Abstract
Britain’s newspaper headlines made for stark reading in July 1981.1 As a series of riots broke out across the country’s inner-cities, The Sun led with reports of ‘Race Fury’ and ‘Mob Rule’, opening up to provide daily updates of ‘Burning Britain’ as the month drew on.2 The Daily Mail, keen as always to pander a prejudice, described the disorder as a ‘Black War on Police’, bemoaning years of ‘sparing the rod’ and quoting those who blamed the riots on a ‘vociferous immigration lobby’ that sought ‘excuses all the time for the excesses of the blacks’.3 The Daily Express wrote of a ‘permissive whirlwind’ wreaking havoc; the Daily Mirror combined coverage of ‘Riot Mobs’ with condemnation of a Tory government that failed to recognize ‘real, deep and dangerous problems’ rooted in housing, education and unemployment.4 Britain was ‘close to anarchy’, the Mirror insisted, as it juxtaposed images of battered police and broken windows with a message to Margaret Thatcher: ‘Save Our Cities’.5
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Notes
See, for example, C. Brooker (1980) The Seventies: Portrait of a Decade (London: Allen Lane);
P. Whitehead (1985) The Writing on the Wall: Britain in the Seventies (London: Michael Joseph);
D. Sandbrook (2011) State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–74 (London: Penguin); idem. (2012) Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–79 (London: Allen Lane). For interesting reassessments of the period, see N. Tiratsoo (1997) ‘“You’ve Never Had It so Bad”: Britain in the 1970s’ in idem. (ed.) From Blitz to Blair: A New History of Britain since the 1970s (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson), pp. 163–90; C. Hay (2010) ‘Chronicles of a Death Foretold: The Winter of Discontent and Construction of the Crisis of British Keynesian’ Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 63, no. 3, 446–70;
J. Moran (2010) ‘“Stand Up and Be Counted”: Hughie Green, the 1970s and Popular Memory’ History Workshop Journal, vol. 70, no. 1, 173–98;
L. Black, H. Pemberton and P. Thane (eds) (2013) Reassessing the Seventies (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
For two differing styles of overview, see B. Harrison (2010) Finding a Role? The United Kingdom, 1970–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
A. McSmith (2011) No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Constable).
The Scarman Report, commissioned in response to the Brixton riots of April 1981 that presaged the wider summer disturbances, recognized the police as carrying ‘responsibility for the outbreak of disorder’, citing prejudice and a failure to engage in community relations as integral to the sense of distrust that permeated estates up and down the country. Lord Scarman (1982) The Scarman Report: The Brixton Disorders, 10–12 April 1981 (London: Pelican), pp. 118–19.
See also J. Benyon (ed.) (1984) Scarman and After: Essays Reflecting on Lord Scarman’s Report, the Riots and their Aftermath (Oxford: Pergamon);
J. Rex (1982) ‘The 1981 Urban Riots in Britain’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 6, no.1, 99–113.
Alwyn Turner and Graham Stewart are just two historians who have drawn from across the arts to find cultural complements to the prevailing moods and events of the early 1980s. See A.W. Turner (2010) Rejoice, Rejoice: Britain in the 1980s (London: Aurum);
G. Stewart (2013) Bang: A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Atlantic Books).
M. Kenny (1995) The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin (London: Lawrence & Wishart);
D. Dworkin (1997) Cultural Marxism in Post War Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies (North Carolina: Duke University Press).
D. Marsh (1977) ‘Dole Queue Rock’ New Society, 20 January, pp. 112–14; S. Frith and H. Horne (1987) Art into Pop (London: Methuen & Co.).
M. Worley (2014) ‘Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality and British Punk’ Twentieth Century British History, vol. 24, no. 4, 606–34.
D. Renton (2006) When We Touched the Sky: The Anti-Nazi League, 1977–81 (London: New Clarion Press), pp. 136–55.
G. Berger (2006) The Story of Crass (London: Omnibus Press), pp. 230–33.
G. McKay (1996) Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties (London: Verso).
S. Alexander Reed (2013) Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
See J. Robb (2009) Death to Trad Rock (London: Cherry Red).
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Worley, M. (2016). Riotous Assembly: British Punk’s Cultural Diaspora in the Summer of ’81. In: Andresen, K., van der Steen, B. (eds) A European Youth Revolt. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56570-9_15
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