Brixton in the South London burns as residents fight pitched battle with police

One rioter is ddragged away while another taunts the police: Explosive angerBrixton, a district in the South London borough of Lambeth, is to Britain's West Indian Community what Southall is to British Asians and it is significant that both areas have experienced major clashes with police in the space of two years. For the local community in Brixton, the afternoon of Friday, April 10, was no different from many others. The decaying streets of this most racially mixed area of London's declining inner-city were bustling with the usual crowds of shoppers and busy traffic. Nor was the presence of police patrols unusual in what has long been the most heavily policed area of England. But within minutes, this apparently peaceful scene had been transformed into an unprecedented local revolt against state authority.It is now generally accepted that the four-day pitched battle between the Brixton community and London's Metropolitan Police was ignited when a police patrol detained a black youth suffering from a stab wound. Police later claimed that they were only holding the youth until an ambulance arrived. But to black spectators, it looked as though police were callously interrogating the wounded youth, instead of rushing him to hospital. As a crowd of angry blacks demanded that the youth be handed over to them, the police rushed in reinforcements equipped with riot-shields and dogs. But local blacks fought back with bricks and bottles, and the police decided on a 'tactical withdrawal'. The matter might have ended there had the police not been determined to prove their superiority by returning in even greater force the next day. "We control the streets of London and that's all there is to it", a police spokesman announced as 1,000 police officers occupied Brixton and cordoned off the area from the rest of London. While local Labour Party leaders like Ted Knight, the leader of Lambeth Borough Council, condemned this 'outside army of occupation', the people of Brixton, mainly blacks but also whites, met the occupying force with a spontaneous explosion of mass anger. With weapons ranging from brickbats to improvised molotov cocktails, they resisted the police street by street for three whole days. Throwing up barricades of overturned and burning cars and burning down shops and pubs along the way it became part of a spontaneous 'scorched-earth' retribution.Heavy Damage: At the end of the battle, an estimated 200 people were seriously injured, 143 of them policemen. Some 286 people, mainly black, were arrested and charged. About 63 police vehicles were attacked and four of them destroyed, along with 19 private vehicles damaged or destroyed. More than 100 buildings were seriously damaged, mostly by fire, and 14 totally destroyed. The cost of the damage and looting has been estimated at 10 million (Rs 18 crore).As the smoke of Brixton's fires settles on an uneasy truce, the press-vultures of white-dominated Fleet Street have descended on the area to scratch among the embers for 'causes' and 'consequences'. But for non-white journalists one of the most striking features of the situation is the hysterical gut-racism it has exposed among ostensibly liberal sections of white British society, and notably the media.The BBC's weekly programme 'Panorama', presented by 'liberal' David Dimbleby, set the tone early on in a programme which wheeled Enoch Powell's views, though not his person, to the centre of the stage with a discussion on whether black violence in Brixton had vindicated Powell's predictions that black immigration would lead to civil war. In the media generally, this spurious equation between blacks and violence has been used yet again to define black people, not white racism, as the problem and to cloak with respectability both the organised violence of the police and the self-fulfilling prophesies of Powell, the National Front and other racists who seek repatriation of black people. This is the inevitable paranoia of a society which remains unwilling to acknowledge its own fundamental racism, but feels increasingly threatened by the revolt of those whom its colonial and neo-colonial institutions have enslaved for centuries.Amid the prevailing chorus of Anglo-Saxon chauvinism, it has been left to a shrinking minority of leftwing, white politicians to remind British public opinion that militant black protest, whether by Asians in Southall and the East End or by West Indians in Brixton and Bristol is not the cause of the problem but an inevitable response to decades of discrimination, deprivation and police repression. At a time when the shortage of public housing and social services is being greatly intensified by Thatcher's 'mad monetarism', blacks, as Roy Hattersley (Labour Shadow Home Secretary) conceded, are the victims, not the cause, of Britain's inner-city decline.Unemployment: In Brixton, one-third of housing stock is sub-standard, and 18,000 people are on the waiting-list for rehousing. Such deprivation obviously affects whites as well, but discrimination ensures that blacks suffer most, especially in the job market. Official surveys show that it is four times as difficult for blacks to get jobs as it is for whites with the same qualifications. In Brixton, 2,000 people are registered as unemployed, and two-thirds of them are black although, blacks number only 29 per cent of Brixton's population.Not surprisingly, Brixton's high unemployment carries with it an unusually high crime rate. But the attempt to combat crime with saturation policing, far from reducing crime, has only led to indiscriminate police persecution of the entire black community. To be black in Brixton is to be automatically suspect as a criminal, to be constantly stopped and searched by police in the streets and, under the infamous 'Sus' law, to be arrested, charged and often convicted on no more evidence than mere 'suspicion of intent to commit a crime'.For several years now, Brixton has been singled out for the attentions of the infamous Special Patrol Group (SPG) - a mobile, paramilitary force responsible for the murder of Blair Peach in Southall - who have swamped the area for up to a month at a time, cordoning off roads and carrying out massive stop-and-search operations on the local population. For instance, during an spg raid in November 1978, as many as 5,000 people were stopped and searched, leading to 430 arrests, mainly on 'Sus'. This operation prompted an official enquiry into communitypolice relations by the Lambeth Borough Council, which reported last January that "the present way the police operate is not with the permission or under the jurisdiction of the local community The community may not survive this kind of policing."But this warning was ignored by Scotland Yard and, on April 3, just a week before the Battle of Brixton, the SPG launched another major stop-and-search operation in Brixton, code named 'Swamp 81', in which over 1,000 people were stopped and searched and 100 arrested in just 7 days. It was hardly surprising that local tempers were running high by the end of this exercise and that only a small spark was needed to ignite a riot.Nonetheless, when the elected leader of Lambeth Council blamed saturation policing for the riots and demanded a police withdrawal. the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dismissed his statement as 'appalling' and condemned the riots as 'inexcusable' and 'criminal'. When the police characteristically blamed mythical 'outside agitators', the popular press reported this without reference to the fact that almost all those arrested and charged were local residents and that the only visible outsiders in Brixton that weekend were the police themselves. The newspapers have been full of pictures of injured policemen; but little has been said about the brutal injuries inflicted upon many members of the black community, young and old, attacked unprovoked by 'thrash' squads of police, often in plain-clothes and armed with prohibited weapons like pick-axes, hosepipes and steel-chains. Violence, it would appear, is only recognised as such when it is the violence of protest, not when it is the long-term institutional violence of the state and its police.Anti-Police: The Battle of Brixton was not a race-riot, but an anti-police and anti-establishment riot. Local whites were never the target of black anger, and some joined in against the police. Ironically, the Brixton -community has never been more racially united than it is today by hostility to the police. And for frustrated black youth in the area, the riot has been a startling demonstration of their own power to change their environment, by destroying it when all else fails. "I've been trying for ten years to get the RailtonMayall triangle pulled down," says a local MP. "The youths did more about it in one night than I managed in all that time." If even some of this energy can be channelled into political action, the riots will not have been in vain.Nationally, Brixton is part of the growing polarisation of racial politics, as black communities, increasingly threatened by unemployment, police harassment and fascist attacks, and abandoned by Britain's political establishment, are forced to fight back. It is only six weeks since 20,000 black people marched 15 miles from New Cross to Hyde Park in a massive but peaceful demonstration against the alleged police cover-up of an arson attack in which 13 black children were burnt to death.The Battle of Brixton will join Bristol, Southall, Lewisham and Notting Hill as the latest landmark in the history of black British resistance to racist oppression. But in the short-term, its ripples may well bring increased persecution of black people less able to defend themselves than the youth of Brixton.Last week, an Asian woman travelling on the underground was abused and assaulted by two young white men who blamed 'your kind' for the Brixton riot and said 'you should all be deported'. Another Asian friend received an unexpected visit from a white neighbour, a middle class 'liberal' with whom she had been friendly for several years, who launched into a torrent of racist abuse and told her: "It's all your fault. You foreigners should all go home."But most black Britons, Asian or Afro-Caribbean, have no other homes. And for them there is no option but to fight back, both against the violence of the police and fascist thugs who physically threaten their right to live here, and also against racist legislation like the current Nationality Bill, which seeks to undermine that right in more subtle ways.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Feb 26, 2014 10:50 IST--- ENDS ---

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Brixton in the South London burns as residents fight pitched battle with police

Brixton, a district in the South London borough of Lambeth, is to Britain's West Indian Community what Southall is to British Asians and it is significant that both areas have experienced major clashes with police in the space of two years.

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