Toxteth Burns, Scarman Reports, and the Summer of Riots Demands a Reckoning

Key Developments at a Glance

• 3–5 July 1981: Toxteth, Liverpool erupts; petrol bombs used against police; CS gas deployed by police on British streets for the first time; twelve days of unrest; Upper Parliament Street devastated.
• Summer 1981: riots spread to Handsworth (Birmingham), Moss Side (Manchester), Chapeltown (Leeds), Southall (London); the pattern is national, not local.
• 29 July 1981: Marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer; 750 million watch worldwide; Caribbean community watches a national celebration it is part of but not centred in.
• 25 November 1981: Scarman Report published; identifies racial disadvantage, policing failures, and social conditions as causes; calls for reform of stop-and-search and community policing.
• IRA hunger strikes end October 3; ten men dead including Bobby Sands (May); Caribbean community maintains its consistent opposition to political violence while acknowledging Irish grievances.
• Edward Seaga PM Jamaica since October 1980 election; JLP government begins IMF negotiations; Michael Manley and PNP in opposition.

The second half of 1981 is defined, for the Caribbean community in Britain, by two events that stand at opposite ends of the summer’s crisis: the Toxteth riots that open the period in early July and the Scarman Report that closes the first phase of the national reckoning in late November. Between those two events, the riots spread from city to city, the government deploys the rhetoric of law and order, and a royal wedding provides a brief national interlude that tests the community’s capacity for a celebration of an institution that has, historically, been more comfortable with its loyalty than with its presence. The community passes the test: it watches the wedding, it participates in the street parties, and it maintains, through its community organisations and political engagements, the argument that the conditions that produced the riots must be changed rather than simply condemned.

Toxteth and the Spread of Unrest

The Toxteth riots begin on the night of 3 July 1981, when a confrontation between police and a young Black motorcyclist in Liverpool 8 triggers the unrest that the area’s residents have been approaching for years. The riots that follow last twelve days and involve levels of violence that are, by the standards of British civil unrest, extraordinary: petrol bombs are used systematically against police lines; CS gas is deployed by British police on British streets for the first time in the history of mainland policing; buildings along Upper Parliament Street are destroyed. The comparison with Brixton is immediate and unavoidable. Liverpool 8, like Brixton, is a community whose Caribbean population arrived in the post-war decades, settled in the area available to it, and built a life under conditions of consistent discrimination in employment, housing, and policing.

The riots that follow in Handsworth, Moss Side, Chapeltown, and Southall complete the picture of a national phenomenon. These are not isolated local incidents; they are expressions, in different cities and different communities, of the same underlying conditions: youth unemployment at levels the country has not seen since the 1930s; stop-and-search policing that is applied to young Black men at rates that have no relationship to crime statistics; housing conditions that reflect decades of exclusion from the better stock; and a political environment in which the Caribbean community’s legitimate grievances are routinely dismissed as the complaints of people who should be grateful for whatever they have.

The Royal Wedding

On 29 July 1981, twenty-six days after the Toxteth riots began, Prince Charles marries Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral. An estimated 750 million people worldwide watch the ceremony on television. Street parties take place across Britain. The Caribbean community participates in the national celebration with the complexity that characterises its relationship to all British national occasions: genuine warmth for a day that is about human celebration rather than political division, and a clear-eyed awareness that the institution being celebrated has not historically placed the Caribbean community at the centre of its sense of what Britain is. The royals and the riots are two expressions of a Britain in which the community is present but not always seen.

The Scarman Report: What It Says and What Comes Next

Lord Scarman’s report into the Brixton disorders, published on 25 November 1981, is a serious and largely accurate document. It identifies racial disadvantage as a major cause of the disorders: not in a simplistic way that blames the rioters, but in a structural way that acknowledges the role of unemployment, housing, education, and policing in creating the conditions for civil unrest. It makes specific recommendations about stop-and-search policing, about the recruitment of Black police officers, about community consultation, and about the need for positive action to address the structural disadvantages that Caribbean community members face. The community receives the Scarman Report as a confirmation of what it has been saying for years, from the lips of someone the government cannot easily dismiss.

The question that the Caribbean community is now asking, as 1981 closes, is whether the Scarman Report will be implemented. The community’s experience of official reports, inquiries, and reviews is that they are produced, acknowledged, and then left to gather dust while the conditions they describe continue unchanged. Scarman has said that racial disadvantage is a fact of current British life; that policing practices in relation to the Black community need to change; and that positive action is required to give young Black Britons the opportunities that their white contemporaries take for granted. Whether a Thatcher government whose domestic programme has consistently moved in the opposite direction will implement these recommendations is, entering 1982, the central question for the community’s future.

Jamaica and the New Seaga Government

In Jamaica, Edward Seaga’s JLP government, which won the October 1980 election in a landslide after the most violent election campaign in Jamaican history, is beginning the programme of economic restructuring that its alignment with the Reagan administration and the International Monetary Fund will require. Michael Manley and the PNP, having governed since 1972, are now in opposition. The diaspora in Britain follows the Jamaican political transition with the attention of people who have family on both sides of the JLP-PNP divide and who understand that the island’s economic trajectory will shape the conditions of life for the families they support through remittances. The new Seaga government’s pro-American, pro-market orientation represents a sharp break from the Manley years; whether that break will produce the economic improvement that its supporters promise is a question the community will be watching closely through the years ahead.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Commission for Racial Equality; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); The Scarman Report (Cmnd. 8427, 1981); House of Commons Hansard; Merseyside Police.

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