What happened at the Brixton Hustings at St Mathews Community Centre – Mon 27th April (2026)

Blogger's Note:

Another piece from Brixton Buzz website, in connection to the SPGB contesting the local election in Lambeth. This light-hearted 'sketch' of a local hustings actually dates from the 28th April.

LAMBETH COUNCIL / NEWS

What happened at the Brixton Hustings at St Mathews Community Centre – Mon 27th April

Tue 28th April, 2026 - by Contributor - 6 Comments.

Yesterday, a Brixton Hustings was held at St Mathews Community Centre, and local writer The Back Row sent Brixton Buzz his report:

“No-one there from Lib Dems (surprisingly – they’ve got a load of ‘real’ candidates in the Brixton wards), Conservatives or Reform. Loads of current Labour councillors from across the wards in the audience.

Some dispute over there being 2 independents under the ‘shake it up’ alliance on the panel. “We’re not a party, but we’re working together”.

Didn’t really make it a lot clearer. (Issue for me is they don’t have any policies – you literally don’t know what you’re voting for. What they support will come down to their assemblies on every issue, but how are they going to run those? )

The Socialist woman was great value. Under the socialists housing will be free for all, you’ll be able to shoplift food again, and we’ll solve deaths on the roads by scrapping salaried jobs so eliminating commute traffic.

She absolutely passed the ‘would you go for few pints with this candidate’ test. A few drinks would turn into an all nighter in no time.

The Trade Union & Socialist candidate was straight out of central casting. 1980s Liverpool will be the model for Lambeth apparently (he disputed the shout from the audience that “they’re all in prison”).

Of all the topics discussed the Christian Alliance guy got most animated denying there was a genocide in Gaza and espousing just how pro-Israel he was (to the extent of getting into some back and forth with the (Kiwi/Jewish) Socialist candidate who was rightly pointing out that you could be proudly jewish without being Zionist).

Unsurprisingly the CA view was not especially popular with the audience. He’d also scrap all the LTNs and decision making would be led by the churches.

Other than incumbent Labour Councillor David Bridson they were all weak on the questions about specific local issues – the stuff that they’d actually be dealing with and have some influence over. Which was disappointing.

Green candidate (ex Labour, Corbynite) was a dramatic speaker but tried to ‘both sides’ questions on both LTNs/Road safety (whereas Green policy is pretty clear) and Brockwell Park Festivals which doesn’t really work whichever side you stand on these issues.

The ‘shake it up’ independents just want to have a citizens assembly on every issue.

Which is both expensive to do properly (DB pointed out Lambeth have done a Climate Assembly) and is going to make any sort of decision making incredibly slow. It’s also not going to lead to ‘consensus’ – you get a view but it’s not one that everyone is going to agree with (the councils current climate/transport/etc policies came out of that assembly).

There was a question about councillors being kicked out for racist/otherwise unacceptable behaviour/statements where most of the candidates were saying they should be kicked out as councillors not just their party.

(Scarlet O’Hara pointed out from audience that there was no way of legally doing that – would require a national change in law but that didn’t stop most on the panel just repeating the same point).

Someone turned up to be shouty and angry about LTNs. That she came from Streatham rather than any of the Brixton wards is probably a strong sign that the anti LTN crew really are shouting into the void now.

And her idea that it’s not safe to walk home from the bus stop without rat running traffic has never made any sense and is counter to all evidence.

The Chair did a good job of keeping people in line, to time, and staying neutral.”

Additional blogger's note:

A link to this report of the hustings was posted on the SPGB's discussion forum with the additional comments by 'ALB':

"We went to the hustings yesterday evening organised by the Brixton Neighbourhood Forum for parties standing candidates in Brixton. Represented were us, the Greens, Labour, Christian People’s Alliance, TUSC and Shake It Up (two — they pulled a fast one as both are technically “Independents”). The Tories, Reform and the LibDems sent no one (the last perhaps because of some deal with the Greens not to try hard in this part of the borough in return for the Greens not trying in another).

There were about 120 present.

The debate was organised fairly which each candidate being given exactly the same opportunity and time to answer questions. From a conventional party political point of view the main contest here is between Labour (representing by an outgoing councillor seeking reelection in Brixton Acre Ward) and one of the Greens standing in the same ward — Michael Chessum, leftwing journalist and activist, who switched from Corbyn to the Green Party. He claims to be a socialist (and confided to our candidate, who was sitting next to him, that he was a “Marxist”). Here is his arguments as to why “revolutionaries” should join the Green Party . . . "

Meet the Candidates: Socialist Party of Great Britain – abolishing capitalism since 1904 (2026)

Blogger's Note:

The Socialist Party is contesting three seats in Lambeth, South London, in the 2026 Local Elections. The following article appeared on the Brixton Buzz website, which is "Brixton’s biggest and most comprehensive news, features and listings site."

LAMBETH COUNCIL / NEWS

Meet the Candidates: Socialist Party of Great Britain – abolishing capitalism since 1904

Wed 6th May, 2026 - by Phil Ross

Founded in 1904, the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) is one of Britain’s oldest socialist parties, and one of its most uncompromising. Unlike Labour or the Greens, the party does not seek to reform capitalism – it seeks to abolish it, along with the state and money itself.

The SPGB is standing three candidates in Lambeth’s 7 May council elections – Anya Krycek in Brixton North, Jacqueline Shodeke in Clapham Common & Abbeville, and Cesar Sotillo in Stockwell West & Larkhall.

Brixton Buzz put four questions to the candidates, and in keeping with the party’s non-hierarchical principles, they answered collectively:

What does the SPGB offer a resident of your ward right now, today?

We do not offer false promises that Lambeth Council can abolish poverty, solve the housing crisis, or fix underfunded public services under capitalism.

Other parties will tell you that with the right policies, the right leadership, or the right ‘progressive coalition,’ things can be made tolerable. We say: capitalism cannot be reformed into a humane system. It is a system of production for profit, and profit will always come before human need.

What we offer immediately is a vote for socialist consciousness.

Every Socialist Party (GB) vote is a declaration that you recognise the present system has failed and must be replaced. It is a signal to other workers that they are not alone in wanting something fundamentally different.

We do not promise to manage capitalism better than Labour. We promise to use any position gained to expose its limits and advocate for revolutionary change.

That said, if elected, we would vote for any measure that genuinely improves working class conditions – since we are not opposed to reforms as such.

[Jacqueline Shodeke]

The SPGB vision is a moneyless, stateless society of common ownership.

Brixton has a thriving culture of independent businesses, market traders and community enterprises.

In that world, what happens to them?

They become part of the common ownership of the means of production. Not state-owned, there will be no state. Not privately owned, there will be no money, no buying and selling.

But democratically controlled by the community of producers and consumers.

Market traders are workers. Independent business owners are typically small scale exploiters of their own labour, often struggling under the same pressures as wage workers.

In socialism, they would contribute their skills and labour directly to meeting social needs, without the constraint of profitability, rent, or competition.

Brixton Market would not disappear, it would transition to a place of free distribution, where the produce of collective labour is available to all without exchange.

The ‘thriving culture’ that people value is not dependent on capitalism and in fact is stifled by both alienation and homogenisation.

Capital constantly undermines through gentrification, rising rents, and the displacement of working-class residents. Socialism would preserve and extend that culture by removing the economic pressures that destroy it.

[Cesar Sortillo]

Where does the SPGB fit in a broader left coalition?

Nowhere. We do not join coalitions with reformist parties, including the Greens or any ‘progressive’ alliance.

Our position is not sectarianism for its own sake, it is a recognition that these organisations operate on fundamentally different principles.

The Greens, like Labour, seek to administer capitalism more humanely. They believe that with better regulation, greener technology, and more ethical consumption, the system can be made sustainable. We disagree.

Capitalism is inherently destructive, of the environment, of human wellbeing, and of any possibility of a rational society. No amount of green washing changes its basic drive for accumulation.

As for ‘working alongside’ others on specific local issues: we support any group of workers in struggle, regardless of political affiliation, for immediate defensive gains.

But we do not enter electoral pacts, shared platforms, or coalitions that imply common political objectives. Our objective is the abolition of capitalism. Theirs is its reform. These are incompatible.

[Anya Krycek]

What is your assessment of Labour’s record in Lambeth, and what would genuinely left representation look like in its place?

Labour has administered capitalism in Lambeth for decades, and the results are visible: gentrification, displacement, privatisation of housing, underfunded services, and a council that acts as a local manager for central government austerity.

They are not a failed alternative to the Tories. They are a reliable partner in managing the same system. ‘Genuinely left representation’ would not mean a more radical Labour council.

It would mean representatives who use their position to tell the truth: that local government under capitalism has no real power to change the fundamental conditions of working class life.

It would be refusing to implement cuts, refusing to collaborate with property developers, and using every platform to argue for the common ownership of the means of production.

That is what Socialist Party (GB) representation would look like.

Not better management of decline, but a clear voice for revolutionary change, starting with the recognition that the working class must organise politically, democratically, and consciously for socialism.

Anya Krycek, Brixton North Jacqueline Shodeke, Clapham Common & Abbeville Cesar Sotillo, Stockwell West & Larkhall

More Info

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Black and white in Brixton (1965)

From the June 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is surprising how little we sometimes know about what goes on just down the road where we live. Capitalism, with its jungle law of every man for himself, tends to make social relationships impersonal and, even in overcrowded cities, to make people live in isolation. Unless there is an outbreak of violence the coloured people are left to go their own way. Although they live among us, they keep very much to themselves; they are not absorbed.

In the Borough of Lambeth (before GLC) the population at the last census was 223,763. There is no separate figure for immigrants but the Borough is estimated to have between ten and fifteen thousand coloured people. There has not been so much open hostility in Brixton as in some other areas, although many of the first immigrants came here, mainly to Somerleyton and Geneva Roads. It was here in the late 1940’s that the fascists started anti-coloured activities, which included the usual horror stories about the appalling conditions coloured people lived in. The fact that most of the places were slums long before any coloured man saw them didn’t matter, the insanitary and overcrowded conditions were easily blamed on to the immigrants.

Since those days, more coloured people have arrived and have slowly fanned out into neighbouring roads; most back streets in Brixton now have coloured families. Most of the housing is low standard but conforms to what the “white” working class have accepted for many years. In some of these roads, including Somerleyton and Geneva, the slums are as squalid as any in London. In conditions like these it is very difficult not to sink into despair and to lose the urge to struggle on. Perhaps the worst aspect of the situation is the resigned acceptance of it by its victims.

In a typical house in Geneva Road, one woman pays £5 5s. 0d. for two or three rooms; another pays £3 for one room. Electrical consumer durables have not made much headway in this district; a pile of washing goes from one plastic bowl to another and is “spun” dry by hand. A dozen or so coloured workers interviewed all said they were satisfied with their housing condition. There were the usual moans about money matters, but no apparent desire to do other than keep plodding.

Asked if they had been victims of prejudice because of their colour their answers were mainly negative. There had been cases of people sitting away from them on trains and buses but no trouble with neighbours and in the local pubs they mixed quite well.

Politics was a subject that brought frowns all round. Both Tory and Labour party met with equal indifference—alas, not the indifference of enlightened rejection.

Trade Unions were joined if they went with the job, which did not seem often. All in all, these coloured workers had attitudes which are pretty common among their “white” counterparts, and the added disadvantage that they lack the traditions and experience of working-class organisation. On the other side of the picture, if there are twenty people studying in the local library’s reference room, six at least will be coloured.

In Somerleyton Road, there is a huge wooden hut which stands on a bomb site. It is painted bright pink and is used as a church. From the doorway the ranting of the preacher can be heard ringing out in old revivalist style, while about 25 men, women and children listen unenthusiastically. A few minutes’ walk from this place, in a dilapidated basement of a house in Effia Road, there is another church. Their saviour here must be a jazz enthusiast—the singing is lead by a tambourine and has a distinct blues flavour. Prayer meetings are held on a street corner during the warm weather. It seems that in Brixton the coloured workers' preparations for the next life are well in hand, even if this one leaves a lot to be desired.

Harry Baldwin (Brixton).

Running Commentary: Behind the Iron Curtain (1981)

The Running Commentary Column from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Behind the Iron Curtain

On 8 June, Panorama (BBC television) showed a film called “Behind The Curtain” made by Antoine Fournier, which consisted of interviews with workers in Moscow. The similarity with life in the West was quite remarkable, as the camera panned over Coca-Cola adverts, horse- and car-racing and amusement arcades. One assistant salesman on £45 a month explained how he is forced to try to earn some money “on the side” dealing in the black market. Another, dealing in the foreign clothes market, explained:

  Underground market is a very popular thing in the Soviet Union. All the young people I know do the things I do because, for two reasons. The first is a great profit, and the second is a simple interest to connect with foreigners. But there are lots of police in civil clothes who control the situation and if they catch you with the clothes, they never take you to the police station, they simply take your clothes and then resell them. Policemen have a little salary too, so we can understand them.

Here are some more excerpts from the interviews.

Can we film you at work? The bosses would never allow it.
Do you get good wages? Good pay? You must be joking . . . If I make 150 roubles a month. I’m doing alright . . . I’m just slaving away.
Do many women do your job? What can I say? There are so many of them. They need money, or they want to get a flat. But we're told a pack of lies. They’ve been lying for five years now about the flat, saying they’re going to give it to us. But we’re still living in a room like this one, we still haven’t a flat, just a room. When will you get your flat? We haven’t any idea. That depends on the boss. Go and ask him yourself. Looks like we haven’t earned it yet so they haven’t given it to us.
Are you going to vote tomorrow? Of course (they laugh) what a stupid question!
And who are you going to vote for? Don’t you have an easier question? (They all laugh cynically.) The portrait of our deputy is already hung up in the entrance!
What about Party members? If somebody joins the Party, either that means he’s a careerist, that he's already decided he wants to make a career of it, or, well it means that he’s just no good.
And Western people? First of all, I think they shouldn’t be afraid of us. We are people just like them. We live like they do.

Brixton

The hysteria over the Brixton riots has faded now, but with unemployment and resentment mounting all the time, it is quite possible that there will be further outbreaks of violence in inner-city areas. Brixton was quite clearly not a “race riot”; the police were attacked as representatives of state harassment and authority. But in the aftermath, references to the “black community” in the press suggested that the main division is between blacks and whites. In fact, the whole community, black and white, is divided into two classes. There are both black and white investors, property-owners, who profit from the poverty suffered by black and white workers.

For example, a Nigerian called Chief Francis Nzeribe has said he wants to invest money in Brixton. Some people in Brixton will be allowed to have jobs, to get wages which are just enough to live one, while Nzeribe will own all of the wealth they produce for him. He owns £50 million worth of assets around the world, and heads twenty-seven companies. He has been a private arms dealer and lives in a flat in Mayfair. He has said of his plans for Brixton: “I see this as an opportunity to make money” (New Standard, 5/5/81). Colour is irrelevant.

Gluts

A few years ago, the media were stirring up a popular fear that oil resources were going to run out. There was a danger of a shortage. Now the tune has changed, and they are getting worried about a “glut”. OPFC and other representatives of oil interests are complaining about the threat of falling prices and profits as hundreds of barrels of oil pour out from the Middle Fast each week, to say nothing of all of the other sources in the world. Because of the recession, world market demand is down, so supply seems to be too high to satisfy the profit demands of the owners.

Resources today are not measured by simple human needs, any more than production is controlled by them. The market rules. This is why today's glut becomes tomorrow’s scarcity. The present crisis in world capitalism is not just affecting oil, though. America has a “butter mountain” which is “growing by ten million pounds a week” (Guardian, 30/5/81); and on 26 May a Guardian article entitled: “There's an awful lot of coffee” referred to “the prospect that the world is likely to be oversupplied with coffee during the next twelve months or so”. But in today’s insane system, that will not prevent millions of people from starving to death this year, and millions more from drinking tea because it is cheaper.

China-Cola

China is supposed to be a People’s Republic. Its government claims to have saved its workers from the ravages of capitalist exploitation. So it is rather odd that on 15 April, Coca-Cola, the epitome of world capitalism, opened a bottling plant in Peking. But the Chinese workers will, it seems, be saved from this danger by their benevolent masters after all. At first, the drink will only be sold to people with hard currency (the Chinese ruling class). Later it may be available for “ordinary” Chinese people (the working class), but probably at a price well over what most of them could afford, (Times, 16/4/81) so thoroughly are they being drained dry by the “People’s” Parasites.

Capitalism's Casualties

Dr. Jay Herbert, chairman of the Hospital Doctors’ Association, remarked recently that more than half the country’s junior doctors work more than eighty hours a week, and that their resulting tiredness was a major cause of death in hospitals (Guardian 30/5/81). He pointed to Sunday evenings as a critical time, and said that the massive amount of overtime worked by doctors was allowed to continue for economic reasons: “Juniors are still expected to work for an overtime rate of one-third the basic rate. It is cheaper for hospitals to employ fewer doctors for longer hours than more doctors.”

Clifford Slapper

Mixed Media: The British Black Panther Movement (2014)

Neil Kenlock self-portrait. 1970.

The Mixed Media Column from the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In October 2013 during Black History month, the Photofusion Gallery on Electric Lane in Brixton, South London, put on a photographic exhibition about the British Black Panther Movement. The exhibition was an oral history and photography project with archive photographs of protests, debates, parties, and key members by Neil Kenlock, official photographer of the British Black Panther Movement.

The British Black Panther Movement was active in the early 1970s, had several branches but Brixton in South London was the centre. Its key members were Barbara Beese, Kenrick Goppy, Darcus Howe, Farukh Dhondy, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Altheia Jones-LeCointe, Danny Da Costa, Liz Obi, Leila Howe, Olive Morris and Neil Kenlock. It had a HQ at 38 Shakespeare Road, off Railton Road, which was bought for them by art critic John Berger. The British Black Panthers were inspired by Black Power in the USA although they were different from the American Black Panthers: ‘they were a Party seeking political power, the American Constitution allows people to carry guns, so they were policing the Police’ (Kenlock).

Malcolm X’s speech at the LSE in 1965, Stokeley Carmichael’s appearance at the ‘New Left’ event Dialectics of Liberation Congress in 1967, and Black Panther Angela Davis’s visit to London inspired the movement. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971) by Angela Davis was very influential along with other Black literature such as The Black Jacobins (1938) by CLR James, George Jackson’s Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters (1970) and The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by WE Du Bois. Reggae musician Linton Kwesi Johnson said: ‘Joining the Black Panthers was a life-changer for me because for the first time I discovered Black Literature.’

The exhibition includes material on the Black People’s Alliance demonstration against Racialism during the Commonwealth Premier’s Conference in January 1969, the National Conference on the Rights of Black People in Britain in May 1971, and the fire-bombing of the Unity Centre at 74 Railton Road in March 1973. There is a focus on the trial at the Old Bailey of the Mangrove 9 in October 1971. The Mangrove was a West Indian restaurant in Notting Hill that was repeatedly raided by the Metropolitan Police, and at a subsequent protest march 9 people including Jones-LeCointe, Beese and Darcus Howe were arrested.

A significant figure in the British Black Panther Movement was Olive Morris (1952-79), born in Jamaica who was a feminist, black nationalist, campaigner against private property rights and for the rights of squatters, a founding member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, and co-founder of the Brixton Black Women’s Group. In 1972, 121 Railton Road was squatted by Olive Morris and Liz Obi and was later home to Black organisations, feminist and anarchist groups which were only evicted by Lambeth Council in 1999.

In 1973, the Brixton Black Women’s Group was set up at 65 Railton Road by Morris and Obi, though it later moved to Stockwell Green. The Lambeth Women’s Project was established in 1979 at 166a Stockwell Road and would be evicted by Lambeth Council in November 2012. In 1986 Lambeth Council named one of its buildings on Brixton Hill after Olive Morris. The Lambeth Council leader at the time was Labour Councillor Linda Bellos, a black radical feminist. It is with grim irony today that Lambeth ‘New Labour’ Council operates its housing department and benefits from Olive Morris House, the same Council notorious for evicting ‘squatters’ and tenants from long-life housing and those who cannot afford to pay the ‘bedroom tax.’ This is in sharp contrast to Linda Bellos who said in 2006: ‘I think class remains a key element in people’s life chances which is why I remain a socialist.’

The British Black Panther Movement was a reformist strategy in capitalism, as confirmed by the following statement: ‘I seriously believe that the methods we learnt, the ideology we imbibed and then the campaigns that we participated in gave rise to legislation which outlawed discrimination in housing and employment. We couldn’t make a Marxist-Leninist revolution but we did establish the right of blacks to become proper citizens of Britain’ (Dhondy).

Today in capitalism ‘Black youth unemployment nationally is now pushing 65 percent and rising, in some local wards this rises as high as 75-85 percent’ (Lee Jasper 8 July 2013). Today there are a disproportionate number of deaths of black men in police custody, a disproportionate number of black men in the prison population, and a disproportionate number of black people subject to stop and search by the police.

Black American novelist Alice Walker said ‘The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.’ Socialists agree with this and when the united black and white working class recognise their own immense potential power they can transform society through conscious unity by abolishing capitalism. Capitalism promotes and aggravates conflicts such as racism. Socialism will be a world free of social conflict in which human beings live and work in unity without distinction of race.

Steve Clayton

It’s bitter out (1999)

John Major with Edwina Currie.

TV Review from the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Old politicians never die, they’ve just been off for a bit writing their memoirs. So it has been with John Major, whose book BBC1 has been kindly promoting in its three-part series The Major Years.

Looking back on Major’s premiership, it’s amazing how such an apparently grey and placid man could have been at the centre of such sustained political turbulence. In many ways it was surprising that he became Prime Minister at all—he certainly didn’t fit the mode of the typical Tory politician. Humble beginnings, a Brixton childhood, state education with three ‘O’ levels, and a father who spent most of his time as an odd-jobbing circus performer do not exactly point the way towards a future Tory premier.

Indeed, one of the most fascinating and noticeable features of the series is what it left out—which is why, in the first place, Major became a Tory at all. Why is it that that he was attracted towards a political party based on an unabashed defence of privilege and Establishment interests?

Other aspects of Major’s life were revealed superbly, like so many layers taken off an onion. And yes, Major revealed some tears too, for the way people sneered at his upbringing when he knew that his parents were decent people with far more guts and application than the chinless wonders in the Tory Party who looked down on them.

The political parties people choose to join can be highly revealing, the more so when there are no easily identifiable social or class explanations on hand to explain their choice. It is then that a deeper, more psychological approach is needed, and this is clearly the case with Major. Just what on earth drives any teenager with Major’s social and class background to get up on a soapbox every weekend in Brixton to defend the Tory Party?

Greasers

Clearly, Major thought that joining the Young Conservatives would give him some social and career advantages, and he was not alone in that. But as was revealed in this series, there was more to it than this. It was as if he wished to prove himself amongst those who looked down on him most and treated him like a spec of dust. A more natural inclination might be to fight this sneering attitude and the people responsible for it from without, such as in the Labour Party or the political left. Major chose to fight it from within and then triumph among his natural enemies.

What was unfortunate for both his peace of mind and his political career was that despite rising to the very top of the Conservative tree, Major was never actually able to defeat the snobs and sneerers in his own Party. Socially brittle, he never truly felt accepted and was their prisoner whatever he did and wherever he went. Indeed, as Premier he saw them everywhere, trying to belittle him and bring him down, both in Parliament and in the Tory press.

John Major as PM was distinctive for two things which were in themselves intimately related—his working class origins and the thinness of his political skin. In terms of his background, Major probably fits closer to an academic sociologist’s definition of “the working class” than any other British Prime Minister. And, not without coincidence, he was the most politically sensitive and fragile PM in modern history, with only Harold Wilson having run him close.

In striving to understand Major it is not necessary to suggest that we should feel sorry for him. Major was a man who did an immense amount of damage to the working class, both in Britain and of course abroad, including in countries like Iraq. And in a Party full of greasers and back-stabbers, John Major could more than hold his own. He was not, as his political aide Judith Chaplin revealed, an entirely pleasant man.

What is most illustrative of all about him though—and this series brought it out as well as could be expected—are the inherent dangers involved in clambering up the greasy pole of capitalism. In this sense Major is not unique as there are tens of thousands of John Majors throughout Britain in almost every walk of life—fundamentally decent people with “something to prove” and who set out to prove it by squirming their way to the top, whether it be in politics, industry, finance or education. That process involves them taking up actions, adopting prejudices and engaging in relationships with people which are fundamentally unhealthy and based on nothing more than power, preferment and the settling of scores. As John Major proved, that is rarely if ever a route to sustained happiness and a fulfilled life. It is virtually guaranteed, instead, to lead to a whole lifetime of spite, resentments and bitterness. And if Major himself needs further proof of that he should take an even longer, harder look than he already has done at his immediate predecessor, with whom he has far more in common than he has ever realised.

Dave Perrin

Scarman—judicial oversight (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since, the riot in the St Pauls area of Bristol in April 1980, there have been disorders on a comparable scale in a number of British cities. The most violent took place over three days in April in the Brixton area of London, but there were also large- scale incidents in Southall, Toxteth (Liverpool) and Moss Side (Manchester), as well as smaller disturbance in other towns. The impact of such events is intensified by live television coverage, which reveals their similarity to civil war and apparently shows a near-total breakdown of law and order. The government were worried, both about what was already happening and about what might happen in the future if the causes of such upheavals went unidentified and unremedied. Two days after the Brixton disorders had ended, Home Secretary William Whitelaw appointed Lord Scarman to conduct an inquiry into the riots. His report was published at the end of November (Cmnd. 8427).

Scarman has a reputation, in staid circles, for being something of a “radical” judge, a supporter of a Bill of Rights, and he is well practised at holding inquiries into social disorders of one kind or another. He has clearly learned (though perhaps it came naturally) how to draw conclusions and make recommendations that will offend no one in authority and yet serve as evidence that not quite all is well and that “something” is being done. For example:

  I find that the direction and policies of the Metroplitan Police are not racist. But racial prejudice does manifest itself occasionally in the behaviour of a few officers on the streets (p. 127).
  There is scope for a more coherent and better directed response by the police to the challenge of policing modern, multi-racial society (p. 128).

His strongest criticism is describing as “a serious mistake” the operation known as Swamp 81, which involved flooding selected areas of Brixton with policemen who were expected to make widespread use of their powers to stop and search people in an attempt to detect and arrest robbers. This operation heightened the impression that it was difficult, especially for the young and black, to walk the streets of Brixton without being harassed by the police.

The report begins by considering the social conditions in which the riots took place. A picture of deprivation and discrimination, the fruits of capitalism, is visible even through Scarman’s studied understatement. In the Borough of Lambeth, which includes Brixton, some twelve thousand households live in overcrowded conditions, and one-fifth of all the housing stock is officially substandard. The unemployment rate in Brixton is thirteen per cent, but among young black males it is estimated to be a staggering fifty-five per cent. The other riot areas have similar environments. In Scarman’s words:

  The common strands in many of the major disorders . . .  are to be found in shared social conditions, in economic insecurity and perceived deprivation, in enforced idleness because of unemployment, and in the hostility of at least a section of young people to the police (p.14).

But these are merely “common strands”: 

  None of these features can perhaps usefully be described as a cause of the disorders, either in Brixton or elsewhere. Indeed, there are, undoubtedly, parts of the country which are equally deprived where disorder did not occur. But taken together, they provide a set of social conditions which create a predisposition towards violent protest (p. 16).

This is a comforting (for the ruling class and their government) piece of illogic.

Reaction to the report has been mixed. The Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality described it as “brilliant”, which is a sad reflection on his aspirations. Ted Knight, lefty leader of Lambeth Council, observed that anyone on the local streets could have said what the report does, and complained that Scarman had not pointed out the new restraints on council spending — as if the past history of Brixton had not included periods of more public spending. The strength of Lambeth Borough Council’s proposals can be seen from their suggestion that the Metropolitan Police would be more answerable for their actions if they were accountable not to the Home Secretary but to a local Police Authority — just as the police in Merseyside are!

Of course, it doesn't matter how the police are controlled. Whatever system is used, they will continue to be the defenders of capitalist order and capitalist property. Imagine that everything the reformers want of the police has been achieved: no racial prejudice among them, black policemen at all levels of the force, local accountability, true consultation, riot equipment surrendered. The essential role of the police will not have been altered. Many of those who see police harassment as the major cause of the disorders are quite content to see the police carry out their duties, so long as they do so in a less objectionable manner. In the words of the leader of one of Brixton’s black organisations: “We do not object to what they the police do so much as to the way they do it.”

What is this essential role of the police? Scarman provides an answer which is eloquent largely for what it leaves unsaid:

   the primary duty of the police is to maintain “the Queen’s Peace”, which has been described as the “normal state of society”, for in a civilised society, normality is a state of public tranquillity. Crime and public disorders are aberrations from “normality” which it is the duty of the police to endeavour first to prevent and then, if need be, to correct (p. 62).

In writing this, Scarman seems to have forgotten that part of his report which describes the “normal state of society" in Brixton, not an area noted for its public tranquillity. Slums, unemployment, insecurity, hopelessness form the Queen’s Peace in nineteen-eighties Britain, which we are supposed to believe is a civilised society! It is a topsy-turvy world in which penury and slums are accepted as normality, but that is the world and the logic of capitalism, and that is the world the police play a part in defending.

And that is the world at whose disposal Scarman has placed his services. The task of his inquiry was to alert the government so that it might tinker with a few things (such as longer training for police) in the hope that these will suffice to prevent such confrontations in the future. Socialists, having held our own inquiry into the nature of capitalist society, recommend that it be not tinkered with but replaced.

Paul Bennett

Brixton explodes (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

After the riots, the deluge. As the fires died in Brixton, the smouldering passions there were doused in words hosed out from all kinds of social and political analysts. Most of them claimed dolefully that they had been expecting just such a thing to happen for a long time; all of them were alert with theories about the causes, and thereby with suggestions to stop it happening again.

One who did not offer any analysis was the very man in the whole of Britain who might be expected to know more about civil disorder than anyone else—Home Secretary William Whitelaw. But apparently he had so little idea about what happened and why that he had to set up an enquiry to tell him. In charge of the enquiry is Lord Justice Scarman, who did similar jobs on the Red Lion Square confrontation in 1974 and Grunwick in 1977 and who, if he doesn't get a rest from it soon, may come to think that open air life in London is about as peaceful as the North Bank at Highbury when Spurs are playing there.

The analysis of the Brixton riots covered a pretty wide field. On the one hand there was the Labour leader of Lambeth Council, Ted Knight, whose role in the affairs of London becomes daily more obscure as people begin to wonder whether he is a councillor or a comedian. Knight declared (Guardian, 16/4/81):

We went to see the commander of the police tonight to demand that he withdraw his men. He won't do it.

And he then went on to advise:

... a future Labour government must dismantle the Metropolitan Police and replace it with a new force "responsible and answerable to the working class people".

Knight is one of those "practical socialists" who, while not actually being delirious, suffer from these dreams in which the police don't have to be a coercive, property protective force but can assert the minority privileges of capitalism in the interests of the unprivileged majority , This is a common sort of delusion among "practical socialists", who deceive themselves that capitalism doesn't have to be capitalism—and Knight's problem is that when he talks like this he is not joking.

On the other hand there was the reaction of Margaret Thatcher—and nobody is in any doubt by now about her role in capitalism's affairs. There was no surprise when Thatcher resisted the invitation to agree that pressures like racial discrimination and unemployment could have influenced the riots. And in between Knight and Thatcher there were the senseless trendies and liberals, like the teachers who tried to get the NUT Annual Conference to debate an emergency motion which called for the restoration of government grants for housing, education and social services.

One thing all these analyses hold in common is the notion that basically there is nothing wrong with capitalism. They all agree that the priority is not to abolish the system but to patch it up; any conflict between them is over how much patching up is needed, and where, and whether it can be afforded right now. The most visionary among them misconstrue Brixton as the result of malignant government policies and harsh police methods; the least visionary misinterpret the riots as .the malignant response to a benevolent, natural order of things.

From this it is clear that capitalism is OK; Whitelaw would hardly have chosen anyone who was likely to say differently. The Home Secretary is a tirelessly courteous man who resembles a friendly sea lion but that should deceive nobody. His plump, fatherly demeanour hides an iron determination to do as capitalism requires, at whatever cost to an undoubtedly kindly disposition.

How then should an enquiry into Brixton proceed? Well first there is the character of the place and the question of whether this is unique or even unusual. Brixton is not one of the world's beauty spots. Arterial roads suck in heavy traffic; there is the prison of grim infamy and, near the Town Hall, there is Rushcroft Road, where the fascists once jammed the streets with their malignant prejudices. The area was largely an Edwardian development and it has streets of substantial villas of that period, now run down and multi-occupied by the more depressed strata of workers. A study of the southern part of Lambeth in 1976 found 18 per cent of the housing in poor condition and 42 per cent of the people there in shared accommodation. These statistics represent workers whose deprivation is such that they must concentrate where the rents are lowest, even if that also means where the walls are damp, where the rats run and the floors are rotten. For these workers, survival takes a desperate toll; they are capitalism's social misfits or its unemployable—single parent families, weary pensioners and, inevitably, immigrants.

Like many parts of London, Brixton has immigration written into its history and by no means all the immigrants have come from what is evasively called the New Commonwealth. But it did receive the first imported workers from the West Indies in the early fifties, and they have stayed, raised families and are easily identified by other, similarly desperate workers venting their frustrations on the most accessible scapegoat. 

So, Brixton has become famous for tension as well as for its seedy buildings and its street crime. The Metropolitan Police say that Lambeth ranks second in their entire area for violent crime: in 1980 they recorded 2859 cases. In 1975 a police report stated that 80 percent of muggings—quick, violent, usually small scale street robberies—were committed by young blacks and that 85 per of the victims were whites. These figures were triumphantly used by racist organisations like the National Front, would not be anxious to emphasise inherently subjective element involved in any criminal statistics. Workers who were already in a panic at the decline in the fabric of the area might have concluded that they were surrounded by black thugs, that 80 per cent of the black youngsters were muggers. But the same report said that only 4 per cent of youngsters were involved in street crime, suggesting that the overwhelming majority of them keep to the law. 

Brixton's street crime gave it a deserved reputation for being about the most intensively policed part of London. It regularly returned the highest figures, outside the West End; for arrests for Sus, the offence which ropes people in not for actually committing a crime but for a couple of policemen think that they are contemplating one. Brixton has also had unusually frequent attention from the Special Patrol Group, which stopped thousands of people in the streets for spot checks and arrested hundreds of them. The police justified these tactics by a sharp fall in reported street but in the process, to some extent, they replaced the muggers' violence with their own. Contact with the SPG is not a tranquilising experience. Brixton bubbled like a volcano; the police tried even harder to hold the top down but in the end it had to blow up.

The riots were seen by many workers as authentication of the doom laden prophecies which have emanated from Enoch Powell, beginning with his infamous 1968 Birmingham speech in which he foresaw "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". Perhaps Powell feels that his reputation for rigourously logical thinking has been sustained. But there were others who also foretold the trouble which can be expected from crowding a specially depressed population into a decayed area and subjecting it to pressures such as racial discrimination, chronic poverty and state violence. Powell's contribution—if it can be described as such—is to blame the riots, and indeed much of the conditions in which the riots happened, onto the skin colour of the rioters. The famous logician Powell is here indulging in the fallacy of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which may be comfortable for him and which may appeal to the more ignorant and prejudiced among the working class but which is not logical or reasonable .

Even Scarman will probably be aware that Brixton is not unique, either now or in the past. In 19th century Britain, for example, the appetite for labour stimulated by the Industrial Revolution drew masses of Irish workers to this country. They came mainly to escape from the appalling famines in Ireland; with only their working abilities to sell for their living they came looking for employment, cramming into towns like Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. By 1851 they made up nearly 3 per cent of the population and, doing mainly unskilled work in textiles and building, they were in competition with equally desperate English workers for jobs and housing.

These were the roots of the discrimination which was practised against the immigrants, with "No Irish" signs up at .the windows and 'employers keeping English and Irish workers apart to avoid trouble at work. Even so there were riots and battles over many years, as one group of degraded workers fought with another over who should be exploited and repressed at one particular place and time. By the end of the century the Irish had become largely absorbed but they had been replaced as the butt of popular prejudice by the Jews, with an Enoch Powell—Tory MP Major Evans-Gordon—rousing mob ignorance for his own political advantage.

Then, as now, deluded workers were avoiding the reality that problems like slums, unemployment, poverty and competition for jobs cannot be laid at the door of an immigrant work force. Capitalism both creates the demand for that work force to be mobile and the urban concentrations in which it must try to survive. For capitalism works by the production of profit, which means by the exploitation of the majority of its people. For capitalism, profitable is beautiful: cheap is beautiful; so often slums are beautiful; conflict is beautiful; ugliness is beautiful. Brixton is beautiful.

And all of this, in 1981, can come into focus on the streets of some urban desert, when a black youngster is stopped by a policeman whose uniform gleams with the authority of one whose job is to protect the minority rights and privileges of the capitalist class which is responsible for the desert. If that same policeman also represents working class prejudices he may treat the youngster to some racist insults. If the focus becomes sharper, like the rays of the sun, there can be a conflagration in which those youngsters might feel that in some undefined way they are getting some of their own back as they riot and burn and loot.

And in that too there was an irony, in Brixton, because as a working class area, the shops specialise in the tawdry rubbish which is all that impoverished workers can afford. The looters were not getting their own back; in what they thought of as their freedom to take what they liked they were in fact affirming their own degradation. .

The conclusion of this enquiry then is that Brixton is not unique in either time or place. There have been many other, similar, riots in many parts of the world and there will be many more for as long as capitalism continues to exploit and repress the majority in the sordid interests of the minority. Here are the roots of Brixton's agony; they will not be approached by any official enquiry no matter how rigorous. The workers of Lambeth, of London and of the world are in a crisis which it is in their own power to end and they should need no judge to tell them what is wrong with society.

Ivan