Word: brixton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seems easier for everyone, however, to give three cheers and subsume the flames that came from Brixton and Manchester and Liverpool in the more congenial firelight of the wedding-eve pyrotechnics at Hyde Park and the 101 celebratory bonfires ignited all over the kingdom, from Scotland and Wales to the Shetlands and the Scillys, even to the embattled north of Ireland. "When politics are in rather a mess," remarks Lady Elizabeth Longford, a historian and biographer, "any institution that is above politics gets an extra dose of glamour...
Organizers. "Red Ted" Knight, an avowed Marxist and mentor to the Greater London Council's Ken Livingstone, is head of London's Lambeth borough council. He loudly protested police action during the riots, mostly by blacks, in Lambeth's Brixton section in April. Said he: "Lambeth is now under an army of occupation. Steps are being taken by the police to set up the same apparatus of surveillance as one sees in concentration camps." A fastidious dresser who drives a BMW, Knight is an unlikely looking street radical, but it is from the pavements that he draws...
Another young devotee, Sam Brown, 22, lived in Nottingham with his Jamaican-born parents before moving to London's Streatham district. He traces his radicalism to being black. As a member of the Young Socialists' London organization, Brown passed out leaflets during the Brixton riots urging young blacks and whites to protest police repression. Says Brown: "I'm a Marxist because that's the way people like me progress...
Thus there were indications that police action had helped to fan the other resentments smoldering in the neighborhood. Indeed, just three months ago, the borough of Lambeth, where Brixton is located, had investigated police-community relations in the area and found them "extremely grave." A Lambeth committee had recommended that the Sus law be abolished. Then Parliament indicated that it would prepare the necessary legislation for effective repeal, but it was still pondering the legislation when Brixton exploded. What added a final poignancy to the violence was the fact that the extra police details in Brixton were to have been...
Whatever the government finally decides, Home Secretary Whitelaw indicated that it would not abandon its monetarist austerity for the sake of financial subsidies to depressed areas like Brixton. Said Whitelaw: "The idea that you can buy your way out of problems in different areas I don't believe to be sound and the Americans have found it that way." Britons may now be finding out something else that the U.S. has already discovered: the road to racial harmony is long and arduous...