Political commentary

The indoor riots

Ferdinand Mount

Unease as thick as an old London peasouper hangs over the Angry Commons Scenes. This indoor riot is blatantly not spontaneous. In fact, it is all got up by outsiders, thousands of them out in the streets. All MPs can do is twitch and rabbit on in the permanent late afternoon light of the Chamber. The metaphors of violence we use to describe one politician abusing another seem so feeble beside the real thing. But politicians cannot stop and hold their peace; they are paid to rabbit on – which is one of the things other people most dislike about them. Making maximum political capital out of a riot – or cutting your losses – is a refractory art, like scratching runes on flint.

Mrs Thatcher is not much good at it. On television, she looked like the Ghost of Marie Antoinette; her hair was blown into a high perruque, her face pale, her eyes glazed with looking at the tele-prompter.

Even before the riots, she was not keen to appear in the party political broadcast, for fear of becoming over-exposed, as she believes Harold Wilson was. Once she had agreed to appear, she could not let Toxteth and Southall change her mind. But a party political broadcast was scarcely the place to reassure people. She could not help talking almost entirely about law and order, as the riots were still in progress – any other approach would have been craven appeasement – but that was bound to make her seem, not so much uncaring, as out of touch and gripless. Later on, she did better, popping up in Brixton and Toxteth, being seen to be active, making short and ringing declarations against fascism, for the police, for equality before the law.

But there is no skimming over the size of the political disaster for her. Even if the riots stop now and do not start again, they have happened, and they have entered folklore. Even if it was the treatment of the blacks and not unemployment that was the prime cause – and a cause slowly building up over the last 20 years, and not the last two years, the equation is there to be used: Thatcherism equals riots in the streets.

I don't say there aren't plus-factors for • the Conservatives. Most people think the rioters need a good belting; the Tories are the belting party; Labour is not only traditionally thought to be soft on law-and order but is also stuffed with dubious figures who appear to have sinister, if loose connections with the riots. Michael Foot has been on the defensive all week.

Yet most of the credit for learning how to suppress disorder will and should go to the police. Undeniably, our policemen are wonderful again. At first, they were caught off-guard and ill-prepared– a weakness, but an amiable weakness – but they rapidly learned how to move in quickly and decisively to disperse the mobs before they had gathered in strength. Not a rioter killed, not a rioter even severely injured by the police. Senior police officers, from chief constable downwards, sound sensible and clear-headed — very different from how they have sounded in front of Lord Scarman.

In contrast, Ministers are bound to cut sorry figures. Whatever the causes of the disorder, clearly they have not prevented it.

The impact upon the authority of the Government seems to me greater than its likely impact upon economic policy. Tory MPs are much impressed by David Blake's recent articles in The Times which indicate that none of the general shifts proposed – reflation, protection and so on – would make a really dramatic reduction in unemployment by 1983-84, but they would lead to a dramatic worsening in inflation and competitiveness. Both sides therefore tend to converge in agreement on the 'Prior Billion' – Mr Prior's collection of measures designed to operate directly on the unemployment figures by offering all schoolleavers imitation work.

Would it be better instead to subsidise employers to take on young people to do real work but at reduced wages — as Professor Alan Walters, Mrs Thatcher's economic adviser, wants?

Yet because the room for manoeuvre is so slight, all these calculations are relatively marginal. The real argument is larger and cloudier. The 'governability question', which surfaced briefly in 1979 after a prolonged outing in 1974, is back with us. And the pessimists are back on top.

But whose governability? This time not the trade unions, for they are as inconspicuous here as they are in Northern Ireland. And not the unemployed strictly construed either, for half the rioters are too young to be out of work, and three-quarters of the unemployed are scarcely represented among the rioters. This time it is the young blacks – not wholly and not separately, but unmistakably – who are so hard to govern. It is the young whites who are the copycats and the taggers-on.

In the House of Commons, Labour MPs roar. The Prime Minister bawls back. But three rows behind Mr Foot, an extraordinary pseudo-riot erupts. David Winnick, Andrew Faulds, and a cluster of other Labour MPs are shouting with real rage at Mr Enoch Powell who throws his head right back, whiskers to the ceiling, in a huge, prolonged stage guffaw. Hansard the next day reports the incident as follows: Mr J. Enoch Powell: Hysterical men, terrified of what is happening (Interruption).'

This is Mr Powell's moment, or should be. And yet there is something sad about a prophet proved right, even if it is not the same sadness as that of a prophet rejected.

Enoch has delivered his best if not his last speech. Fulfilment begins to dispel the suspense and the menace. Mr Powell begins to seem more ordinary again. If you doubt 'this, read his article in the Sun last Monday (would no other newspaper take it?): Why I See Hope In These Riots. The tone is unpowellian: low-key, concessive, almost post-coital.

At the end, Mr Powell almost seems to be trying to screw up the tension again: 'the time is coming when re-patriation or reemigration will be taken seriously.' And he finishes by quoting a young Sikh in Southall who said on TV ten years ago 'we'll not go home – not for years and years, until the rioting begins'.

There is a crucial fuzziness here. If the problem is to be solved by large-scale voluntary re-emigration to Asia and the West Indies, then there is not much for politicians to do – except perhaps to speculate whether their own utterances might have created the problem in the first place. But if politicians are to consider measures to assist and evea enforce reemigration, then they will come up against the well-known barriers – the numbers of secondand third-generation blacks in Britain, lower living standards in Jamaica and Pakistan, the English common law.

It was the menace of what might happen that tensed and weighted Mr Powell's speeches over 13 years. Now that 'it' – or something like it – has happened, well we know what it is like. This knowing-what-it-. is-like is not a consolation. It is simply a subtraction of one element – fear of the unknown.

Civil peace is fleeting and fragile even in English history. It is debatable whether the riots of 1981 pose a worse threat to political stability than the miners' strike of 1974 or the General Strike of 1926; and it is debatable whether the violence has been worse than the disturbances of 1919 or 1911.

'It is impossible not to be surprised at the little physical violence that was done – only a few men killed, in Wales in 1912, and two or three in Dublin in 1913; in England itself not a death', wrote George Dangerfield in The Strange Death of Liberal England of the 1911 disorders which so terrified the ruling classes. Yet what matters to the politicians is not so much the actual quantity of violence as how much violence people believe is happening. Mrs Thatcher has to watch out for her friends as much as her enemies. The real danger to the Government lies not in homilies from the Guardian but in terrifying headlines in the Sun and the Daily Mail. We may survive the riots, but that does not meanthe Government will be forgiven for them.