The Toxteth aftermath
Andrew Brown
Liverpool What remains of Toxteth is cleaner, more brightly coloured, and a great deal less depressing than the centre of Liverpool, which is so squalid and run down at weekends that one cannot tell by looking at the rubbish, vomit, and orange peel on the -pavement whether you are in Lime Street Station or a shopping arcade. The whole place has the pretentious shabbiness of something administered by British Rail. In the centre of the city everyone seemed furtive, resigned, or hopeless. On top of the hill, where the riots began last Saturday, everyone was simply frightened. Liverpool 8 has apparently always been an area where the police walked only in twos or threes. 'That's Nigeria, that is,' said a businessman, very drunk in the Press Club at six on Saturday evening, and added tut you should have come here a few years ago, when things were really bad.'
This businessman was not the only man to have difficulty grasping that something historical had happened. The scale of the damage is immense, and a policeman I spoke to — he had been drafted in from somewhere miles away — simply refused to believe that the ruins of the Rackets club were not the result of a development scheme. I hope his faith steadied him, for Upper Parliament Street was a frightening place on Saturdy night. It's a broad street. Judging from the photographs, five cars in line were needed to barricade it in the riots, and on Saturday evening, it resembled nothing so much as a stage, around which we were all grouped, waiting for the 'incident' as the policeman called it to begin. In the empty space in front of the burnt-out National Westminster bank and the burnt-down Rialto there were at least 50 policemen standing in groups of three or four within a radius of 100 yards. It was a fine summer evening, and the only other people in sight were three coffee coloured children about eight years old playing on the pavement 200 yards away. And, of course, when I saw them, the first thing I wondered was how much they had managed to steal at the weekend.
This reflection would not have occurred on Sunday night, when it had become clear that the trouble was happening in other places this weekend. Across the Mersey, police attempting to keep order in one of the hideous purpose-built slums found themselves attacked from balconies. Furniture, televisions, petrol bombs, and even a cooker were thrown down at the police, but the full scale of the trouble only became apparent later in the courts.
A priest, dressed apparently in jeans, remonstrated with policemen who were beating a youth with truncheons, and was of course charged with conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace, and duly convicted. One would have more sympathy with him if he had not described the rioting as 'a catalyst which has grown out of all proportions'.
Looking at the damage in Toxteth, one is tempted to ask why, if all this was caused by bad housing, there has been so comparatively little violence in the newly built council estates. In one of these, I was told, the tenants were offered their houses for as little as two thousand pounds, and still refused to buy them, on the reasonable grounds that they didn't want them even at that price.
On Sunday, at lunchtime, Toxteth still seemed a frightening place. On Lodge Lane you can walk for perhaps half a mile with shops on each side of you, and every single shop has been looted. Only two or three have reopened, and the posters put up by a shopfitting firm — 'Can we help you to start again?' — have mostly been torn down. The pubs were gloomy but well-filled. Most people seemed to feel that if nothing had happened the night before, then trouble was inevitable now. 'They'll do the pubs next time. There's nothing else left for them to do' as a barmaid told her audience. They seemed to agree, though four West Indian youths drinking with a white, leant over and said they wouldn't do hers because it was such a nice pub. They roared with laughter at this. The barmaid winced, and the rest of the people in the pub just ignored them. That was the only evidence I saw that there were people living around Lodge Lane who were capable also of destroying it.
In the evening, as it became apparent that nothing was going to happen this weekend at all, the fear ebbed away, leaving the sediment of bitterness and rage. It was an extraordinary transformation. The crucially right thing that the police did was to change over from gathering in large groups to moving around in threes or fours. This not only enables them to cover a larger area, and to see any gatherings of youths before these reach the critical mass, but it makes them more approachable. The police stood in small groups every 30 or so yards down the whole length of Lodge Lane, and people kept coming up to them and congratulating them. All the conversations I heard had as their theme the marvellous job that the police were doing, and the bestial nature of the rioters. The pubs were full of middleaged working-class people, their faces pinched into acuity. A sailor returned from Germany spoke with admiration of the methods of the Munich police. Many of the policemen had been drafted in from Weybridge. They said the things one would expect: one constable, who could not possibly have been born at the end of the last war, remarked over and over again that this was worse than the blitz. It was a theatrical remark, but then this was a theatrical occasion: everyone seemed conscious that they were taking part in an impressive, if quiet, demonstration of the fact that the values of the traditional working classes had been re-established in Lodge Lane.
Next day saw a more common sort of demonstration. By lunchtime, the Echo had published the news that Mrs Thatcher was in Liverpool, and a sizeable crowd had gathered outside the Town Hall. Some thought they were waiting for her to arrive, some realised that they were waiting for her to leave, and one man, a thin, malarial looking protestant priest, who said he represented the African church, wanted to see her in order to explain the answer to her problems. The answer was, apparently, that if people have no conscience about moral issues, then they have no conscience about robbing and stealing either. The crowd, though large, was reasonably goodhumoured, and certainly pro-police. A few groups of demonstrators chanted from time to time, but few people joined in. After an hour or so, someone even struck up 'Why are we Waiting'. Then the 'community leaders' emerged to be interviewed.
'Who's that?' asks a woman. 'Nigger' said the man behind me quietly. He was apparently part of the NALGO contingent; he was booing very loudly later. Later, when some American journalists appear, a voice enquires 'Who's the coon?' The dirty words are spoken with real relish.
When Mrs Thatcher emerged, she paused for a moment, and walked surprisingly slowly to the car. One had time to think 'Surely she doesn't look like that in real life' before the crowd remembered what it had been waiting for. There were no chants, simply a terrible burst of inarticulate yells, mingled with very loud booing. For a moment you could feel what a mob is like, and then the car was pulling away, and a well-dressed man scooped something from the pavement she had crossed and lobbed it towards the crowd. It burst in the air, spattering the police cordon with tomato pulp. The well-dressed man was apparently a Tory councillor named Mervyn Kingston, who is in danger of being charged for what he did. It is to be hoped that the magistrates make an example of him.
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