Rioting 1911/2011: Similarities And Differences

As regular readers know I have done a lot of research into the Great Unrest of 1911: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/11/great-unrest-1910-11-part-1.html  I have been in contact with people involved in commemorating this period of strikes and rioting, notably in Liverpool which experienced effectively a general strike.  It is ironic that precisely 100 years on we are seeing much the same kind of riotous activity.  As I have noted that, in contrast to the early 2000s when people on history discussion boards discussed any reference to the Great Unrest as a fantasy or a counter-factual, elements of it are even appearing in prime time television, such as reference to the shootings during a riot in Llanelli in 1911 on 'The One Show' on BBC1.

What then are the similarities and the differences between what we are seeing now and what was witnessed in 1911?  The basis is very different.  The unrest in 1910/11 had its roots in strikes by coal miners, railway workers and merchant sailors.  In 2011 there are no such strikes going on.  The coal industry has been all but destroyed in the UK and our coal, where needed still, is imported.  A lot of freight that arrives in the UK is carried by foreign vessels, whereas in 1911, the UK was the dominant country for sea freight.  The railways were as fragmented as they were in 1911 since the privatisation of the 1990s.  However, at present railway workers seem not to have any reason to strike.  Consequently, unlike in 1911, there is not an established pattern of unrest on which the riots can be based.  A lot of this stems from the hammering of the trade unions during the 1980s under Thatcher and the loss of any collective identity among workers.  Thatcher's greatest success in weakening the unions was not the legislation restricting their behaviour, much of which Labour tried to introduce in the past anyway, it was her success in getting us simply to think of 'me first'.

Another factor that is different to 1911 is the lack of radical rhetoric.  In 1911 Labour MPs notably Keir Hardie went around not only supporting the riots as an expression of legitimate working class unrest which they generally were not, but publicly calling on soldiers to mutiny if their commanders ordered them to fire on rioting working class people.  In contrast this time we have supposedly left-wing Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney one of the most deprived areas of London calling for a London-wide curfew, something that was not even imposed (outside Liverpool) even in 1911 and would appear as if we were under foreign occupation.  No-one in the Labour Party will even try to squeeze out some reference to this unrest being a representation of the anger of the public over a mixture of issues, notably continued police mistreatment of ordinary people, especially from ethnic minorities and youth unemployment at a level higher even than the worst days of the 1980s.  Without channelling there is a danger that the unrest will turn to racial violence as it did in South Wales in 1911 and could easily do in many parts of London.  This may not be black/white violence but as happened in Cardiff a century ago, targeted at people seen as taking jobs, so aimed at Poles and other EU citizens who have settled in London and who we know the CBI favours as employees over UK young people.  This seems to be an unforeseen danger that needs to be addressed now.

Another difference to 1911 is the fact that the weather is not as hot.  The summer of 1911 was exceptionally hot and this always provides a context for rioting.  However, neither is it raining heavily, so the weather may not provoke rioting but it is not discouraging it either at the moment. 

Rioting in 1911 was generally carried out by people unconnected to the strikes going on at the time and it focused on much the same things as this time: attacking the police (especially those brought in from outside the area) and looting.  Looting is especially popular at times of economic hardship and conspicuous consumption that we are experiencing at the moment.  The largest similarity between 1911 and 2011 is the economic context. It is noted that in 1911 a lot of anger stemmed from the fact that real wages were falling but consumption by the wealthy especially of very visible luxuries was increasing.  We are in a very similar position now.  Real pay has been declining for forty years now and even those people in graduate professions cannot afford a fraction of what their parents in such jobs could have done. 

Everyone is suffering from the inexorable rise in petrol costs, utility prices and housing both in terms of buying houses and, in particular, rent, which seems to have had a new burst of climb since the recession started.  The disruption to household incomes by redundancy and unemployment further impinges on disposable income as well as income used to pay for the essentials.  I have been unlucky, but my circumstances are probably not atypical, with over half my monthly income paying for somewhere to live, to light and heat it, to fuel my car and to eat.  I do not go on holiday, my car is 15 years old, I do not eat in restaurants and do not go to the cinema.  You can put up with a dull life and battling for every penny, but after a while it impacts on you.  I am lucky, there are millions of people in the UK far worse off than me, but if I am disgruntled can imagine how many of them/you feel?  Whilst most ordinary people struggle we still keep seeing the obscene salaries and consumption of the privileged.  Bankers pay continues to be high and yet we are still suffering the consequences of their failed greedy gambles and will be for decades to come especially in terms of lost social care and local facilities such as libraries being closed down.  As in 1911 the obvious greed of the wealthy is painful and pricks us, made easier by the constant flow of information to us through every medium available.  Whilst the trains may be slower and less frequent than they were in 1911, information travels far faster these days to people in all walks of life and all ages.

There are a number of other similarities to 1911 not just the conspicuous consumption in a time of hardship.  The drafting in of police to cities is just like in 1911.  There are promised to be 16,000 police on the streets of London tonight; 10,000 of these brought from outside the capital; nine constabularies are sending officers to London.  In some ways this is a reverse of 1911 when the Metropolitan Police provided officers to other parts of the country, but that was only because London remained quiet and the unrest was located in other cities.  However, it seems likely that cities will draw on constabularies in neighbouring more rural counties.  The UK has far fewer constabularies than in 1911, but we still have a very decentralised system.  I wonder if cities in the North East will bid to buy in police from the Cleveland Constabulary given that their former Chief Constable and Deputy Chief Constable, arrested this week for corruption, seem happy to sell their officers to the highest bidder. 

The call from the local authorities for troops to be on the streets of Croydon is just like the hysteria of 1911.  Fortunately local magistrates are no longer in a position simply to summon a local unit as they were 100 years ago.  Given how many people whine about Winston Churchill as Home Secretary centralising the despatch of troops in 1911 to tackle unrest, that is more the system we have now. The issue, ironically, is unlike in 1911, Britain is currently fighting in two wars.  Whilst we no longer have imperial possessions to defend and the commitment in Ireland is far from what it was in 1911, the British Army would be pretty stretched if it was mobilised to police the streets.  In 1911 the Territorial Army was not trusted to oppose rioters, but in 2011 given class fragmentation and the dependence the UK has on its part-time soldiers, they may, in fact be called up to combat unrest.  However, I would imagine even now they would be sent to areas outside those in which they were recruited to avoid any questions about opening fire on family members for individual soldiers.  Of course, these days the odd tank or armoured car can achieve what a squadron of hussars would have been needed to do in 1911, so they could be spread thinner.  They are also no longer dependent on the railway system to reach the scenes of unrest.  However, experiences with civil unrest in Northern Ireland in the 1970s show the hazards of such action. 

I am more familiar with the King's Regulations of 1908 than I am with the current Queen's Regulations, and I would be interested to hear what the procedure is for the military called on to deal with unrest.  I cannot believe it is to simply fire into the front row of rioters but with the power of modern rifles and sidearms, even firing over their heads would cause a hazard.  Of course, the British police, since the 1980s have possessed anti-riot equipment pretty much undreamt of in 1911.  There would be no need for police to fall back on furled raincoats, instead they have baton rounds, tear gas, shields of different types and in some locales, water cannon.  Cameron ought to be alert to coming down too hard on the rioters if he wants to secure his political legacy.  Misremembered accusations that Churchill had striking miners shot were to haunt him politically even forty years after the event.

Whilst it is clear that 2011 is not a re-run of 1911, there are similarities which furthermore makes me ask why no-one in power was ready for the unrest which broke out this month.  As I have noted before, I believe that they probably did foresee and are happy for it to run its course.  Cameron is clearly enjoying sounding off as the authoritarian leader in the media and no doubt taking steps to further reduce liberty in the UK.  Perhaps, I am simply giving him credit for foresight that is undeserved and he is simply even more incompetent than I believed.

Thirty Years On: Rioting In London - Is Anyone Surprised?

I am sure most readers of this blog will have seen the news of the rioting and looting across London from Tottenham to Peckham from Ealing to Hackney and other places including Birmingham and Croydon.  It has now raged for three days and has involved attacks on the police and the looting and burning of shops.  I have written before how the government is ushering in an era which looks unpleasantly like the 1980s with high unemployment and in particular the reduction in opportunities for young people, who increasingly feel they have nothing to lose in rebelling against the government and capitalist society?

Something else which does not seem to have changed is the relationship between the police and ordinary people.  After the murder of  Ian Tomlinson by police in April 2009 and the continued tension with ethnic minorities because of the hyping up of the terrorist threat and the blame being put on to South Asians, activity among far-right political groups, it all seems horribly like 1981 once more.  If you were around in 1981 or have read about the period then you will know it had a summer which witnessed riots pretty much like what we were seeing now.  The Brixton Riot of 1981 occurred in April of that year and raged for three days.  Very much like the rioting we are seeing now, it stemmed from the handling of ethnic minority males by the Metropolitan Police and the bad relations being heightened by rumour around the arrest of Michael Bailey.  Whilst the initial riot was about protest regarding heavy handed tactics by the police, by the third day it was basically a looting spree.  Riots attract different people and get out of hand quickly.  Whilst starting as a political event, they soon bring in people just looking to steal what they can.  I think the looting of phone shops in Woolwich is symptomatic of that phase.

The spark for these riots was the shooting of Mark Duggan by police in Tottenham on Saturday.  Tensions around stops and searches have also contributed to the unrest.  In many ways both the context of Britain in fear of what is being inflicted on it by the government and what worse is to come, combined by heavy handed behaviour by the police have once again led to rioting.  All of this was covered in the Scarman Report of 1981.  I am sure somewhere in the government's or Metropolitan Police's strategy units there was a scenario playing out for summer 2011 just like this one.  Despite the various shootings by police over the past thirty years they seem to behave pretty much as they did in the 1980s.  No-one seems to learn from one year to the next: the police behaviour towards Duggan's family is as if none of these shootings had ever happened and certainly no lessons learnt from them. 

Whilst the hammering of the country by the government, the crass behaviour of the police and the willingness of people unconnected with the initial incident to take advantage of the rioting has not changed in 30 years, the techology has.  The ability to tweet messages and keep in contact via mobile phones and to relay images quickly to different groups explains why we are not simply talking about the Tottenham riot.  We know that there were various groups, following the student riots of last winter, ready for a new round of action.  Summer is always the best time for rioting, you just have to look back to 1911 as I have done.  Yet, all the ministers and the mayor of London, all set off on holiday with no expectation of rioting.  Clearly the police's intelligence is poor and they are not retrospectively hunting down people who use Twitter to organise violence.  If they had not spotted it coming, even in the immediate aftermath of Duggan's death, I think they will continue to be stumped.

The government is wrong to think that rioting will simply go away.  As in the early 1980s it is likely to continue appearing not just in London but in many cities.  The government cannot expect to keep on imposing cuts on services and cutting jobs and most of all opportunities in such a blatant, arrogant way, treating us like idiots when they do not blame their friends the bankers, and expect the British public (and the Northern Irish public either) to remain passive.  The continued police bungling keeps on providing the spark for the whole pile of tinder the government keeps on adding to.

Anyone who had stopped and thought would have been able to put a decent bet on there being rioting this summer.  I cannot believe that the government and the police had not worked through scenarios that showed this happening.  If I can do it, simply watching the television or writing my blog, then they, with all their advisors and their sophisticated computers should have had no difficulty.  I guess that they welcome as a distraction from the continued revelations about how guilty not only News International but also a growing number of its rivals were in hacking the phones of the bereaved as well as celebrities; the corruption connected with that and the government connections to people involved, plus straight forward corruption at the highest level in the Cleveland Constabulary.  I worry that knowing how much 2011 resembles 1981 and even 1911, they had foreseen all of this and yet took no steps to head it off.  It is clear that despite any efforts senior police officers may be making cannot stop their footsoldiers shooting people dead and that will constantly trigger local incidents.  However, I think the broader rioting was expected and has been allowed to run its course to allow the government to introduce the punitive and authoritarian legislation they are itching to impose.  Democracy and liberty are dying quickly in the UK.  I recognise the frustration the rioters are unleashing on this government which is pounding them and keeps telling them to forget have any opportunities in life, but inadvertently they are playing into the hands of a regime which is keen to impose an authoritarian regime and implement a social counter-revolution.

P.P. It is interesting to note that the rioting has spread to areas such as Toxteth in Liverpool, Handsworth in Birmingham and Bristol which experienced rioting in the 1980s.  It is unsurprising the areas affected are those where people still feel as let down by the government as they did 30 years ago.  There seems surprise in the media that so many young people have turned to rioting, without the recognition that if you cut off any hope for such people, they have nothing to turn to except violence.  The hypocrisy of the government as in 1989 over the Tianamen Square unrest, when they laud the overthrow through violent unrest of governments across the Middle East and yet somehow expect their own population to remain passive, I suppose is unsurprising.  I believe that David Cameron really does believe he is doing the best for the UK, even in his reassertion of social class divisions and denying access to higher education for all but the wealthy.  He is  so out of touch with the people that he simply sees all this as criminality.  Of course, every riot has elements of that in, but by focusing on this, he helps the media and the wider population ignore that a huge motive is despair created precisely by the conditions caused directly by government policies.

Cameron knows that the Poll Tax Riot of 1990 helped end Mrs. Thatcher's career and I guess he wants to marginalise this before people start questioning his position, especially as, in a coalition he is in a far weaker position than she was.  I think Cameron will use the riots to bind the Liberal Democrats closer to him, suggesting they sympathise with the rioters if they leave him now.  I also maintain that he will use this as the basis for more authoritarian policies and despite his sour attitude at present is actually enjoying these events.

I Don't Love the 1980s: Second Bash

Back in October, last year, I finally got around to writing my views of the 1980s.  Given that it is a decade which is being referenced a lot at the moment, by politicians, the media/culture and the public, primarily because we are once again under a harsh Conservative regime (wrapped up to look like a coalition, but in fact no less sinister than if David Cameron had won a clear majority), unemployment and social division are rocketing once again.  I intended to write a critique of the decade which too often is remembered through the rose-tinted perspective of the 'Brat Pack' movies of the 1980s and the lie that it was a period of glamour and prosperity, whereas for most people it was one of the worst times of their lives.  My critique: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/10/i-dont-love-1980s.html ended up going down the Alan Davies route and in fact being very much about my personal experiences of the decade and far less a general historical survey of the times along the lines of what I did for the 1970s.  Thus, with the objective of reminding those people who lived through the 1980s actually how bad it was, cutting through the softening of memory and especially of nostalgia, and for those who were not alive or not conscious of the decade except as history, this posting is a more impersonal critique.

Bascially the 1980s were frightening.  When the population was not frightened about losing work and home, they were frightened about being wiped out in a nuclear war.  The period called the Second Cold War started in 1979 when the USSR invaded Afghanistan to support the left-wing government in power there against radical Islamists; they remained until 1989.  The Soviets were to prove the second of three superpowers (the British in 1837-42 and again 1878-1880; the Americans now) to get into serious military difficulties trying to control the country.  Their invasion coincided with a shift in the American political scene away from the detente phase of the mid-1970s to a much harder line under right-wing president Ronald Reagan (1980-8), not an intelligent man and one who had strange beliefs about how God would defend the righteous when a nuclear war came.  Consequently, certainly until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR in 1985, there was a real fear that we would see a nuclear war.  Reagan's bullish approach was seen in active support for the Contra rebels seeking to overthrow the elected left-wing government in Nicaragua and for the Afghan Mujahadeen fighting the Soviets.  Such support seemed to revive the 'proxy' wars facet of the Cold War of the early 1980s. 

The threat of nuclear war was brought home to the population of Britain and many other West European countries by the higher visibility of nuclear weapons in the country.  The advent of cruise missiles launched from lorries meant that ordinary people saw nuclear missiles coming through their village on manoeuvres in a way that they had not seen them in the past when they were generally concealed in underground silos and nuclear submarines.  Culture constantly reminded us of nuclear weapons and it spilt over into all aspects of popular culture with numerous books and even games about the Third World War; songs about nuclear war by mainstream bands (e.g. 'Two Tribes' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1984) and 'Russians' by Sting (1985)), not only protest singers; television dramas (notably 'The Day After' (1983) and 'Threads' (1984)) and documentaries about the effects of nuclear war (the concept of nuclear winter began to be explored at this time) and even comedians referenced nuclear war, not only the burgeoning 'alternative' comedians in the UK (such as in 'The Young Ones' series (1982-4), but even mainstream comedy like the short-lived series 'Comrade Dad' (1986). 

For many people there seemed to be a choice between instant vapourisation in a nuclear blast or lingering death from radiation sickness or starvation during the nuclear winter.  It is unsurprising that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) revived so vigorously.  It had been formed in 1958 but had been pretty moribund, having only 4000 members in 1979.  The immediate threat of nuclear war meant membership rose to 100,000 by 1984 with many more sympathisers in the general population.  The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev was a real relief to much of the world.  Whilst most of us had never expected the USSR to start a nuclear war (in fact China was a greater danger but constantly overlooked in the West), this was confirmed by Gorbachev's steps in the late 1980s.  Fortunately Reagan saw which way things were going.  With the failure of his delusional plan for the 'Star Wars shield' against nuclear weapons he recognised, or his advisors did, that going along with Gorbachev could also spare the ailing US economy of the burden of the constant arms race.  It was made more palatable for the Americans by the declarations that they had 'won' the Cold War, though, as I have argued on this blog, that was probably a premature claim.

The other global threat to life in the 1980s was AIDS. HIV had been identified in 1959 but the perception of it as an epidemic really began to appear in 1980-1; AIDs was officially defined as a disease in the USA in 1982. While we were aware of the rising number of people with HIV and AIDS, it reached around 8 million globally with HIV by 1990 (it is now 33 million), in the UK, the real jolt came with the 'Don't Die of Ignorance' campaign started in January 1987. With intentionally very grim imagery, it instilled in people the fear that the world was at risk from this epidemic. It certainly seemed like something out of science fiction series of the 1970s such as the chilling BBC series 'Survivors' (1975-7) and movies like 'The Andromeda Strain' (1971; from 1969 novel). To a great degree it was to shake up the complacent attitude that the disease was something that only gay men or intravenous injecting drug addicts would get. Of course, Africa has seen the outcome that the whole world anticipated in the mid- to late 1980s, with over 22 million people in sub-Saharan Africa with HIV, 1.4 million deaths and over 14 million children left orphaned by AIDS. Around 1 billion people live in Africa, so we are talking about 5% of the population of that continent still suffering. Fortunately the development of medicines and a degree of alteration of behaviour, in particular the growth in the use of condoms, slowed down the growth of HIV/AIDS in other parts of the world, especially the wealthy countries. However, complacency is risky, as the rise in all STIs among over-50s has shown in the past two years in the UK. AIDS seemed, like nuclear war, to tell us that the warnings that authors had given us in the 1960s and 1970s could easily come true and the fear was palpable.


In terms of global politics, in the early 1980s most people assumed that the world would be divided into two or three superpower blocs for the foreseeable future.  Looking back now on the era there is naturally a sense that the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and of the USSR itself was inevitable.  However, the suppression of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland in 1981 with the implementation of martial law made us far less optimistic in the 1980s.  Even when Gorbachev came to power there were often concerns in the late 1980s that he would be overthrown and a harder line regime re-introduced as happened after liberal Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was removed in 1964.  Like Khrushchev, Gorbachev did not always pursue liberal policies and the suppression of nationalist uprisings across the USSR in 1986 can be seen as a clear example of this.  Thus, millions of people in Europe continued to be under totalitarian Communist rule until the Soviet bloc began to break up properly in 1989 first with Hungary and notably with East Germany and Romania.  Even then the break-up of the USSR was not a foregone conclusion.  The former Communist states did get democracy and some have flourished.  Russia has found it harder and has suffered from gangsterism and a tendency towards authoritarianism.  Elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc, national tensions effectively put on hold in 1944 have revived, most shockingly in the brutality of the Yugoslav War 1991-5 (I know Yugoslavia was not entirely in the Soviet bloc but it had been a Communist state) but also in states like Hungary and Romania.

The rapid collapse of the Soviet bloc and then the USSR 1986/9-91 led many to feel that the right-wing assumption that a free economy must lead to democracy was disproved by the experience in China.  Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Chinese leaders like those in the USSR came to realise that a highly centralised economy was no longer working and so more steps towards a more capitalist system was needed to secure even basic prosperity.  In China millions of people were allowed to relocate, primarily to coastal cities.  In the 1980s about 80 million people, equivalent to the population of Japan (which was the booming economy of the time, people forget it was seen then very much as China is now) relocated.  China moved very slowly towards capitalism, a process which was anticipated to move as fast as it had in the USSR, though thirty years on it is still incomplete and the Chinese state still controls vast sections of the economy.  Too many commentators cannot shake off the delusion that China will inevitably (and comparatively soon) come to a more democratic system.  They do not look at Taiwan which had capitalism for fifty years before it became democratic or how authoritarian in flavour the regimes of South Korea and Singapore are.  If they needed any more evidence they have to only look as we did at the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.  The sending in of tanks looked incredibly like the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968-9, the crushing of attempts towards a more liberal political system in Communist states.  China has made no further steps towards political liberty, it remains a totalitarian state with an appalling human rights record as it did in the 1980s.

Another concern was what was happening in Iran.  This took time to really penetrate into our consciousness, but also signalled a big change in the risk to the world.  In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeni became the head of a revolutionary regime which had expelled the corrupt Shah of Iran.  The shah's callous and greedy behaviour, based on the country's immense oil wealth, had made him naturally hated in Iran.  The failure of Arab nationalism to effectively remove western influence in the Middle East and limit/destroy Israel, led to Islamist thinkers (remember the population of Iran is mainly not Arabic, they speak Farsi) to adopt different approaches.  In common with a trend across the world (in terms of Christianity, notably in the USA) there was a shift to fundamentalism; a re-emphasis on literal interpretation of holy writing.  In Iran, Islamic fundamentalism was the foundation of the regime which persists to today.  Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter had ordered an embarrassing failure of an attempt to rescue US hostages in Iran and I think this is why Reagan stayed away from the country.  US interest in the region dates back to the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 which outlined the USA's need to ensure stable friendly governments in the Persian Gulf region to secure oil supplies, a policy revived under the two Presidents Bush in the 1990s and 2000s.  Reagan's approach was to bolster secular Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein, especially during the inconclusive Iran-Iraq War 1980-8; ironically Hussein was later removed by the Americans on the basis that he was backing Islamist terrorism, but in fact it was simply about the oil he controlled and that his usefulness to the USA was at an end. Fundamentalist Islam is an attitude that proved to provide the intellectual seeding ground for Islamist terrorism in the 1990s and 2000s.

One country which attracted much attention in the 1980s was South Africa.  The apartheid system was still in place.  Apartheid had been in place since 1948 and though there had been massacres in the 1960s and 1970s, notably the Soweto Uprising of 1976, in 1985-9 the situation came to a head with local rioting spreading.  In 1985, a State of Emergency was declared and spread to the whole country.  Battles between the black population and government forces and within the black population filled this period and it appeared as if South Africa was on the verge of civil war.  As it was fatalities were commonplace.  It was only with the resignation of President P.W. Botha and his replacement by F.W. de Klerk in 1990 that began the steps towards the dismantlement of the apartheid system, including the release in 1990 of Nelson Mandela.  For the bulk of the 1980s it appeared as if the killings in South Africa would not cease and a full-scale racial war would develop as it almost did at the start of the 1990s.

Many Americans seem to think that terrorism was not invented until September 2001.  However, the UK in the 1980s was suffering terrorist attacks by Irish Republican groups.  In the period 1981-3 there were bombs across London including in prominent sites like Regent's Park and Harrods store; another in Kent in 1989.  In 1984 they blew up the Grand Hotel in Brighton where the British government were staying killing and injuring members of the government and their families and almost assassinating the prime minister.  These were a continuation of bombings on the British mainland seen in the 1970s.  In Northern Ireland itself bombings and shootings continued almost without cease; notably the Enniskillen massacre in November 1989.  The British government responded with harsh policies such as 'shoot to kill' allowing special forces to assassinate terrorists both in the UK and outside its borders.  In the 1990s the incidents increased in regularity and severity.  This is why the British were pretty non-plussed about the 11th September 2001 attacks and their aftermath.  In the 1970s we had seen the Queen's cousin assassinated; an MP Airey Neave killed right in the Houses of Parliament car park and were to see another Northern Irish Secretary assassinated, mortar bombs fired at the home of the prime minister and countless soldiers and civilians killed.  The security checks you went through whenever visiting a public building reminded you of the risks you faced.

Another particular characteristic of the UK in the 1980s was rioting.  In 1981 there were riots in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Bristol.  During the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 there were regular battles between police and strikers that seemed to resemble something from the Middle Ages with police behind shields and riding down strikers from horseback.  In 1985 many of the areas which had experienced riots in 1981 saw them again, some again in 1987.  The introduction of the poll tax was to lead to the Poll Tax Riot of 1990 in central London.  The poll tax or Community Charge as it formally named (though even government documentation noted its more popular name) was introduced to Scotland in 1989 and the rest of the UK the following year.  It funded local authority spending.  Unlike previous local authority taxation or the current Council Tax, it was not based on the value of the property which you lived in.  All people living in a district had to pay the same amount no matter whether they own property and no matter what their income was (though the unemployed could get a discount).  Clearly it hit the poorest working people hardest.  It was incredibly inefficient as it was based on individuals, and on average a district would see 2-4000 people move address between each year's assessment and the bills being sent out.  In the town where my parents lived it meant doubling the number of staff working for the council simply to handle the tax so sapping the funds it brought in.  I lived in East Anglia at the time and received bills for eight different people who shared a surname with me; one friend of mine whose surname is the very common Smith never received a bill because they were all sent to someone else.  Another friend who was out of the country for three months (you were not liable for the tax if not in the UK), and had told the council returned home to find he was being summoned to court for not paying the tax, so costing the council additional money in the legal processes.  You can see why the tax was unfair and in fact useless.  The idea was that it would make payers put pressure on the local authorities to find the cheapest way to provide services so curtailing the activities of high-spending local authorities on behalf of the government which despised Labour-run councils.  However, no-one gave any thought to that just the inequity of the whole scheme and how it penalised them.  No wonder the riot was so virulent.  Again it was a factor which brought fear into your everyday life.  I worried I would be taken to court and be imprisoned (elderly people who refused to pay on principle were imprisoned, so I feared, that, as a young man, I would be one of the first to be locked up) because I had not paid the other seven bills sent to me but certainly lacked the money to do so.  The poll tax led to a great distrust of local authorities to the extent that even in the mid-1990s when I was living in East London it was reckoned there were 60,000 people living in the borough who were not registered for council tax.  Though the poll tax was short lived it has done immense damage to local authority funding. 

There was an assumption, which fortunately in the past five years seems to be finally being challenged, that private business will always run things far better than any public provision.  As we have seen with filthy hospitals, expensive fuel and water and appalling public transport, in fact, private business is good (most of the time) at making huge profits but in terms of service delivery is very poor.  In addition, British service providers are not even good at running businesses, which is why so few of the privatised services of the 1980s remain in the hands of British companies.

Another major trouble of the 1980s not only in the UK, but across capitalist countries, was unemployment.  UK unemployment was a little below 2 million, around 5% of the working population when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979.  This contrasted to 1.2 million, around 3.5% in 1974.  The increase had been provoked by the oil price rise, the decline of heavy industry in the UK and difficulties around the strength of the pound and balance of payments which had led to the introduction of semi-monetarist policies in 1972 and again in 1976 on the urging of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  The cutback in public services, the wrecking of the coal industry, the restriction on money flow and a strong pound limiting export markets meant that manufacturing, which had been overtaken by service industries in contributing to the economy in 1974, went into severe decline.  In 1983 unemployment exceeded 4 million, around 12% of the working population, but far higher in particularly depressed regions like Northern Ireland where it exceeded 20%.  Even in the 'boom' of 1989 it was still at 2.5 million before rising again to 3.5 million in 1992, 10% of a larger working population.  The UK was not alone, the USA had unemployment of 7.5% in 1980 and 10.8% by 1982.  These days the rate of 10.2% unemployed in the USA means 16 million people without work.  West Germany, like the USA and UK pursuing a monetarist policy saw its unemployment rise from below 4% in 1979 to over 9% in 1983 and remain that high for the rest of the 1980s.  Unemployment not only blighted individuals and their families, it blighted towns.  As now you could walk or drive through areas with all the shops and often many houses boarded up.  It was easy for areas to get into a spiral as with high unemployment people did not have money to spend in shops so these would also close putting more people out of work.  The fear of losing your job hit far wider than the 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 people who might be unemployed in your street.  In addition, as now, many of those in work were in part-time and low-paid jobs.  In particular local public sector work saw a decline in wages as councils were compelled to privatise them to the cheapest bidder.  Thus, even those in work were often worse off than they had been during higher inflation of the 1970s.  Those who did not get the training or the education or the promotion or who spent much of the 1980s unemployed are still being affected by these years now.

Despite that the bulk of the population, even those who were not affected directly by unemployment, reined in their expenditure for fear of losing their jobs, the very nasty aspect of the 1980s was the emphasis on greed.  I always refer back to a line from a song by the band 'the The' (1986; I think from the track 'The Mercy Beat'): 'everyone can be a millionaire so everyone's got to try'.  The sense, as now, that if you were not out being an entrepreneur and making a huge profit you were somehow a 'scrounger' and unpatriotic, despite the fact that through the 1980s recessions thousands of companies large and small were going out of business.  It was as if you did not put yourself up as a sacrifice to capitalism you had no right to respect.  Of course, the bulk of us will never make good entrepreneurs.  However, public service was now looked down upon and claiming benefits had you portrayed as a pariah and pushed around by an ever intrusive state. Trade unions which stood up for decent pay and conditions were portrayed as 'the enemy within' and were increasingly restricted by legislation and police activity.  Margaret Thatcher's emphasis that society did not exist exempted those doing reasonably well from caring at all about their neighbours or even members of their own families and instead the cry 'get a job' was shouted at them as if they were deliberately avoiding work.  This myth that anyone on benefits was claiming simply for an easy life, despite how low those benefits are, became fixed in British society and remains there today, when, in fact, the bulk of unemployed people are desperate to work which is why even the low paid and increasingly dangerous jobs were filled.  These attitudes, this smashing of concern for others infected the USA as well.  I am sure it appeared across Europe though perhaps not as virulently, though the steps against immigrants does suggest it took root.  This view that we can all be successful in private business and if we are not it is our fault, revives one strand of Victorian thinking without the balancing element of philanthropy which stemmed from seeing all great and lowly as part of the same society.  Attempts to re-establish that latter aspect by Cameron, are not succeeding and so we simply have the harsh Thatcherite line of 'I'm all right Jack, the rest go to Hell' is back as virulently as it was in the 1980s.

Though the 1980s can be seen as a period of important steps forward, in the dismantlement of apartheid and of Communist dictatorships, for the bulk of the decade the future seemed incredibly bleak and the present unsettled and violent.  Scars have been left on public attitudes which have damaged many societies, notably in the UK and USA up to the present day and make life far more unpleasant that it needs to be.  Hyper-individualism and being beholden to profit-making at any cost are harmful for the vast majority of people who are never going to come close to being millionaires.  Yet, since the 1980s these attitudes have been portayed as laudable and the 'common sense' basis for how things should run.  I am glad that the fear of nuclear was has subsided but the racism and the unemployment with all the bigotry it brings are with us now.  Remember when you sit down to watch 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' (1986) or 'The Breakfast Club' (1985) let alone 'St. Elmo's Fire' (1985), that that was a fantasy of the 1980s, all big hair, pastel colours and big mobile phones; it came nowhere near the bitter reality that most people experienced.  Certainly there seems to be none of the fear that was so prevalent in the 1980s and is again, that you could be dropped by society and there would be no escape from that.  Watch instead 'Boys from the Blackstuff' (1982) or 'Edge of Darkness' (1985) or even 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' (1983-4) for a more realistic indication of the times.  If I had written this three years ago as I had intended, I would have said, I just hope we never go back to the days like that.  Unfortunately, now we seem to be back in the midst of them once more.

The Anger Grows

Over the past decade people have often commented in the media around the question of how educated, intelligent people from an Islamic background, but previously without fundamentalist tendencies have become 'radicalised' and have ended up doing violent acts such as stabbing an MP at his constituency session or driving a 4x4 into Glasgow airport with the intention of causing an explosion. As I watched the fourth day of rioting in central London in four weeks, I began to understand how thinking people can go down the path to turning their back on civil society and see the only way forward as being to engage in violence. Intelligent, well educated people, especially in the medical professions, are often filled with self-confidence which can in many cases turn into at least intellectual snobbery and very commonly, arrogance. If there were not people who felt that society was wrong and that they knew a better way for us to live, then there would not only be no politicians, but also no-one working for charities and, in fact, no clergy. We accept being told how to behave by certain sets of people, whose challenges to us have somehow been 'normalised', but feel free to ignore or even resist others.

I am trying to cling to my faith in democracy but as the weeks go by and I witness act after act of a government which seems bent on harming as many ordinary Britons as possible, it proves to be increasingly hard. David Cameron can argue that he won some kind of mandate for the actions he is carrying out, though, of course, the bulk of them never appeared in the Conservative election manifesto, and the Liberal Democrat manifesto, in fact, outlined some policies completely opposed to what is being done now. Ed Miliband, Labour leader, clearly has learnt Cameron's trick and said yesterday that it was 'better to under-promise and over-deliver', in other words, do what the Conservatives have done, and spring policies on the population once you have the power.

I am increasingly drawn to issues highlighted by the historian E.P. Thompson (1924-93) certainly in 'Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act' (1977) and to an extent in 'The Making of the English Working Class' (1968). Thompson highlighted how populations behave when they feel that the ruling group has lost its moral mandate. He highlights examples such as bread riots in which the rioters seized the bread but rather than simply distribute it, sold it at what they felt was a fair price. This is a very British characteristic, we yearn for what we see as the establishment of what is 'right' and 'proper' rather than anything more radical. This can play into the hands of the left, as witnessed in the poll tax riot of 1990, but it can also play into the hands of the right as seen in the pro-fox hunting demonstrations and attacks against refugees. Moral indignation can bisect with politics and when it does, it can bring out responses from those who feel apolitical. In the UK many people take pride in 'I'm not political', but when it moves into a moral area of their world view, then they do feel they should become involved. The government's policies are cutting so hard into the everyday life of ordinary people that it is even beginning to radicalise those who in the past would have given no thought to being 'political'. Remember those elderly people who put themselves up for imprisonment rather than pay the poll tax? We are going to be back to that soon.

I certainly feel that the current government is carrying out acts which neither have 'right' in a moral sense, nor are proper for British society. The speed and severity of their actions makes Margaret Thatcher's policies, which in themselves were unacceptable, seem mild and considered. If you feel that the government you are dealing with is morally bankrupt then you look around for methods to challenge it. When the government retains the loyalty of the forces of control, primarily the police, but also the armed forces, who use violence to counteract any form of protest as we have seen with baton charges, horse charges and kettling, then it is not surprising that, in time, even intelligent people see a violent approach as the only way to even simply unsettle the bankrupt government. This seems to be the path I am currently going down. I suppose it is because I have lost my faith that anything can stop the crumbling of our society. The current government policies are rapidly creating a highly divided, very hierarchical country where ordinary people have no opportunities to advance themselves and struggle to find work opening up opportunities for the wealthy to exploit them to a scale not seen for many decades.

To some degree the rioting by students and young people (many of the rioters and protestors are too young to attend university yet) who are actually going to suffer more than current university students, especially with the cutting of the EMA, has had an impact. The coalition government's majority should be 84 but in last night's vote on university tuition fees they only won by 21 votes. This is the kind of narrowness of margin John Major experienced as his government began its limp to its death. Five Conservative MPs and 21 Liberal Democrat MPs voted against the government they are part of; 8 Liberal Democrat MPs abstained. Two Liberal Democrat government aides, Mike Crockart and Jenny Willow resigned as did on Conservative aide, Lee Scott. I wonder if there would have been such opposition if week after week we had not seen thousands of protestors in London. The Liberal Democrats are in trouble anyway, with their popularity at only 11% of the vote. They seem to be reliving the 1920s when they went from being part of a coalition with the Conservatives to fragmentation into three parts and almost disappeared as a party in parliament by the 1950s. If, as seems likely, they do not get proportional representation after the vote next May, then they could be back to a handful following the 2014 general election. In many ways, the Liberal Democrats' blunders are helping to make politics more extreme. Meanwhile David Cameron is shifting constituency borders and reducing the number of MPs by about 8% in order to engineer an automatic majority for the Conservatives and, with fixed term parliaments of 5 years, we will find it far harder to have unpleasant/incompetent governments removed.

Rioting did not overturn the decision in the House of Commons but it reduced the majority to a quarter of what could have once been expected. It should be noted that this was on an issue, which despite the fact that 42% of 18-year olds now go to university, in fact, does not affect the bulk of the UK population. Even with the rise of university attendance 58% of 18-year olds do not go to university; Scottish students do not pay fees; Welsh and Northern Irish fees will not rise. Families without children and people who have finished their education will not be affected. Yet, already the government is struggling to get a majority and trying to work out how to deal with riot after riot. Now, what will happen when the legislation removing the EMA comes up? What happens when the reduction in housing benefit really starts biting, especially in London where it is to have the most impact? What happens when hundreds of thousands of public sector workers are out of work, especially in places like South Wales and North-East England where in some towns the public sector makes up 40-55% of the workforce? What happens when the 2011 equivalent of the Jarrow Crusade reaches London? As I have noted before, the extremity of the government's policies has triggered off such a reaction far faster than any government of the 20th century. It may believe that the worst of the unrest is over, but I think that this is only the beginning. If we have had such a severe response to policies which only hits a slice of the population, can you imagine what will happen when the policies that affect so many more of us begin to come into force?

This government seems to have no interest in compromise, so the only solution left for it will be repression. The police were out in force across central London last night, but ironically, as I have noted before, just at a time when they will be called on more, they too are being cut. Incompetence seems to already be playing a part. The failure to defend the Conservative Party Headquarters four weeks ago, and the inability, last night, to defend the Treasury and Supreme Court buildings, let alone Prince Charles and Duchess Camila in their car, shows that a lot of work needs to be done. Again, I emphasise, that in contrast to what will come, this was a pretty small incident. I quite expect that a 'Bannmeile', i.e., a German term meaning a zone around government buildings in which no protest is permitted, will be introduced to Westminster and Whitehall, with the kind of gates we see at the entrance to Downing Street, or, at least, a 'ring of steel' as is around the City of London financial district being introduced. I am sure public order penalties will rise. I noticed when in London last week that MI5 is actively recruiting staff. I did wonder if they were using the right media by advertising in the free 'Metro' newspaper, but I suppose if they are looking to recruit homeless people and students to infiltrate the rioting groups, this is probably the correct channel as thousands of copies of 'Metro' are daily littered across London's public transport and streets.

These steps will only address the symptoms rather than the causes of unrest in the UK. I am a left-winger who would be opposed to a Conservative government, but it has taken the leadership of David Cameron to lead me to begin doubting democracy, to sit watching television cheering on the rioters as they smashed the windows of the Treasury and wishing that Charles and Camila had been dragged from their cars and beaten up. This was something even Thatcher took 10 years to achieve. With no hope for my future or that of the 9-year old living in my house, you can see why people are radicalised. Lecturers at the University of London have praised the protests (though not the rioting) and more buildings are occupied by students at the moment than any time in the past forty years. Opponents of government always have levels in their structure. You can see this if you study any revolutionary group or terrorist groups such as ETA, IRA and RAF. There is a small group at the centre who carry out the action, but vital for their survival are the next two layers, far less visible. There is the layer of people who provide funds and active support and then the layer who provide passive support, might hide an operative on the run for the night, etc. Whilst the focus is on the rioters, the government seems oblivious to the fact that the anger they are provoking is rippling quickly through society and rapidly building up these layers of active and passive supporters. I imagine these are people who MI5 will also go against. So, if this blog goes offline, you will know what has happened!

Of course, David Cameron and his cronies have absolute faith in what they are doing. It is clear that they want to reshape society under the cover of addressing the deficit, which ironically was incurred to help out their banker friends. I believe they, but probably not everyone in the state machine, is blind to how they are radicalising the population. As they take away any hope we might have, they remove more and more of what we might lose if we protest or riot. People with nothing to lose are the most dangerous. People with a lot less to lose than they once did are the necessary structure for the active radicals to thrive. The government must stop its harsh policies or the coalition will crumble within a year or two, and this period will go down in history as the one which saw more unrest and public violence than the UK had witnessed in a century.

Rioting And Reaction

David Cameron should be proud of himself, it took Margaret Thatcher two years before her government faced rioting and yet his policies to throw us back into some Edwardian-style society and shut off opportunity for all of those people who are not already in the elite he moves in, meant he had his first riot just six months after coming to power.  In addition, it was a political riot, one directed at the policies of the government, rather than, as with many riots in 1981, focused on local friction with police behaviour.  The riot was not extensive, only 56,000 people (150% more than had been expected), primarily students protesting about the raising of fees for the young people reaching university age in the next few years.  It was primarily focused on the Conservative Party headquarters in Millbank in central London.  There were acts of vandalism and rioters got on to the roof of the building.  However, overall 14 people a mix of rioters and police were hospitalised and 35 people arrested, which is very small scale compared to riots in London of the 1980s and 1990s.  However, this may be just the beginning.

Interestingly, in contrast to the G20 protest last year, at which the police went in very forcefully and murdered a passerby, and even when compared to the original round of protests against student loans, famously in 1989 with mounted police riding down student protestors, some of whom later showed the hoof marks on their shins when they had been trampled by the horses and images of students being clubbed by batons, the police response was very low key.  This has angered Conservative Party members as there was no police protection of their headquarters as the focus had been on the nearby headquarters of their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats.  I imagine this was due to the earlier protests outside the house of the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg.  Police have been criticised for under-estimating the scale of the disorder and not bringing in a large enough force.  They had, however, protected Whitehall ministerial buildings, which in the past have been a target.

I think there are a number of reasons for the nature of the response.  First, the weather was terrible on the days either side of the riot, Wednesday 10th November.  If it had been as bad that day I doubt we would have seen even 20,000 protestors and it is unlikely rioting would have started.  However, it was sunny and dry.  There is a clear correlation in the UK between good weather and rioting.  The second thing is, after the criticisms the police received after the murder of Ian Tomlinson (a passerby not even a protestor) by a police officer during the G20 protests in April 2009, they are probably a little more careful and the aggressive policy of hunting out the protestors and breaking them up or even 'kettling' them was avoided.  Perhaps the police saw students as being 'different' to the G20 protestors, though the bulk of them were ordinary people, not revolutionaries.  On Wednesday the police reacted rather than being proactive.  However, I think, at the next large scale protest they will being encouraged by Home Secretary Theresa May, who in effect, unlike with other constabularies in the UK, heads the Metropolitan Police, to take a more aggressive line and certainly to put a ring of officers around the Conservative Party headquarters.

There is another more mischievous explanation for the Metropolitan Police's reaction, particularly in leaving Conservative Party headquarters unprotected.  On 20th October the government announced cuts of 20% in the police budget.  I have not seen the figures for the reduction this is likely to mean for the size of the Metropolitan Police, but we can make some estimate from looking at other constabularies.  The Greater Manchester Police employ just over 13,000 staff (this includes all uniformed and plain clothes police and all civilian workers in the constabulary), the West Midlands Police, almost the same.  These two constabularies reckon they will have to shed 3,100 and 2,100 employees respectively, i.e. between 16%-24% of their workforce.  Not all the losses will be uniformed officers, but some will have to be.  If the same ratio of job losses is applied to the Metropolitan Police with a little over 52,000 employees then it means laying off something between 8,300 - 12,500 employees.  Given that it is argued that Britain continues to face potential terrorist attacks which most likely would target London and with the crime rate always rising as unemployment climbs as it is at present, you can see why the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, might feel that it is the worst time to be cutting the police service so severely.

Thus, perhaps next time there is the risk of a riot, the Metropolitan Police will say, 'well we would love to be able to protect Conservative Party headquarters' but unfortunately the cut-backs mean we cannot spare the officers to do so'.  This shows how the government's widespread cuts hitting at all parts of public service, are to a degree politicising sections of that service which normally would never come close to protesting.  The last time the UK had a police strike was in 1918, but it seems we may be on the path to another one.  Firefighters have struck more often, but usually on a localised basis, but already, only six months into Cameron regime we are seeing strikes of the nature that the Labour government of 1974-9 only experienced in its closing months.

Now, looking beyond the immediate issues of the likelihood of more rioting and the challenges for the police in dealing with it, are there bigger political moves behind all this?  Of course, we know from the early 1980s, groups such as the Socialist Workers' Party (and back then Militant Tendency) believe that a revolution will only come about when the bulk of the population, even those who typically cannot tear themselves away from watching 'The X Factor' to even answer the door, are so angry with the government that they strike and riot.  I have always felt this was a delusional policy, the British are far too passive a bunch ever to even protest on the scale we have seen in France over the past two months, let alone something more active.  British society is incredibly divided and people tend to blame others on their level or specific groups like students, the unemployed, single mothers, immigrants, asylum seekers, ethnic minorities, gay people, people from the North/the South/Scotland/Ireland rather than the government.  We have already seen the rumblings of race rioting which was another aspect of the 1970s and 1980s (and the 1950s and the 1910s...). 

What I think is more likely is that there will be a counter-reaction by the state.  A riot on the scale of the Poll Tax Riot of 1990 would play right into David Cameron's hands; it would be what the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks were for George W. Bush, they gave him carte blanche to strip citizens of so many civil liberties.  Cameron in many ways takes the policies of Margaret Thatcher and drives them in harder and faster.  So, as Thatcher used the rhetoric of 'the enemy within' applied by dictators commonly to Jews, Socialists, Communists, also Catholics and Freemasons, and during the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 allowed police to pick up people driving around London simply on the suspicion that they were going to attend a coal mine rally, I can see this coming with Cameron, but even more harshly.  I have often commented how Tony Blair's govenment steadily eroded civil liberties in the UK.  Blair is the link in the chain between Thatcher and Cameron, advancing their agenda rather than reversing it; Major and Brown were barely hiccoughs in that process.  If Cameron cannot fund a larger police force, then he will use legislation, he will encourage the public to inform on their neighbours (something we have been encouraged to do for a number of years now) and given the restriction on prison spaces, other limits to personal freedom will be introduced.

A sub-headline on 'The Guardian' frontpage of Thursday said 'Both sides warn of 'more to come''.  Already 'sides' are being outlined.  Winter is not the time for rioting, but come April and beyond, especially if there is a hot summer, then I think we will see disturbances that will make 1981 look tranquil in comparison, partly because this government has unsettled not only those usually at odds with the state, but also very quickly, those like the police and firefighters, who generally we loyal to the state but now feel they are being stabbed in the back.  The government reaction, with the ground so well prepared by Blair, will be harsh, and with the cutbacks, will probably have to involve the military.  I do not think Cameron is an idiot, he may be evil, but no fool.  He must know that you cannot destroy the hopes of so many people and expect them to accept it passively.  Thus, I believe, as Thatcher prepared well in advance for the Miners' Strike, he is readying to oppose civil unrest and use the opportunity to suppress civil liberties that little bit further.  He believes he is right, because, as I increasingly believe with every passing day, he is bent on reshaping British society to something resembling the fixed hierarchical model of a hundred years or more in the past.

Return to Victorian Policing for the UK?

I was intrigued to read that the so-called 'think-tank' group, Reform is advising that the UK move back towards the police structure that Britain had in the Victorian era, well, really up to 1942 Defence (Amalgamation of Police Forces) Regulations for southern England and the 1946 Police Act for most of the rest of the UK, though not really completed until the 1964 Police Act. If we go back to the date for which I have best figures, coming from my work on the Great Unrest we find that in 1908 there were 197 police forces in England and Wales (plus 48 in Scotland where mergers began in 1930), primarily because many towns had separate forces to those of the counties around them. For example as well as the Kent County Constabulary there were separate forces, until 1942 in Dover, Folkstone, Maidstone, Margate, Ramsgate and Tunbridge Wells. Thus, a criminal could skip across seven jurisdictions without leaving the county. Back in 2006 the government attempted to take the 1942/6 and 1964 developments a stage further and combine the current 43 constabularies in England and Wales (Scotland now has 8 constabularies; Northern Ireland has always had only one) into 17 so-called 'super-forces' though this initiative failed primarily as people felt they would be too far from the central organisation of their police units.

Forming large regional groupings was trying to go into the opposite direction to what most trends in Britain have been doing certainly since the 1995-8 with the establishment of local government unitary authorities which fragmented a county like Berkshire into four pieces and the recreation of the tiny county of Rutland in 1997 which has only two small towns Oakham and Uppingham. I have often noted how the British cling to outdated, often impractical, elements because they have no pride in anything contemporary. This is why it is taking so long for imperial measurement to die out, despite the fact that nothing else has been taught in British state schools for over 35 years. The British like the quaint and the old fashioned in favour of anything larger or more efficient. Interestingly Reform argues that smaller forces are more efficient and wants to introduce an additional 52 constabularies, raising the number to 95, a figure not seen since the 1940s. They argue that senior police officers effectively form an oligarchy, so I think they imagine that having an additional 52 chief constables would widen the intake a bit.

Another interesting thing is their reference to the Metropolitan Constabulary as being de facto the national police force and rather than the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) formed in 2006, that the Metropolitan force should take on formal responsibility for tackling such things. Again this is no different really to the pattern of the early 20th century in which detection of serious crimes such as murder was often handled by someone sent down from Scotland Yard and for dealing with riots Metropolitan police were often sent in as the only other alternative was the Army.

I suggest Reform look back to the experiences of having numerous constabularies. One key problem was the small size of these forces. In 1911, some towns such as Tonypandy in Wales would only have eight policemen all told and Hull despite being a port and a large city only had 5 mounted police. Given that we are seeing cutbacks in constabularies in an effort to cut costs. The rural county of Dorset is shedding 50 police; next door Hampshire which contains the port cities of Portsmouth and Southampton is dropping 100, more suburban Surrey is reducing by 144, 80 from Gwent in Wales and 120 from County Durham. This follows on from the fact that 19 constabularies cut police numbers in 2008. Now, if you increase the number of forces by 120% then each force will have 45% of the police they had before. I know they will have smaller areas to police and I hope that Reform has divided up the country on a rational rather than nostalgic basis, but it would mean a lot of fragmentation. In addition, each new force will need a Chief Constable and deputies and all the staff associated with those roles, so the smaller forces will actually lead to fewer frontline police officers.

So, as in 1911 we will see a plethora of small forces and a return to the dependence on London to supply detectives and probably riot police too (which given police predictions of civil unrest this Summer in the wake of the recession, this is an issue to consider). In 1911 local forces were overwhelmed. Some were able to draw on deals they had made with other constabularies, such as Liverpool bringing in police from Leeds and Birmingham, but this leads to a very complex pattern of command. I have noted the reluctance of the British population to see their local forces merged with those of neighbouring areas, back in 1911, for example in Cardiff, middle class people turned out to assault Metropolitan police brought in to help control the rioting as though they were not involved in the strikes occurring at the time, they had a violent hostility to 'foreign' police being used in their city. It became typical for 'imported' police to remove their insignia that showed which constabulary they belonged to. I did wonder during the 1984-5 Miners' Strike if officers not wishing to be the focus of complaint was only part of the reason for them concealing their insignia or whether deep in police forces there was still this guidance about revealing the origin of imported police, as, during that strike, police were bussed in from all over the UK to strike areas.

I would be intrigued to see on what basis Reform feels smaller forces are more efficient. I would suggest that they pay at least some attention to the history of the forces in the UK before making these sweeping statements, which whilst in line with recent tendencies in this country towards parochialisation could cause real problems especially as we might be heading towards a period of unrest not unlike that of the 1910s and certainly resembling that of 1981-5.

The Great Unrest 1910-11. Part 1: Introduction

About seven years ago I became interested in the widespread strikes and numerous riots, known at the time as 'The Great Unrest' which occurred in the UK in the years before the First World War. Most people know of the difficulties faced by the Liberal Government of that era in dealing with the campaigns for women's suffrage and for Irish independence. However, the industrial unrest and the numerous riots which occurred at the same time, and were often related to the strikes, are far less well known. The extent that these events have been forgotten was revealed to me in when I was a regular contributor to the BBC 'what if?' message boards. When I wrote about the period of serious unrest across the UK especially 1910-11, people accused me of having made it up and asked, that given they were knowledgeable about history, why they had not heard of these events. I can only think the reason is because the image of a 'golden era' before the First World War is still pandered to. In the long run women won the vote and most of Ireland achieved independence so this upheaval can be seen as leading to an advancement of the liberal British state, very much in the Whig history pattern. However, the issues of the industrial unrest, provoked in part by conspicuous consumption and falling real wages, of the kind we are seeing currently, was an unresolved situation. For an introduction to 'The Great Unrest' I always advise people to read 'The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901-1914' by David Powell (1996) which also covers the Irish and female suffrage issues too. You can find a lot on the labour unrest of the period on local history websites about what happened in this period in particular towns; especially prominent were the events of South Wales, Liverpool and Hull.

Anyway, I decided to write a proper article on the unrest, looking at how the government responded to it. Partly this was because I had believed the myths that I had heard that Winston Churchill as a Liberal and Home Secretary at the time had ordered the shooting of striking coal miners. As I investigated, I found a very different picture to what I had expected and in fact heroes of mine in the labour movement came out of it in quite a bad light and stirring up trouble which led to the riots. There was an assumption by many labour leaders that workers had a legitimate right to riot and be violent, though in fact the people who suffered most in those riots were generally other ordinary people. This was connected to something else that annoyed me which was that many of the books had been written in the mid-1980s and were heavily influenced by the events of the Thatcher regime and especially in the governmental response to the Miners' Strike 1984-5. It annoyed me that these authors had not been able to be more objective and had let contemporary politics influence their analysis of the past.

To produce the article I spent months going to the National Archives at Kew in London and reading all the files from the time. I also read everything I could that has been written on the events. I produced the article with full academic footnoting of a British style. I tried to get my finished article published both in the UK and in the USA. The Americans thought my article was too parochial. The British felt it was not sufficiently analytical or they disliked me challenging the established 1980s perspective on the events or did not find the government policy aspect interesting. I did think of posting it on online history websites but the ones that seemed interested in this kind of topic seem to be hosted by extreme left-wing groups and they always want a particular language and perspective. I imagine they support a worker's right to riot and so would be unhappy with my conclusions and also the fact that I show that a lot of the rioting had nothing to do with the strikes occurring at the same time and was usually carried out by people unconnected with the striking industry. My views of the actions of the Army which seemed surprisingly measured would also not go down well in such contexts.

So, as a result, if you are interested in reading what went on in Britain 1910-11 to the extent that King George V feared he would ousted, I am going to post the article over a number of postings. I produced many various versions trying to appeal to different magazines and have picked the best from each. Rather than keep it as the integral articles I wrote, I am doing it as episodes looking at different features, for example, the establishment of government policy, the unrest in South Wales, the Liverpool General Strike, etc. The numbers refer to the pages in books, articles and government documents which I referred to and these are listed at the end of each posting.

This section is the introduction to the article and gives information about the level of strikes occurring at the time.

‘Cossack Action of the Tsar Liberals’?: the British Government’s Response to Strikes and Riots 1910-11

Introduction
This article explores the consequences of the juxtaposition of two trends in British politics and society in the years preceding the First World War. The first is the rise in violent unrest related to industrial action, particularly in the 1910s. This is set against the continuity in governmental policy, from the 1890s to the 1910s, towards serious industrial unrest despite the increasingly severe nature of the upheaval. The strikes and their associated riots led many to perceive a slide towards revolution or civil war. The apparently dire nature of the ‘Great Unrest’ meant that, whilst remaining with the framework for action that had been well established, exceptional responses were felt to be both necessary and justified in these particular circumstances.[1] However, despite the fact that many in the labour movement opportunistically used the rioting to exclaim virulent class-war rhetoric, in fact the riots had little to do with the strikes which in themselves were focused on bread-and-butter gains for workers.

Whatever the true nature of the strikes and the riots the government still faced a challenge in tackling their impact on the public. A study of the practical difficulties in dealing with this challenge forms the core of this article. Whilst the role of Winston Churchill as Home Secretary has been rehabilitated, a harsh attitude towards the application of the government’s policy on the ground remains unchallenged. This article challenges the view that became established in the 1980s, that there was a sharp break around 1910-12 to the approach to responding to strike-related riots is challenged. This article also explores, in an overarching way, the often neglected aspects of the upheaval such as the racial violence, the hostility to ‘imported’ police and the difficulties faced by local authorities. Finally the article outlines the overlooked area of how the experience of the immediate pre-war years shaped preparations for the anticipated wartime unrest.

Background: A Peak of Unrest
Unrest in the 1910s is seen as reaching a peak unmatched since the 1840s. Strikes rose from 389 in 1908, seen as a year of recession, to 872 in 1911 and 1459 in 1913. The scale of the strikes increased too. In 1909 only 170,000 British workers had struck, in 1911 the figure was 831,000 and the following year 1.23 million. The numbers of workers in a particular industry involved in the disputes was also high, 91 percent of transport workers and 62 percent of miners participated in the strikes between 1910-13. The scale of strikes grew away from locally-focused disputes, as shown by the first national rail strike in 1911 and the first national coal strike in 1912.[2]

Explanations for the upheaval vary, but there are a number of core occurrences which may help provide an answer. The period 1911-1914 had the lowest unemployment since 1901. It was 3 percent in 1911 compared to 7.8 percent just three years before, thus, workers felt themselves in a stronger position as there were fewer unemployed to draw on to work as blackleg labour.. However, real wages were not rising and up to a third of the population was on or below the poverty line. This impacted on living conditions, the infant mortality rate in 1914 being 139 per 1000 births, seven times the level today. Almost a third of men who volunteered for the Army in 1909-10 were rejected on grounds of ill-health.[3]

Historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Friedhelm Boll and James Cronin portray the outbreak of unrest as matching a pattern of strike waves that had occurred throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Such peaks were associated with growth in trade unionism. British trade union membership was rising in the years before and during this peak of unrest.. It climbed 60 percent 1910-14 and the growth was particularly strong among transport workers and general labourers. There were 2.02 million trade unionists in 1900 but 4.15 million by 1914.[4]

Cronin highlights that, despite the stronger opposition from the employers, there had been a qualitative break-through in the way the unions organised themselves. Ironically the problem was viewed by ministers such as Sydney Buxton, the President of the Board of Trade, as being that union leaders had lost control over their rank-and-file members. Key grievances included non-recognition of even well-established unions by employers and the fact that in a time of conspicuous prosperity for the middle and upper classes real wages for workers were falling.[5] As discussed below, there was a widespread perception that the unrest had political objectives, but as Powell importantly notes though the break down of relations in a number of industries did threaten disruption, the strikes themselves were concerned ‘with specific grievances rather than with more millenarian ideas’. The TUC favoured co-operation over confrontation and even the Triple Alliance, formed in 1914, was seen as a method of maintaining industrial discipline rather than for syndicalist or other political goals.[6]

One key change was how involved the government was becoming in industrial disputes. Lloyd George in fact felt that the period if strikes and lockouts should be over and saw the future in a corporatist approach to disputes. In contrast the unrest drew the government ‘willy nilly into industrial conflicts’ facing it with embarrassing challenges. Whilst the Liberals’ social and industrial agenda have been portrayed as being ‘patchwork’, divorced from an overarching philosophy, the government had passed social welfare legislation covering a range of aspects from workmen’s compensation, an eight-hour day for miners and the creation of trade boards. In 1911 this was followed by the Health Insurance Act. This legislation, though aimed at benefiting workers meant that the government had had to have an interest in the industries covered by these laws.[7] This particularly applied increasingly to conciliation.

In 1896, the Conservative Government had passed the Conciliation Act to encourage boards of conciliation and by 1913 there were 325. Ronald Sires argues these enabled greater government intervention. Though voluntary conciliation remained the most popular approach, the government found itself drawn into strikes which impinged on the national infrastructure, such as in the transport and coal mining sectors. Seeing its role as protecting the nation’s economy, the government intervened to get talks established for the rail industry in 1907 and 1911 and in the national coal strike of 1912.[8] One can see a number of factors combining to provoke industrial unrest. However, this does not explain the level of violence seen during the strikes that broke out in 1910-3 and there were other aspects that have to be considered to obtain an overall picture of the volatile state of parts of British society at the time. It had been the government’s choice to become involved in encouraging conciliation between the sides in disputes, but it also faced a stronger, older, imperative in safeguarding law and order in the face of unrest.

References
[1] Anthony Babington, Military Intervention in Britain from the Gordon Riots to the Gibraltar Incident, (London, 1990), p. 142. Despite popular complaint about the imposition of ‘martial law’, the government's law officers stated that action by troops in suppressing riots was what was legally expected of all citizens in standard peacetime circumstances.
[2] James E. Cronin, ‘Strikes and the Struggle for Union Organization: Britain and Europe’ in Wolfgang J. Mommsen & Hans-Gerhard Husung, ed., The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880-1914, (Boston, 1985), p. 56; Friedhelm Boll, ‘International Strike Waves: a Critical Assessment’ in Mommsen & Husung, p. 89.
[3] Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain, (New York, 1979), pp. 149-151. Despite the title of the book it includes a chapter ‘The Labour Unrest 1911-14’; Noel Whiteside, ‘The British Population at War’ in John Turner, ed., Britain and the First World War, (Winchester, Massachusetts, 1988), pp. 86-7; Parliamentary Paper, Cd. 5477, ‘Report on the Health of the Army for the year 1909’, no. LI, p. 1 and Parliamentary Paper, Cd. 5599, ‘Report on the Health of the Army for the year 1910’, no. LII, p. 1, both collected in Parliamentary Papers. Accounts and Papers, 1911. Vol. XLVII (3).
[4] Cronin, p. 62; Boll, p. 83; Steve Peak, Troops in Strikes. Military Intervention in Industrial Disputes, (London, 1984), p.27.
[5] Cronin, pp. 65-6.
[6] David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901-1914, (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 127-8.
[7] Michael Bentley, Politics without Democracy, 1815-1914, (London, 1996), p. 324; Alun Howkins, ‘Edwardian Liberalism and Industrial Unrest: a Class View of the Decline of Liberalism’, History Workshop, vol. 4, (1977), p. 157; G.R. Searle, The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration 1886-1929, (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 94, 99; George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, (London, 1966), pp. 186-7.
[8] Powell, p. 124; Ronald V. Sires, ‘Labour Unrest in England 1910-1914’, in Journal of Economic History, vol. XV, no. 3 (1955), pp. 255-6, 264.

Is 'Noah's Castle' on the Horizon?

This probably sounds like a Biblical posting, but in fact it refers to a novel, 'Noah's Castle' written by John Rowe Townsend and published in 1975 which was televised as a children's series in 1980 on ITV. People often look back nostalgically at the drama series produced for children on British television in the 1970s. Some of the series were incredibly serious and not that appealing, there was a bit too much Victorian dullness to them, but fantastical elements were also common producing programmes which are seared into the memory of people who saw them. If you search the internet for information about 'Noah's Castle' you will also find references from people in their 30s and 40s saying how chilling it was.

Looking back on that time I remember quite a few dramas worth a mention and would point you to 'The Changes' (broadcast 1975; based on Peter Dickinson's triology of novels: 'The Weathermonger' (1968), 'Heartsease' (1969) and 'The Devil's Children' (1970)), 'The Owl Service' (first broadcast 1969; based on Alan Garner's novel of the same name (1969) still very frightening) and 'A Traveller in Time' (broadcast 1978; based on Alison Uttley's (1884-1976) novel of the same name which I believe was published in 1934 and re-released in 1977). These were dramas aimed at 'older children' which had a fantastical elements, respectively a force making people destroy machines, a kind of animal spirit trying to dominate a house, and slipping back into Elizabethan times, but also addressed the issues in an adult way, often looking at responsibility, loyalty, dealing with danger, etc. I know some of these issues are tackled by even cartoon series these days, but these series needed commitment. I think that their descendant is the Harry Potter series which combines fantasy and the serious and is also tied into novels. So, perhaps the demand for these things has not entirely disappeared.

It is a shame, that despite so much 'retro' TV getting on to DVD that these series are not available. There was a 4-hour video of 'The Changes' but I have not seen the others. Given how well 'Mr. Benn', 'The Clangers' and 'Catweazle' have all gone down with the 6-year old in my house I was thinking that in a couple of years he might be ready for this kind of series, he can recite the Harry Potter films back word-for-word (very irritating if you are trying to watch them!).

Sorry, I have wandered right of track now in typical mid-life nostalgia. The reason why I have picked on 'Noah's Castle' out of all of these is because it is set in the near future and focuses on the UK experiencing a period of hyper-inflation. Even growing up in the 1970s when pictures from Northern Ireland of riot police and soldiers in armoured vehiclers, those full-face helmets, with baton guns and real guns fighting against protestors, were common to envisage such things in a street in the Home Counties, protecting food convoys was startling, I think to adults as well as child viewers. Of course we had been through inflation in the 1970s triggered by the sharp oil price rises from 1973 onwards so it seemed quite possible that things would go further. Of course Thatcher had come to power in 1979 and soon we moved from inflation to mass unemployment as being the great social divider (does any of this sound familiar in the current situation?) It is nearly 30 years since I saw the series and read the novel, but some things stand out. The hero in the series is Norman Mortimer, the Noah character. He runs a shoe shop and in one scene a man tries to buy a pair of children's shoes but they cost £320. Nessie, who if I remember correctly is the elder daughter and her boyfriend become involved in an increasingly radicalised movement which supplies food to elderly people, a bit like a revolutionary meals-on-wheels service and all they can bring to this one old person is a handful of potatoes.

The Mortimers, who have four children and a large detached house, effectively begin barricading themselves in. Thus like Noah in the ark they would weather the 'storm' of food shortages and come out into whatever world would come after. Norman Mortimer has been stockpiling food for months during the lead up to the real crisis and feels he and his family can survive keeping outsiders back. Of course his family is divided over this especially the two sons Barry and Geoff, one of whom supports his father, the other who increasingly contests his views. So, like all the best of these series, it combines broad sweeps of drama with family tensions too. The issue of a father on a mission trying to get his children to come along with him is a common but interesting them that many readers/viewers can relate to. In terms of the series I thought the way it appeared to be just into the future, not only in terms of the police (remember this was before the UK police force outside Northern Ireland had any riot equipment as was revealed in 1981 during the Brixton riot when they relied on shields improvised from dustbin lids, so it was more startling than today) but also in terms of fashions, which was a clever touch. The teenagers wore things that were high trends in 1980, but seemed to have become as normal as jeans by the period of the story. In some way, though we did not experience food riots in the 1980s, the series was echoed greatly in clashes between police and protestors during the Miners' Strike 1984-5 and the Poll Tax Riots of 1990. By then of course the police had the equipment they had been shown with in 'Noah's Castle'.

To some degree 'Noah's Castle' was almost a 'what if?'. One could envisage that if James Callaghan had held an election in Autumn 1978 when he was expected to and so scraped a victory before the widespread public sector strikes of Winter 1978/9 that by, say, 1982 you could have had a situation as shown in the book/series. This would have come about, if, there was another sharp oil price rise (as in fact happened following the Iranian Revolution of 1979) and pay had not been restrained by mass unemployment and to keep the economy going on a pseudo-Keynesian basis consumption was kept up by wage settlements leading to hyper-inflation. I do not know if Townsend was a monetarist but his novel could have easily been used to show up the potential dangers of an unrestricted flow of money through public spending and consumption that the monetarists sought to counter.

Are we coming back to an era when 'Noah's Castle' again appears feasible? Possibly. Interestingly, I do not remember if there was reference to fuel costs spiralling, though I think I remember power cuts in the series. This of course is the big burden on the British public alongside petrol and food costs. Back in the 1970s in the UK all power supplies and utilities like water and sewage were state-run which meant that there was far greater control over prices. Now they are all run by very greedy private companies which make vast profits, so this factor comes to the fore in a way Townsend could not have foreseen. Petrol has always been a major factor in inflation across the world and prices since the late 1960s have been driven up by both the countries producing the oil and by the multinational companies which move it around and refine it. Interestingly the British seem far happier rioting about petrol than they are about food. In the 20th century there were very few food riots in the UK, someone might correct me on this, but the last one was probably in Liverpool in 1911 when the whole city was effectively under a state of siege with a dock and railway strike meaning food was not getting into the city and armed police and soldiers patrolled the streets, protected food convoys and defended bakeries from attack. Contrast this with blockades and fuel protests against the increase in petrol prices and duty on petrol that we have seen throughout the 2000s. In addition, farms are being raided by people trying to get hold of 'red' diesel which is sold at a subsidised price to farmers and they even follow tankers around to see where the fuel is being delivered. People are increasingly processing used food fats and oils at home to make bio-fuel and now even chipshops are being broken into to get hold of their oil. I think a lot of this comes down to the British being more concerned more about their 'right to drive' than feeding their families.

To some extent the impact of inflation has been reduced by competition among UK shops. Whilst £1 in every £10 spent in the UK goes to Tescos, there are four (five now with the Co-op takeover of Somerfield) large supermarket chains that seem happy to reduce prices and compete sharply between them. Of course we have lost the small shops of the 1970s but in times of inflation they cannot keep up because they lack the economies of scale. UK supermarkets still have a profit margin wider than that of equivalents on continental Europe which is partly why food price inflation bites harder in the UK than it does elsewhere in the EU/ Due to climactic factors and demand food prices are rising globally but in the UK the price to the consumer is affected more by the cost of moving the food to the shop than the actual food price, bringing us back to petrol.

What we are seeing which is characteristic of the 1970s is the circle of price rises prompting demand for salary increases especially in the public sector and we are seeing strikes as in the 1970s by everyone from school caretakers to coastguards and even the police are demanding the right to strike something they have not done in the UK since 1918. Public sector pay has been kept down during the stable period of New Labour rule and even without the current difficulties it is likely there would be demands for increases. The interesting thing is people expect inflation to come from high demand and so assume that it will mean a high demand for workers. However, a lot of the inflationary factors have become detached from demand, well certainly local demand as much of the oil price rise comes from Chinese rather than US or European demand for oil. Similarly the food price inflation does not come from any shortage of food, the EU still produces more food than it needs, it comes from factors such as transport costs. So, unsurprisingly we are seeing rising unemployment too. Another difference to the 1970s is that in 1974, a year behind the USA, for the first time more economic activity in the UK came from service sector jobs rather than manufacturing. This shift was accelerated by the Thatcherite policies. Service work is more responsive to shifts in demand from the public and the sector which is seeing the fastest fall, housing, is showing the quickest rise in unemployment as seen by falls in building and estate agency employment.

Of course it is weird that the single greatest contributor to UK inflation, house prices, are falling fast, an average house has dropped £4000 (€5040; US$8000) in the past month. To some degree this is beneficial because it means that once other inflationary factors cool, then the UK will not be as so out of step with the rest of the EU as it usually is. In addition, it should cool the vicious speculatory pressure that has been going on in the UK with loads of money being pumped into high-value developments, buy-to-let, etc. which overheats the economy. In some ways though we have not seen an abrupt crash, we are almost coming to the end of an era of over-speculation in a way that the Wall Street Crash of 1929 did in terms of shares. It will very much hurt those people who took out mortgages for 90%-125% of the value of their property, but for most people they will be able to hang on (unless they get made unemployed and there is more payment insurance these days than 20 years ago). It will be tenants with rents already rising in some cities I have visited by £80 per month (about an 8% increase) and those who lose out when the landlord/lady defaults on the mortgage and the tenants are evicted with no rights to remain under current UK law.

I do not think we will see 'Noah's Castle' as a reality in the near future, partly because in contrast to France and Spain the British rarely riot about anything and are easily cowed by the police let alone the Army. They see no common interests with anyone else and actually what is liable to happen in the UK as inflation rises will be communities turning against themselves, seeking out local scapegoats rather than the people behind the difficulties. Of course immigrants and ethnic minorities are going to be attacked, so rather than the assaults of food convoys as portrayed in the series I can see police defending the homes of Polish workers in the UK from violent mobs. What is certain is the relative peace and stability of say 1994-2007 is now at an end. Even the most positive see the problem persisting at least until 2009. It took 1990-3 before the problems with the housing market collapse shook themselves out, some perhaps 2011 is a more accurate prediction. In the meantime we are going to have a nasty mix of 1970s-style inflation and shortages and 1980s-style mass unemployment which is not going to make the last quarter of the 2000s a nice time to live. Maybe I should be stockpiling tins of food and candles now.