Days Of Thatcher

In July 1981, Liverpool police arrested Leroy Cooper in front of a large crowd in the poor, black Toxteth neighborhood. The arrest, carried out with the force’s then-customary casual brutality, served as a flash point for pent-up rage at police harassment in the community, leading to days of violent clashes with the coppers that drew in youth from all around the region and triggered riots in other British cities.

The night this photo was taken, hundreds of officers were driven back down Granby Street toward the city center by rioters throwing stones and petrol bombs. The police eventually managed to quell the violence, but not before pissing off a lot more people by firing tear-gas “ferret rounds” directly into the crowd.

he early 80s were an amazing time to be a photojournalist in the UK. British society felt like it was literally coming apart at the seams as the country began facing the end of major industrial employment and finally coming to terms with the loss of its empire. Working-class communities that had enjoyed relative prosperity in the 70s were now dying, and the result was alienation and mass violence. It was also an era in which one could work virtually unhindered as a photographer on Britain’s inner-city streets—people were eager to have their struggles made known and were far less suspicious of outsiders’ intentions than they are now. These days, unless you grew up in the area, you basically need an on-the-ground fixer like in a war zone to enter the sketchier parts of town.

There is also the challenge of figuring out how to represent fights that it has become increasingly clear there is no hope of either side winning without resorting to juvenile nihilism or frustration. It’s still possible to meet these challenges, but it takes dedication, time, and money, a lot of which isn’t exactly forthcoming in today’s climate of “lifestyle editorial” photography.
 

This showdown at the Orgreave Coking Works near Sheffield turned out to be a pivotal moment in the 1984-85 miners’ strike. After the police prevented the picketers from closing the plant, it was a long, slow trudge to defeat. There were still several bloody battles to be had, but the miners’ failure to muster support from other workers at the Battle of Orgreave left them isolated and dejected. Despite the large amount of money collected for the strikers, the Thatcher government’s tactics, which involved preemptively stockpiling coal and deploying strikebreakers on mass pickets, prevailed and brought an end to an era of strong trade unions. Click on images to enlarge Margaret Thatcher touring a doll factory in Glasgow during the 1987 election campaign. Thatcher went on to win her third consecutive term in office, cementing her victory over the National Union of Mineworkers two years earlier. Police watch a building crumble to cinders in Brixton, 1985.

After Brixton police mistakenly shot Cherry Groce, the mother of a man for whom they were searching, a second round of race riots erupted, fueled largely by the continued harassment of blacks and failure of the government to address the social grievances that caused the 1981 riot. Police horses were used extensively during the miners’ strike to corral and break mass pickets. Scenes like this one in Brodsworth near Doncaster in the fall of 1984 looked more like medieval battles than contemporary political skirmishes. A young boy playing near the busted-out window of a council estate in Manchester. Over the course of Thatcher’s time in office, the contrast in living conditions between the increasingly wealthy upper and middle classes and the inner-city poor grew starker and starker year by year. (PS: Check out the Burberry.)