Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (63 page)

The public pronouncements of the prime minister and the rhetoric at successive Conservative Party conferences left little doubt that the Tories were the self-styled party of law and order. The
reality was more complex. While Thatcher could be labelled as, at least by instinct, a hanger and flogger, she had actually long ceased to regard bringing back the birch as practical politics
(nevertheless, she did vote against scrapping corporal punishment in state schools when, on a free vote, Parliament decided, by a majority of one, to end the practice in November 1986). Even the
proposal for the restoration of capital punishment, which she supported, was restricted to those found guilty of terrorism or killing police officers, and would therefore not have impinged upon the
vast majority of homicide cases. When it was debated in the Commons, soon after the Conservatives came to power, in July 1979, MPs rejected the proposal by 362 to 243 (among Tory MPs the vote was
228 in favour and ninety-four against, the latter group including the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw). Despite occasional calls to give all police officers the protection of firearms, the
government preferred to keep Britain’s streets as the only ones in Western Europe routinely policed by an unarmed force.

These were not the only differences between tough talk and more nuanced action. Conviction rates did not remotely correspond with the level of crimes being perpetrated. By 1985, only 22 per cent
of notified robberies were cleared up.
²²
The numbers found guilty of indictable offences increased during the first half of the decade, only to
fall so sharply after 1985 that in England and Wales there were nearly seventy-three thousand fewer sentences handed down in 1989 than in 1979 – despite the intervening rise in crimes
committed.
²³
The ratio of prisoners to the level of criminal convictions was lower during the eighties than in any previous decade of the
twentieth century.
²⁴
The Home Office expressed the desire that judges should not impose custodial sentences on those
responsible for non-violent burglaries because of the fear that putting such (usually) young offenders in prison, however briefly, merely enrolled them in an academy of crime and brutality which
would make their rehabilitation less, rather than more, likely. This attitude was particularly prevalent when Douglas Hurd was Home Secretary, between 1985 and 1989, since he regarded the increase
in the average annual prison population in England and Wales from 42,220 to 46,000 over the previous five years as a sign of policy failure rather than of success – though it was only by the
end of his Home Office tenure that his efforts to reduce custodial sentences began to have an effect.
²⁵
By contrast, it was during the nineties
that the governments of first John Major and then Tony Blair actively propounded a ‘prison works’ strategy to reverse the comparatively liberal attitude of the eighties. A far cry from
the 1985 statistics that had alarmed Douglas Hurd, by 2008 the prison population exceeded eighty thousand. This was a shift of policy that coincided with – whether or not it engineered
– the falling crime rates experienced in Britain, the United States and most other industrialized Western countries at the end of the century.

Policing in the eighties was far from confined to detecting and preventing individual criminal acts. In contrast to the relative civic order of the post-war period, policing had also come to be
about dealing with displays of drunken rowdiness in town centres – the decade gave birth to the term ‘lager lout’ – as well as controlling violent mass protest and outbursts
of potent thuggery. The rise of football hooliganism provided one test, the containment of political rallies and industrial disputes that turned to violence another. The pitched battles fought
during the 1984 miners’ strike and the 1986 ‘siege’ of Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper printing plant at Wapping are discussed in the next chapter. In the year between those two
conflicts between management and unions, there was a return of full-scale urban uprisings whose distinctive feature was racial tension and whose target was the police. The rioting in several
English inner-city areas in the autumn of 1985 was a reminder that the cinders of the ‘long hot summer’ of 1981 had not been fully extinguished.

Events began on 9 September in the Lozells area of Handsworth in west Birmingham, when the arrest of a suspected drug trafficker triggered a violent response from local youths – mostly
black – who began attacking the police and engaging in widespread looting and arson, which culminated in the burning to death of two Asian shopkeepers in their post office. An even wider
breakdown of order took place on 28 September, when a bungled police raid in Brixton resulted in the accidental shooting of the mother of Michael Groce, an armed robber who days previously had
evaded capture by
sticking a gun into the apprehending policeman’s mouth. The rumour quickly spread that Mrs Groce had been killed (she had, in fact, been crippled by
the shot), inciting fury among those in the black community who saw this as just the most grievous instance of how the police’s prejudices had remained untouched by the lessons of the Scarman
report. A crowd of local black youths responded by attacking the nearby police station with Molotov cocktails. The efforts of a black priest to pacify the mob through a loudhailer had to be
abandoned when he, too, came under a shower of fire-bombs. As news of the disturbances spread, the mostly black rioters were joined by white thugs, alongside agitators from the Revolutionary
Communist Party and the anarchist group Class War. Shops were ransacked and set ablaze, as was a block of flats on Gresham Road and the Conservative Club on Effra Road. In the ensuing battle, a
freelance photo-journalist working for the
Sunday Telegraph
was set upon by looters and beaten up so severely that he died from head injuries, and two 23-year-old white girls (one reportedly
an MP’s daughter) were raped by black youths, one in her house, the other openly in the street.
²⁶
Fifty-three people were injured and 230
arrested.

Three days later, riots broke out again in Toxteth, following the charging of four black youths over a stabbing incident. Then, on 6 October, the trouble moved to the Broadwater Farm estate in
Tottenham, in north London, ignited by similar circumstances to those that had sparked the trouble in Brixton. In the trauma of a police raid on her home, the (black) mother of a man suspected of
possessing stolen goods suffered a heart attack and died. Within hours, the housing estate had erupted, with mostly black youths – joined by some whites, who were described as
‘skinheads’ – engaging in widespread looting and assaults on police lines. With its grim, forbidding concrete gantries and elevated walkways, Broadwater Farm proved the ideal
citadel from which to lob concrete blocks and petrol bombs at those struggling to restore order below. For the first time in the century, rioters were armed with guns. One police officer was shot
in the abdomen and two others were also treated for gunshot wounds. The firing seemed indiscriminate, with a BBC cameraman shot in the eye and a Press Association reporter receiving multiple pellet
wounds. A blaze was started by the petrol-bombing of a shop and when firefighters arrived to tackle the flames they, too, came under attack. As the police moved forwards in an effort to protect the
firefighters, one officer, PC Keith Blakelock, tripped and stumbled to the ground. He was immediately set upon by a mob wielding knives and a machete. Lacerated by forty-two blows, the helpless
Blakelock was hacked to death – the first serving policeman to be killed in a mainland British riot since 1833. In total, the night’s carnage produced over two hundred and twenty
injuries, two hundred of which were to police officers.
²⁷
‘This is not England,’ a bewildered police officer told the BBC. ‘This
is just madness.
My men are being used as target practice.’ No sooner had the riot been quelled than Bernie Grant, the Labour leader of Haringey council, addressed a
rally outside Tottenham town hall where he explained what he took to be the views of local youths, that ‘the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday night and what they got was a
bloody good hiding. There is no way I am going to condemn the actions of the youth on Sunday night.’
²⁸
His desire to be associated with the
rioters’ actions was greeted with cheers from the crowd and widespread condemnation beyond. Grant, who had recently become Britain’s first black council leader, was two years later
elected as the country’s first black MP.

The Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, promised to ‘get tough’ with those who were responsible for ‘the lawlessness which has broken out amongst ethnic communities in inner-city
areas’.
²⁹
But the legacy of the riots also brought changes to police procedures. In the hope of avoiding repetition of the incompetence that
had left Cherry Groce paralysed, CID detectives lost the right to carry guns, with firearms use henceforth restricted to designated trained units within the police force. At the same time, the Home
Secretary found his hard words about lawlessness among ethnic communities equally applicable to white youths attracted to the sub-culture of football hooliganism. The sport had long attracted
sporadic off-pitch episodes of rowdy – and on rare occasions even violent – behaviour, though during the seventies such outbursts had become more frequent and necessitated the erection
of pens on the terraces in order to prevent opposing factions from attacking one another or surging on to the pitch. Such measures sought to contain the behaviour. Preventing it at source was more
difficult. The ‘English disease’ became a common phrase on both sides of the Straits of Dover, reflecting the manner in which the nation’s hooligans were distinguishing themselves
among their European rivals by the extent and savagery of their antics.

Called in by the government in 1985 to investigate safety and trouble at football grounds, the High Court judge Sir Oliver Popplewell noted that hooliganism was by no means confined to those who
had been hardened by the dispiriting experience of unemployment and poverty into becoming antisocial yobs. Rather, many ‘often hold down good jobs during the week, dress stylishly and detach
themselves from those fans with club scarves who travel on official coaches or trains. They plan their violence as a recreation in itself to which football is secondary or a mere
background.’
³⁰
Buttoned-up shirts with cashmere V-neck sweaters was one look that distinguished the premeditated hooligan, though some went
as far as wearing Italian-made suits. Generically designated ‘casuals’, they adopted monikers specific to their chosen club. In London, Chelsea had its Headhunters, Millwall its
Bushwhackers and West Ham the ICF (Inter-City Firm), so called because its members preferred to travel in the relative comfort of InterCity125 trains
– they took to
issuing printed ICF calling cards to their victims as they attacked them. In Birmingham there were City’s Zulus and Aston Villa’s multi-racial C-Crew and Steamers. In Edinburgh,
Hibernian had the CCS (Capital City Service) and Hearts the CSF (Casual Soccer Firm). Like the Bank Holiday seaside fisticuffs between Mods and Rockers of twenty years previously, and given
Popplewell’s finding that most were in full-time employment, this seemed to be more about finding an identity distinct from the mundane and conventional working environment than a consequence
of exclusion from that world. While the organized violence was overwhelmingly perpetrated between whites, the verbal hostility mouthed towards black players on the pitch (who had been rare in
top-flight football until the eighties) and the involvement of far-right agitators among some casual groups added a racist dimension. The cultural influence of Ulster’s paramilitary
organizations was particularly evident in Scotland, where sectarianism distinguished the two main clubs in Glasgow and, to a lesser extent, in Edinburgh. Like all fashions, copycat behaviour drove
the football firms’ style and formation. Scenes of disorder and violence from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which were a regular feature of television news coverage throughout the
seventies and eighties, supplemented by inner-city riots and strikes that turned into pitched battles with the police, may well have been factors indirectly influencing the hooligan mentality.

Thus it was that escalating levels of injury and death appeared to incite further aggression among those competing to top the league for raw masculinity. On 11 May 1985, the same day on which a
discarded cigarette caused a fire to sweep through the aged wooden stand at Bradford City football ground, killing fifty-six spectators and injuring 255 more, Leeds United hooligans rioted at
Birmingham City’s ground – in the melee, 125 arrests were made and a wall tipped over, killing a boy. Less than three weeks later, on 29 May, just as the European Cup final was about to
start in the decrepit Heysel stadium in Brussels, Liverpool fans attending the match followed up their opening barrage of projectiles with an all-out assault on Juventus fans, smashing through the
segregating barriers and charging into the Juventus end of the ground. As the Italian fans tried to flee, a crush developed and a wall collapsed, killing thirty-nine of them and injuring six
hundred more. Despite what had just been witnessed, officials were so fearful of what might happen if they cancelled the game that they let it go ahead, providing the players with a police escort
on and off the pitch. With Thatcher’s encouragement, the Football Association announced a ban for the rest of the season on English clubs participating in European competition, an admission
of shame and defeat that failed to head off stiffer penalties from UEFA, which duly banned all English clubs from Europe until the 1990/1 season (with the punishment of an extra year for
Liverpool). The ban did not affect the
English national team. The carnage at the Heysel stadium appeared not to have had any sobering effect on the two hundred and fifty
England fans arrested for going on the rampage in four German cities during the European Championships in June 1988.