Tân (Fireman Sam); they were unlikely products of a hunger strike.
The month after the government’s capitulation on S4C, six IRA prisoners and one from the INLA splinter group launched their own hunger strike, demanding to be treated as political prisoners and not as ordinary criminals: given the rights of free association, of exemption from work and of wearing civilian clothing, rather than prison uniforms. This status had in fact been granted in 1972 (again after a hunger strike) but rescinded in 1976, since when there had been a campaign to have it restored. Initially this had taken the form of refusing to wear uniforms, instead going naked or using blankets for covering. It escalated into what became known as the dirty protest – a refusal to wash and the smearing of excrement on cell walls – and then into the hunger strike. The fast ended 53 days later amidst some confusion, the republicans claiming that the government had promised concessions, while Thatcher was insistent that ‘this was wholly false’. In any event, no concessions were forthcoming and, at the beginning of March 1981, the most famous hunger strike of all began, when Bobby Sands, an IRA man serving fourteen years for possession of firearms, refused food. He was to be joined at periodic intervals over the next months by others, one at a time, to maximize the potential publicity.
Thatcher’s approach remained resolutely uncompromising throughout: ‘What the terrorist prisoners wanted was political status,’ she wrote later, ‘and they were not going to get it.’ The republicans were equally uncompromising and over the next two months it became ever more likely that deaths would result. The stakes were raised still further when the parliamentary seat of Fermanagh and West Tyrone became vacant and Sands was nominated as the republican candidate, standing on an Anti H-Block/Armagh Political Prisoner ticket. He was duly elected to the House of Commons on 9 April, though obviously unable to take his seat, an event that attracted worldwide attention to the campaign (and prompted the swift passage of the Representation of the People Act 1981, banning any prisoner from standing for election). Thatcher was unmoved: ‘Crime is crime is crime,’ she insisted. ‘It is not political, it is crime.’ From the outset, the decision had been taken not to force-feed, and with no movement on either side, Sands died on 5 May after sixty-six days of refusing food. He was twenty-seven years old.
Sands’ funeral was attended by upwards of one hundred thousand people, and there was an escalation of terrorist attacks, but the sense of outrage was not confined to republicans in Northern Ireland. There were demonstrations across Europe, Lech Walesa, leader of the Polish free trade union Solidarity, expressed his sympathy, and various French towns renamed streets in Sands’ name. Not to be outdone, the Iranian government renamed Winston Churchill Street in Tehran, where the British Embassy stood, as Bobby Sands Street. More significantly, there was an upsurge in republican feeling in America, which helped to fund IRA activities for the remainder of the civil war. And, although Thatcher showed no regret at his death (‘He chose to take his own life; it was a choice that his organization did not allow to many of its victims’), there were signs that there might be movement elsewhere in the British political establishment: James Callaghan spoke in the Commons in favour of an independent Ulster, despite being asked not to do so by Michael Foot, while Roy Jenkins was reported to have ‘now made up his mind after much reflection that Britain should “withdraw” from Northern Ireland’.
Other prisoners followed on from Sands and, by the time the strike was called off in November 1981, a total of ten men had starved themselves to death. It was, wrote Thatcher, ‘a significant defeat for the IRA’, but it was also a significant victory for Sinn Fein, the republican movement’s political wing. Its profile was now raised internationally, and it had established the principle of contesting Westminster elections; henceforth the republicans were to pursue a twin-track strategy of armed struggle and political engagement, as encapsulated in the slogan ‘a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other’. The path from here to the peace process launched during John Major’s premiership was to be a tortuous one, but a step had been taken. At the time, however, no one could plausibly have predicted any such outcome. Amongst the most depressing aspects of the whole eight-month campaign was the way in which the sacrifice of human life came to seem less and less important. Sands had attracted massive coverage and support, but there was a law of diminishing returns, as even sympathizers with the cause acknowledged. ‘For the media and supporters alike, the gruesome truth was similar to the later moon landings,’ wrote Mark Steel. ‘It was impossible to get as emotional about the fifth as the first.’
The same sense of exhaustion applied to the media’s treatment of the entire conflict, which largely comprised routine outbreaks of fury sweetened with suitably sentimental stories, as emerged from the 1982 London park bombings. One IRA device exploded in Hyde Park as mounted soldiers of the Blues and Royals were passing; minutes later, a second destroyed the bandstand in Regent’s Park, where the band of the 1st Battalion, the Royal Green Jackets was performing. Seven musicians and four soldiers were killed that day, but the press attention focused on a horse named Sefton that was seriously injured in the attack. A fortnight later Sefton was considered well enough to meet the media at a photo-call, though according to a rumour recorded at the time by Alan Bennett: ‘Sefton has so far recovered that his wounds no longer register on camera so make-up is applied.’
The prevailing attitude was summed up by a cynical television reporter in Douglas Livingstone’s 1985 television drama We’ll Support You Evermore: ‘The trouble with Northern Ireland is the built-in boredom factor.’ The play starred John Thaw as Geoff Hollins, the father of a British officer found murdered by the IRA. ‘Your son was a hero,’ he’s told by the authorities. ‘You can be proud of him.’ But Hollins suspects they’re hiding something, and travels to Belfast in an attempt to uncover the truth of the death. What he actually finds is ‘the only Third World country in Europe’, a decaying alien environment in which every word and deed is swathed in cultural subtleties he can scarcely begin to comprehend. ‘It’s supposed to be the same bloody country,’ he says in bewilderment, shortly before he returns home, and an army liaison officer puts him straight: ‘I can’t imagine you really believe that.’ Hollins’ sheer bewilderment, as he stumbles into an army patrol in the Falls Road and is directed back through the wall of the Peace Line to the Shankill Road, reflected the feelings of much of mainland Britain.
This was the context in which Ken Livingstone, ‘the IRA-loving, poof-loving, Marxist leader of the GLC’ (to use the words of the Sunday Express), made his comments about the need for communication with republican leaders, since they were clearly not ordinary criminals. Unsurprisingly, his words fell on deaf ears in both Westminster and Fleet Street, and periodic explosions of violence continued to punctuate the decade.
Less inflammatory, though cheekily provocative nonetheless, was the GLC’s decision to exploit the prime location of County Hall, just across the Thames from Parliament, to display a huge banner announcing the number of unemployed people in London. Not that there was any agreement on what the figures actually were. By 1983 the official statistics showed that there were three million unemployed in the country (12 per cent of the workforce), but there had been substantial changes to the way the numbers were compiled, and the ‘real’ figure – or rather the one that bore direct comparison with the methodology used in 1979 – was closer to four million. Or, as New Socialist magazine, saw it: ‘When those on special government schemes and those not claiming benefits are counted, five million people who want a job have not got one.’ From the other side of the political divide, Norman Tebbit was later to say that there was so much systematic fraud in claiming, ‘such widespread abuse, that I think it is now quite reasonable to doubt if unemployment ever reached three million at all.’ He was, for once, on the losing side of the argument and, despite all the disputes, the expression ‘three million’ became the accepted shorthand for mass unemployment, and the best-known statistic of the decade.
Behind the figures lay very considerable discrepancies, in terms of race, age and location. According to the 1971 census, unemployment amongst men of Asian and Afro-Caribbean descent was 138 per cent of the level experienced by white men. Ten years later, with unemployment having more than tripled, that differential alone would have produced many more black unemployed, but in fact the recession impacted disproportionately in terms of colour, to such an extent that even the Sun recognized there was an issue here: ‘Unemployment in Britain rose by 37 per cent in the year up to last August,’ it reported in late 1980. ‘Amongst black people it rose by 47.5 per cent.’ Even in the relative prosperity of London and the south-east there were places where unemployment, more especially youth unemployment, became an habitual way of life, as described by a character in Martin Millar’s Brixton novel Milk, Sulphate & Alby Starvation: ‘Everyone I know is broke, no one ever has any money apart from a brief flurry on giro day, sitting celebrating this fortnight’s pittance in the pub and maybe even lashing out and buying something to eat.’ Rural areas too often suffered disproportionately, though seldom attracted much attention: in 1983 the unemployment rate stood at 17.5 per cent in Cornwall and at 25.5 per cent in the Western Isles, way above the national average.
But it was the north of England, where the decline in manufacturing industry was most concentrated, that tended to be the primary focus of political concern. In Hartlepool, it was reported, it was more likely that a school-leaver would get a place at university than a job. The resultant desperation was encapsulated in the story of Graeme Rathbone and Sean Grant, two unemployed 19-year-olds in the Merseyside town of Widnes, who committed suicide together in the summer of 1981. ‘What have we got left to live for now there is no work for anyone?’ they wrote, before killing themselves with the exhaust fumes of a stolen car. ‘All teenagers have to do is hang around street corners getting moved on by police who think you are up to something.’ Interviewed afterwards, the mother of one said that her son had become increasingly withdrawn in the last months of his life and, when she had asked him why he was sitting around at home and not going out, he had replied: ‘Well, there’s nowhere to go, Mum. There’s no jobs, no money, there’s nothing to do. You just walk up and down the street. It’s the same every day.’ The story sparked the creation of one of Mike Leigh’s more depressing films, Meantime, which centred on the relationship between two unemployed brothers (played by Phil Daniels and Tim Roth), set in the East End of London.
The dispiriting tedium of youth unemployment was caught in the Specials’ single ‘Do Nothing’ (1980), written by guitarist Lynval Golding: ‘I’m just living in a life without meaning, I walk and walk, do nothing.’ As the decade developed and began to become obsessed with ascribing a financial value to everything, it was discovered that even inactivity had a price: in 1985 a Kent farmer named Eddie Waltham was reported to be employing youths at a wage of £50 a week to walk around his cherry orchard banging bits of wood together to scare off starlings. So desperate were the times that five unemployed school-leavers moved from Birmingham to take up these roles as human scarecrows.
It wasn’t just the young. Amongst the most famous fictional creations of the first Thatcher term, was Yosser Hughes, who became a symbol of the wastelands of the north. First seen in Alan Bleasdale’s 1980 television play The Black Stuff, which followed a gang of six Liverpool labourers laying tarmac on a job in Middlesbrough, Yosser (played by Bernard Hill) was a nightmare character fuelled by violence, greed and hatred. When the gang stop to give a lift to a female student who’s hitch-hiking to Leeds, Yosser greets her with a leer: ‘Been raped recently, love?’ The original drama was followed two years later by a series of five plays, Boys from the Blackstuff, that included ‘Yosser’s Story’, where he struck a much more pathetic figure. Increasingly gaunt, dressed in shabby black clothes, and with scars across his forehead from his tendency to headbutt anyone and anything that stood in his way, he now looked like a Scouse incarnation of Frankenstein’s monster, the unwitting creation of a society that can find no place for his lack of talents. ‘He wasn’t very good at anything,’ notes his ex-wife, Maureen, a condition exacerbated by his own frank admission that ‘Nobody likes me’. His plea to everyone he encounters: ‘Gis a job’, became something of a national catchphrase, a plea to the government, and was used on a Labour Party document, ‘Working Together for Britain’, about youth unemployment. As he sinks into mental illness, however, even that desperate cry subsides in favour of a simple declaration, ‘I’m Yosser Hughes’, as though – with his job, his children and his house all taken from him by a system over which he has no control – the only thing he has left to hold onto is a memory of his identity. ‘I thought I knew where I was going once,’ he says simply, in a rare lucid moment. ‘There’s nowhere left to go.’
The fear amongst many was that the persistence of unemployment would pass onto the next generation, in effect to Yosser’s children. In 1981 Jack Chambers, the president of the National Union of Teachers, warned that school discipline was being adversely affected as children witnessed unemployment in their families and concluded that this was destined to be their future too. There was also, he said, an increasing number resorting to alcohol, drug and solvent abuse.
Drugs, of course, had been a central part of youth culture since at least the 1960s, but over recent years there had been a shift in the market position of the substances involved, with amphetamines and LSD used to heighten sensory perceptions, being overtaken by glue and heroin, the function of which was mostly deadening. The pursuit of oblivion through solvent abuse had seemed exotically alien when New York band the Ramones included the song ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’ on their 1976 debut album; by 1981 the numbing effects were turning up in the home counties’ world of Ruth Rendell’s detective Inspector Wexford, called out to Sewingbury Comprehensive ‘where there was an alarming incidence of glue-sniffing amongst 14-year-olds’. Nationally, the number of deaths attributed to solvents rose from thirteen in 1980 to sixty-one, two years later, with one estimate suggesting that 10 per cent of teenagers were regular users of glue and other inhalants, and that one in three 14-year-olds had tried it.
Parallel to this was the rise of heroin, a trend linked to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the subsequent Islamic revolution. ‘Desperate businessmen are using heroin as a compact way of getting their frozen capital out of the country,’ reported the Daily Mirror in the summer of 1979. ‘Farmers in the opium-growing north of the country have doubled their acreage this year.’ The result, the paper said, was a spectacular collapse in the price of the drug on the British market, from £200 a gram to just £50 in the space of six months. Soon it was possible to buy a wrap for five pounds, and by 1984 there were an estimated 50,000 regular users in the country. In response, the government launched an awareness campaign, under the slogan ‘Heroin screws you up’, though it wasn’t an unmitigated success: ‘We were warned,’ remembered health minister Edwina Currie, ‘that the horribly pimply youth who was the main focus of some of the 1986 advertisements was in danger of becoming a cult hero, with requests for his poster coming in, so we put a stop to that and his face disappeared from our campaigns.’ Meanwhile the children’s television soap Grange Hill was running a storyline about the addiction to heroin of schoolboy Sammy ‘Zammo’ McGuire (Lee Macdonald), out of which emerged the 1986 hit single ‘Just Say No’.
As ever in a recession, one route out of the ranks of youth unemployment was through recruitment into the police and the armed forces. In Reginald Hill’s 1984 crime novel Exit Lines, he wrote of ‘a trio of young constables whom Detective-Superintendent Dalziel had unkindly nicknamed on their arrival two months earlier Maggie’s Morons, suggesting that their recruitment into the force was more the result of Mrs Thatcher’s economic policies than a natural vocation’. Charley Frostick, another character in the same novel, talks about why he took the other route and chose to join the army: ‘It’s better than being out of work. I was pig-sick of that. In the end it was either the police or the army and I didn’t fancy running into bother with my old mates.’
The idea that there would be ‘bother’ seemed almost taken for granted, as increasingly it was being. Fay Sampson’s novel for teenagers, Sus, told the story of a group of provincial youth who find themselves harassed by the police at every turn. ‘What did I do wrong?’ asks one after an encounter with yet another officer, and his black friend replies: ‘You don’t have to do anything. You just got to be sixteen, that’s all. You’re young. You’re male. To the fuzz, that scores two out of three. You want to try being black as well?’ The central scene in the book sees the main character going on a CND march and being beaten up by the police, after which he’s tricked into signing a confession that sees him prosecuted for assaulting a police officer in the course of his duty. (The title of the novel referred to the so-called sus law that gave police officers the right to stop and search anyone on suspicion of wrong-doing without having to account for that suspicion – it was widely believed that it was used to target black youth in particular.) So commonplace did the idea of conflict between police and youth become that eventually even alternative comedy began to send it up; in the sitcom Filthy, Rich and Catflap, written by Ben Elton, Rik Mayall’s character turns to the camera after a scene of police violence and sneers: ‘If you don’t like the police, next time you get beaten up try calling an alternative comedian.’
The relationship of the police with the public was to come under ever greater strain during the decade. In North Wales in 1980, there was considerable concern over the tactic of mass arrests in the wake of nationalist-inspired arson attacks on English-owned holiday homes. ‘People were taken from their beds during the night or snatched from the street and then held for several days,’ wrote criminologist Phil Scraton. ‘With no access granted to lawyers and no information given to friends and relatives concerning their whereabouts, those arrested virtually disappeared for several days. Eventually they were returned to their homes without being charged.’ There were many who saw such actions as being a deliberate form of intimidation, a view articulated by Ken Livingstone: ‘The police are one of the most worrying aspects of society and have become a very political organization indeed.’ A similarly heavy-handed approach was most notoriously directed towards areas with a substantial black population, where it was alleged that the policing was compounded by an overt racism. ‘When you canvas police flats at election time,’ claimed Livingstone, ‘you find they are either Conservatives who think of Thatcher as a bit of a pinko or they are National Front.’
The 1980 film Babylon, directed by Franco Rosso and set in south London, made these themes explicit, showing a black character being violently assaulted and framed by police officers, for no reason other than to alleviate their boredom. It ended with a police raid on a club, where a sound system battle was being staged; as the picture faded and the credits rolled, the soundtrack carried a defiant chant of ‘We can’t take no more of that!’ It was to prove a prophetic slogan.
The late-1970s had seen sporadic conflict between the police and black youths, particularly at the annual Notting Hill Carnival, but it was not until the Thatcher years that the underlying hostilities really exploded. When they did, in April 1980, it was unexpectedly not in London, Liverpool or Birmingham – their time would come – but in Bristol. Unnoticed by the rest of the country, tensions had been building in the city for some time: black unemployment had doubled over the last four years, at a time when it was in decline locally amongst white workers, and there had been a steady stream of complaints about a campaign of police harassment that had, amongst other things, closed down all but one of the black-owned cafés in the St Paul’s area, where prostitution, cannabis-smoking and unlicensed drinking were said to be rife. It was a mass raid by uniformed policemen and drug squad officers on that last remaining café that provoked a spontaneous fight back by some 2,000 youths, forcing the police off the streets for several hours. Buildings and police cars were burned, causing an estimated half-a-million pounds’ worth of damage, before order was restored.
This was not, despite the inevitable tone of much of the coverage, a race riot as such, a conflict between white and black; rather, in the words of one St Paul’s resident: ‘This is the start of a war between the police and the black community.’ Twelve people were later charged with riotous assembly, a serious offence that brought a potential sentence of life imprisonment, but none was convicted. From the state’s perspective, the most worrying aspect of the events was the withdrawal of the police at the height of the disturbances; it was ‘unacceptable’, insisted William Whitelaw, and he set up an inquiry into the police response to the riot, though not into their prior behaviour, nor into what might lie at the root of the problem. Perhaps he felt there was little need, since the answer was relatively obvious and required government action that was unlikely to be forthcoming. ‘The causes, then, lie in the squalor and deprivation of decayed urban centres, in empty lives, and lack of work and opportunity,’ noted an editorial in the Sun. ‘These same conditions exist on a far greater scale in other cities: Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and London itself.’
Indeed they did, as did heavy-handed policing, and a year later a police operation in Brixton, south London sparked an explosive two days of rioting, more serious than any comparable disorder thus far in the century. The estimated damage this time amounted to £6.5 million, while hundreds were injured, with police casualties outnumbering civilians by around three to one. Petrol bombs were used on a widespread scale for the first time on the British mainland, and several buildings were burnt down, though the arson was not indiscriminate: the local Law Centre and the branch of Marks & Spencer remained untouched, while a pub with a reputation ‘of having in the past discriminated against black people’ was attacked. So too was a newsagent that ‘was alleged to have refused to serve homosexuals’. It was, said Whitelaw, ‘a shameful episode in our nation’s life.’ Amongst those arrested was the future comedian Mark Steel (‘Sorry about the colour, sarge,’ said the arresting officer apologetically), who recorded his observations at the station: ‘ “Black bastards,” said a copper as he smashed a truncheon into the face of a lad stood about ten yards from me. A line of black youth descended the stairs at the back of the station, each of them with their face covered in blood.’ Others provided similar stories of police action; John Clare, the BBC’s community affairs correspondent, witnessed three officers attack a photographer who was taking a picture of a man being arrested: ‘his camera was wrenched away, thrown into the gutter and stamped on,’ it was reported, and the photographer ‘was severely beaten up with the police aiming at his groin: the motorcycle he had been riding when he took the picture was dragged along the road and its petrol tank ripped open’.
Again this was not a race riot, but an attack on a seemingly indifferent society and on policing practices. ‘Fuck monetarism, fuck the free market, and more specifically fuck the police,’ as one sympathetic writer put it. ‘There is police violence,’ a retired detective, John Scott, told the Labour Party conference later that year, ‘and while there are many people in the police force who are not racially or politically prejudiced, the vast majority are.’ Other commentators were keen to explore a wider dimension; journalist John Cole, soon to become the BBC’s political editor, drew parallels with the American riots of the mid-1960s and concluded: ‘The casus belli of a youth war therefore lies in unemployment, bad housing, the breakdown of morality and of family/school discipline, a more rebellious attitude to authority in this generation, over-reaction by the police, the violence of youth culture, of some rock music . . . The list trails on to infinity.’
Political reaction was divided, even within the Labour group on Lambeth Council, within whose environs Brixton lay. The council leader, Ted Knight, complained about saturation policing not merely before but after the event: ‘Lambeth is now under an army of occupation,’ he said, claiming that the police were using the ‘same apparatus of surveillance that one sees in concentration camps.’ More publicly, an editorial in the magazine London Labour Briefing, a journal particularly associated with both Knight and Livingstone, caused some controversy with an editorial that argued: ‘An alternative view would be that the street fighting was excellent, but could have been (and hopefully, in future, will be) better organized.’ Such attitudes were never going to be condoned by the party’s national leadership, but they did presage future events, identifying the left as apologists for riotous behaviour in a way that would become particularly associated with Bernie Grant in Haringey. And there was a further hint of the future when another Lambeth councillor, the then unknown Peter Mandelson, broke ranks to denounce Knight, claiming that he was ‘screaming and raging and saying the most bizarre things’.
The official government response again fell to Whitelaw as home secretary. Less than a week before the Brixton riot, he had rejected Enoch Powell’s latest call for the repatriation of black Britons to their countries of racial origin, with an unequivocal endorsement of a multi-racial society that wasn’t shared by all members of his party: ‘Black people are part of this country and part of our future.’ Now, he managed to resist the press calls for immediate and draconian action and instead appointed Lord Scarman – said to be one of the more liberal members of the judiciary, though he had been one of the Law Lords who ruled against the GLC’s Fares Fair policy – to chair an inquiry into the riots. Whitelaw’s statement to the Commons concluded that ‘we must develop policies designed to promote the mutual tolerance and understanding upon which the whole future of a free democratic society depends’, and he was later to claim, with some justification, that: ‘The thing I am proudest of is that I managed to handle the riots in 1981 without being forced to take more repressive measures.’
Even as Scarman was installing himself in Lambeth Town Hall to collect evidence for his inquiry, the first week of July 1981 saw another outbreak of rioting, first in Toxteth, Liverpool, followed swiftly by Southall in West London, Moss Side in Manchester and Handsworth in Birmingham. There were smaller disturbances too in a dozen other places, including Leeds, Preston, Wolverhampton, Hull and again in Brixton. The worst of these were in Toxteth, where the police used CS gas for the first time on the mainland and where the first fatality was recorded – a disabled man named David Moore was killed after being hit by a police van driving on a footpath. Gradually the wave of disorder subsided, just in time for the nation to celebrate the royal wedding, but a pattern had been set that was to recur throughout Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.
When Scarman did deliver his report, it was critical of the police, even if some felt that it pulled its punches: ‘racial prejudice does manifest itself occasionally in the behaviour of a few officers on the street,’ he conceded, but ‘the direction and policies of the Metropolitan Police are not racist.’ He recommended that greater efforts be made to recruit black officers, and that racist behaviour be made a disciplinary offence, with dismissal as the normal penalty. What was most striking was the placing on official record for the first time of extremely hostile attitudes towards the police and of so many anecdotal accounts that they could hardly be ignored – even amongst many black people of an older generation, the Scarman Report came as a revelation.
The balanced and carefully weighted liberalism of Scarman’s words, however, was enough to infuriate some senior officers. James Anderton, the chief constable of Greater Manchester, claimed that, if the report’s recommendations were implemented, ‘the character of the British police would never be the same again.’ More subtly, the Metropolitan Police staged a propaganda counter-offensive by releasing crime figures that showed for the first time the race of the offender, but only in the categories of robbery and violent theft, as though wishing to imply that it was black criminality that caused all their problems. They were rewarded by front-page headlines such as the Sun’s THE YARD BLAMES BLACK MUGGERS – HUGE RISE IN STREET CRIME. When asked why there was no similar racial breakdown for other, perhaps more serious, crimes such as rape or murder, Assistant Commissioner Gilbert Kelland explained that the figures for robbery were a response to ‘public opinion and pressure’: ‘There is a demand for this information from the public and from the media on behalf of the public.’ Sections of the media were indeed satisfied, but many others remained unconvinced; Lord Lane, the Lord Chief Justice and not a man noted for his radical tendencies, dismissed the statistics as being ‘mostly misleading and very largely unintelligible.’
The emphasis on race in the Scarman report and in the media coverage was to some extent a criticism that the government was content to accept. Much more concerning would have been if the blame had been directed at its economic policies. Yet, despite Whitelaw’s insistence that of those arrested in Brixton ‘the majority, far from being unemployed, held steady jobs’, there were some in the Conservative Party with a sneaking suspicion that mass unemployment had a part to play in the wave of civil unrest. One party member at the 1981 conference had the temerity to raise it as a possibility, provoking Norman Tebbit’s most famous comment: ‘I grew up in the ’30s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.’ In an unfairly distorted form (‘on your bike’), that response came to symbolize for millions what was perceived to be the Tories’ callous indifference to the unemployed, and Tebbit came to rival Thatcher herself as a hate figure for the left. It was a position that for the most part he appeared to enjoy greatly, though there were times when even he could be riled. In early 1983 he suggested that those on the dole weren’t really trying hard enough: ‘despite the three million unemployed I had been unable to find someone to paint the gates of my home in Berkhamstead’. He wasn’t amused when he subsequently found the gates daubed with red paint, with demonstrations being staged outside.
Although the ravages of unemployment were to continue, festering into the next century, the images of those few weeks in July 1981, when the streets of so many British cities seemed to have been taken over by rioting mobs, juxtaposed with the pomp and celebrations of the royal wedding, were perhaps the most emblematic of how divided society had become. And just as the wedding produced a No. 1 single in ‘Prince Charming’, so too did the riots. ‘Ghost Town’ by the Specials was the high point of the politicized pop of the early-1980s, a record that captured the claustrophobic desolation of boarded-up high streets and urban decay, and it reached the top of the charts as Toxteth was in flames. The lyrics were sparse and effective (‘No job to be found in this country, can’t go on no more, people getting angry’), but it was the perfection of the production, the bleakly beautiful sound, that made it such a triumph. For many the single became a touchstone: ‘the most effective opposition to Her Majesty’s Government’, in the words of John O’Farrell. Others weren’t so certain. It so happened that the record was a hit at the time of the 900th edition of Top of the Pops and, to celebrate this historic event, the veteran disc jockey David Jacobs was invited back to present the show on which he had worked so often back in the 1960s. And as ‘Ghost Town’ came to an end, his comment inadvertently summed up the mood of the nation: ‘Oh dear, that wasn’t very cheery, was it?’