Portrait of the Week
After the riots in Southall and Toxteth, Liverpool, last week, rioting spread to Wood Green, North London, Moss Side, Manchester (where a thousand youths attacked the police station), Woolwich, Balham (Gateway to the South), Birmingham and a dozen other insalubrious places. Shopkeepers began to put up boarding in South Kensington and Kings Road, Chelsea. About five hundred policemen were injured, some seriously, and hundreds of shops and many police cars burned, but apparently no rioters were hurt. Mrs Thatcher reaffirmed her admiration for the police. Mrs Janet Peach, mother of the left wing agitator Blair Peach killed in the 1979 'Anti Nazi League' riot in Southall, announced she was suing the Metropolitan Police Commissioner for money in compensation.
Race, unemployment and general hooliganism were blamed. Of various remedies put forward. Mr Whitelaw urged expeditious court treatment of offenders and suggested that parents should be responsible for paying children's fines; he also delighted Tory MPs by promising police plastic bullets and armoured cars, and advocated army camps as special prisons for rioters. Mr Prior proposed a scheme to guarantee full employment for the nation's youth (in government training schemes) for which he was taken to task by the Treasury, saying it had no money; Mrs Thatcher agreed not to tour Toxteth on a fact-finding mission. Later she went to Liverpool after all and provoked some minor disturbances. Some left wing agitators — including Mr Ken Livingstone, Chairman of the Greater London Council — agreed they had been present at riots. For the future, striking civil servants threatened to close down all dole payments as their contribution to the general unfolding of events.
In Belfast, Mr Joseph McDonnell the hunger striker, died, provoking further riots in the course of which a 16 year old youth was shot dead; another IRA prisoner, Mr Patrick McGeown, 25. took McDonnell's place in the queue for martyrdom. After his funeral, troops arrest three men in military-style uniforms with rifles, and this prompted further rioting. Hopes of an agreement to end the hunger strikes in Maze Prison faded. Another hunger striker, Martin Hunson, 26, died unexpectedly on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne.
Other religiously-inspired riots broke out in Kano, northern Nigeria, probably the result of some difference of emphasis in the interpretation of Koranic texts. Several thousand Nigerians were thought to have perished. Elsewhere in Africa, Mr Ian Smith was threatened with deportation from Zimbabwe if he continued to make unhelpful remarks about the government of Mr Robert Mugabe, and massacres of missionary children by government troops were reported in Nigeria. In Iran a new wave of executions claimed about a hundred supporters of Mr Bani Sadr, the former President, now in hiding. Mr Menachem Begin celebrated the confirmation of his election victory in Israel with two bombing raids on the Lebanon.
As the Central Congress of the Polish Communist Party tried to work out its future role in the country's leadership, a fresh wave of strikes sent nervous tremors through Warsaw. Poles were warned that they faced a huge rise in prices which would reduce their living standards still further. At home, some exceptionally gloomy Treasury forecasts warned that there was no end to the recession in sight, unemployment and inflation would continue to rise and there was no rational grounds for hope in any direction. Mr Roddy Llewellyn married and Mrs Shirley Williams was given an honorary doctorate of law at Southampton University. Labour formally adopted a plan to outlaw fee-paying schools as its official policy, boasting that it could achieve this reform in one year. Wigan Council refused a couple who had succcessfully fostered 47 children on its behalf permission to adopt a child on the grounds that the couple were unacceptably happy. Social workers advised that any child exposed to such happiness would be insufficiently exposed to 'negative experiences'. Mr John McEnroe was not elected to the All England Lawn Tennis Club, Mr Max Hugel, the CIA chief of secret operations, resigned after allegations of commercial impropriety, and Admiral Sir John Treacher, former Nato Commander-in-Chief in the Eastern Atlantic, replaced Mr Victor Lownes as managing director of the Playboy Club and Commander-in-Chief of Bunnies. AAW
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