Riot!

Ian Hernon

Description

'A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.' Martin Luther King



Riot! covers, with a reporter's eye, almost 200 years of civil disturbance on mainland Britain, and gives a voice to some of the remarkable men and women involved. Ian Hernon shows that resistance played a part, not always beneficially, in the creation of proper parliamentary democracy, the welfare state, the trade union movement, the rights of immigrants and civil liberties. All of these, it can be argued, are under renewed attack today.



Hernon tells the story of a largely unacknowledged tradition of violent protest in Britain, from the martyrs of Peterloo to the drug-fuelled street violence of today. Riot! charts how the struggles of individual groups of workers turned into a broader campaign for electoral reform and justice; how excessive use of state force failed to extinguish the fires; how the trade unions pressed for wider social justice; how Thatcherism reversed decades of gradual reform and sparked social turmoil; and how a "good" riot played a part in her downfall. Finishing with an account of the anti-globalisation movement and G8 protests, this lively book shows how the ugly roar of a mob has perhaps done more to change society than measured parliamentary debate.
Foreword by Paul Routledge

Preface

Introduction

1. Luddites and Blanketeers

2. The Road to Peterloo

3. The Massacre

4. The Reckoning

5. Captain Swing and the Rural War

6. The Reform Riots and the Battle of Bristol

7. The Merthyr Rising

8. The Chartists and the Newport Insurrection

9. The Chartists and the Plug Plot Riots

10. Cunninghame Graham and Bloody Sunday

11. The Featherstone Riot

12. The Suffragettes and Black Friday

13. Churchill and the Troops

14. The Police Strike

15. Mosley and the Battle of Cable Street

16. The Notting Hill Riots

17. From Student Protest to Blair Peach

18. Brixton, Toxteth and Broadwater Farm

19. The Battle of Orgreave

20. The Poll Tax Riot

21. The Return of Race Riots

22. Stop the War and G8

Conclusions

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Political Advocacy
• Political Process
• Political Science
• HISTORY
• Reino Unido
• Advocacy group
• General officer
• United Kingdom
• History of Europe
• Great Britain
• General
• Royaume-Uni
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849643245
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

Riot! Civil Insurrection from Peterloo to the Present Day

IAN HERNON

P Pluto Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI

First published 2006 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Ian Hernon 2006

The right of Ian Hernon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN10 0 7453 2538 6 hardback ISBN13 978 0 7453 2538 5 hardback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

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9

8

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1

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Gutenberg Press, Malta

‘A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.’  Martin Luther King

Contents

Foreword by Paul Routledge Preface

Introduction  1 Luddites and Blanketeers  2 The Road to Peterloo  3 The Massacre  4 The Reckoning  5 Captain Swing and the Rural War  6 The Reform Riots and the Battle of Bristol  7 The Merthyr Rising  8 The Chartists and the Newport Insurrection  9 The Chartists and the Plug Plot Riots 10 Cunninghame Graham and Bloody Sunday 11 The Featherstone Riot 12 The Suffragettes and Black Friday 13 Churchill and the Troops 14 The Police Strike 15 Mosley and the Battle of Cable Street 16 The Notting Hill Race Riots 17 From Student Protest to Blair Peach 18 Brixton, Toxteth and Broadwater Farm 19 The Battle of Orgreave 20 The Poll Tax Riot 21 The Return of Race Riots 22 G8 and Stop the War Conclusions

Notes Bibliography Index

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1 7 21 28 39 47 58 70 80 90 105 115 123 136 152 162 170 185 197 218 237 248 256 267

276 288 293

List of Illustrations

 1. Instructing the Volunteers  Engraving after John Leech, c.1860s  2. Henry Hunt and the St Peter’s Field massacre  Illustrated London News  3. Cruikshank’s ‘The Reformers’ attack on the Old Rotten Tree’  Illustrated London News  4. The attack on Westgate Hotel, Newport  Illustrated London News  5. The Plug Plot Riots  Illustrated London News  6. The attack on Preston, 1842  Illustrated London News  7. Tom Merry’s cartoon of Robert Cunninghame Graham  St Stephen’s Review, January 1888  8. A poster for the January 1910 general election campaign, drawn by Alfred Pearse  Museum of London, Suffragette Fellowship Collection  9. The Toxteth Riots, Liverpool  empics 10. The Poll Tax Riot, London  empics

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Foreword

Paul Routledge

We read so much about Britain’s foreign wars, not least because there were so many, that we sometimes forget ours is a nation often at war with itself. Quite apart from fullblown civil war, a class war has raged down the centuries, manifesting itself in riots, strikes, civil disobedience, conspiracies and public disorder of the most fearsome kind, France may have the better mob, but Britons are no strangers to mayhem on the streets. Ian Hernon’s book is a timely reminder of this overlooked dimension of the national character. For much of the last decade, presumably as an antidote to the quotidian dullness of life at Westminster where he works as a political correspondent, Hernon has patrolled the furthermost reaches of empire in search of forgotten imperial conflicts. He has now turned his attention to bloody, violent events at home, from the Luddites to the Stop the War campaign against the Iraq war.Riot! makes fascinating reading, and seeks to understand the positive results of law and order breakdown, as well as the unhappy human toll. I have not been in many riots myself, but I do have some experience, including the people power revolt that brought down President Marcos of the Philippines, During the miners’ strike of 1984/85, which I reported forThe Times, I was on the front line at the time. Indeed, sometimes behind it. I recall a very cold November morning on the approach road to Brodsworth colliery, south Yorkshire, where half a dozen strikebreaking miners were being escorted into work by hundreds of police officers, many in riot gear. Brodsworth was known as ‘the Royal pit’ because its coal warmed Buckingham Palace. There was little sign of the Queen’s Peace that day. I travelled to the battleground with pit officials of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). It was quite clear what was going to happen. One of the young miners showed me his ‘King Edward’ – a large lump of concrete hidden inside his bomber jacket.

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In the cold light of dawn, they confronted the police lines, throwing anything they could lay their hands on. A police LandRover, caught in a muddy field, drew an intense fusillade, which threatened to overwhelm its occupants. They were only saved by a determined recovery operation. Thereafter, the police charged the pickets, scattering them through a council estate. Officers hit out at anyone and anything, especially the windscreens of parked cars. It was a small riot, not many injured, typical of a ‘normal’ day’s events as the strike moved inexorably to defeat. It achieved nothing, beyond venting the rage of the strikers. The scabs got through, but no coal was produced. Incidents of this kind took place regularly in the dying months of that yearlong confrontation. Hernon concentrates on what became known as the Battle of Orgreave, where NUM President Arthur Scargill and thousands of pickets laid siege to a coking plant near Sheffield. This operation was designed to replicate the Battle of Saltley Gate during the 1972 pit strike, when Scargill’s flying pickets and striking local workers closed down a cokeworks in Birmingham, forcing the police to withdraw. Saltley was a victory for the forces of disorder, but, ultimately, a pyrrhic one. Conservative leaders engaged in a strategic rethink of policing policy and trade union law, which broke the back of organised labour a decade later when the party swept back into office. It is the seesaw of power, now in the hands of a welldirected mob, now in the hands of the civil authorities, that has characterised the history of unrest. At every new manifestation of disorder, the authorities invest themselves with fresh powers to impose their hegemony. In the days of Peterloo, the Merthyr Rising and the Featherstone Riot, the military was routinely employed. In Featherstone, where the riot is still known locally as ‘the Massacre’, though only two died, soldiers of the South Staffordshire Regiment were despatched to put down a baying mob of striking miners. Ironically, the colliery manager, Alfred Holliday, is buried only yards from the victims in the local cemetery. Death levels the playing field. In more recent times, the authorities – Parliament, the police and the legal establishment – have increasingly used the law to suppress unrest. In the 1980s strikers at Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping plant found themselves and their unions tied down by a thousand Lilliputian legal knots, including sequestration of funds, curbs on socalled secondary picketing and court orders restraining individuals on pain

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of imprisonment. The legal route was first tried out in the dispute between print unions and Eddy Shah’s Messenger Group, where it quelled a riotous siege of his Warrington production plant. Union leaders are actually a more conservative breed than is customarily acknowledged. A Victorian sense of probity gives high priority to the safeguarding of union funds, built up through generations of workers’ pennies contributed by those with little enough to spare. By going for the financial jugular, the authorities knew how to cripple the directing brain of insurrection – where one was operating. The process of legal control continues apace with New Labour’s laws against terrorism, which give the police unprecedented new powers. Demonstrations have been banned in the environs of Parliament and Downing Street, minimising the risk of a televised repeat of the Poll Tax Riots which paralysed central London and accelerated the downfall of Margaret Thatcher. The ranks of MI5 have been boosted, giving the security services an information overload on who is planning what, and where. Briefly, the internet and the mobile phone made conspirational contact easier and surveillance harder, but the civil powers have invested massively in technological knowhow and expert personnel to close that loophole. All of which suggests that the day of the riot is no more. Even if they had radical instincts, which is debatable, the trade unions are in a legal straitjacket. And the root causes of unrest – unemployment, unfair or punitive taxation, the use of scab labour in industrial disputes – have diminished to the point where they do not easily offer a trigger for mayhem. Relative prosperity makes cowards of us all. A bottle of chardonnay on the table and a pizza in the oven are seductive deterrents to throwing bricks in the rain. Only the underclass, Marx’s lumpenproletariat, could rightfully claim to have been left out of the prosperous society, and they are all too often steeped in drugs and alcohol, virtually immured in their sink estates and shackled with Anti Social Behaviour Orders to have the energy for unrest. Hernon recognises this historic social shift, arguing that ‘riot as a weapon against degrees of poverty and exploitation which could and did kill the body became an expression of rage against a poverty of expectation which can kill the spirit. Whether violence can be justified in that ongoing struggle remains debatable.’ For rioting to be justified, oppression must be real, tangible, and incapable of resolution by other,

FOREWORD

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peaceful means. The trick of the British establishment has been to turn the spears of insurrection on one hand by bread and circuses and on the other by constructing a discreet security state whose mailed fist can be deployed at a moment’s notice. In such circumstances, it is small wonder that Hernon, ambivalent about the violence and dismissive of the efforts of trade union bureaucrats, should yearn for the passion of yesteryear’s mob. Not for him Chairman Mao’s view that it is too early to assess the impact of the French Revolution. Sometimes, he insists, there has been no alternative to taking to the streets. ‘The brickbat may not be cricket, but Britain would be a different place without it.’ Different, yes. But worse, or better? Hernon provides the evidence in these pages, which celebrate the civilians who took on the might of the Establishment. Unlike the heroes of Britain’s imperial wars, they are not honoured in a single memorial in their own country. Perhaps they should be.

Paul Routledgeis a columnist for theDaily Mirrorand a biographer of Arthur Scargill, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown, Betty Boothroyd, John Hume, Airey Neave and Harold Wilson. He has personal experience of riots, having been a ‘refusenik’ in the Wapping dispute.

Preface

The broad purpose of this book is to catalogue almost two centuries of riot and disorder which show that Britain has had more in common with America’s Wild West than our cosy selfimage may allow. I have tried to show an unbroken link between the civil unrest caused by clearcut injustices in the nineteenth century to the street violence of the twentieth, and the legacy left in the twentyfirst. A secondary aim was to give a voice to those in the crowd who have not always been heard. In explaining the circumstances which led to civil violence it has also, inevitably, become a potted history of many other issues: the long battle for universal franchise, the growth of socialism and the trade union movement, immigration, social divisions, poverty, the changing role of the police, and the mechanics of both state repression and public protection. These are not always edifying stories, and I have tried my best not to be too judgemental. The heroes are those who fought for rights which most now take for granted, but which are always under threat. The villains are easy enough to spot. But the vast majority on either side of the picket line or barricade were neither, just ordinary people caught up in the tumultuous tide of social history. Therefore the incidents I describe involve highminded idealism, determination, courage and cowardice, official incompetence, savagery, stupidity, alcohol, bigotry, greed, selfinterest, mob mentality and repression. Taken together they have helped shape modern Britain. Some may question the inclusion of certain incidents, or complain about the exclusion of others, or question my focus on the violence itself, rather than wider social concerns. Such charges may be reasonable. My main motivation has been to recall battles which have largely dropped out of public consciousness. Schoolchildren may still be taught about Peterloo and the Suffragettes, but few people outside academia and the geographical locations themselves are very much aware of the Battle of Bristol or the police strike.

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