A Very British Coup by Chris Mullin Read Free Book Online Page A

it had only done so at the cost of massive unemployment and great social violence.
    The inner city riots which began in the summer of 1981 grew steadily worse as the decade wore on. Shopkeepers began to evacuate. The buses stopped operating after dark when the police said they could no longer guarantee the safety of the bus crews. Brixton High Street became a corridor of estate agents’ fading signs and chipboarded shop fronts smeared with graffiti. “Avenge the Railton Five,” said one in a reference to five West Indian youths killed in Railton Road when police opened fire on a crowd of petrol bombers. Another said simply: “Burn Brixton,” but it had already been overtaken by events.
    Gradually, the inner cities were abandoned to roaming bands of unemployed youths and more and more police were required to stop them breaking out into the suburbs where owner-occupiers with jobs lived. In ten years the police budget had doubled. In Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth, Moss Side and the Gorbals police in armoured cars and bullet-proof jackets patrolled the streets. Around the city centres special units of riot police on permanent stand-by sat fidgeting with their new, lethal nightsticks, imported from America.
    In February 1988 Trotskyism had been banned by legislation rushed through Parliament in three days. This had followed the discovery of an arms cache in a derelict house in Islington, said to be used by the International Marxist Group. Some said the guns had been supplied by the IRA, others said they had been planted by the police. No matter, Trotskyism was now illegal. Army camps on Salisbury Plain were filled not only with rioters, but suspected Trotskyists, too. Underthe new law only a single witness, usually an anonymous member of the Special Branch, was needed to secure a conviction for Trotskyism.
    The mid-1980s were also the time in which the long struggle between industrial and financial capital was finally resolved in favour of the financiers. For decades successive British governments had pursued policies of high interest rates and manipulation of demand, designed to favour those engaged in speculation rather than production. In these circumstances the only worthwhile investments were short-term ones promising high returns. Even industrial companies already profitable were advised by their accountants to ‘go liquid’ and hold their assets in cash, gold or oil paintings rather than in new plant and equipment.
    As if this were not serious enough, exchange controls (removed by an earlier Tory government) had never been restored thereby making possible what one industrialist, in the privacy of his boardroom, called a ‘scorched earth policy’. As the crisis grew worse, the outflow of capital increased.
    On the Clyde and the Tyne shipbuilding all but disappeared. A few rusting hulks remained in the yards, half completed at the time British Shipbuilders was allowed to go under. Asset strippers, sharp young men who came from London in Rolls-Royces, wandered among the ruins buying up at bargain prices the cranes and any other movables which they sold at large profits to yards in Spain and France. The hulks that remained were decaying monuments to an industry which had consumed generations of engineers, boiler-makers, welders and fitters. Those who were young enough moved south in search of work. Some went to work in Arabia. Those who were too old or too set in their ways to move stayed put and went down with their ships.
    The fishing industry had long since disappeared. In Aberdeen, Fleetwood, Grimsby, Hull and Lowestoft a few rotting trawlers bobbed idly at anchor. They were all that remained of the proud fleets that once roamed the North Sea from theEnglish Channel to the Arctic Circle. One or two more enterprising skippers had converted their trawlers into pleasure boats taking day trippers for rides along the coast during the summer, but it was no way to make a living. The trawler-men