Post by Teddy Bear on Apr 16, 2011 20:17:07 GMT
Consider this phrase:
‘What aggravated the riots into a virtual saturnalia was the impression gained by the rioters that they could enjoy a fiesta of crime, looting and rioting in the guise of social protest.
Think back to the 'green' protesters, who I'm sure the majority of whom received unemployment benefit, but felt empowered to delay tax paying travellers getting to the airport as their way of 'saving the planet'.
Or the students, riled by the prospect of having to pay their own way through university - although only once they were earning enough, rioting, damaging property and injuring police as their way of displaying their feelings about it.
Have you considered how the BBC leads this behaviour by first presenting these 'causes' as righteous, and then portraying these hooligans and thugs, who are then convinced they are in the right, as some kind of social redress to uphold those values.
Not for a moment does the BBC consider the injuries and damage done as anything they need to feel responsible for, much less feel ashamed for having provoked. So long as it furthers their agenda, and makes the feeble minded believe the BBC is their champion, never mind the consequences.
The phrase above was first uttered by Margaret Thatcher following the Brixton Riots, 30 years ago. The BBC is making a programme about it, and as this article describes, were as much a part of inciting it then, as glorifying it now.
Perhaps the most disturbing element is somehow the BBC manage to convince themselves they are a force for good.
‘What aggravated the riots into a virtual saturnalia was the impression gained by the rioters that they could enjoy a fiesta of crime, looting and rioting in the guise of social protest.
Think back to the 'green' protesters, who I'm sure the majority of whom received unemployment benefit, but felt empowered to delay tax paying travellers getting to the airport as their way of 'saving the planet'.
Or the students, riled by the prospect of having to pay their own way through university - although only once they were earning enough, rioting, damaging property and injuring police as their way of displaying their feelings about it.
Have you considered how the BBC leads this behaviour by first presenting these 'causes' as righteous, and then portraying these hooligans and thugs, who are then convinced they are in the right, as some kind of social redress to uphold those values.
Not for a moment does the BBC consider the injuries and damage done as anything they need to feel responsible for, much less feel ashamed for having provoked. So long as it furthers their agenda, and makes the feeble minded believe the BBC is their champion, never mind the consequences.
The phrase above was first uttered by Margaret Thatcher following the Brixton Riots, 30 years ago. The BBC is making a programme about it, and as this article describes, were as much a part of inciting it then, as glorifying it now.
Perhaps the most disturbing element is somehow the BBC manage to convince themselves they are a force for good.
Heroes or anarchists? The 1981 Brixton riots are now being hailed by the Left as a heroic uprising. The truth is rather different
By Sue Reid
Last updated at 2:50 PM on 16th April 2011
Easter was around the corner and a grand Royal Wedding was being planned. The Government was struggling with public spending cuts, young jobless totals, and control of immigration.
But this isn’t 2011. It was 30 years ago, as Brixton in South London burned almost to the ground in the ugliest British riots of the 20th century.
For three days, battle raged across this inner-city Lambeth borough already brutalised by Hitler’s bombs. Over one balmy April weekend, thousands of West Indian youths fought 3,000 Metropolitan police through every alley and street.
The windows of television, furniture and jewellery stores were smashed and looted, even though many belonged to the rioters’ families, who had settled in post-war Britain from the Caribbean.
By the Monday morning, 60 bystanders had been hurt, some pulled from their homes for a beating by the mob. In all, 149 police were injured, and 224 people arrested. In the mayhem, the predominantly white fire and ambulance crews sent into Brixton to save lives had been attacked with bricks and bottles too.
There had been no such event in English memory. The country was swept up in a wave of shock and recrimination.
Brixton was a catalyst for copycat riots by young blacks — often egged on by Left-wing agitators — in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester, Leeds and other parts of inner-city London.
The Communist Party of Great Britain stated that Brixton was an explosive reaction to the unfair treatment of ethnic minorities and the ‘particular consequences’ of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policies. It was a view many in the Labour Party hungrily endorsed.
From 1981, the Left-dominated Greater London Council led by ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone plotted a response to Brixton, pioneering a controversial strategy of ‘making minority communities feel part of British society’.
After consulting minority groups, it drew up equal opportunity policies, established race relations units, and dispensed millions of pounds in grants to ethnic organisations.
But significantly, far from being encouraged to become part of British society, these ethnic organisations were told they need not integrate or even adopt a British identity. They should live by their own values, pursue their own lifestyles, and express their own views.
Other city councils followed suit, and five months after Brixton, the Tories — caving in to criticism of racial insensitivity — appointed the first-ever Minister for race relations. MP Sir George Young was told to hand out £270 million a year to migrant communities, an act that Right-wingers said patronised the indigenous population.
From the moment the first brick was hurled in Brixton, the march towards multiculturalism had begun.
Today, in the minds of the liberal Left, a mythology has grown up promoting the belief that the Brixton rioters were justified in their behaviour because they were racially oppressed.
To celebrate the anniversary, the BBC produced a naively one-sided account of the riots for Radio 4’s Reunion programme — in which people who have taken part in an event are brought together years later to discuss it.
The Reunion’s line-up featured five people — Brian Paddick, then a police sergeant, later a controversial Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard famed for telling police in Lambeth to ease up on drug arrests; Darcus Howe, a Left-wing black ‘thinker’; ‘Red’ Ted Knight, who led Lambeth Council at the time; Alex Wheatle, now a novelist and then a young rioter; and Peter Bleksley, then a junior policeman caught up in the riots who went on to become a ‘community’ copper in the area.
‘This selection was a parody of BBC bias,’ proclaimed the commentator and journalist Charles Moore after hearing the programme.
‘We were not reminded that Knight declared, in the aftermath of the Brixton riot: “We want to break the Metropolitan Police.” He was probably the hardest-Left of all the Labour leaders in London,’
The BBC offered no ordinary residents — black or white — of Brixton to describe the fear, crime and disorder meted out on that once-peaceful community. Nor did the programme invite anyone to pass comment on the havoc that poorly planned mass migration had wreaked on Brixton all those years ago, as well as on other traditional working-class inner-city communities.
In Lambeth this week there was even a questionable ‘celebration’ of the Brixton riot 30th anniversary.
Councillors renamed the event the ‘Brixton Uprising’ and provided ‘first-hand witness accounts’ along with ‘special guests’ for entertainment. Among them was the Jamaican ‘poet’ Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose writing contains graphic descriptions of alleged police brutality during the Eighties, including one poem entitled Ingland Is A Bich.
But what really caused the Brixton riot? And what did the events of that weekend say about a Britain which had absorbed 1.9 million non-white immigrants since the Fifties?
Brixton in the early Eighties was a tinderbox. Unemployment in the area stood at 13 per cent overall, and 25 per cent among the West Indian community. Half of young black men were jobless and, understandably, discontented with their lot.
In those days, it was a place of black council tenants, many hardworking older immigrants, and white squatters living cheek by jowl.
Many of the young blacks smoked dope, listened to reggae, and spoke an almost impenetrable patois. Empty houses, still not renovated after war bombing, were taken over as drinking and gambling dens and all-night party venues. Crime was soaring, with 90 burglaries, muggings and assaults being recorded each week.
Into the tinderbox, the police threw a match.
Relations between the police and Brixton’s black community had never been good. In 1966, a report published by the Commonwealth Institute, with the foul title Nigger Hunting In England?, reported that the police used dogs to chase black people, and that ‘reliable sources’ confirmed how constables left Brixton police stations with the express purpose of hounding West Indians and other ethnic groups.
Even 15 years later, on the eve of the riots, the area was awash with unconfirmed stories that detectives working there wore ‘Ace of Spades’ ties, and sported BNP badges on the inside of their jacket lapels. At the time, just 286 of 117,000 officers in the England and Wales forces were black or Asian, a far smaller proportion than in the population.
Determined to stamp out violent crime in Brixton, the police launched Operation Swamp 81 that April. They sent in hundreds of officers to stop and search 1,000 people in just two days, using outdated 19th-century vagrancy laws.
These ‘sus’ laws were hated. The 1824 Vagrancy Act had been passed to stop soldiers from begging on the streets after they returned from the Napoleonic wars. Anyone could be convicted on the sole testimony of the arresting officer for being a ‘suspected person loitering with intent to steal’.
Among the hundreds of policemen sent into Brixton as part of Operation Swamp was Steve Margiotta.
On Friday, April 10, 1981, he was patrolling not far from Railton Road, a main street in Brixton which was to become the ‘Frontline’ of the riots.
‘What aggravated the riots into a virtual saturnalia was the impression gained by the rioters that they could enjoy a fiesta of crime, looting and rioting in the guise of social protest. They felt they had been absolved in advance.'
A black teenager, 19-year-old Michael Bailey, ran towards him. The policeman wrestled him to the ground and found Bailey had been stabbed. As Margiotta, then 27, recalled recently: ‘I was on a busy street and I could see this person running towards me. He was coming at quite a speed. He was coming straight for me, so I had to stop him
‘We collided, and as we got up his shirt came off the shoulder and I could see he was bleeding. I was also covered with blood.
‘He kept on running and I set off in pursuit — just to help him, as I could see he was badly hurt. Some others there thought I was trying to arrest him. They were saying: “What are you doing?”
‘It all started from there.’
Bailey ran to a flat where a white family tried to help him. The father of the house put some kitchen roll over the wound and bound it tightly. When he asked Michael who had caused the injury, he simply said: ‘Blacks.’
Bailey was put in a mini-cab for the hospital. But, fatefully, a police car saw the cab moving away at speed and stopped it. When an officer from the police car, realising Bailey was injured, tried to bind his wound more tightly, trouble ensued.
A group of 50 youths began to shout for Bailey’s release. ‘Look, they’re killing him,’ claimed one. And with that the crowd descended on the police car and pulled him out. They dispatched him to hospital and told officers: ‘Let us look after our own.’
By now, rumours were spreading through Brixton streets that it was the police who had hurt Bailey. And within an hour, the riots had begun.
It seems astonishing now that a misunderstanding, even a small act of kindness from the police themselves, should have sparked an event that would have such huge political and social consequences.
At the height of the fighting, in what many took as a racist gesture, a tailor’s white-skinned dummy had been pulled from the broken window of the men’s shop Burton’s, thrown to the ground, then stripped and set alight by the rioters.
The smouldering, naked effigy was still lying on streets covered with shattered glass and next to upturned Panda cars, when Prime Minister Thatcher was whisked from 10 Downing Street for tea at the local police station during a lull in the riots.
She asked the West Indian tea ladies who served her what they thought of the rioting. ‘They were clearly as disgusted as I was with those who were causing the trouble,’ she recalled later. ‘I had gone to the canteen to thank the staff, as I had thanked the police officers themselves, for all that they were doing.’
But tea and sympathy were not enough. The weekend of April 10 to 12, 1981, was a seminal time for Britain. The riot provoked a wobble in the first term of Mrs Thatcher’s Tory Government.
She went from her Brixton visit to an urgent briefing by the Metropolitan police chief, Sir David McNee, at Scotland Yard. Sir David told Mrs Thatcher that many of his men had faced the mobsters — armed with petrol bombs for the first time in mainland Britain — with dustbin lids covering their faces, because they had no proper equipment to cope with such an onslaught.
By the end of the year, the police had been issued with water cannons, rubber bullets, and bigger truncheons. Protective helmets had arrived from the Ministry of Defence to provide protection against burning petrol. In an unexpected consequence of Brixton, the militarisation of the police had begun.
But that was not the only change in the air. Home Secretary William Whitelaw asked Lord Scarman, a liberal-leaning Law Lord, to head an inquiry into the reasons for the riot and how to halt future outrages.
Scarman was to report that the riot’s cause was a spontaneous outburst of resentment among Brixton’s black population sparked by flare-ups — many involving the Metropolitan Police — in the days, weeks and months beforehand.
Consultation between Scotland Yard and leaders of the ethnic minorities was called for. The vagrancy laws allowing random ‘stop and search’ were scrapped — although more strictly controlled stop-and-search powers were reintroduced many years later. A key recommendation of Scarman’s report was that the police transform themselves into a ‘community friendly’ body — after all, many members of the black community had blamed Scotland Yard for fomenting the trouble.
This was to change the face of policing and fostered a ‘kid gloves’ approach to fighting street crime even in the most troubled parts of London.
Today, those on the liberal Left like to portray Brixton as a place where people live in multi-racial harmony, free of drugs and violence — thanks, in part, to the Scarman recommendations and the millions of pounds of state money poured in to help the black community.
But the truth is that neither the violence nor the community tension has disappeared.
Today, protesters from Brixton will march to Scotland Yard to highlight the mysterious death from a stab wound of local reggae star Smiley Culture during an early morning raid on his house.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is urgently investigating the ‘death following police contact’. When the raid took place, 48-year-old Smiley was facing charges of supplying cocaine.
A three-month police offensive, using sniffer dogs, to target the high numbers of Class A drug sellers near Brixton station has just begun. And as for the stabbings, they have never gone away, while gun crime is worse than in 1981.
Meanwhile, in other parts of South London, the drugs culture is as strong as ever, as black teenage gangs armed with a lethal arsenal of firearms and knives run riot. Murders of their own gang members and innocent bystanders are all too commonplace.
When spending cuts, unemployment and immigration controls were often blamed for the rioting in Brixton three decades ago, Mrs Thatcher had this to say:
‘What aggravated the riots into a virtual saturnalia was the impression gained by the rioters that they could enjoy a fiesta of crime, looting and rioting in the guise of social protest.
‘They felt they had been absolved in advance. These are precisely the circumstances in which young men riot, and riot again.’
While her words may have been too harsh, they are no less misguided than the beliefs of those who today hail the perpetrators of that bloody anarchy 30 years ago as heroes.
By Sue Reid
Last updated at 2:50 PM on 16th April 2011
Easter was around the corner and a grand Royal Wedding was being planned. The Government was struggling with public spending cuts, young jobless totals, and control of immigration.
But this isn’t 2011. It was 30 years ago, as Brixton in South London burned almost to the ground in the ugliest British riots of the 20th century.
For three days, battle raged across this inner-city Lambeth borough already brutalised by Hitler’s bombs. Over one balmy April weekend, thousands of West Indian youths fought 3,000 Metropolitan police through every alley and street.
The windows of television, furniture and jewellery stores were smashed and looted, even though many belonged to the rioters’ families, who had settled in post-war Britain from the Caribbean.
By the Monday morning, 60 bystanders had been hurt, some pulled from their homes for a beating by the mob. In all, 149 police were injured, and 224 people arrested. In the mayhem, the predominantly white fire and ambulance crews sent into Brixton to save lives had been attacked with bricks and bottles too.
There had been no such event in English memory. The country was swept up in a wave of shock and recrimination.
Brixton was a catalyst for copycat riots by young blacks — often egged on by Left-wing agitators — in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester, Leeds and other parts of inner-city London.
The Communist Party of Great Britain stated that Brixton was an explosive reaction to the unfair treatment of ethnic minorities and the ‘particular consequences’ of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policies. It was a view many in the Labour Party hungrily endorsed.
From 1981, the Left-dominated Greater London Council led by ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone plotted a response to Brixton, pioneering a controversial strategy of ‘making minority communities feel part of British society’.
After consulting minority groups, it drew up equal opportunity policies, established race relations units, and dispensed millions of pounds in grants to ethnic organisations.
But significantly, far from being encouraged to become part of British society, these ethnic organisations were told they need not integrate or even adopt a British identity. They should live by their own values, pursue their own lifestyles, and express their own views.
Other city councils followed suit, and five months after Brixton, the Tories — caving in to criticism of racial insensitivity — appointed the first-ever Minister for race relations. MP Sir George Young was told to hand out £270 million a year to migrant communities, an act that Right-wingers said patronised the indigenous population.
From the moment the first brick was hurled in Brixton, the march towards multiculturalism had begun.
Today, in the minds of the liberal Left, a mythology has grown up promoting the belief that the Brixton rioters were justified in their behaviour because they were racially oppressed.
To celebrate the anniversary, the BBC produced a naively one-sided account of the riots for Radio 4’s Reunion programme — in which people who have taken part in an event are brought together years later to discuss it.
The Reunion’s line-up featured five people — Brian Paddick, then a police sergeant, later a controversial Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard famed for telling police in Lambeth to ease up on drug arrests; Darcus Howe, a Left-wing black ‘thinker’; ‘Red’ Ted Knight, who led Lambeth Council at the time; Alex Wheatle, now a novelist and then a young rioter; and Peter Bleksley, then a junior policeman caught up in the riots who went on to become a ‘community’ copper in the area.
‘This selection was a parody of BBC bias,’ proclaimed the commentator and journalist Charles Moore after hearing the programme.
‘We were not reminded that Knight declared, in the aftermath of the Brixton riot: “We want to break the Metropolitan Police.” He was probably the hardest-Left of all the Labour leaders in London,’
The BBC offered no ordinary residents — black or white — of Brixton to describe the fear, crime and disorder meted out on that once-peaceful community. Nor did the programme invite anyone to pass comment on the havoc that poorly planned mass migration had wreaked on Brixton all those years ago, as well as on other traditional working-class inner-city communities.
In Lambeth this week there was even a questionable ‘celebration’ of the Brixton riot 30th anniversary.
Councillors renamed the event the ‘Brixton Uprising’ and provided ‘first-hand witness accounts’ along with ‘special guests’ for entertainment. Among them was the Jamaican ‘poet’ Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose writing contains graphic descriptions of alleged police brutality during the Eighties, including one poem entitled Ingland Is A Bich.
But what really caused the Brixton riot? And what did the events of that weekend say about a Britain which had absorbed 1.9 million non-white immigrants since the Fifties?
Brixton in the early Eighties was a tinderbox. Unemployment in the area stood at 13 per cent overall, and 25 per cent among the West Indian community. Half of young black men were jobless and, understandably, discontented with their lot.
In those days, it was a place of black council tenants, many hardworking older immigrants, and white squatters living cheek by jowl.
Many of the young blacks smoked dope, listened to reggae, and spoke an almost impenetrable patois. Empty houses, still not renovated after war bombing, were taken over as drinking and gambling dens and all-night party venues. Crime was soaring, with 90 burglaries, muggings and assaults being recorded each week.
Into the tinderbox, the police threw a match.
Relations between the police and Brixton’s black community had never been good. In 1966, a report published by the Commonwealth Institute, with the foul title Nigger Hunting In England?, reported that the police used dogs to chase black people, and that ‘reliable sources’ confirmed how constables left Brixton police stations with the express purpose of hounding West Indians and other ethnic groups.
Even 15 years later, on the eve of the riots, the area was awash with unconfirmed stories that detectives working there wore ‘Ace of Spades’ ties, and sported BNP badges on the inside of their jacket lapels. At the time, just 286 of 117,000 officers in the England and Wales forces were black or Asian, a far smaller proportion than in the population.
Determined to stamp out violent crime in Brixton, the police launched Operation Swamp 81 that April. They sent in hundreds of officers to stop and search 1,000 people in just two days, using outdated 19th-century vagrancy laws.
These ‘sus’ laws were hated. The 1824 Vagrancy Act had been passed to stop soldiers from begging on the streets after they returned from the Napoleonic wars. Anyone could be convicted on the sole testimony of the arresting officer for being a ‘suspected person loitering with intent to steal’.
Among the hundreds of policemen sent into Brixton as part of Operation Swamp was Steve Margiotta.
On Friday, April 10, 1981, he was patrolling not far from Railton Road, a main street in Brixton which was to become the ‘Frontline’ of the riots.
‘What aggravated the riots into a virtual saturnalia was the impression gained by the rioters that they could enjoy a fiesta of crime, looting and rioting in the guise of social protest. They felt they had been absolved in advance.'
A black teenager, 19-year-old Michael Bailey, ran towards him. The policeman wrestled him to the ground and found Bailey had been stabbed. As Margiotta, then 27, recalled recently: ‘I was on a busy street and I could see this person running towards me. He was coming at quite a speed. He was coming straight for me, so I had to stop him
‘We collided, and as we got up his shirt came off the shoulder and I could see he was bleeding. I was also covered with blood.
‘He kept on running and I set off in pursuit — just to help him, as I could see he was badly hurt. Some others there thought I was trying to arrest him. They were saying: “What are you doing?”
‘It all started from there.’
Bailey ran to a flat where a white family tried to help him. The father of the house put some kitchen roll over the wound and bound it tightly. When he asked Michael who had caused the injury, he simply said: ‘Blacks.’
Bailey was put in a mini-cab for the hospital. But, fatefully, a police car saw the cab moving away at speed and stopped it. When an officer from the police car, realising Bailey was injured, tried to bind his wound more tightly, trouble ensued.
A group of 50 youths began to shout for Bailey’s release. ‘Look, they’re killing him,’ claimed one. And with that the crowd descended on the police car and pulled him out. They dispatched him to hospital and told officers: ‘Let us look after our own.’
By now, rumours were spreading through Brixton streets that it was the police who had hurt Bailey. And within an hour, the riots had begun.
It seems astonishing now that a misunderstanding, even a small act of kindness from the police themselves, should have sparked an event that would have such huge political and social consequences.
At the height of the fighting, in what many took as a racist gesture, a tailor’s white-skinned dummy had been pulled from the broken window of the men’s shop Burton’s, thrown to the ground, then stripped and set alight by the rioters.
The smouldering, naked effigy was still lying on streets covered with shattered glass and next to upturned Panda cars, when Prime Minister Thatcher was whisked from 10 Downing Street for tea at the local police station during a lull in the riots.
She asked the West Indian tea ladies who served her what they thought of the rioting. ‘They were clearly as disgusted as I was with those who were causing the trouble,’ she recalled later. ‘I had gone to the canteen to thank the staff, as I had thanked the police officers themselves, for all that they were doing.’
But tea and sympathy were not enough. The weekend of April 10 to 12, 1981, was a seminal time for Britain. The riot provoked a wobble in the first term of Mrs Thatcher’s Tory Government.
She went from her Brixton visit to an urgent briefing by the Metropolitan police chief, Sir David McNee, at Scotland Yard. Sir David told Mrs Thatcher that many of his men had faced the mobsters — armed with petrol bombs for the first time in mainland Britain — with dustbin lids covering their faces, because they had no proper equipment to cope with such an onslaught.
By the end of the year, the police had been issued with water cannons, rubber bullets, and bigger truncheons. Protective helmets had arrived from the Ministry of Defence to provide protection against burning petrol. In an unexpected consequence of Brixton, the militarisation of the police had begun.
But that was not the only change in the air. Home Secretary William Whitelaw asked Lord Scarman, a liberal-leaning Law Lord, to head an inquiry into the reasons for the riot and how to halt future outrages.
Scarman was to report that the riot’s cause was a spontaneous outburst of resentment among Brixton’s black population sparked by flare-ups — many involving the Metropolitan Police — in the days, weeks and months beforehand.
Consultation between Scotland Yard and leaders of the ethnic minorities was called for. The vagrancy laws allowing random ‘stop and search’ were scrapped — although more strictly controlled stop-and-search powers were reintroduced many years later. A key recommendation of Scarman’s report was that the police transform themselves into a ‘community friendly’ body — after all, many members of the black community had blamed Scotland Yard for fomenting the trouble.
This was to change the face of policing and fostered a ‘kid gloves’ approach to fighting street crime even in the most troubled parts of London.
Today, those on the liberal Left like to portray Brixton as a place where people live in multi-racial harmony, free of drugs and violence — thanks, in part, to the Scarman recommendations and the millions of pounds of state money poured in to help the black community.
But the truth is that neither the violence nor the community tension has disappeared.
Today, protesters from Brixton will march to Scotland Yard to highlight the mysterious death from a stab wound of local reggae star Smiley Culture during an early morning raid on his house.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is urgently investigating the ‘death following police contact’. When the raid took place, 48-year-old Smiley was facing charges of supplying cocaine.
A three-month police offensive, using sniffer dogs, to target the high numbers of Class A drug sellers near Brixton station has just begun. And as for the stabbings, they have never gone away, while gun crime is worse than in 1981.
Meanwhile, in other parts of South London, the drugs culture is as strong as ever, as black teenage gangs armed with a lethal arsenal of firearms and knives run riot. Murders of their own gang members and innocent bystanders are all too commonplace.
When spending cuts, unemployment and immigration controls were often blamed for the rioting in Brixton three decades ago, Mrs Thatcher had this to say:
‘What aggravated the riots into a virtual saturnalia was the impression gained by the rioters that they could enjoy a fiesta of crime, looting and rioting in the guise of social protest.
‘They felt they had been absolved in advance. These are precisely the circumstances in which young men riot, and riot again.’
While her words may have been too harsh, they are no less misguided than the beliefs of those who today hail the perpetrators of that bloody anarchy 30 years ago as heroes.