1981 Files: Fears that Royal Wedding would be spoiled by riots, strikes and economic misery

* Ministers blamed television for the outbreak of the 1981 riots, much in the way that social media websites were blamed this year.

On July 8, Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher?s famously gruff press secretary gathered his team from across the economic departments to consider the next few months.

?The consensus can be summarised in two words: ?Deeply worried,?? he told the prime minister in a memo marked ?secret?.

Summer unrest by backbench MPs was compounded by riots in Southall in West London, Wood Green in North London, Toxteth in Liverpool, and Moss Side in Manchester, he said ? adding plaintively in brackets ?Where next??

The answer was Handsworth in Birmingham and Chapeltown in Leeds, along with a second outbreak of riots in Brixton, South London.

Mr Ingham worried about ?the certainty of much worse unemployment figures, and very much worse youth unemployment? aggravated by stagnant growth and public sector strikes.

He even feared that ?what the Royal Wedding will bring to unrelieved gloom will be reduced by industrial action and the national atmosphere soured.?

The twin issues of riots and the threat of public sector strikes had become major concerns for the government.

John Hoskyns, head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, wrote to Geoffrey Howe on July 9 telling him: ?We should try ? implicitly and subtly, not very obviously ? to link in people?s minds the moral similarity between high pay claims demanded with menaces and other forms of anti-social behaviour, including rioting and looting.?

Michael Hestletine, the Environment Secretary, lobbied for a ?100m boost for Liverpool following the Toxteth riots, and planned to make a two week visit to draw up a rescue plan.

But Mr Howe wrote to the prime minister warning her of the ?need to be careful not to over-commit scarce resources to Liverpool.?

?We do not want to find ourselves concentrating all the limited cash that may have to be made available into Liverpool and having nothing left for possibly more promising areas such as the West Midlands or, even, the North East,? he added.

?It would be regrettable if some of the brighter ideas for renewing economic activity were to be sown only on relatively stony ground on the banks of the Mersey.?

He referred to a study by the Central Policy Review Staff, the original Cabinet Office ?think tank? and added: ?I cannot help feeling that the option of managed decline, which the CPRS rejected in its study of Merseyside, is one which we should not forget altogether. We must not expend all our resources in making water flow uphill.?

Minutes from a Cabinet meeting on July 9 1981 recorded a discussion of the underlying causes of the disturbances and said ?attention was drawn to the number of young people, many West Indians, who felt no loyalty to society and resorted to crime.?

But ministers also spoke of how many had taken advantage of the riots to go on looting sprees.

?The riots and their aftermath had revealed an alarmingly widespread lack of moral sense; much of the large-scale looting in Toxteth, for example, had been carried out by middle-aged white residents who had had no part in the riots themselves,? the minutes said.

They added: ?Much responsibility also lay with the parents who failed to exercise adequate control over their children.?

In place of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and the dangers of Blackberry instant messenger, ministers in 1981 laid the blame for the disturbances on television.

?The fact was that the generation of young people now growing up were habituated to watching television for many hours every day, and there was good reason to fear that television had undermined the traditional disciplines of family life, and had given prominence to violence in both news and entertainment programmes,? the memo read.

The government even laid the blame at the feet of ?some left-wing members of the legal profession? who had allegedly ?sought to persuade young people who came before the courts that their convictions were the result of calculated social injustice.?

In a parallel to the riots of 2011, ministers pointed out that the ?difficulties of identification might be diminished if the wearing of masks were of itself to be made a criminal offence? and called for special sittings of magistrates courts to deal with offenders.

The following week, July 16, Cabinet minutes reported that police were to be provided with new helmets, fire-proofed clothing, protected vehicles and possibly armoured cars ? painted blue rather than army grey - and Mr Whitelaw told the House of Commons that water cannons, CS gas and rubber bullets would be made available to be used on the authority of the chief constables or their immediate deputies ?when all other methods had failed.?

?Chief constables were anxious to preserve as much as possible of the traditional methods of British policing and fully shared his reluctance to see these weapons used except as a last resort: some had said to him privately that they would not in any circumstances deploy them, though they had agreed not to say to publicly,? the minutes said.

The Secretary of State for Defence, John Nott, agreed to make army camps in Wiltshire, Nottinghamshire and Shropshire available to hold prisoners.

?It might have been necessary in any event to use such camps because of the extreme pressures on the prison system,? the minutes said. ?But he thought it good tactics to make the decision known in the context of the riots.?

However notes of a telephone conversation between Mrs Thatcher and Mr Whitelaw said: ?The use of troops could not be contemplated: if necessary the police should be properly equipped, and even armed, before such a step was taken.?

As it happened the Royal Wedding between the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer proved to the morale boost Bernard Ingham had been seeking.

Three weeks after his first memo, he wrote again to the Prime Minister telling her: ?The triumph of the Royal Wedding has been a national tonic. Contrary to all our expectation, we have ended July ? and entered recess ? on a higher rather than lower note. That is gratifying.?

Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568387/s/1b61cb5a/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cnews0Cpolitics0C89738960C19810EFiles0EFears0Ethat0ERoyal0EWedding0Ewould0Ebe0Espoiled0Eby0Eriots0Estrikes0Eand0Eeconomic0Emisery0Bhtml/story01.htm

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