In Scarman Town

Roy Kerridge

positive discrimination would be all right if it was me and a white girl going for a job,' a coloured friend told me, after watching a television programme on the Scarman Report. 'But what if I go and there's a girl darker than me applying? Then what if I marry a white man and have a light-skinned baby? Would Lord Scarman count the child as white or coloured? They'll have to register everyone's colour and put it on files, like in South Africa. I think that's terrifying.'

Stepping from Brixton tube station last Saturday, I had a foretaste of things to come when a shaggy young man from the Opinion Research Centre asked me to give my opinions on the report, which he noted down on a form marked 'White'. 'Say that you're working class!' the researcher implored with beery breath. 'All I'm getting is professional people.'

I told him enough lies to keep him happy, and then sought out his opposite number, the Black Researcher, who told me that most of those researched said that attitudes needed to change, not laws, and that the police should treat everybody the same, regardless of colour.

`Scarman Fever', which so excited Fleet Street and the pollsters, hardly seemed to have touched Brixton. I would have thought that Charles Dickens, in Hard Times, had had the last word on blue papers, and that nobody needed to bother with them any more. However, there was a similar fuss over the Albemarle Report on youth, as I recall, not long after the appearance of teddy boys. This report, in language infinitely more genteel than Scarman's racy prose, advocated youth clubs as a cure for all ills. Scarman suggested 'funding', more cooperation between police and 'black leaders', and positive discrimination; and so the world goes on.

In giving me an excuse to go to Brixton, however, Lord Scarman has earned my gratitude. Soon I was sitting happily in an Irish pub listening to an accordionist playing 'The Rocks of Bourne' while a stout old Irishman, with great dignity, danced around a group of tippling young colleens. One by one, people began to dance, but I tore myself away and faced the world outside, armed only with a copy of the Report itself.

It was a friendly world I found; memories of the riots seemed to have vanished, and the market was cheerful and brightly lit. Here too a young Irishman played jigs on a fiddle, adding a musical background to my researches. A youth in a comic Negro mask proved, when he has taken it off, to be a Negro himself.

Outside a reggae store, I stopped a pleasant-looking young couple, of faintly Rastafarian aspect, and asked them what they thought of Scarman. 'I never talk politics,' said the man. 'Politics is no good, but I'll talk to you about football. Ask me anything about football — go on, ask me!'

Declining this offer, I passed on to the next record shop, from which the more agreeable sound of Lovers' Rock was blaring. This neglected form of music appeals to sentimental and lovesick Jamaicans, as it lacks the militancy of reggae. Here I met a coloured young man of jaunty cockney appearance, who had never heard of the Scarman Report at all. I summarised it for him. 'Well, it's true the police are a bit cocky round here, and thick with it,' he admitted. 'But on the whole I'm not bothered with inquiries, as I wasn't involved in the riots anyway. I don't see how this "positive discrimination" can work, mind you.'

'I am totally opposed to positive discrimination,' a thoughtful-looking white Englishman told me. He was a trainee accountant living in Brixton. 'Also, if people have stupid prejudices, they have them, and no amount of legislation can help. Mind you, when the riots were on, [felt oppressed by the sheer amount of police around here, even though I'm in favour of law and order.'

Buying some newspapers, I sat down in the market cafe and read them over a cup of tea. The Caribbean Times was in favour of Scarman, chiefly because 'he has been seen playing dominoes'. Mr Jah Bones, in The Voice of Rasta, a paper he seemed largely to have written himself, waxed more lyrical. On page 44 of the Report he had given Lord Scarman a rather rosy picture of his faith. In the Voice he was campaigning against the cutting of Rasta hair in prison, a vexed question, as no one can be sure if Rastas are a cult like hippies or a religion like Sikhs.

`Lord Scarman had a very intelligent and civilised conception of Rasta, which is very different from the Home Office's quite evil and colonialist conception,' he wrote. It may be that Scarman's ideas on 'funding' appealed to him, for he went on to say that his readers must ... harass the men of Babylon to pay out compensation to slave l'n' I and further to capitalise I'n'l is a Must! Repatriation [to Ethiopia] is a Must!'

Turning to the Report itself, I enjoyed the vivid description of the riots, in which Chief Superintendent Robinson emerged as a hero whose story ought to be read aloud in schools as an example to young people of courage and clear thinking. Scarman's conclusions are another matter, as here he falls into jargon and becomes rather bogged down with references to 'blacks' and 'black leaders'. 'Blacks', in the Brixton context, usually means fierce young men who live in the street. Women, children and the old, who have to put up with these young men, don't seem to be black at all, and reap few benefits from the riots. The 'leaders' of the riotous young, to my way of thinking, must be gang leaders, ringleaders and ruffians, who cooperate with the police only when they 'agree to come quietly'. 'Community leaders' snug in their offices drinking tea have no influence on the gangs outside, who have never heard of them. Some might say that the 'community leaders' ought to go out and look for a community to lead, but I think it would be cheaper and less troublesome to dismiss them with redundancy pay. Their existence is a clear case of Scarman's 'racial disadvantage', since white people don't have 'leaders' billeted on them in this way.

t Brixton police station, my next port of call, I found a 'Help Fight Crime' campaign in full swing, and earnest coloured men gazed with interest at pictures of burglar-proof locks and windows. Rather a contrast from my previous visit in the summer, when the whole station had seemed to be full of crying West Indian women clutching children and queuing to make complaints against their brutal husbands, lovers and sons. The police had interviewed one woman at a time in a sound-proofed room, and the others crowded unhappily into the foyer.

People's Marches for Jobs tend to dog my footsteps these days, and a miniature one now filed past, dominated by a punk girl in bright pink hair. The marchers had been passengers on the Jobs Express organised by the unions as a protest against the £23.50 wage paid on Youth Opportunity Programmes, and most of them seemed to be 12 years old and remarkably inarticulate. Circumnavigating them with difficulty, I made for Railton Road, the socalled Front Line.

'Front Line Off Licence', read one shop sign, so the title must now be official. It derives from a pop song by Eddy Grant, called 'Living on the Front Line', which appears to be about inter-tribal fighting in Africa. What with the rioters and the council, there wasn't much left of Railton Road, and I was faced by two ominous long rows of corrugated iron. An Anarchist Bookshop, full of white nasal-voiced young men, still stood at one corner, and an anarchist told me that the Report was 'a whitewash'. As darkness fell, groups of men gathered on the pavements, and I had to squeeze through these somewhat im movable Scarmanites. Ponces, dressed to the nines, pranced along followed by bedraggled white girls. Scarman was popular here.

'At the gambling house, right? I see one policeman outside, and then Scarman himself walks out with all the gamblers who have been showing him police damage. He just walked about like an ordinary person with no protection — great!'

'I work with a mobile disco and they call me the Jester! What I say is, when I'm in a cell I don't want no community leader visiting me like Scarman says, I want my friends visiting me, and this the police don't allow.'

As he spoke, the Jester, in manic good humour, pounded his right fist into his left palm. He began to berate skinheads, and said that if only they stopped going about in gangs he could beat them up one by one. I was less disapproving than I might have been, as on the previous night, at Highbury, a skinhead had jumped out at me and shouted 'Are you English?' Yes!' I replied with patriotic fervour. 'Thank f---for that,' he said in relief. 'You've just saved your f---ing life!'

Nothing like this happened to me on the Front Line, but all the same I felt happier when I reached Coldharbour Lane and a pub I knew. Here, watched by tolerant West Indian drinkers, a bearded aboriginelike man performed a lone, leaping, spinning dance to the music of a reggae record. His antics grew wilder, and finally he was so overcome that he began to roll around on the floor in circles. I wondered if he was Jah Bones, but before I could ask him, the landlord, who looked like a coloured Edward G. Robinson, picked him up and threw him out bodily. Outside it was raining, and policemen plodded by in twos, looking infinitely weary. I had finished my inquiry, and now had to write my Report.

My conclusion is this: that in deference to fashionable opinion, the police in Brixton for many years kept such a low profile that they were never there when you wanted them. Railton Road thus became a criminal sanctuary, the black equivalent of Kray Brothers territory in the East End. Young men whose parents had thrown them out came to squat in the derelict houses, and a way of life developed that could not, with any justice, be called West Indian, Rastafarian or black British, but was simply criminal. Belatedly realising this, and overwhelmed by complaints from victims of all colours, the police all came back on the same day, the famous Operation Swamp.

The wild young and not-so-young people found, to their amazement, that there were laws in England. Criminal public opinion was outraged and the riots began.

If instead of 'blacks' you say 'hooligans' you gain a new perspective, one denied to Lord Scarman. Do we want liaison committees between the police and hooligans, an element of conciliation between police and hooligans, and recognition of and action to meet the special problems and needs of hooligans? My case rests, my lord.