The idea that police racial prejudices might be rife did permeate beyond the far left. First broadcast in November 1980, after the Bristol riot but before Brixton erupted, a celebrated highlight
of the BBC satirical sketch show
Not the Nine O’Clock News
featured Rowan Atkinson as a police inspector berating one of his underlings, a Constable Savage, played by Griff Rhys Jones,
for arresting the same man, a Mr Winston Codogo, 117 times on a succession of preposterously trumped-up charges. When prompted, Savage improbably claimed not to have noticed whether Mr Cadogo was a
black man. The sketch appeared in the same show as featured a gag about the Queen failing to identify the thief who had stolen her handbag, accompanied by a photo of Her Majesty inspecting a guard
of black soldiers.
A serious effort to bring closure to the debate was made in November 1981 with the publication of Lord Scarman’s inquiry into the Brixton riots. His report acquitted the police of
over-reacting in response to the outbreak of trouble and upheld the bravery of officers who ‘stood between our society and a total collapse of law and order on the streets’. But it also
found fault with the police’s lack of transparency, failure to discipline some officers and its unattractiveness to ethnic minorities. It recommended that racist behaviour by police officers
should be a sackable offence and called for concerted
attempts to enlist ethnic minority recruits. It also proposed new statutory consultative committees for community
liaison. Noting that ‘by and large, people do not trust the police to investigate the police’, Scarman demanded proper independent monitoring of the police complaints procedure.
Importantly, he argued that random stop-and-search powers should be better regulated, but not prohibited. While concluding that the riots ‘were essentially an outburst of anger and resentment
by young black people against the police’, Scarman felt compelled to stray into social matters, advising that the ‘social context in which policing is carried out could not be
ignored’. The government should act to reduce inequality in housing, education and employment, which disfigured urban communities, and it should do so, at least in the short term, by positive
discrimination in favour of ethnic minorities. The thrust of Scarman’s findings immediately received cross-party support and were applauded by mainstream commentators in the media. It was the
Brixton Defence Committee and some local activists, including Lambeth’s council leader, Ted Knight, who dismissed Scarman out of hand.
Enacting statutory liaison committees and better complaints procedures was a matter for legislation. More difficult for a government philosophically entranced by the free market was how actively
to improve the deprivation that scarred urban life. Michael Heseltine’s brief included urban regeneration. He took two and a half weeks out of his Whitehall schedule in July to tramp the
streets of Liverpool, partly to show the locals that the government was listening, partly to get a better gauge of realities on the ground. He found a port whose commercial
raison
d’être
was much reduced; a city that had once been a magnet for immigration was shrinking and becoming a British Baltimore. A population of 867,000 in 1937 had slid to 610,000 in
1971. During the 1970s, it had lost a further 100,000 residents. Prosperous Liverpudlians had moved to the safety of the suburbs or the surrounding countryside. Local government had proved
incapable of finding the means of arresting the decline by making the inner city attractive to new businesses. Talking to ordinary people was at first difficult, as Heseltine resisted the attempts
of self-appointed community leaders to monopolize the debate. He was given an armed escort to meet one such source of local power, the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee, an experience he subsequently
described as like ‘sitting on a powder keg. The wrong gesture, the wrong remark and the whole thing could have exploded.’
36
Only slowly,
through visits to youth clubs and community centres, did Heseltine feel he was able to get under the surface of the hostility.
Heseltine persuaded the chairmen of several major financial institutions to join him on a bus ride around the once great gateway to the Atlantic, followed by an effort temporarily to requisition
their assistants for regeneration initiatives. Ever at ease in the glare of publicity, Heseltine was open to the
charge that he was engaged in a publicity stunt, but by the
time his tour was over he was already announcing a list of initiatives, including government grants for better sport facilities and workshops, help for small firms and encouragement for the opening
of a northern branch of the Tate Gallery in the dilapidated Albert Docks. With a capable civil servant, Eric Sorensen, effectively acting as an executive for Liverpool’s regeneration,
Heseltine returned there to check on progress almost once a week throughout his remaining sixteen months as environment secretary. His report for the Cabinet was entitled
It Took a Riot
. Its
recommendation for ‘substantial additional public resources’ to be directed ‘to Merseyside and other hard-pressed urban areas to create jobs’ ran contrary to the free-market
ethos of the prime minister. Nevertheless, making £270 million available for urban redevelopment in 1981–2, Thatcher let her environment secretary continue with his work of making
Liverpool a test bed for central government intervention where neither the free market nor left-wing municipal government seemed to offer quick solutions.
Independently of the riots, the government’s main response to a decade of urban decay began to be implemented in 1981. Where Heseltine’s focus on Merseyside involved state
intervention to assist with public–private partnerships, elsewhere the emphasis was more on removing what were identified as the state’s barriers to opportunity. This took the form of
eleven ‘enterprise zones’ in deindustrializing centres like Newcastle, Clydebank, Belfast, Swansea and London’s Docklands. This status simplified planning rules and exempted
development from various tax restrictions. The transformation in the space of a decade of London’s Docklands from a desolate wasteland into a desirable residential area and rival financial
district to the City was the most visible manifestation of success. The opening in 1988 of Tate Liverpool in the lovingly restored Albert Docks – which immediately became not only a source of
local pride but a major international visitor attraction – was testament to the work of the Merseyside Development Corporation and its success in attracting significant investment into a
stretch of Liverpool whose purpose had seemingly disappeared in the seventies. The struggling city that missed out was Sheffield. Under David Blunkett’s leadership, the steel city’s
Labour-controlled council refused the government’s offer to set up a Sheffield enterprise zone with the dismissive riposte that free enterprise was the problem rather than the solution.
That the government was already working on such plans to attract investment to failing and increasingly post-industrial cities demonstrated that it had not just taken a riot. But for all the
public show of defiance and support for the police, the Cabinet was severely shaken by the extent of civil disorder, with Heseltine given more autonomy and money as a result. Two speeches,
delivered within hours of each other, at the 1981 Conservative
Party conference, were illustrative. The first was by Heseltine, who warned of the dangers of drawing racist
conclusions from what had happened: ‘There are no schemes of significant repatriation that have any moral, social or political credibility.’
37
The second was by the employment secretary, Norman Tebbit, who pointed out that when his father had been unemployed in the 1930s, instead of rioting, ‘he got on his
bike and looked for work’. Interestingly, both performances produced rapturous applause and standing ovations. Thatcher also visited Toxteth, but she delivered a verdict that was closer to
the view of her employment secretary on whether it was the state or the individual who had to do something:
I had been told that some of the young people involved got into trouble through boredom and not having enough to do. But you only had to look at the grounds around these
houses with the grass untended, some of it almost waist-high, and the litter, to see this was a false analysis. They had plenty of constructive things to do if they wanted. Instead, I asked
myself how people could live in such circumstances without trying to clear up the mess. What was clearly lacking was a sense of pride and personal responsibility – something which the
state can easily remove but almost never bring back.
38
And after three weeks topping the pop charts, The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ gave way to Shakin’ Stevens’s cover version of the amiable 1950s hit
‘Green Door’.
The Hunger Strikes
Perhaps it would have been surprising if the decade of unrelenting violence experienced in Northern Ireland, and regularly brought to the mainland in graphic news footage, had
not produced some psychological effect upon the politics of protest in England, Scotland or Wales. In the year in which the mainland’s riots resulted in one fatality, the Troubles in the
Northern Irish corner of the United Kingdom resulted in 113. In order to provide even this level of security in the province, thirteen thousand soldiers were deployed, in addition to the
RUC’s policing efforts. During the 1970s, over two thousand people were killed in Ulster’s political divisions and Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street saw no change of tactics by
the Irish republican paramilitaries. On 27 August 1979, the IRA pulled off one of its ‘spectaculars’, within the space of hours killing eighteen soldiers at Warrenpoint in County Down
and blowing up the Queen’s cousin Lord Mountbatten, his teenage grandson and two others while they were enjoying a spot of lobster-potting off the Sligo coast. In all, 853 people would be
killed as a consequence of the Troubles during the eighties.
There were around four hundred Irish republican prisoners detained in the H-blocks (so called because their layout resembled a letter H) of the Maze prison outside
Belfast. In October 1980, the first of these inmates began a series of hunger strikes. The demands were not the generalized wish-list of revolutionary idealists. They were specific and confined to
life behind bars, not the society beyond. The republican prisoners demanded the right to wear their own clothes, to have unrestricted freedom of movement within the prison (in effect, to run their
own affairs) and to be exempted from doing any work.
Thatcher and her Northern Ireland secretary, Humphrey Atkins, divined a greater motive behind the demands, viewing them as part of an orchestrated IRA campaign to give the terrorists the run of
the prison and to win the status of ‘political prisoners’, incarcerated for their beliefs rather than for violent criminal activity. The government was therefore prepared to make only a
partial concession, going as far as permitting the republican inmates to discard their prison clothes in favour of ‘civilian-style’ (but not their personal) clothing. The notion that
they could have the free run of their own prison was firmly rejected.
The terrorists had, in fact, been granted various prison privileges in 1972, which gave them a category and status separate from those of other violent criminals. But the distinction accorded
them was revoked by the Labour government in 1976. Two years later, H-block prisoners had begun a dirty protest, smearing their cells with their own excrement. The switch to a hunger strike
strategy was altogether more dangerous. Nevertheless, in refusing to bow to the prisoners’ demands, the Thatcher Cabinet was acting in line with a May 1980 report by the European Commission
on Human Rights which had ruled that the form of detention in the Maze prison was not inhuman and had rejected the prisoners’ complaints. Far from being singled out for especially grim or
degrading punishment, those incarcerated for terrorist offences enjoyed a significantly laxer regime than British criminals convicted of comparatively minor crimes on the mainland. Nevertheless,
the IRA decided to turn the issue into a cause célèbre. In December 1980, one H-block inmate on hunger strike starved himself to the point of going into a coma.
In March 1981, the hunger strikes recommenced with renewed determination and were to continue for a further seven months, during which time ten republican prisoners starved themselves to death.
In so far as getting the government to accept that they were political prisoners was their aim, they all died in vain. But as a means of drawing the world’s attention to the republican cause,
the starvation plan was an undoubted success. Indeed, they had already gained a measure of international awareness from the slow, debilitating suicide of the first H-block prisoner. Bobby Sands was
a
27-year-old IRA operative who had served five years of a fourteen-year sentence for possession of a gun fired against RUC officers. Within the H-block, he enjoyed the
status of ‘Officer Commanding’ the republican inmates. With his long hair he could be portrayed as a cross between one of Jesus’s disciples and a seventies glam-rock star, but
what made him particularly significant was the IRA’s decision that he should stand for Parliament,
in absentia
, on an anti-H-Block ticket in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election.
A gun-runner facing death was seeking a democratic mandate.
Bobby Sands’s campaign not only wrong-footed the government. It placed the main, non-violent, democratic party of Northern Ireland’s mostly Catholic nationalist community, the SDLP,
in a difficult position. The Fermanagh and South Tyrone constituency had a narrow nationalist majority, having previously been held by an Independent Republican, Frank McGuire, the publican
primarily famous for his drunkenly shambolic bit-part in the fall of James Callaghan’s government in 1979.
EN12
If the SDLP chose to forego
running its candidate in the by-election created by McGuire’s sudden death, it risked tarnishing its anti-terrorist image by stepping aside to ensure an IRA gunman won the seat. Yet, if it
contested the constituency, the nationalist vote would be split and an Ulster Unionist candidate would be returned. In this eventuality, the SDLP risked being portrayed as an accomplice of the
unionists, joining in the ‘persecution’ of a young man prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for his cause. Weighing these two unenviable options, the SDLP decided it would not
contest the by-election. Bobby Sands was given a direct run against his unionist opponent. It was a crucial decision, for Sands won the seat by the tight margin of 1,446 votes.