Behind the Scenes: 1981, Britain’s Awful Year.

It’s once again release day for my newest deep-dive historical video on YouTube. This one is “1981: Britain’s Awful Year,” and it’s been in the works for quite a while now. As the title suggests, the video is a profile of the major events of one of the darkest and most tumultuous years in the recent history of the United Kingdom. The year 1981 was marked by a severe recession, brutal unemployment and inflation, racial strife, the political turmoil of the early Thatcher years, and perhaps most notably a wave of rioting and urban violence that was unprecedented in British history and the developed world as a whole in the 1980s. There’s a tremendous amount we can learn from studying the UK’s 1981, and in this video—my second-longest ever (2 hours 55 minutes)—I try to take a deep dive into all of it.

The video is embedded below.

Eerily as if almost determined by the calendar, one of the central events in British history in 1981 happened very early in the year, in January. On an icy Saturday night, a fire broke out at a row house located at 439 New Cross Road in South London, where a party attended almost exclusively by Black people of Afro-Caribbean descent was in progress. Nine people were killed that night and four more died later. The London police couldn’t decide how the fire started and largely ignored evidence that it was a racially-motivated arson. Outrage in Britain’s Black community, over the New Cross massacre and especially the issue of police oppression, sparked the massive demonstration, over 20,000 strong, called the Black People’s Day of Action which marched on London on March 2, 1981. Threads connected to these issues had significant relationships to the rioting that erupted in Brixton (also South London) in April and Toxteth (Liverpool) in July. By definition this has to be the main thread of the story of 1981 in the UK.

This thread is, however, connected closely to the political story. Margaret Thatcher is naturally one of the main characters of the video. She had become the UK’s Prime Minister in May 1979, with an apparent mandate to roll back much of the British welfare state that had been established after World War II and to apply ideologically conservative theory—particularly monetarism and privatization—to the economy. By the beginning of 1981 those policies had wreaked disaster throughout Britain, and especially with regard to unemployment. Not coincidentally, the neighborhoods that erupted in riots in April and July 1981 in over 20 English cities tended to be areas where unemployment, particularly among youth, was worst, and also neighborhoods predominantly of color. Thatcher’s handling of the economy in 1981 was such that many of her own advisers expected her to be sacked as leader of the Conservative party even before another election took place. Thus, Thatcher’s follies form a significant part of the narrative of this fateful year.