"London's Burning" (the political epithet, not the UK TV show)

Usage
"London's Burning" was a political media epithet relating to the inner London social anarchy from the mid 1970's to the mid 1980s. It is not related to the UK's TV show about London's firefighters. Left wings, ethnic minoraties, squatters, gays, hippies, anti-Vietnam War protests, bent cops, crooks, communist agitators, "Loony Left" councilors and Neo-nazi rioters all got involved in the crisis at various times.

Racism and Anti-Sematisum in the East End
Anti-sematisum, sino-phobia and Polonophobia were common place since late Victorian times. Some of the then Jack the Ripper theories were wholly Anti-semitic in nature and Sir Oswald Mosley's fascist Black Shirts held sway parts of in the East End from the mid 1930s to the early 1950s.

The Kray twins
Twin brothers Ronald "Ronnie" Kray (24 October 1933 – 17 March 1995) and Reginald "Reggie" Kray (24 October 1933 – 1 October 2000) were English gangsters who were the foremost perpetrators of organised crimes including armed robberies, arson, protection rackets, assaults, intimmidation and the murders in London's East End of during the 1950s and 1960s.

The 'Windrush Boys' arrive


The British Nationality Act 1948 gave British citisenship to all people living in Commonwealth countries, and full rights of entry and settlement in Britain. Many West Indians were attracted by better prospects in what was often referred to as the mother country, which was short of manpower due to the heavy losses incurred in World War 2. Northampton and Reading welcomed them, but London and Nottingham hated them. The traditional Labour voting parts of the East End basically hated any one, who weren't native Londoner/East End Whites. Sir Oswald Mosley had once held much support in parts of it due to his Anti-Semitic views.

In 1958, attacks in the London area of Notting Hill by white youths marred relations with West Indian residents, leading to the creation of the annual Notting Hill Carnival, which was initiated in 1959 as a positive response by the Caribbean community. The continue to celebrate their cultural heritage at the festival to the resent day.

East End declines
Limehouse Basin was amongst the first docks to close in the late 1960s. later the docks also closed at Whapping and The Isle of Dogs. Othere places like Whitechapple and Brick Lane were also in decline for other socio-ecanomic resons. By 1981, Limehouse had shared the London Docklands-wide physical, social and economic decline which led to the setting up of the London Docklands Development Corporation in these regions.

CND marches
CND organised the Aldermaston March which went from the Atomic Weapons Establishment near Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square in London every Easter weekend Between 1959 and 1965. Many Labour MPs and councilors, alonf with a few Conservatives and Liberals, supported CND's ideals and joined in their rallies and maches.

The Special Patrol Group
The Metropolitan Police's Special Patrol Group (SPG) was a often violent special police squad analogues to the other forces' more law abiding Special/Flying Squad and was active from 1961 to 12 January 1987, then being replaced by  the Territorial Support Group. The SPG was accused of racism and abuse of the UK's sus laws. The offical equiery and police disaplintry equiery after the death of Blair Pech found variety of unauthorised weapons were either used by and/or found in the possession of SPG officers, including baseball bats, crowbars and sledgehammers.

The 17th of March, 1968, Anti-Vietnam London protests
A 10,000 held a rally in Trafalgar Square in London and later 8,000 mainly youthful protesters marched on Grosvenor Square, where Vanessa Redgrave delivered a letter of protest to the American embassy.

The crowd, though, refused to disperse, and a fierce battle ensued between demonstrators and riot police. Protesters hurled mud, stones, firecrackers and smoke bombs; mounted police responded with charges.

The violence of the struggle, in the heart of Mayfair, shocked everyone. By the end of the afternoon, more than 200 people had been arrested, a police horse injered and 21 people from both sides also injured during the event.

Their was rumour amongst the protesters that US Marines guarding the embassy were hiding behind the doors, armed with machine guns filled with live ammunition, and under a licence to kill. Some protesters also felt sorry for the police horses as they threw ball-bearings under their hooves.

Other such rallies had also occurred at about the same period of time in Tokyo, Paris, Prague, Chicago, Mexico City, but not all of them were violent.

The Bangladeshis arrive


They fist came over as a result of the 1969-1972 Bangladeshi was of independence against Pakistan. 5 March 1971 saw a demonstration in front Pakistan High Commission in London with a flag burning and memorandum handover to high commissioner for liberation. Similar anti-Pakistan events occurred at this time in both Birmingham and other parts of London, such as Spitalfields. They later came in on mass due to changes in immigration UK laws, natural disasters such as the Bhola cyclone, the aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan, to escape poverty and on the Sylhet region's perception of a better living led Sylheti men bringing their families in the UK.

A large immigration to Britain then took place during the 1970s, leading to the establishment of a British Bangladeshi community. Bangladeshis were encouraged to move to Britain during that decade because of changes and the desire to

Brick Lane in the 1970s
Brick Lane (Bengali: ব্রিক লেন) is a street in East London, England, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It runs from Swanfield Street in the northern part of Bethnal Green, crosses Bethnal Green Road, passes through Spitalfields and is linked to Whitechapel High Street to the south by the short stretch of Osborn Street. Today, it is the heart of the city's Bangladeshi-Sylheti community and is known to some as Banglatown. It is famous for its many curry houses.

A mixed White/Asian/Black demonstration against the National Front took place in Brick Lane, during the June of 1978.

1970 Southall peace and unity march
A 25-30 strong Afro-Caribbean and Asian rally occurred near Ealing Broadway station in first week of May.

Clerkenwell squatter's camp
A disused tenement building in Clerkenwell Road was taken over by hippy squatters and daubed with graffiti in 17 August 1971. They tried to promote anarchist-leftism, liberal-leftism, dope, peace, anti-capitalism and personal freedom. Left-wingers had be active in the district since at leas 1933.

1974 Tube strike
It was a partly effective 1 day tube strike in the May of 1974 which was meant to back up the NUM's long running strike outside London. The 2 miners' strikes were in 1972 and 1974.

The British government imposed a 3-day working week in early 1974 for commercial and industrial users of electricity after industrial action by miners caused most power stations to run out of coal. Steel, dock, power station, bus  and rail workers also struck at times across the nation to. Many dockers were jailed in both strikes for treason, but were soon released after the strike was over, since they did break strike and trades union activity laws in several cases, but were not traitors or in league with a hostile outside power and/or organised crime as some claimed at the time.

Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE)
Paedophile Action for Liberation had developed as a breakaway group from South London Gay Liberation Front. The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) pedophile advocacy was founded in October 1974 and officially discriminated and disbanded in 1984. Vague media and purported eye witness accusations that it was in league with the 'Loony Left', if not the London branch of the Labour Party as a whole continue to this day.

The 'steaming' of the Nottinghill Canaveral
The 1959 event, held indoors and televised by the BBC, was organised by Trinidadian Claudia Jones

Emslie Horniman's Pleasance (in the nearby Ladbroke Grove area, with Westbourne Park its closest tube station), has been the carnival's traditional starting point.

There was major trouble in 1976 and 1975 with pickpockets in the crowd and police's heavy-handed approach against the large congregation of blacks and it became "no-man's land". The 1,600 strong police force violently broke up the 1976 carnival, resulting in the arrest of 60 people. The mostly white police then understandably bullied, got paranoid about, lied about and racial smeared it for many years. A change of policy came after a confrontation with mostly Jamaican 'Steamers' (crowds off professional muggers, mugging entire clouds of spectators on mass) in 1987. There were a few other muggings, lesser steaming in later years.

The 'Winter of Discontent' in London
The phrase "Winter of Discontent" refers to the British winter of 1978-1979, when widespread strikes marked the largest stoppage of labour since the 1926 General Strike, as the working classes and the Trade Unions rebelled against the hapless Labour Party government of James Callaghan, due to the declining economically. Most of the strikes were  over by the February of 1979, but the Conservatives fed on it and proto-spin-doctored there way to victory in the 1979 general election and then inevitably passed legislation to restrict unions.

Public sector employee strike actions included an unofficial strike by gravediggers working in Liverpool and Tameside, and strikes by refuse collectors. Additionally, NHS ancillary workers formed picket lines to blockade hospital entrances with the result that many hospitals were reduced to taking emergency patients only.

The U.K.'s dustmen (a.k.a. garbage collectors) went on strike trough out most of the strike and caused much chaos in the nation. Feb. 1, 1979, during a strike by dustmen in the London borough of Westminster. Leicester Square Soho, Part of the three-quarter mile backlog of rotting garage in London’s Finsbury Park, waiting to be cleared in 1979. LUL and the buses went on strike at times as well.

The death of Blair Peach
Blair Peach was an active member of the East London Teachers' Association, a branch of the National Union of Teachers, and became its president in the last year of his life. He was also allegedly a member of the Socialist Workers' Party at the time of his death.

He was a campaigner and activist against far right and neo-Nazi organisations and a member of Anti-Nazi League.

Blair Peach attended a 3,000 strong demonstration held by the Anti-Nazi League outside the town hall in Southall on St George's Day, 1979, against a National Front meeting that was taking place in side the town hall, in the run-up to the 1979 UK general election. 2,500 police battled both mobs violent; more than 40 people, including 21 police, were injured and 300 were arrested.

Blair Peach was knocked unconscious in a side street, at the junction of Beachcroft Avenue and Orchard Avenue out side the now-demolished Dominion Cinema at 51.51051°N 0.38034°W, and died the next day in Ealing Hospital. Another demonstrator, Clarence Baker, a singer of the reggae band Misty in Roots, remained in a coma for five months.

A few days after Peach's death, 10,000 marched past the place in Southall where he collapsed and The now-demolished Dominion Cinema, which was where his body was lying in repose, was visited by 8,000 Sikhs on the eve of his funeral. A total of 10,000 people attended his funeral, which took place 51 days after 23 April.

The Public reaction to his death, along with other underlying racial tensions including excessive police use of the Sus law and the rough treatment that Blacks got when they were arrested, ultimately led to the 1981 Brixton riot and a public inquiry lead by Lord Scarman.

Blair Peach's memory lived on as a primary school in Southall was later named in his honer and the song "Reggae Fi Peach", on Linton Kwesi Johnson's album Bass Culture, chronicles the death of Blair Peach in the form of dub poetry, amongst other things.

Monday the 23th April/St George's Day is regarded as a pivotal cultural and moral event by many English fascists and neo-Nazis, especially for the years directly after Blair Peach's death.

Soho's illegal sex industry
Between 1965 and 1982, the number of sex shops had over doubled from 30 one to 65 and had disturbed the local populous with their activities by the late 1970s. In 1982 Porter became Chairman of the General Purposes Committee and set to work in alleviating the issue.

The Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982 stipulated that Westminster Borough Council could shut down any pornographer that did not hold a license. The licencing rules were thus set as 20 sex shops, run by staff and managers who had both a minimum of 6 months residency in the UK, run by staff and managers who had a clean police record, to keep a register of their staff and to conceal their practice with blinds. Only 13 shops remained in Soho by the Febuary of 1983.

The porn shops and squatters in Clerkenwell incident
In the late 1970s and early 1980s several suattre camps/illegal porn shops ran there covert trade in and around Ashmount Road, Hornsey Rise until the Police's SPG unit violently raided them and arrested/beat up the people behind them.

The 1980 Britsh Movement's London rallies
They held a roudy rally that ran from Paddington and Marble Arch. London, 1980. there were scuffles with police and some arrests. A couple also occered at a similar time in the East End.

Nicky Crane,Crane was jailed in 1981 for his part in an ambush on black youths at Woolwich Arsenal station. An old bailey judge described Nicky Crane as "worse than an animal" after his part in the May 1978 bus stop attack that involved assault on a unsuspecting black family in Bishopsgate.

The Manxman and the Soho gay/porn cinema incident
In the early 1980s a morally conservatively minded bloke from the Isle of Man was jailed for chucking a petrol bomb in to a then well known and popular illegal night time gay/porn cinema in a Soho basement, leading to a 5 deaths and several injures as a result of the fire and the subsequent struggle to escape the burning room.

Nuclear-free zones
By the late 1980s, Grater Manchester, Greater London, The London Borough Hounslow and the 'Loony Left' London boroughs in London; along with a few other rural counties (of which a few wer Liberal and Conservative run) and boughs had declared them selves nuclear zones.

The 'Loony Left'
See London's political 'Loony Left'

Dame Shirley Porter
The Conservatives were narrowly re-elected to Westminster City Council in the 1986 local council elections, with their majority reduced from 26 to just a majority of 4. The Conservatives in total only held onto control of the council by 106 votes after Labour failed to gain the marginal Cavendish Ward which was needed to give Labour the majority to take control of the council.

Now fearing that they would eventually lose control unless there was a permanent change in the social composition of the borough, Dame Shirly Porter instituted a secret policy known as 'Building Stable Communities'. The most marginal in the City Council elections of 1986. Bayswater, Maida Vale and Millbank, had been narrowly won by Labour, whilst St. James's, Victoria and Cavendish had been narrowly lost by them, in West End ward an Independent had split the two seats with the Conservatives while in Hamilton Terrace the Conservatives were threatened by the SDP.

As a result every thing from who could get a council house to what streets were cleaned became politically skewed to promoting, rewarding and creating more Conservative held wards. This fatally subverted democracy between 1986 and 1990. He antics helped prove to many that the Conservatives were as anti-democratic as labour, thus rasing the Liberal and SDP vote in Greater London as a whole.

End game at the The London Poll Tax Riot
The London Poll Tax Riots

Life today
There have been LUL and bus strikes since, and a mixture of anti-capitalists, ecolagists, Reeclaime the Streets, anti-Iraq war protesters, El Majaroon (a pro-Taliband lot), the Countryside Alliance and ethnic miorites have rallyed, marched, peotested and rioted since, but is has never been as constant or bad as in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2002, the Countryside Alliance organised the Liberty & Livelihood March, then the largest ever demonstration in British history, with almost half a million people marching through London to demonstrate against the proposed ban on fox hunting with hounds.

Also see

 * 1) The Paris riots of the 1960s
 * 2) Italy's Years of Lead
 * 3) CND
 * 4) RAF Molesworth
 * 5) RAF Upper Heyford
 * 6) Greenham Air Base
 * 7) London's political 'Loony Left'

Links

 * 1) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Poll_Tax_Riots
 * 2) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Kray_twins
 * 3) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Special_Patrol_Group
 * 4) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Death_of_Blair_Peach
 * 5) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Notting_Hill_Carnival
 * 6) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Clerkenwell
 * 7) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/British_African-Caribbean_people
 * 8) http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/image_galleries/london_thru_lens_gallery.shtml?14
 * 9) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/British_Movement
 * 10) http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/HU007879/british-movement-march-through-london
 * 11) http://bussongs.com/songs/baa-baa-white-sheep.php
 * 12) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Black_sheep
 * 13) http://bussongs.com/songs/baa-baa-black-sheep.php
 * 14) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Baa,_Baa,_Black_Sheep
 * 15) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Paedophile_Information_Exchange
 * 16) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Loony_left
 * 17) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loony_left
 * 18) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sus_law
 * 19) http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/labour-vs-militant-tendency.html
 * 20) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Knight_(politician)
 * 21) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-rise-and-fall-of-red-teds-loony-lefties-1593657.html
 * 22) http://bussongs.com/songs/baa-baa-white-sheep.php
 * 23) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/21/1968theyearofrevolt.antiwar
 * 24) http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/witness/march/17/newsid_4090000/4090886.stm
 * 25) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Death_of_Blair_Peach
 * 26) http://www.magnumphotos.com/Catalogue/David-Hurn/1968/GB-London-Anti-Vietnam-War-Riots-1968-NN162836.html
 * 27) https://uk.news.yahoo.com/on-this-day--thousands-of-anti-vietnam-protesters-clash-with-police-in-london-161217942.html
 * 28) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Shirley_Porter
 * 29) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nuclear-free_zone
 * 30) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Homes_for_votes_scandal
 * 31) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Shirley_Porter
 * 32) http://www.conservapedia.com/Winter_of_Discontent
 * 33) http://www.businessinsider.com/thatcher-and-the-winter-of-discontent-2013-4#ixzz3iAINpK00
 * 34) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Winter_of_Discontent
 * 35) http://www.businessinsider.com/thatcher-and-the-winter-of-discontent-2013-4?IR=T
 * 36) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hunting_Act_2004
 * 37) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Poll_Tax_Riots
 * 38) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Countryside_Alliance
 * 39) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/21/1968theyearofrevolt.antiwar
 * 40) http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/witness/march/17/newsid_4090000/4090886.stm
 * 41) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Death_of_Blair_Peach
 * 42) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Limehouse
 * 43) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/History_of_Bangladeshis_in_the_United_Kingdom
 * 44) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6729683.stm
 * 45) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Brick_Lane
 * 46) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6729683.stm
 * 47) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Edward_Heath
 * 48) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/10794806/Tube-strike-London-Underground-live.html