LONDON: When I was a reporter on the Birmingham Post & Mail, I could guess anyone’s politics by how they described the looting and murder that overwhelmed Handsworth in September 1985. If they talked about the ‘Handsworth riots’, I knew they were conservatives who had seen criminals going berserk after the police arrested local dope traders. Thugs of all creeds and colours had joined the fun. It was a yobs’ orgy, not a political protest. As I’d ducked and dived to escape machete-wielding rioters, I took the point. When a couple cornered me and demanded my money, I was saved only by the honest conviction of my junior reporter’s cry: “But, but, I don’t have any money!”
On the other hand, people who talked of the ‘Handsworth rebellion’ were clearly from the left. Before they became respectable, Herman Ouseley and Keith Vaz were fire-spouting revolutionaries who declared in a report for the old West Midlands County Council that the word ‘riot’ didn’t begin to describe what had happened in Handsworth. ‘The never-employed black under-class, interned in the workless gulags of Britain’ had risen up against their oppressors, they insisted. Birmingham was seeing ‘violent resistance’ by blacks who believed they were being forced to live under ‘a form of apartheid’.
For all the hyperbole, I had sympathy for them as well. In Brixton, Tottenham and Handsworth, the classic riot of the period began after a real or rumoured assault on a black woman by the police. The rioters were poor young men without a future. To say the violence had nothing to do with racism and the mass destruction of manufacturing jobs in Margaret Thatcher’s first recession was wishful thinking or Tory propaganda.
Twenty years on, I am back on the Lozells Road after another riot. Nothing has changed, but everything is different.
What started the riot was not a bungled police round-up of drug dealers, but a racist rumour which swept black Birmingham. Everyone knew someone who could swear that an Asian shopkeeper had locked up a 14-year-old black girl he had caught shoplifting and then raped her with the help of his friends. The police have been investigating for a week. They haven’t found the girl or the crime scene or the rapists. Unless that changes, and my guess is it won’t, the rumour will be a grotesque libel that painted Asian shopkeepers as the bestial abusers of feminine innocence.
Warren G spread it on his show on a pirate station. Mr G isn’t a standard DJ. He’s a religious man and left the studio for a meeting about the rape at the New Testament Church.
The meeting ended and the riots began.
As striking as the violence were the wild statements on the radio and in internet chatrooms. There was plenty of talk of Asian racism, and all sides accepted that there are racist Asians as there are racist blacks, whites and whatever. Ligali, a black African pressure group, went further and damned everyone. It called for a boycott of Asian shops. Not of the shop where the crime took place — no one knew where it was or if it existed — but of all Asian shops.—Dawn/The Observer News Service
