Showing posts with label 1981 uprisings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1981 uprisings. Show all posts

Friday, September 30, 2022

The Age of Insurreckshan - LKJ in NME, 1984

From the NME, 17 March 1984, Neil Spencer interviews Linton Kwesi Johnson. Don’t call him a dub poet…

‘I’m not a dub poet and I don’t want to be classified as one… I’ve always seen myself as a poet full stop. I write mostly in the reggae tradition so my work can be described  as reggae poetry in the same way as jazz poetry, blues poetry.. but dub poetry no. I’m responsible for coining the phrase, as early as 1975 in a pamphlet I wrote called Race and Music but then I was talking about the reggae DJs and describing what they do as poetry, as dub lyricism’





[click images to enlarge]

Extract from interview:

Do you think it's important for black Britons to have a separate identity?

I think they have to forge their own identity from their own reality. The cultural gap between my generation, when we came to this country, and my children and their contemporary white friends, it's negligible.

What are you saying there? There's been no real change between conditions for blacks in Britain between then and now?

Oh, there's been changes, but we've had to fight for them. We've made a lot of progress, tremendous progress I believe, over the last 25 years, and as the events of '81 show clearly, we've moved from the era of the '50s and '60s and early '70s, which was an era of resistance, to an era of insurrection. And that is progress from my point of view.

Progress in what respect?

We're now accepted as being part of the country, even the repatriation lobby has to recognise and live with that. The state and the political parties, those who have power in this country, recognise that we have something to offer, we can swing an election particularly in marginal constituencies.

When Thatcher was running for election in 1978 she made those racist speeches about Britain being swamped by an alien culture; well, as you can see, by the last election they'd changed their tune and were trying to win the black vote.

The riots of '81 seemed almost like fulfilments of prophecies you'd made on the
first two LPs.

Well, not so much prophecies, anyone with any common sense could see it, I wasn't unique in saying those things. There had been a lot of mini-riots throughout the '70s, Basically I think the seeds were sown by the police in the '70s and things came to a head with a new generation of youth.

They were anti-police riots primarily?

Definitely. Anti-police and anti-establishment. All the foreign press reported them as race riots, and some press here too, but you and I and Joe Public know different, because though the young blacks were primarily in the leadership of those insurrections - in Brixton, Toxteth, Manchester whites were a big part of those riots.

I think a lot of the frustrations of the unemployed came out there, and were no means confined to them because a lot of those arrested and charged with looting were workers, people in jobs.
On the LP, on the title track and the tone you adopt is, not exactly rejoicing but…
Celebration! An event to be celebrated! It's an important event in the history of blacks in Britain. It's part of our making history in Britain.

Do you think it changed anything?

Of course it did.

What exactly?

I think it's given the establishment and the police a measure of what blacks can do if pushed too far. It did away with saturation policing. They've eased up a bit, been more careful how they move. Things have generally cooled down. And the project hatchers have got a bit more monev out of it.

A lot of the anger about the New Cross massacre spilled over into the riots. a lot of people can't see that, it was only a month after the day of action that the Brixton riots started.


Ad for LKJ's Making History LP from same issue of paper






See also


 

Tuesday, July 06, 2021

The Luton Riots of 1981 - Brixton comes to Bedfordshire

In 1981 a wave of riots swept across England, starting off in Brixton in South London and spreading to many other towns and cities. The Brixton uprisings are recognised as of historic importance, prompting the landmark Scarman report into policing and race relations. The riot in Toxteth, Liverpool, is also sometimes recalled for its impact on urban regeneration policy - in the immediate aftermath Michael Heseltine, then Environment Secretary, spent 3 weeks in Liverpool producing a report for cabinet entitled ‘It took a riot’. Most of the others are rarely mentioned today, or are just dismissed as lesser 'copycat' riots.

The riot in Luton, Bedfordshire, in July 1981 was immediately dismissed in these terms at the time. Vivian Dunnington, the Conservative leader of Luton Council, claimed: 'It was a copycat riot - the kids had seen the riots on TV and thought it a lot of fun. The town was neurotic with rumour. It went crazy' (Luton News, 23/7/1981).

In his reflections on 'Race, riots and and policing' in this period, Michael Keith warns against explaining different riots by a single cause: 'Generalizations, by definition, exclude the significance of the historically and geographically specific; by suppressing memory, they become the vehicles through which time is lost and place is forgotten'  (Race, riots and and policing - lore and disorder in a multi-racist society, 1993).

The following account is an attempt to recover what was specific to events in Luton in 1981, as well as what they shared with experiences elsewhere.  The Luton riot – like each of the others - did not come out of nowhere. While undoubtedly inspired by events elsewhere, those taking part had their own reasons for doing so, with the riot as a key event in a longer period of racism and resistance in the town. 

I have covered some of the history leading up to July 1981 in previous posts here. The far right National Front had been active in the town since the mid-1970s, and there had been ongoing opposition to them, including to their meetings in Luton Library (see: A School Kid Against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80). An attack on the mosque by racist Chelsea fans in December 1980 had led to further community organising against racist attacks. In early 1981 the Luton Youth Movement, inspired by Asian Youth Movements around the country, had been set up to oppose racism and organise self-defence. An LYM march through Luton in May 1981 had been attacked by racist skinheads (see: Blinded by the Light - memories of 1980s Luton racism). Which brings us to July...

July Days

‘In the summer of ’81, Britain seemed to be two entirely different countries, slapped on top of each other, like two films being shown on the same screen at the same time’ (Mark Steel, Reasons to be cheerful: from punk to new Labour through the eyes of a dedicated troublemaker, 2001).

Temporary Hoarding, Rock Against Racism zine, August 1981 - 
the cover depicts the Royal Wedding coach against backdrop of a burning city

The big news story in July 1981 was supposed to be the preparations for the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.  But in the weeks immediately before this ill-fated union, the youth of England seized the front pages in the most dramatic way possible. The 1981 riots actually started in  April in Brixton, South London, sparked by the oppressive policing of 'Operation Swamp 81'. In July though it became clear that this was not an isolated incident, but the harbinger of a nationwide movement of uprisings.

The first of the summer riots occurred in an area with similarities to Luton - Southall in West London, with its large South Asian population and a history of racism and resistance. On 3 July several hundred skinheads arrived in the area for a concert in a local pub. After a number of racist incidents in the High Street, hundreds of Asian youths took to the streets and attacked the pub where the gig was due to take place. The pub was set on fire, and petrol bombs thrown at police who were seen as protecting the skinheads.

On the same evening, four nights of rioting erupted in Toxteth, Liverpool where black and white youths fought the police. Over the next few days, similar scenes were repeated across the country - notably in Manchester's Moss Side and in Wood Green, north London.

By the end of the week, many people were just waiting for the wave to hit Luton. The talk was of little else at a Luton Youth Movement meeting on July 9th. In the previous week there had been  two major incidents in Luton. On Saturday 4th July a group of 30 racist skinheads charged a group of Asian youths in St George's Square, where a crowd was watching a Punch and Judy Show organised by Luton Children's Library. Then in the early hours of the following Monday morning two petrol bombs were thrown at the Sikh temple in Portland Road, Luton. Volunteers from amongst Luton 1000-strong Sikh community mounted a round the clock vigil to prevent further attacks (Luton News, 9/7/1981). Notorious local racist Robert Relf told a local paper that it had 'probably' been the work of a right wing group (Herald, 9/7/1981).  

On Friday 10th July many town centre shops had taken the precaution of boarding up their windows as rumours spread of impending violence; by Saturday morning others must have wished that they'd done the same. By 8.30 pm on Friday night  'two hundred mainly Asian and West Indian youth had organised to defend their community and had gathered outside the Luton mosque. The local Asian taxi service was used to link groups of black youth in Bury Park and the Town Centre' (Socialist Worker, 18 July 1981).

In effect there were two riots in Luton on the Friday. The first involved a gang of 50 or so skinheads who rampaged down George Street (the main shopping street) shouting racist slogans and smashing some windows, including Don Miller's bread shop.  Their presence brought out a crowd of black and white youths to confront them, who rioted in turn.

The Plume of Feathers pub in Bridge Street, a haunt of the skinheads, was smashed up and fighting broke out with the police. By the end of the evening the fighting had moved to Bury Park. Shop windows were smashed and bricks, bottles and two petrol bombs were thrown at the police.  The police reported that 150 people were involved.

The following day 12 of the 21 people who had been arrested on Friday night were brought before a special court, a mixture of racists and their opponents.

Saturday


'Day the Town Went Crazy' (Herald, 16 July 1981)
'The scene could have been Belfast, or even Brixton or Liverpool'


On Saturday afternoon the town was buzzing with rumours. There was a mixture of anger, determination, curiosity and excitement. Everyone was waiting for something to happen, with lots of people hanging around in the town centre. Here's my memories written down not long after:

'The signal was the police and security guards locking the doors of the Arndale shopping centre, apparently panicked by the crowd forming inside. The group of people I was with at the St George's Square end ran down to the side entrance of C&As and through the store. When we got to the front, the grill had been lowered so we couldn't get into the main bit of the shopping centre, but faced with having a section of the crowd loose in the store the management opened the doors briefly to let us join the rest. There was now a surreal situation with the shopping centre malls deserted except for a couple of hundred African-Caribbean, Asian and white youths, while thousands of shoppers watched on from behind the locked doors of the shops. There was a real feeling of power as the crowd moved through the Arndale. A line of police moved on ahead making no attempt to stop us as we moved without incident out into the high street and back along in the direction of the Town Hall. The rumour going around was that a community festival in High Town might be attacked by fascists and that was the direction we headed. The police were nowhere to be seen by this point. A couple of skinheads were spotted in a cafe in High Town on the way, and the windows were broken as they cowered in the back. There was no sign of any trouble at the festival and everybody sat down in the sun on the grass in People's Park overlooking it. Then people moved off again over Cromwell Road towards Bury Park. There was a brief stand-off with the police in Dunstable Road and a couple of bottles were thrown before people dispersed. The Conservative Club had its windows smashed'.

On Saturday night, some racists were still on the streets of Luton: 'A heavily built white man in his late 20s goose stepped along George Street yelling 'Sieg Heil!' and saluting Nazi style'. Youths were guarding the mosque, but many others, black and white, had now converged on the town centre: 'A gang of youths, most of them black, armed with snooker cues and broom  staves, lingered around the streets near the ABC Cinema' (Herald, 16.7.1981).

The situation was moving rapidly from self-defence towards a full-scale riot, and a number of fires were started. At 8.20 pm, there was an arson attack on Jack's curtain shop in West Side Centre. At 10.05 pm, a fire bomb was thrown into Maurice Davis hat makers in Guildford Street. Later tyres were set alight at National Tyres in Crawley Road (Herald, 16.7.1981).

The police's priority seemed to be move the focus of the riot away from the town centre, and the main shopping area, towards the predominantly Asian area of Bury Park: 'Police had shepherded hundreds of white and black youths along Dunstable Road out of the town centre when pubs closed' (Herald, 16.7.1981). 

The most serious fighting occurred as the crowd reached Westbourne Road, near the mosque: 'Trouble flared again as the police brought out riot shields and made indiscriminate arrests in an attempt to break up the groups of youths. Petrol bombs, bricks and bottles were thrown at police lines as more black and white youths came out from local pubs and joined in, swelling the numbers to about 400… a few police were injured but many black youngsters carry the marks of police brutality' (SW, 18.7.81). 

A line of police advanced banging their riot shields - 'Soon the banging came from hundreds of bricks pounding into the shields' (Herald, 16/7/1981). People ‘broke pieces from garden walls and used them against the police’ A police van had its windscreen smashed. The fighting spread into Leagrave Road and Althorpe Road before the crowd were driven towards Biscot Road. Shop windows were smashed, including at Sainsbury's in the West Side Centre, and at Peters motorcycle shop in Dunstable Road where two motorbikes were dragged onto the pavement and wrecked. 

At 2.30 am, groups of young people were still defiantly on the streets but 'youths refusing to shift paid the penalty and we saw and heard the truncheons crack' (Herald, 16/7/81).

A total of 107 people were arrested; '64 of them white, 30 of West Indian extraction, and 13 of Asian extraction' (the white category included both racists and those fighting alongside black youth against racists and the police). Special court sessions were held on the Saturday, Monday and Tuesday, with 67 people appearing before the magistrates, 51 of whom were bailed with strict conditions including being restricted to their homes between 8 pm and 7 am . Almost all of those arrested were under 25 years old, with over half of them teenagers ((LN, 16.7.81).




Herald, 16 July 1981


A police authority meeting in September was told that 200 police officers had been deployed on the Saturday night, including some from the Metropolitan police.  17 police vehicles had been damaged and 83 claims made in Luton under the Riot (Damages) Act 1886. The cost of all claims in Bedfordshire was estimated to reach £60,000. The same meeting heard that Bedfordshire police had held stocks of CS gas for the past 15 years, although these were not used (Luton News 24.9.81).

Reactions to the riot

On the weekend of the Luton riot, similar scenes were witnessed across the country. On the Friday night there were renewed clashes in Brixton and Southall, as well as in Hull, Liverpool, Preston and many other areas. The following evening, LeicesterDerby, Bradford, Leeds and the Handsworth area of Birmingham were among those that erupted.

As the riots started to spread across England, Luton Conservative MP John Carlisle predictably called for arming the police with CS gas, rubber bullets and water cannon and flogging rioters with the birch (LN 9/7/81)A week later, with Luton having exploded, he called for ‘a new Riot Act for Britain which would give the police powers to break up groups of people’. Carlisle's hardline approach was in accord with his reputation as one of the most right wing and racist MPs of the time. Linked to the far right Monday Club, he frequently made anti-immigration speeches. For instance in the same week as the anti-racist march in Luton in May 1981, Carlisle was quoted as saying that black people should be given a grant to encourage them to leave Britain (LN 22/5/1981). He was to become known as the 'Member for Johannesberg' for his links to the South African apartheid regime including in 1985 speaking at a meeting at Luton Town Hall with the South African ambassador. 

Other local Tories took a slightly more sophisticated approach than the local MP: 'A top Luton Tory has told the Government to spend more on jobs, council housing and sport - to help prevent further street riots… Cllr Vivian Dunnington, leader of Luton's Conservative-controlled council, told Home Office Minister Timothy Raison that Government cuts were too harsh in some areas' (Luton News 13/8/81). 

Adult employment had more than doubled in Luton between June 1980 and June 1981, with 7,840 people officially registered as unemployed (10.5% of the labour force). The Trades Council estimated that that the real figure was closer to 12,000 (Luton News, 2.7.81).  Most of the major employers were making redundancies. The week before the riot, 330 workers at the Electrolux fridge and cleaner factories in Luton received redundancy notices (Luton News 9.7.81).  In March 1981, Whitbread brewery made 300 workers redundant, followed by 200 at Kent engineering in June 1981 (Luton News, 23.7.1981). Just days after the riot the town's main employer, Vauxhall Motors, announced 2000 redundancies in addition to hundreds of jobs that had already been cut that year.

For young people leaving school there were very few opportunities. Two weeks before the riot Jim Thakoordin, secretary of Luton Trades Union Council and a Labour councillor, claimed that there were 'over 2,000 young people in Luton and Dunstable chasing after eight vacancies. Many more young people leaving school will head straight for the dole queues'. 700 young people were temporarily employed on short term Manpower Services Commission schemes like the 'Youth Opportunities Programme' (Luton News, 2.7.81).

John Solomos  (2003) has written of the ‘racialisation of the 1980-81 events' as demonstrated in press reports of ‘mobs of black youths’ in the Daily Mail and elsewhere (Race and racism in Britain, 2003). One Luton paper did lead its riot reports with the headline ‘Race Hate Erupts’ (Herald, 16/7/81); however equally notable was an anxiety amongst local police, press and councilors to downplay any racist aspects of the riots. A Luton News editorial stated firmly that  ‘this was no racial riot’, it was rather the work ‘of young hooligans who like nothing more than an opportunity to attack and loot’ (LN 16/781). The paper also reported that ‘Tory and Labour councillors are united in their belief that Luton’s recent riots were not racial but the copycat acts of a panic stricken town’(‘Copycat riots not racial’, Luton News, 23/7/81). The riots were presented as an explosion of irrational criminality with no real basis in conditions in the town.

Labour Councillor Jim Thakoordin put forward a different view, claiming that ‘police action to clear black youngsters off the streets caused some of the worst violence’ (LN 16/7/81).

As we have seen, Luton did not experience a race riot in the sense of a battle between white and black communities. There were far right white racists on the streets, but also white people amongst those opposing them. But the experience of racism and organizing against it was a crucial ingredient in the events of 1981. Many of those who had been fighting against racism in the town in the previous months were at the forefront of the events of July, and in the subsequent defence of those arrested. The events in Luton may have been inspired by what was going on elsewhere but they were rooted in local experience and existing networks. 

Trials

In the days immediately following the riots, summary justice was dealt out by the local courts. Two people were jailed, for four months and four weeks respectively, for ‘threatening behaviour’. They had been part of a group of ‘youths of all nationalities’  (the police description) which ‘threw bricks and bottles at police’. Another 17 year old was fined for the same offence, saying in a statement ‘We were just there to fight the skinheads’.

Members of the skinhead gang also appeared in court, two of whom were jailed at a later trial. Two skinheads, aged 18 and 19, were jailed for 3 years for 'throwing a destructive or explosive substance with intent to cause grievous bodily harm'. One of them claimed that the police had frightened him into making an untrue statement that he had lit a petrol bomb for his friend to throw (Luton News, 10.12.81). A 17-year-old claimed by the prosecution to be a leading member of the skinhead gang was jailed for 18 months.

In a remarkable case at St Albans Crown Court, a 21-year-old 'West Indian youth' was acquitted by a jury of 'throwing a destructive or explosive substance with intent to burn two police officers' during the Luton riots. He admitted throwing a petrol bomb but said that someone handed it to him and he had thrown it as 'a spur of the moment thing. I didn't mean to harm anyone' (LN 26/11/81). He also denied he had told police that petrol bombs were being made at the mosque. 

This was one of a number of sympathetic verdicts reached by juries in this period. In Bristol, the trial of 12 people on the serious charge of ‘riot’ collapsed in April 1981 when the jury failed to agree convictions. The charges related to events in the St Pauls area of Bristol in April 1980 following a police raid on the Black and White Café which foreshadowed the uprisings of the following year.

A jury also acquitted the ‘Bradford 12’, members of the United Black Youth League, even though they admitted that they had made petrol bombs on 11 July 1981 – the same day as the main Luton riot. The jury accepted that it had been legitimate for them to do so to defend their community against the threat of racist attacks.

 The Luton Community Defence Committee

Across Britain around 3000 people were arrested in the 1981 riots, and in many areas defence campaigns were established to support those facing trial. These included the Brixton Defence Campaign, Liverpool 8 Defence Committee, Hackney Legal Defence Committee, and the Moss Side Defence Committee in Manchester. In Luton, a Community Defence Committee was established on the day after the riots and quickly secured legal support for defendants. 

At a hearing at Luton Magistrates Court on the Monday after the riot, CDC members complained from the public gallery that the police had not allowed parents to see their children in custody and that those arrested had only been allowed to see duty solicitors.  Sibghat Ali, a solicitor ‘involved with the legal aspects of the Brixton and Bristol riots’ was in court and was described as ‘A legal representative of the newly-formed Luton Community Defence Committee’ (‘Police Kept Children From Us’ Claim, Luton News, 16 July 1981).

The first public meeting of the Community Defence Committee was held at Warwick Road church hall on 19 July. I remember it being a packed and stormy affair, with around 350 people in attendance and various arguments raging. Rudi Narayan, a Brixton-based solicitor for some of the Luton defendants, sparked off a row by calling for Luton Labour Party to put forward a black candidate for Parliament, and specifically for former Luton Labour MP Ivor Clemitson (Chair of the Community Relations Council) to support Jim Thakoordin, a black Labour councillor and Chair of  the CDC. This led to Clemitson and others storming out of the meetingThe meeting Chair seemed to want to sideline more militant Luton Youth Movement activists,  asking  ‘Are you going to let this meeting be run by a white girl and a half-caste?’, referring to the secretary of LYM and another member (LN 23/7/81)

Despite this there was general support for continuing with the CDC with the objectives including ‘To defend all victims of racism’ and ‘to provide advice, information and assistance in terms of legal advice, financial and moral support to all victims of racism’. The following week a steering committee meeting was held with '40 representatives of most the major ethnic minority groups and youth and political organisations’(LN 20/8/81). While some other defence committees were primarily focused on those arrested in the riots, the Luton committee had a broader remit in promoting community defence against racism in all forms.

The formation of the CDC incensed John Carlisle MP who called for the group to be prosecuted under the Race Relations Act for being ‘racially biased’ and planning to compile a dossier of racist attacks in the town (LN 27/8/81). Luton’s other Tory MP, Graham Bright joined in the condemnation: ‘They should be disbanded. The police, as the body responsible for maintaining law and order, should be left to do their job’ (LN, 16/7/81). Labour councillor Eric Haldane also criticized the group for turning down a request from the police to attend its public meeting (LN 23/7/81).

On 30 July 1981, the Luton Youth Movement held its own post-riot public meeting at the International Centre.in Old Bedford Road. There were a couple of speakers from the Brixton Defence Committee, including Monica Morris who called the Brixton riot 'a legitimate uprising against police harrassment' (LN 6.8.81). Another speaker talked about the case of Richard Campbell, a black youth from Brixton who had died in custody in the previous year.  John Gardner of Luton Labour Party also spoke. The meeting agreed to picket Luton magistrates court in September when three LYM members were due in court on charges relating to the riot.

The question of whether a black-only defence committee (as set up in Brixton) should be established in Luton was the cause of some discussion and was promoted by the BDC speaker.  As with the Luton Youth Movement, the Luton defence committee had a predominately South Asian/Black membership but not exclusively so.  The Committee was made up of 23 local minority ethnic community organisations (Dunstable Gazette, 1/10/81) but ‘it was not of the defence committee’s choosing that it became all black. There were whites on the committee when it was formed during the recent street disturbances in Luton but for reasons best known to themselves they chose to leave. However at present there are six whites on the committee again’ (Cecil Harrison, treasurer, Luton CDC, letters, LN 27.8.81).

Luton Community Defence Committee leaflet for October meeting - 'Despite repeated promises and assurances by the police to defend the black community, racialism in Luton and Dunstable has continued to increase. In many cases the police have been unable to question or prosecute the racist aggressors'.

On 3rd October 1981 Luton CDC held a meeting at Holy Ghost Church. The week before  'The Dunstable Gazette' had reported that 'Extreme right wing activists are waging a campaign of hate against immigrant families in Houghton Regis' and quoted  Jim Thakoordin, Chair of CDC, as saying 'we have heard of leaflets being distributed from organisations like Column 88, a military type group… Then there is the November 9 group which is a similar Nazi style operation' (DG, 1.10/81). The latter was an explicitly neo-nazi organisation based in Milton Keynes.

The meeting heard reports of continuing racist attacks in the area. Mr Bhim Dookie, originally from Trinidad and living in Houghton Regis, told of being abused and spat at in the streets by skinheads and of having stones thrown at his windows. There were calls for black people to defend themselves and widespread criticism of the police. Mr Dookie said that a policeman who had come to see him had said 'If things are so bad here, why don't you go home?'  Jim Thakoordin, said that black families were to be given a list of telephone numbers to ring for help and advice if they were attacked (LN 8/10/81).

Report of October meeting from 'Fight Racism Fight Imperialism'

Members of Luton Youth Movement participated in the CDC and its steering committee, and in some ways its formation can be seen as a reaction to the earlier activities of the LYM and to the summer riots – events that galvanized the older activists of established community organizations to take a more militant stance. At the same time, the formation of the CDC threatened to drag militant anti-racism back into the internecine feuds of the local Labour Party and Community Relations Council which the LYM was partly a reaction to in the first place. The difference of approach was shown in the aims of the organizations – as well as offering defence and support to ‘victims of racism’, the CDC sought to ‘To liase between various ethnic groups and institutions, such as the police, young people, local authorities, the community relations council and Government agencies’ (LN 20/8/81). Some of its leadership saw it as having a role in mediating with the authorities rather than confronting them.

The LYM on the other hand had a generally more militant approach. As Fahim Qureshi of Luton Youth Movement has recalled,  ‘young people had enough of seeing their parents cowed down and they said enough was enough…  We used to go and sit with families.... We had self defence vigils in family homes’ and would go outside and confront racists who were harrassing people in their homes. The LYM was part of a network of similar movements across the country and  'We worked closely together especially after the riots’ (Fahim Qureshi interview with Taj Ali, youtube, 2020 - see below). Coaches bringing Asian youth movement activists from Southall and East London would stop off in Luton and pick up people on their way to picket courts in support of the Bradford 12, and Luton activists travelled down to Brick Lane to support their East London counterparts opposing racists there - the area was notorious for its National Front paper sales and associated violence.


The Luton Youth Movement are listed in this list of supporters of the Bradford 12 - a who's who of radical movements from that period


The Luton Youth Movement continued into 1982, when it was involved in protests after a pig’s head was left at the local mosque, but it seems to have faded away soon afterwards. Youth Movements tend to be short lived by their very nature, as members grow up, move away or move on to other things. LYM never reached the size or maturity of some of the other youth movements of this period, some of which for instance published their own magazines, but it was a significant chapter in an important national movement (see Black Star: Britain's Asian Youth Movements by Anandi Ramamurthy, 2013, for more on this).

The British Movement

In the weeks after the riot, the far right British Movement stepped up its activities in  Luton and the wider Bedfordshire area, or at least its threat of activities - most of which never materialised. At the beginning of August, the British Movement announced plans for a march in Bedford, in response to which the Home Secretary banned all demonstrations in BedfordLuton and Dunstable from 1 August to  9 August. (LN 30.7.81). Demonstrations in London had been banned in the previous month (Times, 11/7/81).

I remember going to Bedford on 1 August to oppose a rumoured BM plan to put a wreath on the war memorial as an alternative to their banned demonstration. Our van was stopped at a police road block outside Bedford and we were questioned about why we were going there. We convinced them that we were just going for a drink. This was partly true as we had a pint at the Barley Mow (a gay pub) and then went and staked out the war memorial watched by the police, but with no BM showing up.

Two weeks later, the British Movement announced a plan to march in Luton on the 15th August, leading to another ban on all demonstrations in the town (Luton News 15.8.1981).  In September, the BM claimed that they were setting up their own vigilante group to defend their supporters in the town because their Luton organiser 'had to have hospital treatment after a glass was thrust into his face, and that he had now left his home because of further threats and attacks' (LN 10/9/91).

Many of the BM claims were undoubtedly hot air, but their supporters were still a real threat. On 1 August, youths with British Movement sympathies threw a petrol bomb into an Asian family home in Hayhurst RoadLuton. Three 16-year olds were later charged with the attack and with writing racist slogans and Nazi symbols (Luton News, 3.9.1981).

It is doubtful whether the British Movement actually had the capacity to organise significant demonstrations in Luton or elsewhere, but their continual announcement of planned marches provided the authorities with a pretext to ban all demonstrations in affected areas. In Luton the biggest casualty of this was a planned Sinn Fein march in support of the Irish hunger strikers which was banned after the threat of a BM counter-demonstration - though a static Sinn Fein rally did go ahead in September (see previous post on the hunger strike and Luton). 

'Under heavy manners': Crisis culture

While it is possible to reconstruct events from memories and newspaper clippings, it can be more difficult to recapture how people were thinking.  One feature of the ‘structure of feeling’ of this period was a generalized sense of crisis. Aspects of this crisis culture were evident in everything from political discourse to popular music. The economic crisis was real enough, as shown by the rise in unemployment discussed above, and this was reflected in a range of responses across the political spectrum.

On the right, politicians had invoked the spectre of crisis throughout the 1970s, to articulate a sense of the British way of life being threatened by an enemy within of strikers, Irish republicans, migrants, radical students and other malcontents . This sense of unraveling of the social fabric informed some responses to the riots themselves – Luton Tory Council leader Vivian Dunnington blamed the violence on the ‘general deterioration of society’ (Luton News, 16 July 1981).

On the left, there was a sense that new forms of authoritarian policing and racism were paving the way for some kind of quasi-fascist ‘crisis state’.  For instance, Stuart Hall and the other authors of ‘The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain’ (1982) argued that  ‘the construction of an authoritarian state in Britain is fundamentally intertwined with the elaboration of popular racism’ in the context of ‘the organic crisis of British capitalism and race’. The sense that the racism of the far right National Front was now being taken up by the Conservative Party had been heightened by Margaret Thatcher's remarks in 1979 about Britain being 'swamped by people with a different culture.' 

Another ingredient of this culture of dread was the overarching threat of nuclear destruction, prompted by a heightening of Cold War tensions and giving rise to the rebirth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The Luton branch of this was very active and coachloads from the town went to London in October 1980 for the huge ‘Protest and Survive’ demonstration.

Imagery of social contradiction and collapse was at the heart of punk (Luton’s main punk band were called UK Decay), with an apocalyptic language borrowed from reggae and rastafarianism. In 1979 The Clash covered Willie Williams ‘Armagideon Time’, and The Ruts sang of ‘Babylon’s burning’. The phrase that summed up this sense of crisis more than any other was ‘under heavy manners’, coined in Jamaica during the violent political conflicts of the 1970s and popularized in Britain by The Clash and subsequently Rock Against Racism. The peak period of RAR was passing by 1981, but some people from Luton attended the big RAR carnival in Leeds on 4 July, just a week before the riot, where the Au Pairs, The Specials and Misty in Roots played. I saw the latter play at Luton Recreation Centre on a snowy night in January 1981 -  the UK reggae band had been involved in the anti-National Front demonstration in Southall in 1979 where anti-fascist Blair Peach had been killed. Music was a key means by which anti-racist struggles circulated and a sense of a national and indeed international movement was created and sustained.

Famously, the Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ was the number one record in July 1981, providing a suitable soundtrack for the riots with its depiction of urban dereliction and its cry of ‘people getting angry’. For Paul Gilroy, writing immediately after the riots,  the Two Tone movement of which the Specials were part prefigured the movement of July with its ‘self-conscious anti-racist politics’ and its impact of  African Caribbean culture on white youth; it also encapsulated ‘youth’s own perceptions of economic crisis and the consequent crisis of social relations’  ('you can't fool the youths ... race and class formation in the 1980s', Race & Class, Autumn 1981).

In the aftermath of the riots, Socialist Worker reproduced a photo of a banner from 1908 stating flatly ‘work or riot, one or the other’ with the caption ’73 years on – the same fight’ (SW 18.7.1981). Earlier in May 1981, the TUC organized People's March for Jobs from Liverpool to London passed through Luton, met by 2000 local people in the pouring rain, an attempt to resurrect the spirt of the 1920s/30s hunger marches.

The movement of riots can certainly be seen as a kind of reaction to mass unemployment, not in the narrow sense of demanding jobs, but as an angry response by young people to their situation as a 'no future' generation condemned to the dole queues or low-paid work.  In his reflections on the riots, A. Sivanadan argued that: ‘Nowhere have the youth, black and white, identified their problems with unemployment alone… There is a different hunger – a hunger to retain the freedom, the life-style, the dignity which they have carved out from the stone of their lives’ (A different hunger: writings on black resistance, 1982).  Another response was summed up in the title of an anarchist pamphlet published after the Brixton riot: ‘we want to riot not to work’.

Whatever the underlying causes, the spark for the Luton riots was undoubtedly the presence of far right skinheads and mobilising to oppose this, in a similar pattern to the Southall riots. This differed from the situation in some areas such as Brixton where the rioting was more of a direct response to policing. In both scenarios it was racism that was key, whether coming from the National Front, the British Movement, or the police.


Luton features on this riot map on cover of ‘Like a Summer with a Thousand Julys’, a situationist-influenced account of the 1981 events that declared that ‘the UK is tripping down the primrose path to social revolution’.




Report of the Luton riot - Socialist Worker, 18 July 1981

I had thought that the 40th anniversary of July 1981 might be marked with some interesting events but I guess Covid put a stop to that. I would be interested in other people's memories of this time in Luton (or indeed elsewhere), my own teenage involvement was quite peripheral. Leave a comment or drop me an email.
 

Other Luton writings:



Neil Transpontine (2021), The Luton riots of 1981: Brixton comes to Bedfordshire <https://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-luton-riots-of-1981-brixton-comes.html>. Published under Creative Commons License BY-NC 4.0. You may share and adapt for non-commercial use provided that you credit the author and source, and notify the author.

Friday, September 04, 2015

Rico on Railton Road

Rico Rodriguez, the great Jamaican ska trombonist, has died this week at the age of 80. In the UK he's best known for his work with The Specials, including playing on 1981's Ghost Town. The record famously reached number one in the week of the July riots that swept the country  that year, and was actually recorded in the week of the first Brixton riot in April 1981 -  a precursor to the long hot summer that was to come. The song's lyrics seemed to have anticipated the uprisings with its lines 'This place, is coming like a ghost town, No job to be found in this country, Can't go on no more, The people getting angry'. Even the video seemed with hindsight to refer to rioting, with the band throwing stones - though into the Thames at Rotherhithe rather than at the police.



During the Brixton riot, The George - a pub with a racist reputation on the corner of Railton Road and Effra Parade  -was burnt down. A new pub, Mingles, was built to replace it and unlike its predecesor was predominantly an African-Caribbean bar. In the early 1990s, in between his Specials stint and his involvement with Jools Holland's band, Rico used to play down at Mingles. The place was just down the road from the 121 Centre which I frequented, and a few of us went down to Mingles a couple of times to see him play. It was no big deal, just a a band playing in the pub in a low key way, but what a band. To be honest I thought at the time Rico deserved a bigger venue, but there was a sweet irony in this Jamaican musician playing in that place given its history.

In a further ironic twist, a future Jamaican musician might not be able to play in a place like this - not because of racist door policies but because of the loss of venues as a result of more affluent residents moving into the area that was once known as the Front Line. Mingles became the Harmony Bar and then La Pearl, before closing. Antic - who run the Dogstar and various other London pubs - acquired the site (82 Railton Road SE24)  and applied for planning permission to develop it with flats above and a bar below. Local residents campaigned against it with a 2012 petition stating  that 'We strongly feel this site is no longer suitable to be used as a pub or entertainment venue, as the surrounding streets have become more residential and it is too close to these homes'.

Planning permission was refused and BrixtonBuzz reported a press release last year that crowed 'London based construction specialists Sorrel Construction Ltd, partner with Lambeth Council to breathe much needed life into a post-riot area... Sorrel Construction Limited have recently announced their latest project working closely with Lambeth Council to dramatically transform a damaged pub on Railton Road into a series of brand new luxury flats'.


Mingles later became the Harmony Bar before closing

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Riot comms: from chalk, to CB radio to blackberry

The state and media's targeting of social media following last week's riots in England started out as an absurdity, with twitter, facebook and blackberry messaging variously blamed for the ability of rioters to seemingly outwit the police. Now it has begun to take a tragic turn with the jailing for four years of two young men for posting up facebook events for riots that never even happened. They were prosecuted under sections 44 and 46 of the Serious Crime Act for 'intentionally encouraging another to assist the commission of an indictable offence'.

Doubtless people did use their smartphones and their laptops to keep track with what was going on, arrange to meet up and spread information both true and false. But of course as many people have pointed out, riots have been happening for hundreds of years without the aid of these devices as insurgents have always found ways to communicate with each other. In the past , riotous demonstrations were sometimes publicised by chalked messages - see example from Deptford in 1932 .

Thirty years ago there was a suggetion that Citizen's Band (CB) radio was being used by rioters. In the aftermath of the rioting in Moss Side, Manchester in July 1981 Chief Constable James Anderton blamed the events on a conspiracy: 'It was well-coordinated. We believe a kind of military strategy was used with look-outs, people taking up observations, and vehicles being used by spotters. We also know that CB radio was used to pass messages'(Times July 10 1981).

CB radio enabled personal two way communication between users years before the mobile phone. By 1981 at least 300,000 people were believed to be using it in the UK, but it was illegal to do so amidst claims that it could interfere with emergency services communications (Times 27 February 1981). To demonstrate how law abiding they were, some CB users campaigning for legaliszation offered to help Manchester police by jamming rioters' messages (Times 11 July 1981), though their offer was rejected. Later that year, the Government did allow some FM frequencies to be dedicated to CB users, effecitively legalising it - though it remained illegal on AM.

In real terms, CB radio was marginal in the 1981 riots but its advent did signal that the state's monopoly on this kind of communication was coming to an end. The police still do have a tactical advantage in communications, particularly through its network of CCTV, helicopter and satellite imagery. But the means of mass communication are no longer solely in its control. We can expect to see a concerted attempt to reverse this in coming months, with arguments being made to close down communications in 'emergency' situations.

This will have implications for people trying to organise parties and all kinds of social events, not just demonstrations and riots. Last week a 20 year old from Essex was charged with "encouraging or assisting in the commission of an offence" under the 2007 Serious Crime Act. His alleged crime was publicising a mass water fight on Blackberry and Facebook.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Riots in The Sun, 1981 and 2011

Two front covers from The Sun thirty years apart. The first from 1981 during riots, an image of police behind riot shields in Liverpool 8 and the headlne 'To think this is England' (note also bottom of the page 'Fury in the Ghetto'):


The second from last week's riots declaring 'England is Sick' (note bottom of the page 'Anarchy in the UK'):
The similarities are obvious, a pervading sense of a post-colonial melancholia (Gilroy), dreaming of some imagined homogenous England free of social conflict that never existed. The choice of England as the frame of reference rather than the UK was particularly significant in 1981 since elsewhere in the disunited Kingdom - in the north of Ireland - scenes of rioting and urban violence had been commonplace for more than 10 years. The implicit assumption was that the 'heartland' should be kept untainted while its forces unleashed water cannons, CS gas, plastic bullets and indeed live ammunition in Derry and Belfast.

If the imagined English rose garden is an acardia, any disruption must be borne by foreign bodies. There is a direct line from Margaret Thatcher's infamous 1978 comments about being 'swamped by an alien culture' to royalist historian David Starkey's complaint this week about the riots being partially the result of white youths 'becoming black'. Inevitably, others have specifically pointed the finger at black music, with Paul Routledge in the Daily Mirror blaming 'the pernicious culture of hatred around rap music, which glorifies violence and loathing of authority (especially the police but including parents), exalts trashy materialism and raves about drugs'.

But there have been changes. The woman on the front page of the Sun in 2011 is a Polish migrant rescued from a burning building in Croydon. England is more diverse than ever, and the dream/nightmare of an all-white Anglo-Saxon nation has receded into the past. Even the fascists like the BNP have stopped publically talking about forced repatriation and have opted instead for positioning themselves as a pressure group for white ethnicity - a begrudging acceptance, whether they admit it or not, of multicultural reality. Darcus Howe saw the 1981 riots as one factor leading to an 'ease of presence' for black people. Well it hasn't always been easy, but up until the 1970s, a significant proportion of white people believed that it was both desirable and possible to 'send 'em all back'. That England is thankfully dead, however much racism continues to exist in various forms.

Still the Polish woman leaping from her flat, the Asian families mourning those killed in Birmingham, the black women at my work complaining about the unruly youth, also pose a problem for any future 'left' or 'radical' movement. The problem is not so much how to overcome cultural barriers but the difference between the rage of those who feel they have nothing to lose, and other working class people who feel - and sometimes are - threatened by this anger. A working class consituency of all ethnicities that can be mobilised by papers like The Sun behind calls for more police and harsher sentences. A New England where overt official racism is marginalised, but marginalised young people - and especially young black people - have a tougher time than ever.

(best thing on musical aspects of the riots so far is Dan Hancox's article in The Guardian, Rap responds to the riots: 'They have to take us seriously')

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Short Hot Summer 1981: Bradford 12

As the uprisings of July 1981 died down, the focus shifted to the defence of those arrested. The most remarkable trial was that of the Bradford 12, arrested following events on the 11th July when Asian youth had taken to the streets prepared to confront the threat of a racist attack on their community. Despite admitting making petrol bombs, the defendants were acquitted by the jury who seemingly accepted the argument that they were acting in self defence.



The following analysis was written by The Race Today Collective (165 Railton Road, Brixton, London SE24) and publihsed in their 1983 pamphlet 'The Struggle of Asian Workers in Britain'

Reflecting on the Trial of the Decade: The Bradford 12

On July 17 1981, the attention of the West Yorkshire police was drawn to two milk crates of petrol bombs which were hidden in high bushes at the back of the nurses' home in Bradford. The police removed the petrol from the bottles, replaced it with tea and set up a vigil for the manufacturers. No one turned up. Thirteen days later, 12 young Asians from the Asian community in Bradford were arrested and subsequently charged with the following:

Count 1: Making an explosive substance with intent to endanger life and property contrary to Section 3(1)(b) of the Explosive Substance Act 1881. That on the 11th day of July 1981 (the 12) unlawfully and maliciously made an explosive substance, namely 38 petrol bombs, with intent by means thereof to endanger life or cause serious injury to property or to enable other persons to do so.

Count 2: Conspiracy to make explosive substances, contrary to Section 1 of the Criminal Law Act 1977. On the 11th day of July 1981 (the 12) conspired together to make explosive substances, namely petrol bombs, for unlawful purposes.

These charges were returned by the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions upon examination of evidence provided by the West Yorkshire police. They carry a penalty of up to life imprisonment, and legal pundits forecasted prison terms of seven to ten years should the defendants be found guilty.

The 12 appeared before the local magistrates on Saturday, August 1st and were refused bail. The defendants spent the next three to four months in prison before they were granted bail on conditions which included large sureties, daily reporting to the local police, an evening curfew and a complete ban on attendance at all political meetings, later relaxed to a ban on those meetings which related directly to their cases. Giovanni Singh, Praveen Patel, Saeed Hussain, Sabir Hussain, Tariq Ali, Ahmed Mansoor, Bahram Noor Khan, Tarlochan Gata Aura, Ishaq Mohammed Kazi, Vasant Patel, Jayesh Amin and Masood Malik appeared at the Leeds Crown Court on April 26 1982. They were all represented by counsel with the exception of Tariq Ali who chose to defend himself. The trial lasted 31 days before Judge Beaumont and a jury of seven whites and five blacks. All the jurors were local Leeds residents.

The main line of defence was self-defence. Gata Aura, Singh, Patel, Hussain, Mansoor, Malik, Sabir Hussain, Khan and Vasant Patel admitted to being involved somewhere along the line. Ali, Amin and Kazi denied any involvement at all. All claimed that he was told by Gata Aura about the existence of the petrol bombs and he advised Gata Aura to destroy them. Amin's counsel cross examined on the basis that his client knew nothing about the operation and was playing cricket at the time. Kazi denied any involvement at all.

Those who accepted that they were involved advanced the line that they were legally and morally right to manufacture the petrol bombs. They had heard that racialists were on their way to attack the Bradford Asian community, and after a meeting at Amin's house, they took the decision to make and use the petrol bombs to create a wall of flame along Lumb Lane which would deter the attackers from violently set-ting upon the Asian community. They had not intended endangering life or property; they merely set out to deter.

The English Common Law upholds the right of self-defence, qualified by the fact that the force used in self-defence must not be in excess of that which is reasonable to repel the attack. The defendants claimed, therefore, that the manufacture and possible use of the petrol bombs was a perfectly legal act and necessary for the defence of the community against a racialist onslaught.

The second line of defence turned on the definition of explosives. The defendants argued, through counsel, that petrol bombs were not explosives, that on impact they did not explode. On June 16, the jurors, after deliberating for a day and a half, re-turned verdicts of not guilty. The breakdown was eleven to one.

The Mass Youth Movement and its Origins

Firstly, who are these young men and what are the forces which shaped them and their actions? The 12 defendants are all young Asians, that is to say the offspring of immigrants who arrived in Britain from India and Pakistan. They are products of the British educational system and are aged between 17 and 25 years. With the exception of Jayesh Amin, a university graduate, and Ishaq Kazi, a bank clerk, they were, at the time of their arrest, either unemployed workers or employed in working-class jobs in the city of Bradford.

Politically they were members of the United Black Youth League, (UBYL), a small organisation which, at the time of their arrest, was three to four months old. By then no statement of policy and position had been stated by the organisation, but an interpretation of their activities in campaigns indicated a radical approach to the issues of racial attacks on the Asian community and deportations of Asian workers.

What is certain is that these young men did not fall from the sky, nor are they odd balls prone to irrational behaviour. They are products of an historical movement which first made itself felt at the heart of British society in the summer of 1976.



Every new historical movement invariably emerges around a single issue and has as its objective the transcending, perhaps, the shattering of the old. In this case the issue has been and continues to be the constant and murderous stream of racial attacks against the Asian community. The old at this juncture was and is being represented by the moderate approach of the traditional Asian organisations backed by the British state. The moment? The murder of 18 year old Gurdip Singh Chaggar by a gang of racialists on the streets of Southall on June 4 1976.

Up to that moment, the Asian community throughout the United Kingdom had been complaining about racial attacks to anyone who would listen. Their experiences in this regard stretched way back to the late 1960s. Right-wing fascist organisations in some cases actually carried out the attacks and where they did not, they were able to stimulate disaffected young whites into what was popularly referred to as Paki-bashing. The Asian community made it clear, through their organisations, that the British police showed a marked reluctance in tracking down and bringing their assailants to justice. They were perfectly right. The official position, repeated in parrot-like fashion by police forces up and down the country, was that the term, 'racial attack', was a figment of the Asian imagination. These acts, claimed officialdom, were merely the expressions of vandals.

The Asian community responded to this phenomenon with an uncharacteristic moderation. Apart from scattered groups of vigilantes in East London they seemed to reply on complaints to the authorities as a way of dealing with this issue. Another factor needs to be considered. During the late sixties and throughout the seventies, the Asian community had developed a remarkable militancy on the shop floor. Theirs is a history of militant strikes in opposition both to the employers and the trade union bureaucracy. These militant activities won, for those activists in the traditional Asian organisations, recognition from the authorities. Some of them were rewarded with jobs inside the trade union bureaucracy, others became local councillors; the mosque and the temple attracted visiting Members of Parliament and other dignitaries. Add to this the vast race relations bureaucracy and the Manpower Services Commission with its equally vast and paralysing sources of state funding, and the corruption of traditional Asian organisations was complete by the time Gurdip Singh Chaggar lay dying on the pavement of a Southall street. The effect of this corruption was and continues to be the stifling of the traditions of militancy in the Asian community.

A whole generation of Asian youth had grown up by then. They, like everyone of the defendants, had been to school here. They were socially confident. They rose en masse to challenge the old ways and methods of dealing with racial attacks and to break through the solid wall of Asian organisations which maintained the status quo.

The first major expression of this new force came in the aftermath of Chaggar's murder. The terrain was Southall. It is a West London suburb in which some 30,000 Asians reside. They hail mainly from the Punjab. They work in local factories in the main and in various jobs at the Heathrow Airport. Theirs is a solid proletarian base. The children are socialised in local schools and pursue lives increasingly dominated by British circumstances. The Indian Workers Association, the Sikh Temple and the local race relations industry dominate. That particular organisational formation exists in every Asian community in Britain.

In the days following Chaggar's murder, the youth took to the streets. They organised patrols and in a sharp outburst attacked white motorists and opposed the police. When two of their number were arrested, they surrounded the local police station and secured the release of their comrades. Meanwhile, the identical process was in motion among Bengalis in the East End of London. Young Asians in other parts of the country stirred in response.

This was a massive social upheaval involving thousands of young Asians throughout Britain who were prepared to throw the caution of their parents to the wind. They distinguished themselves from all that had gone before by employing militant and violent methods to defend themselves against racial attacks. Such was the impact that the rest of British society had to take notice. No longer could the issue be clouded by the smoke screen of official jargon and police semantics. Thousands of whites responded in support. They were mainly political radicals and well-meaning liberals. The mass of the British people were not against; they were merely bewildered, waiting for a positive lead. And the first generation Asians, who got nowhere with their moderate approach, were willing to go along with the youth.

All the defendants in the trial of the Bradford 12 cut their teeth in this mass movement. It is on this general terrain that they were blooded. But there is more to it than just the general. All new historical movements must constantly contest the old if they are to ground themselves and meet the historical tasks required of them. And this movement was no exception. The old is represented by a panoply of formal Asian organisations formed during the early stages of Asian immigration. They were progressive once, but had turned into their opposites. Behind this solid wall stood the British state ready and willing to hold the line against the invading hordes of young Asians.

The British state was cautious at first, leaving matters up to the entrenched Asian formation. The traditional Asian organisations did not manage too well. They barely contained a mass revolt against the demonstration which followed Chaggar's murder. Up to the morning of the march, no one knew whether the youth would demonstrate or not. Here are a couple of comments made by a young protester: "These people [the elders] have done nothing. Some of them have got rich. The party wallahs are asking us to join them when what they should do is join us, otherwise they are finished".

Posit these comments against those expressed by traditional moderates: "These people [the youth] are not political, they have no politics. It is we who have the political experience". Those were the political lines to emerge in the cut and thrust of events surrounding the Southall murder, but they replicated themselves among the Asian community throughout the country. As it is with these contests, the manipulation began. The young Asians set up youth organisations in Southall and elsewhere. The old struck back and their ways were many. Take this as an example: In Blackburn, a northern town, a youth organisation had surfaced. The membership challenged the old on a range of issues. At the end of the day, the major figure in the youth movement was savagely brutalised by thugs organised by the old leadership. In other areas the soft option prevailed. The youth leadership was guided with much encouragement into state funded projects. The new was constantly courted with persuasive offers to sink differences and join up with the old. All manner of pressure was bought to bear.

These manoeuvrings penetrated large sections of the organised youth leadership, but the mass movement remained largely unaffected. When the front line fails it is the turn of the backline to prevail. In this case the backline was the coercive forces of the British state.

During the general election of 1979, the fascist and racist National Front put up candidates in constituencies where there were large black communities. They had no chance of winning but it would give them the right to hold public meetings in black areas. And a public meeting was carded for Southall. Young Asians gathered in their thousands to prevent the meeting taking place. The police mobilised in enormous numbers. They proceeded to attack the protesters with a savagery which no section of the society, except the Irish in Northern Ireland, had experienced in years. One person, an anti racist school teacher, Blair Peach, was bludgeoned to death by police batons. Over 300 people were arrested and the cases were heard by carefully selected magistrates throughout London who returned a disproportionate number of guilty verdicts. Only by the most vulgar, empirical violence could the British state hope to contain the Asian mass movement and its white support under the hegemony of traditional Asian organisations.

There is the time honoured conclusion, born out of centuries of social and political experience, that repression of this order only serves to strengthen the resolve of the mass movement. In a period of five years, the young Asians had transformed the balance of power in this crucial struggle. Thousands of them participated in this movement. One moment of violent excess on the part of the police would not crush it.

All 12 defendants had at one time or another been activists in that general movement. Their membership in the UBYL placed them in a special category though. By being members of that organisation, they were openly repudiating the traditional Asian formations which dominated the Bradford community. They were, therefore, consciously laying down the challenge to the state and its Asian phalanx for the hearts and minds of the Asian community.

Gata Aura and Tariq Ali were involved in the initial breakaway from the old. They, along with others, founded the Bradford Asian Youth Movement in 1977. There they mobilised for anti-fascist demonstrations and campaigned against the deportation of Asian workers. The Bradford AYM had planned the Freedom March which would begin in Bradford and take in all major immigrant conurbations in Britain. they had hoped that this tactic would lay the foundation for Asian and West Indian unity. The march did not win effective support and was cancelled.

In the cut and thrust of attempting to transcend the old, a faction within the Bradford AYM succumbed to the practice of state funding and welfare activities. Gata Aura and Ali walked out and set up the United Black Youth League through which they aimed to draw membership from the West Indian community and to travel along a radical and revolutionary path. Above all, they persisted in their efforts to take the mass youth movement, with the support of older Asian workers, beyond the reactionary confines delineated by the old guard. For the membership of the UBYL, the manufacture of petrol bombs for use in the event of a racial attack was a normal activity. For this generation of young Asians there was nothing at all extraordinary in this approach. Also, Gata Aura had emerged as a national political figure as chairman of the Anwar Ditta campaign. He pursued this activity while being a member of the UBYL. Anwar Ditta, an Asian woman, was prevented by the immigration laws from having her children join her here. The campaign was national in scope and ultimately successful. Constant reports in the press and a documentary on television brought the issue to the nation's attention. The point to be made here is that by organising campaigns of this scope, Gata Aura and his organisation were in fact making clear what the traditional Asian organisations were not doing.

The Campaign to Free the 12

As in Southall in the general election of 1979, the British state drew the line. On this occasion the Director of Public Prosecutions was the cut-ting edge. Once that office received the evidence collated by the police, two options were open to the judicial arm of the British state. The Director could take the normal course of charging the defendants simply with manufacturing petrol bombs. It would have been a low key, straight forward matter. During the summer riots, which were going on at the same time, many were so charged. He chose the ab-normal and consequently highly political course. Out came the political bludgeon disguised in judicial garb aimed at smashing that tendency in the Asian Youth Movement which sought to transcend the moderate approach.

By opting for the conspiracy charges, the DPP lay down a major challenge to the youth movement and its organisational activists. How did they fare? Here was a political opportunity, par excellence, to galvanise the thousands of young Asians into motion. They were there, alive and vibrant. They had shown their mettle over five dramatic years and all the evidence indicated they were on the move. Only weeks previous to the arrests, skinhead fascists were bussed into Southall for a pop concert at a local pub. Four members of the party abused an Asian shopkeeper and attacked Asian shop windows on the main street. The young Asians of Southall organised themselves, marched on the pub and despite police protection burnt the building down. Not only did a campaign to free the 12 have the opportunity to mobilise young Asians, the way was open to take the issue to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Thousands on the Asian continent would have responded. And finally, such a campaign would establish an organisational bridgehead which would have had the effect of eclipsing the traditional Asian organisations once and for all.

A group of activists from the Bradford AYM, in alliance with other forces in the community, formed the July 11th Committee to free the 12. The issue, which at once preoccupied the committee was the political line they would adopt for mobilisation. This, of course, would tun on the defence which those arrested would employ. Courtenay Hay, a former member of the defunct Bradford Black Collective and now Chairman of the Committee, visited Gata Aura in prison. Gata Aura tells us that he informed Hay that the line was self-defence. Hay moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. He returned to the Committee with the line that the defendants were framed. His campaign message was that: "The UBYL, because of its political activities of fighting racism, its resistance to fascism and carrying forward the anti imperialist struggle has been made a victim of political persecution by the state police".

It was obvious that he had elevated the UBYL to a position which did not accord with reality. The organisation was all of four months old, just about cutting its teeth and had made to date little impact locally or nationally. Had political activists been operating in a situation in which the British state would deliberately frame an entire organisation on conspiracy to make petrol bombs, then we were living in dire straits indeed. Nowhere in the country was such evidence available. There was ample evidence in the trial that the Special Branch tailed the UBYL waiting to pounce once a mistake was made, but the frame up line was indigestible to all but the most gullible.

The July 11th Committee went to the public for the first time on August 12 1981 at the Arcadian Cinema in Bradford. The leaflet inviting the public to the meeting screamed, 'Framed by the Police'. Some 900 Asian youth attended that meeting but the explanation for the arrests was difficult, almost impossible to swallow. The 12 defendants were their peers whom they knew politically and socially. The audience would know that the 12 were quite capable of making petrol bombs. No big thing. Some of them might even have known of the details. This is not pure speculation. Large numbers of Asian youth in Bradford were aware that all the defendants made statements to the Police on arrest, that they were party to making the bombs. The frame up line fell on deaf ears.

There was more to come. The platform boasted Councillor Ajeeb, Councillor Hameed and J.S. Sahota of the Indian Workers Association. The political practice of the speakers has been in mortal opposition to the mass radical and revolutionary movement of Asian youth. From that meeting onwards, the mass of Asian youth voted with their feet. They went away and stayed away.

Meanwhile the Yorkshire police had been visiting the elders of the Asian community warning them away from supporting the 12. They were terrorists, admonished the police. The elders accommodated the police and subsequently spewed out the line to their followers that the 12 were evil terrorists who had let down their villages back home.

The Committee persisted with the frame up line. In November, a full three months later, the Committee held a meeting at the London School of Economics and again the leaflet harangued, 'Framed by the Police'. The degeneration was complete. Southall, Brick Lane, New-am are traditional strongholds of Asian youth revolt. Yet the meeting was held at the LSE. It was clear that the campaign was firmly in the grips of the Asian middle classes (student types) with every left tendency, every miniscule radical outfit on board. Whatever else the campaign would do, it certainly could not take the mass movement one step further.

And the only line which would generate support in the Asian community was the self-defence line. Sections on the committee in Bradford argued for it, debated the issue week after week. In the end they were defeated, overruled by the solicitors. The solicitors? Yes. The legal team advised that it would be the correct course to keep the defence secret and surprise the prosecution with the self-defence argument. They carried the day. Unimaginable!

We defy a single lawyer to explain what could the prosecution have done to strengthen their case if the self-defence issue was made public. Nothing at all. Here we need to explain the legal procedure involved. The police collate their evidence and send it to the Director of Public Prosecutions who returns the charges. All the police evidence is handed over to the defence. All. What on earth could the prosecution do to hinder the defence if the self-defence position was made public? Sweet F/A.

A word about lawyers in general. They, most of them, have the tendency to dominate the client. Not for them words of advice which the defendants may or may not accept. Their word is law. It needs a powerful, political campaign and equally strong defendants to hold the fort. Otherwise, lawyers do as they please, requiring of campaigns mere orchestration and stage decoration.

In time the campaign switched line to the obscure and liberal position that conspiracy charges were legally oppressive. Listen to this. "Conspiracy charges relate more to defendants' political views and activity than to anything else. They have been used before as a political weapon by the British state to repress opposition." The question to be posed here is 'so what?' That argument is appropriate to the National Council of Civil Liberties who convince intellectuals about complex legal matters. It could not mobilise a single Asian youth. Young Asians would have responded to the line which said, 'Yes, we made the bombs, we made them in defence of the Asian community. Self-defence is No offence'. They would have flocked to that position from every Asian community in this country.

Instead, the campaign persisted in the conspiracy argument with the consequence that support came exclusively from Asian university students, law centre workers, other state-funded projects workers and various denominations of the white left. Here the campaign organisers had a fine political opportunity and squandered it. What is most ironic is that the campaign eventually adopted the self-defence position, but only after the trial was half-way through.

However all was not negative. The 12 entered Leeds Crown Court with much behind them. The mass movement's dramatic actions over a period of five years ensured that no jury in this nation could be un-aware of the general issue of racial attacks. That was a major plus. The campaign, although not historically in tune with the needs of the move-ment, was able to let thousands know of the trial. And the de-fence secured a major weapon when a Home Office study revealed the existence of 2,581 instances of racial attacks in two months. William Whitelaw, Home Secretary, was forced to change the official position. In his introduction to the Home Office report he said, "The study has shown quite clearly that the anxieties expressed about racial attacks was justified". That admission was dragged out of him by the ceaseless militancy of young Asians on the question. And finally a team of radical lawyers, blooded in and shaped by the black revolt in Britain would take the fight to the judicial authorities.

There was one major hurdle to transcend nevertheless. Tarlochan Gata Aura, on arrest, made two statements to the police. They had offered the inducement that he would be granted bail if he came clean. They also prompted him with the information that his finger-prints were found on one of the bottles. In his statement he men-tioned Ishaq Kazi, Praveen Patel, Jayesh Amin, Bahram Noor Khan, Sabir Hussain, Tariq All and Vasant Patel as part of the general organisation. He admitted to making the bombs for use "in case the National Front were there causing trouble". Following Gata Aura's admission, all the other defendants crumbled and made varying ad-missions. Without these statements the prosecution would have had no case.

Gata Aura's admission created a great deal of acrimony among the defendants. The rank and file membership expressed a serious hostility to the leadership trio of Gata Aura, Amin and Ali. The three, they claimed, got them into the mess and created extra difficulties by being the first to sign statements of admission.

More needs to be said on this issue. On the face of it a serious question mark is raised when the leadership of a radical and revolutionary political organisation crumbles so easily before normal police interrogation. In this instance, the issue is much more complex. Gata Aura admits that he signed because he thought "it was the end of the world". Obviously he could see no way out. His attitude is quite understandable. The UBYL was perhaps the sole Asian youth organisation which sought to take the struggle forward against the state and a solid and entrenched wall of Asian reaction. An immense task, one which they were attemp-ting in virtual isolation. Once the entire membership was locked up, with apparently incontrovertible evidence at hand, it was likely that a youth of 25 years with little experience of police stations, would crumble.

The Trial at Leeds Crown Court


And so to the Leeds Crown Court, April 26 1982. The first major issue at the trial turned on jury selection. Defence counsel challenged the fact that out of a panel of 75 none of the jurors were from the Asian community in Bradford and only two prospective jurors were Asian. Old legal statutes were invoked, complex arguments were offered, specialist and technical jargon was employed. Eventually, Judge Beaumont, by an administrative sleight of hand, met the defence half way having expressed his sympathy with the view that there should be some black representation on the jury. Evenutally 12 jurors were sworn in, seven of whom were white and five black.

Paul Kennedy opened for the prosecution. Not a man of great sparkle, wit and incisive intellect which are the characteristics of an exceptional barrister. He was quite ordinary, mediocre even. He re-ferred the court to events of July 11 1981 when he recalled "there was considerable disturbance in Bradford City Centre in which windows were broken, property was damaged and crowds behaved in a menacing way and had to be dispersed." Tariq Ali, he offered, was identified by police officers as moving between groups of Asians. Tarlochan Gata Aura, he added, was organising members of the UBYL to attend a meeting in which "Tarlochan made it clear that trouble was expected that evening and that petrol bombs should be made."

And here was the major point around which the central contention between defence and prosecution turned. "There was no threat from skinheads and the National Front... they [the bombs] were to be used against the police... against large shops when they would have a larger effect... they were to be used in a riot". Then he outlined the specific allegations against the 12:

Tarlochan Gata Aura - Co-leader of the United Black Youth League (UBYL). Organised the meeting and the manufacture of petrol bombs. Obtained the petrol, stuffed the bottles with wicks. Wiped the bottles clean of fingerprints. Went to the town centre to participate in a 'riot' and was arrested and charged with threatening behaviour.

Tariq Ali - Co-leader of the UBYL. Took decision with Tarlochan Gata Aura to make petrol bombs on July 11. Went to town centre to agitate and incite a riot in which petrol bombs would be used. Arrested for disturbing the peace.

Jayesh Amin - Leading member of the UBYL 'reluctantly' allowed his home to be used for the manufacture of petrol devices.

Giovanni Singh - Bought rubber tubing for syphoning petrol. Arrested in town centre intervening in Ali's arrest.

Praveen Patel - Present at UBYL meeting. Obtained milk bottles, filled with petrol, syphoned from car.

Ishaq Mohammed Kazi - Present at meeting. Allowed his car to be used to obtain necessary materials.

Bahram Noor Khan - Present at UBYL meeting. Obtained petrol, kept watch while others made devices.

Masood Malik - Present at UBYL meeting. Obtained materials necessary for petrol bombs. Kept watch while others made devices.

Vasant Patel - Present at UBYL meeting. Obtained milk bottles and material for wicks.

Saeed Hussain - Present at UBYL meeting.

Sabir Hussain - Present at UBYL meeting. Arrested in town centre intervening in Ali's arrest.

Ahmed Mansor - Present at UBYL meeting. Obtained bottles, kept watch, wiped bottles clean to remove finger prints.

The basis of all this information lay in the statements of admission signed by all the defendants.

Then there followed some 37 officers most of whom testified to the fact that they accurately recorded, in the language and wording of the defendants, hundreds of questions and answers. The line of cross examination by defence counsel aimed to show that sizeable areas of the police documentation were fabricated and that they intimidated, harassed and used violence against the defendants to sign certain admissions.

The major issue turned on the use for which the bombs were manufactured. The police claimed that some defendants admitted that the bombs were to be used against the police and property. The defence denied this allegation and claimed that those words were fabricated by the police.

The high point of the fabrication issue was reached in Helena Kennedy's cross examination of Officer Maloney. He claimed that he questioned Sabir Hussain extensively without taking any notes. Some 200 questions were asked and replied to. Maloney claimed to have gone away and recorded verbatim 196 questions and answers. "Did you do that from memory?" teased Ms Kennedy. "Yes, I did", replied Maloney triumphantly. What was the first question I asked you today?" demanded Kennedy, a sharp edge to her Scottish brogue. "I can't remember", surrendered Maloney.

And then there was the crafty 'hatchet job' on Detective Inspector Sidebottom executed by Paddy O'Connor, counsel for Masood Malik. Paddy enquired of Sidebottom whether, "Further to my previous statement I would like to clarify the points which I did not mention before", were really the words of "an 18 year old Yorkshire lad?" "Yes", replied Sidebottom.

O'Connor then read from Sidebottom's own statement, "Further to my previous statement I would like to clarify the point I did not mention before". Out came O'Connor's sledge hammer. "Did the 18 year old lad draft your second statement for you?" Sidebottom was demolished.

Highlights those were, but there were many like moments in the detailed and rigorous cross examination by defence counsel. At the end of the day the jurors were aware that the police were prolific at putting words in mouths of defendants. Then there was the other key issue. Were racial attacks prevalent in Bradford? Officer after officer described Bradford as a haven of multi-racial peace. They would not budge even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. They made themselves sound and look ridiculous.

At the end of the prosecution's case, the defence is invited to make submissions. They are invariably to the effect that the prosecution had not made a case against this or that defendant. Following like submissions, Sabir Hussain and Saeed Hussain had count 1 dropped against them. There was no evidence to show that they had participated in manufacturing the actual devices. Both charges were dropped against Jayesh Amin, there being no prima facie case made against him. He was set free.

It was now the turn of the defence. Mansfield opened for Tarlochan Gata Aura who then went onto the witness stand. Soft features belied a formidable political experience. Tarlochan had just turned 25. He was blooded in the anti fascist, anti racist movement of Asian youth and sought relentlessly for some organisational and ideological clarity through which to advance the Asian struggle. He had joined the International Socialists, a Trotskyist off-shoot. There he was part of a black caucus which probed and prodded the leadership on its grasp of the black question and its practice in relation to this vibrant and lively terrain. 'Black and White Unite and Fight' was all the leadership could muster. Tarlochan and the majority of the caucus left and formed `Samaj inna Babylon,' a combination of Asian and West Indian activists who produced a newspaper. That organisation fell apart and he moved on to the Indian Progressive Youth Movement in Bradford, then to the Bradford AYM, the Black Socialist Alliance and finally the UBYL.

Tarlochan gave his evidence quietly and moderately, if somewhat nervously. His delivery under examination in chief and cross examination could be described as `suaviter in modo, fortiter in re'. Moderate in manner, strong in content.

Yes, he had made the bombs; yes, he had organised others to manufacture them. He would take full responsibility. He had pursued the course because he was told that the fascists were coming to attack and a wall of flame would deter them. No, he was not a man of violence. He had not left the Bradford AYM because he wished to pursue violent methods. He left because the organisation had degenerated into living off state funding. Cooly and calmly he informed the court of the d it ferent campaigns in which he had been involved. At the end of his three day ordeal, he impressed the jury and the public as a young man of moderation and sensitivity, searching for ways and means of alleviating the Asian condition. It was a splendid performance and the high point of the trial.

Evidence was called to show that the Asian community througout Britain had been living under a reign of racist terror, and that on July 11 1981, the whole community was under virtual siege once news of an impending racialist onslaught spread like wild fire. Evidence was also put forward, and not questioned by the prosecution, that a Chief Inspector was actually informed of the impending attack and the police did nothing to protect the community.

Then came the dramatic moment. Not a single defendant, apart from Tarlochan, would go into the witness box. They would make statements from the dock on which they could not be cross examined. Even Tariq Ali, a formidable political activist, stayed away. It was a curious decision. Thousands throughout Britain would have been moved by their responses to the prosecutor's questions. Silence!

The lawyers advised on this course because they speculated that the defendants were too naive to withstand lengthy and hostile cross examination. We beg to differ. These speculations are based on interviews between the lawyers and defendants. A more precise analysis of those interviews must be presented if we are to be convinced.

It is understandable that the defendants were thrown on 1he de l'ensive when they discovered that the campaign failed to muster the Potential support from young Asians, but that they could not wilh stand hostile cross examination because of their naivete is so much liberal speculation based on the poor, docile Asian victim theory.

Five years of mass revolt do not docile Asian make. All of these voting men have experiences in organising demonstrations, campaigns and other militant activity. They have lived through the jungle of the school playground, the cut and thrust of working class urban social life, three to four months in prison and the rigorous discipline of the bail conditions for close to a year. At the end of that process you become many things and certainly not among them are docile and naive victims. The mass of Asian youth up and down the country would have warmed to the spirited defences which they surely could have mounted.

The closing speeches and the judges summing up were of the usual order, apart from odd flourishes of rhetoric from defence counsel. The jurors deliberated for a day and a half before returning verdicts of not guilty. The verdict carried clear implications. The five black and seven white jurors were asked by the defence to scale two formidable hurdles.

Firstly, they were asked to say that the manufacture of petrol bombs was a legal act required to meet the threat that racialists posed against the Asian community. And that the petrol bombs were necessary because the police failed to protect Asians from racial attacks. Secondly, they were required to accept, that 'the best police force in the world' contained men and women who would fabricate evidence against defendants. In a provincial area, far away from London, a mixed jury, by accepting the defence's version of events, defied the fundamental propositions that the police placed before them. There, the mass movement of recent years was expressing itself.



Text of leaflet:



'BRADFORD 12 ARE FRAMED BECAUSE THEY FOUGHT STATE RACISM

Everyday our families are split apart by the racist Immigration Laws. Our homes are raided by Immigration Officers. We are harrassed by the police on the streets and arrested on any pretext. We are criminalised through arbitrary charges confirmed by the racist judiciary. They played a major role in the struggle of Anwar Ditta, Jaswinder Kaur and Nasira Begum against the racist Immigration laws and of Gary Pemberton against the lying West Yorkshire police.

THE BRADFORD 12 ARE FRAMED BECAUSE THEY DEFENDED THE BLACK COMMUNITY

Our mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers are attacked and murdered in the streets. The police do nothing. Our homes and places of worship are burned to the ground, nobody is arrested. Families are burned to death. The murderers and firebombers speak openly of their organised violence against our communities. In Bradford people face racist attacks everyday. For example on July I4th a white gang with a petrol bomb attacked an Asian Shoolboy. On July 24th two Asian homes were gutted by racist firebombers.

The only Conspiracy is Police Conspiracy - DROP ALL CHARGES NOW

POLICE STATE IN ACTION

For years Britain has been a police state for black people. This year the repression has been stepped up by paramilitary attacks on the black communities - the army of occupation in Brixton, police vehicles crushing people to death and CS gas bullets in Liverpool and highly developed surveillance techniques all over Britain In Bradford black youth have faced increased surveillance over the last 18 months. The 'riots' were an excuse to arrest our brothers and frame them for conspiracy. While the racist attackers of Asian homes on the 24th of July are out on bail, our brothers are being held in prison and refused bail'.





There's an event at SOAS in London this Saturday 23rd July - Self-Defence is No Offence! 30th Anniversary of the Bradford 12, 'A Day of Speakers, Discussion and Celebration'. Details here.

Top two images from Tandana, onlne archive of materials from Asian youth movements in this period