"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 wing riots, 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, 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. Northampton and Reading welcomed them, but London and Nottingham hated them. The traditional Labour voting parts of the East End basicly hated any one, who wern't native Londoner/East End Whites. Sir Oswald Mosley had once held much suppoert in tlhe region due to his Anti-semitic vews.

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.

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.

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.

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 cosseted heart of Mayfair, shocked everyone. By the end of the afternoon, more than 200 people had been arrested and 21 people from both sides injured.

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
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.

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.

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.

Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE)
Pedophile Action for Liberation had developed as a breakaway group from South London Gay Liberation Front. The Pedophile 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.

Clerkenwell squatter's camp
A 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 1993.

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 steamings

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.

Monday the 23th April/St George's Day is regarded as a pivotal cultural and moral event by many English fascists and neo-Nazis.

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 Est 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 cinema incident
In the early 1980s

The Porn and squatters in Clerkenwell incident
In the early 1980s several 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 'Loony Left'
While academics have depicted the era as of the "new urban left" (such as with the rate-capping rebellion) as a throwback to earlier municipal militancyand poplarism, but wider media coverage tended to focus on the personalities of city leaders such as the Greater London Council's Ken Livingstone and Liverpool's Derek Hatton. The Lambeth Borough leader 'Red' Ted night is often regarded as there spiritual founder. The Conservative Party and the popular tabloid press habitual mocked them and the GLC as part of a anti-Labour Party campaign run by the Conservatives (AKA- The Tories). Labour had got a firm controle of Greater London and Liverpool, which it ran as de facto quasi indipendent states through out the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The press accounts about the wider use of the nursery rhyme "Baa, Baa, White Sheep", renaming manhole covers, and "black bin-liner bags" were urban myths caused by outright fabrications by the gutter press. The reports that London councils had insisted that homosexuals be placed at the heads of the waiting lists for council housing and that London councils had spent £0.5 millions on "24 super-loos for gypsies" were found to be highly misleading upon investigation by the Media Research Group of Goldsmiths' College, University of London.

The 'Loony Left' were Labour councilors, party associations and MPs who were considered to be-
 * Irrationally obsessed with minority and fringe issues,
 * Paranoid about racial and sexual "problems" that are wholly imaginary on their parts and that have no real existence (see- Baa, Baa, White Sheep).
 * Anti-Thacherite.

"Baa, Baa, White sheep"


The 1986 incident concerned the sopsed possible ( and false ) coded racist meaning behind the nersary rhyme, which was originally made hundred of years ago  to mock a medieval wool tax. The original story reported a Parent/Teacher Association (PTA) ban at Beevers Nursery, a privately run nursery school in the borough of Hackney. The loony Left Hackney council then offered them offical support and thought they were ideologically right.

It was originally reported by Bill Akass, then a journalist at the Daily Star newspaper, in the 15 February 1986 edition under the headline "Now it's Baa Baa Blank Sheep". Bill Akass had heard of a ban issued, by nursery school staff, on the singing of the nursery rhyme "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep", on the grounds that it was racist and portrayed black sheep (allegedly code fore Blacks ) as subservient to the people (allegedly code for the mostly  White  general public). The press then entered a political feeding frenzy for literally  anything  they could find that was a anti-Labour/left-wing in nature,  most of which was false! 

In a unrelated incident at about this time, Brent Council also chose to appoint race-relations advisers to schools and Ealing offered the local gay community 'gay only' days at council run swimming pools and sports centrrese even though thay gays said they did not want or need it.

Baa, Baa, Black sheep-
 * Baa, baa black sheep
 * Have you any wool
 * Yes sir, yes sir
 * Three bags full.
 * One for my master
 * And one for my dame
 * And one for the little boy
 * Who lives down the lane.


 * Baa Baa white sheep
 * Have you any wool?
 * Yes Sir, Yes Sir, three bags full.
 * One for my master
 * and One for my Dame
 * And one for the little boy
 * with holes in his socks!


 * Baa, baa black sheep
 * Have you any fear
 * No sir, No sir
 * God is near.
 * He never slumbers
 * He never sleeps
 * He is always looking after
 * this little sheep.


 * Baa Baa Pink Sheep
 * Have you any spots
 * Yes sir yes sir
 * Lots and lots
 * Some on my fingers
 * And some on my toes
 * And some on the end of
 * my pink fluffy nose.


 * Baa, baa black sheep
 * Have you any cotton
 * No sir, no sir
 * It's all gone rotten.
 * None for the master
 * And none for the dame
 * And none for the little boy
 * Who fell down the drain.


 * Baa, baa black sheep
 * Have you any wool
 * Yes sir, yes sir
 * Three bags full.
 * Thank you says the master,
 * Thank you says the dame,
 * Thank you says the little boy
 * who lives down the lane.


 * Baa, baa black sheep
 * Have you any wool
 * Yes sir, yes sir
 * Three bags full.
 * One to mend the jerseys
 * One to mend the socks
 * And one to mend the holes in
 * The little girls' frocks.


 * Bah, Bah, a black Sheep,
 * Have you any Wool?
 * Yes merry have I,
 * Three Bags full,
 * One for my Master,
 * One for my Dame,
 * One for the Little Boy
 * That lives in the lane.


 * White sheep white sheep
 * On a blue hill
 * When the wind stops
 * You all stand still
 * When the wind blows
 * You walk away slow
 * White sheep white sheep
 * Where do you go.


 * Baa Baa White sheep,
 * where's your little lamb?
 * She's down on the meadow
 * and she can't get home.
 * The water's very deep
 * and the hedge is very high,
 * poor little baby lamb don't you cry.


 * Baa Baa White Sheep
 * Look over there
 * See all the nanny goats
 * going to the fair
 * With white shoes and white socks
 * And white curly hair
 * See all the nanny goats
 * going to the fair
 * Baa Baa Baa.


 * Baa Baa pink sheep,
 * have you any spots?
 * Yes Sir, yes sir,
 * lots and lots.
 * One on my forehead,
 * and one on my tummy,
 * and one on my nose,
 * and that's NOT funny!


 * Baa Baa pink sheep,
 * have you any spots?
 * Yes Sir, yes sir,
 * lots and lots.
 * One on my forehead,
 * and one on my tummy,
 * one on my bottom,
 * and that's NOT funny!


 * Baa Baa White Sheep,
 * Have you any wool?
 * No sir, No sir, no needles full.
 * None to make a jumper.
 * None to make a frock.
 * None for the little boy
 * with holes in his socks.

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 Basen

Links

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