“Paralyzed,” Bow Wow Wow’s “W-O-R-K,” and Heaven 12’s “(We Don’t Need No) Fascist Groove Thang.” In the week of the riots, the best-selling record in Britain was the Specials’ “Ghost Town,” a scary, shambolic account of city life as it is. The sound of the riots—doomed, two-toned party music—was being played every hour on Radio One while on the news bulletins in between the experts wondered what on earth was going on. Punk and postpunk music hasn’t just described squalor, tedium, and aggravation—it has been a means of handling them, a source of tolerance and hope. The day-to-day reality of a monetarist government is meanness, and the musical task has been to orchestrate the constant individual harassment into a collective anger, good humor, and obstinacy. What is at issue on the front line of Thatcherism is a politics of survival, a politics which both divides localities and unites them. Even in the midst of the fighting local shopkeepers (who in Manchester stood back-to-back, white and Asian, armed with iron bars) knew that it was here, with these people, that they had to make their living. Posters soon appeared on the boarded windows: “Buy now while shops last!” Thatcherism has not only made the problem of getting by more acute, but has also, more importantly, sharpened the difference between the people who can look after themselves and the people who are dependent on increasingly shoddy and authoritarian public services. This means that what the bourgeoisie has to say is now completely incomprehensible to everyone else, so that the standard Tory explanation of the riots is to blame them on “outside agitators,” parents, and the lack of proper religious education in the schools. And as a result, class conflict increasingly involves confrontation not between capital and labor but between the individual and the state—the state in the form of the bureaucrats who control housing, health, education, social security, and the state, above all, as the police force. The British police force was created in the 19th century not to catch criminals f but to contain the new proletarian communities. Policemen have had a double image ever since. In suburbia, they are still the friendly bobbies of tourist myth—protecting the citizenry, keeping the criminals out. But on inner-city streets, the police are themselves the threat—the “rozzers,” the “filth,” the “trouble” of music-hall slang. Urban crowds drink and dance and meet under license, and policing the inner city has always meant regulating working-class play and breaking up “mobs”—one of the major causes of black resentment of the police is the constant raiding of “illegal” drinking clubs. Under the Tories, the class connotations of “dignity” are obvious. Mass youth unemployment threatened disorder directly—there are more people involved in petty crime, more people on the streets to be contained. At the same time, cuts in state expenditure push people to take things for themselves, to squat in empty houses and fiddle welfare claims; ways of life become criminal. The police are, in other words, at the front line of monetarist politics. Their job is to control the new unemployed, to regulate new state dependents, and Margaret Thatcher’s first act as prime minister was to give them a massive pay raise. Tory law and order is experienced as white law and order. Black/police relations were particularly embittered, even before the riots, by the Deptford fire inquiry. Thirteen West Indian teenagers died in an arson-destroyed house in East London, stronghold of the racist British Movement, and the police not only discounted the suggestion of a BM attack (“not enough evidence”), but put heavy pressure on the other teenagers who had been at the party to admit to starting the fire themselves. As youth after youth at the Coroner’s Court withdrew his sworn statement and described how detectives had detained and threatened him, it became clear (not least to the outraged parents) that dealing with a hostile police is now the major preoccupation of inner-city teenage life. The antipolice fury of the rioters (Moss Side police station in Manchester was actually besieged) was their political message. The riots were episodes in a war. In Brixton and elsewhere, the dividing line that policemen usually drawbetween villains and decent citizens is impossible to define, and so all young blocks ore treatedas potential muggers end thieves. The most savage episodes (Brixton, Toxteth, Moss Side) involved the police and West Indians. West Indian youths face systematic discrimination in their search for work, places to live, and places to go, but the effect of such discrimination is to put them continually up against the police. Black youths live on the street, subsisting on street skills (small-scale hustling, pilfering, dealing, etc.). In Brixton and elsewhere, the dividing line that policemen usually draw between villains and decent citizens is impossible to define, and so all youth blacks are treated as potential muggers and thieves. In the last five years, black youth culture has been effectively criminalized. At the same time, much of black youth’s struggle with the police is for the use of public space—they have few other gathering spots (the Rialto, burnt down in the Toxteth rioting, had been well-known for its exclusion of blacks). The police’s task has always been to control public places, to prevent “mobs” gathering, and the black/police fight for space is continuous—the corner of Railton Road and Mayall Road in Brixton, where black youths have long hung out and white policemen long sought to move them on, has been called “The Front Line” for as long as its habitues can remember. In this war the police show off their own form of toughness. The white people I W1NTEQBODNE 3520 ne 42 THREE LIONS’BAKERY 3 he caprice of chef and sea ^ith fresh flowers and fine ^ine Dinner from 5:30 Wed.-Sat. Uptown - Downtown - All Around Town OUR UPTOWN BAKERY OFFERING A COMPLETE LINE OF CLASSIC FRENCH PASTRIES OUR DOWNTOWN LOCATION FEATURING SELECTED FAVORITES FROM THE UPTOWN BAKERY 1133 S.W. Morrison 608 S.W. Alder into a spacious double bed with a removable designer print cover. $115. Other sizes available. We also feature English cotton flannel sheets, rice paper shades and tatami mats. Northwest Futon Co. 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