Race and Riots in Thatcher's Britain

Simon Peplow is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Twentieth Century British History at the University of Warwick

• Introduction1 Resistance to rebellion2 ‘No other way to make their points of view known’? St Pauls, Bristol, 2 April 19803 Lacking conviction: inquiries and trials after Bristol4 Escalation: Brixton, 10–12 April 19815 ‘The Brixton Defence Campaign says boycott the Scarman Inquiry’6 A ‘conspicuous success’? Policing Liverpool and Manchester in July 19817 ‘Who the hell’s defending if they’re going to walk out of here?’ The Moss Side Defence CommitteeEpilogue: ‘Turning point’ or ‘opportunity lost’? The legacy of 1980–1Index

'Overall, this book enlivens, reinterprets, and repurposes previous analyses of both black history and protest studies, bringing them into clearer focus. As a national study, it retains (primarily) a state-orientated focus, while using urban case studies to illuminate certain problems, with the Manchester and Liverpool case studies of greatest interest for Transactions readers. Peplow makes a convincing case in how we examine historic protest linked with race and ethnicity, and his approach can inform future studies, offering a natural continuation to Peter Shapely’s recent Deprivation, State Interventions and Urban Communities in Britain (Routledge 2018), which itself ends before the riot build-up Peplow covers after 1979.'Dr Marc Collinson, Bangor University, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 168, 2019