of music and has been a media KTjfflgBHBHgS^ccmrnunity, a bastion, cheerfulness that adversity. Times on certainly bad, but these people, ' would whistle through, like,” exclaimed the chief constable ~ cannot happen to Merseyside.” was never the way the Beatles made it seem. riots there in 1919,1948, and 1972. Its always looted, thieved, run in gangs, and hated last year, Liverpool * There were race citizens have • and legs broken.” And he spoke in Scouse, the language of John and George and Paul and Ringo. For years now, Liverpool (city football, comedians and poets) 4 symbol of working-class . ♦ supposedly, of the marks British grit in « Merseyside were black and white alike, / 4p “Race riots and the * feirst the action, then the words. For a moment, as the street fighting spread, f words failed and only pictures—flaming buildings, gutted cars, layer upon layer of policemen—told the story. The words soon spewed again—“riots,” “hooligans,” etc.—but for that moment the shock to the British political system was tangible. Old certainties crumbled, and a new condition flickered through the smoke. The first youth riot was in Bristol a year ago, the second flared in Brixton this April, and the first of this series began in Southall on July 3, but the event that really jolted our screens that weekend was the explosion in Toxteth, which was shocking not only for its ferocity j ^ ^ ^ * * ^ * but also for its accent. ‘‘My aim was to kill a . policeman,” a participant told the Sunday | Times. “We wanted to leave them in V the middle of the road with their arms -7 rtvjjig P " uw x Kids Against Copsin Britoin BySimonFrith BBBBHHBBIBBBIB the police. “To tell the truth,” a white Liverpudlian told a friend of mine last year, “if someone round here saw a policeman on fire they wouldn’t even piss on him.” And the fact is that Toxteth doesn’t look much different after the riots than it did before—a few more shelled shops, a few more rotting cars, a ; few more broken homes. j Liverpool was never the way the Bootleg mode it seem. There were rose riots there in 1919,1948, end 1972. Its citizens hove always looted, thieved, run in gongs, and hated the police. The shock of the Toxteth riot was not that it happened, but that it revealed in such a sudden glare of violent anger the reality of British race relations under Margaret Thatcher. If Labour politicians and liberal academics have been predicting the breakdown of the social order ever since the Tories got in, the people of Toxteth have been living the breakdown, forced to make sense of it for themselves. For at least the last five years the mass media images of British life have made no sense of the inner city at all. The only public descriptions of what it is like now to be young or black or unemployed, to be desperate or homeless or bored, have been songs and records—not only the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” and the Clash’s “White Riot,” but Misty’s “How Long Jah” and Aswad’s “Warrior Charge,” Delta 5’s “Mind Your Own Business” and the Gang of Four’s 20 Clinton St. Quarterly Illustrations by Stephan Leflar
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