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

A Knight exposed (1984)

From the June 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Ted Knight, leader of Labour-controlled Lambeth Council, is a politician whose lips produce a stream of radical cliches. Presiding over one of the most impoverished boroughs in London, Knight's response takes the form of left-wing posturing and bureaucratic exercises in reformist futility. Knight and his fellow Labour councillors have a relationship with their NALGO and NUPE workers which is widely acknowledged as one of the worst in London. This is not unrelated to Knight's autocratic style of power, which currently depends on the defection of one councillor to the Labour Party from the SDP; there was no election after the defection and Knight is therefore ruling Lambeth despite the fact that most of the councillors elected were not of his party.

On 28 April the Socialist Party of Great Britain set up a literature stall inside the Friends' Meeting House in Euston, London. The rally which were attending was called A New Social Order For Britain and, in addition to the opportunity to sell and give away socialist literature, over an hour of the meeting section of the event was due to be allocated for speakers from the floor to state their case. So seventeen Socialist Party members entered, talking to people at the literature stall, visiting the other stalls and seeing what ideas they had to offer and preparing to have our say in the discussion period.

From the start, it was a strange event. The politicos were there alright: Camden Labour Party, the Peace Pledge Union, CND, SERA and the Ecology Party. As a group of us entered we saw immediately that this was no ordinary lefty set-up: a procession of harmless-looking folk were doing a "sacred dance" around the hall. While they did the Greenham shuffle, apologetic stewards tried to get the admission fee out of us: £2 to get in ("Well, you do know that Tony Benn's speaking, don't you?") and 70p. for the unemployed, old, young, ill, oppressed—they ended up owing one of our lot £1.40.

Once inside it became clear that this event was an occasion for all sorts of people to search into the recesses of their minds for peculiar ideas to present to those who would listen: Pagans Against Nukes, the Vegan Society, Kingston Natural Healing Centre, Celtic Friends of the Trees, Playworld. Socialists are not unwilling to listen to and learn from such people and, to tell the truth, many of their ideas were considerably more practical than the conventional wisdom of non-fringe thinking which workers are taught to revere. Of course, there were astrologists and religion-pushers and the odd con-man who was clearly there only to earn a few quid by exploiting the gullible. But it was a pleasant atmosphere and it was right that a socialist presence was there to counter the distortions being handed out from the Labour Party stall.

At about two o'clock the public meeting was due to begin in the main hall. Socialists spread ourselves around. A few hundred workers listened as Joan Andrews, the organiser of the event, made it clear that we were here to make plans for an "Alternative Britain". On the platform were Tony Benn (head in hands), Rex Andrews (Quaker), Helen John ("a Greenham woman"), Jonathon Porritt (Ecology Party), Angela Warner (anti-vivisectionist), Guy Dauncey (trendy writer) and, in the chair, Ted Knight. Ted stood up. So did the four rows sitting behind me. Ted cleared his throat to allow a few radical cliches to ascend to his mouth, but before he could do so the people behind were shouting him down: "We don't want Ted Knight to chair this meeting. He's an enemy of working-class people. He evicted us and our mates at four in the morning from our council flats in Brixton."

Ted tried to talk over them, but there was a victory of real feeling over empty rhetoric and the demonstrators were drowning them out. Their story, it seems, is that Lambeth Council used riot police, accompanied by dogs, to burst into the flats of these workers and evict them from their homes. Who could blame them for wanting to see Knight off a platform debating a "new social order"? For nearly an hour the row continued. At one point Guy Dauncey and a few other trendy nice-guys grabbed the microphone and vainly urged the audience to sing a song of peace to drown out the dissenting shouts.

Socialists argued with the demonstrators that the best way to proceed would be to destroy Knight in argument rather than destroy the meeting. One socialist suggested to Knight that the only democratic and honourable thing for him to do would be to leave the meeting. Knight insisted that he would stay and that, despite there having been no vote electing him to the chair, he would tolerate no vote to remove him. Before very long four van-loads of police were on the scene. A vote was taken as to whether they should be brought in; socialists voted against and the vote was lost overwhelmingly.

There was one card left to play as far as the platform leaders were concerned: bring Benn to the microphone. Everyone would listen to Benn. And sure enough, they did. Even the evicted workers—who had been thrown out of their homes on the order of Benn's party—were silenced when the radical opportunist stood to address them. At first the old performer had them eating out of his hands. He had been at a meeting in Brixton with Ted Knight the previous week and collected £2,000 for the miners. It was outrageous to suggest that a leader of Knight's quality could be anything but an upright socialist. Applause greeted his every word and even one or two of the evicted workers of Lambeth felt the revival of blind faith. And then Benn made the big mistake: if the miners were here, he said, and if they could see the behaviour of these noisy disrupters over there, they'd soon sort them out. A threat. "Well, the bloody miners aren't here, mate" shouted a voice and within a few seconds Benn's microphone had been smashed, the stewards were fighting with the demonstrators and the boys in blue rushed into the meeting to defend Tony Benn against the attack of those he incited to violence by making threats on behalf of workers who were not present. (Had the miners been present maybe they would have supported the evicted workers rather than the radical Viscount.)

Benn finished his speech with the microphone volume at full blast and the disruptors safely locked away in Metropolitan Police vans. After Benn came plenty more reformist waffle: Porritt the Ecology-man spoke about the importance of spirit and the Greenham woman was so self-righteously stale that it was painful to listen. Angela Warner of the BUAV made an informative and emotionally stirring speech, showing how capitalism finds it profitable to cause pain to animals and humans for the sake of profits. Of course, her conclusions were reformist, but it would be a great step forward if we could persuade her and her movement to join the real campaign against the profit priority. Guy Dauncey's speech sounded like a psychotherapeutic confession and, in the middle of it, he asked us all to sit for two minutes in silence so that we could contact our inner selves (which, after my lunchtime vegetarian curry, I had been thinking of doing during Tony Benn's speech). Socialists love organised silences because they provide us with an opportunity to do some talking. So, several hundred workers sat in silence while several of us shouted out that "Silence is what the bosses want. It's time to speak up for yourselves". "Knight, Benn and the Labourites are not socialists, but mere defenders of state capitalism. They have no alternatives to offer." "Socialism means a world of common ownership and democratic control. A world without buying or selling or money. The abolition of the wages system." It was an educative silence.

Then came the discussion period. Knight agreed to let each contributor speak for three minutes at the microphone. A few christian lefties complained about the earlier disturbance and said that they had come to be energised and were now feeling bad vibes. A woman who seemed to be from the Bloomsbury Circle advocated Henry George's scheme for land reform. Then came the first socialist, who used his time to expose the anti-socialist case of Knight and Co. Then came a spiritualist from Devon who spent two minutes saying that he felt angry about society and then spent what seemed like a long weekend singing a song which proclaimed that socialists are Anti-Christs. We advised him not to give up his day job. Then, by luck, another socialist was invited to have his say. Bob Moran made clear what sort of a society he wanted to live in and urged those agreeing to find out about and then join the Socialist Party of Great Britain. After listening to five more contributions—including an interesting one from a socialist sympathiser who had met us during the last election campaign and another from a man who said that the only way to end the problems of society was to abolish money—it was my turn.

Let us be in no doubt: there are very many workers who are ready and willing to listen to the case for world socialism and to take it up with enthusiasm. Optimistic we may be but socialists have a message which is irresistible and the most urgent and exciting task of the moment is to work for a speedy termination to the system which enslaves the majority class.

Steve Coleman