By Jodi Burkett
As part of my ongoing research into the creation of post-imperial Britain, particularly in changing conceptions of ‘race’ and attitudes to immigration, I have recently been reading reports by the Thatcher government regarding the ‘race riots’ in Handsworth in 1985. These documents, released after the 30th anniversary of the riots, reveal a government confident and self-assured in its belief that it was right in its handling of social and economic policies. However, there are hints that they were aware that something was not right in British society, although they fail to put a finger on what exactly it was. This in itself is quite revealing as one of the significant problems, it could be argued, was their very ignorance to what the real problems were.
Of course, I am not the only person interested in looking again at the tumultuous years of the early 1980s. In the last five(ish) years there have been numerous academic and public re-appraisals of the era, many of which have sought to draw parallels between the Cameron Coalition and then Conservative governments (2010-present) and the Thatcher governments. The first Thatcher government (1979-1983) was a period which saw extensive social unrest and protest, rivalled only by the second Thatcher government (1983-1987). As well as the ‘race’ riots, which I will discuss more in a moment, there was extensive labour unrest, the Falklands war, and the Northern Irish ‘troubles’, to keep the government busy ‘ensuring law and order’.
The ‘race riots’ which occurred between 1980 and 1985 have, quite rightly, been the subject of extensive scrutiny and debate. The first question which arises is how exactly to refer to them. For many involved, they should properly be understood as ‘uprisings’. The government was quite clear that they were ‘riots’, highlighting their lawlessness and aimlessness. The government depicted them as pointless destruction carried out by ‘alienated young black people who had opted out of society at large, who had no lawful occupation and who tended to be involved with drugs.’
There was, of course, never any evidence presented to support the accusation that most people involved in the riots were drug dealers – or indeed, that most of the black population of Handsworth was so occupied – as this statement suggests. Nor was there any exploration or understanding of what young black men, or indeed anyone else, should do when confronted with extremely high levels of unemployment. There was widespread agreement that these young people suffered some of the worst rates of unemployment across the country. In some places, unemployment rates for those aged 16 to 24 were up to 80%. What the government expected these young people to do with their time, or how they were expected to earn any money, was never discussed.
The government were keen to point out that in the wake of the Scarman Inquiry into the Brixton ‘riots’ of 1981, ‘£20 million of public money had been spent in Handsworth’ – on what exactly they didn’t elaborate. They were also adamant that no government representative should argue or even implicitly accept that ‘unemployment inevitably led to lawlessness’. This is, of course, true. What was clearly not understood was that opposition to government policies or, more precisely opposition to the treatment meted out by the police upon black communities in the name of upholding ‘law and order’, was not, and is not, synonymous with ‘lawlessness’.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department, Douglas Hurd, was happy to report that there was ‘very little sympathy in the area for the deeper social diagnoses’ that had been given by the Social Democratic Party, amongst others, as an explanation of the ‘riots’. This, however, never addresses whether there was any truth to the ‘deeper social diagnoses’, whatever they were, just that some nameless ‘local politicians’ did not have sympathy for them.
The criminalisation of young black men was not new in 1985 and persists today. What can looking into the events at Handsworth and these recently released government documents tell us? They speak to the ways in which ‘polite’ (read: white) British society was being created and re-created in this period. They highlight the blind spot that those in power had regarding the lived reality of young black men in some of Britain’s largest cities in the early 1980s. They show the development of policing in this period and the close relationship between patterns of policing and governmental views of certain groups. And this just scratches the surface…
Jodi Burkett is Principal Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth