The summer of 2001

[E10 Rifle]

Remember the riots in Bradford in the summer of 2001? Or the ones in Oldham? Or Stoke? Resentment and racial tension simmering all over the gaff, even manifesting itself in outbreaks of lairyness at that year's England v Pakistan ODIs. I bring it up now because – in all the breast-beating and howling and "how did we get here" and special reports from Racism Correspondents over the causes of Brexit – I've not read a single allusion to them, even in passing. This was long before austerity, the financial crash and before even 9/11. Yet these convulsions are hardly ever talked about.

I bring it up now because, I reckon, that whole late-90s/early 2000s period is as in danger of being rewritten by its winners as surely and as misleadingly as the Seventies have long been, perhaps because the mostly middle-aged, middle-class white men now writing about politics in newspapers were probably having the time of their lives at the time, tearing it right up (I was too, mostly). It's glibly assumed to be a bit of a golden age, this period, or at least one of stability, Common Sense, with no great divisions and fissures in British society. This was clearly not the case.

Of course, we had a better government then than we do now, if we're setting the bar nice and low, but from what I recall of my political activity at the time, there was still much to be angry about. I remember going on a march about the Blair government's draconian Asylum Bill in 99, which pushed us smoothly along the path of anti-immigrant legislation and a 'legitimate concerns' anti-immigrant consensus. I recall being enraged about the nascent specialist-schools and academisation programme being inveigled into the education system; pickets and protests here and there about low pay and job insecurity. All stuff that has bitten us on the arse in a major way this decade, when, according to many, Everyone Suddenly Went Mad in 2015/16.

Oh, and there was a general election that summer too. Which more than 40% of the country didn't bother voting in.

So, in summary then, the late 90s/early 2000s? Bollocks, more like. Or something.

[ursus arctos]

Great post, E10

[Incandenza]

Somewhat related to that, remember for a brief few weeks in 2001 when the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban was one of the biggest stories in the world? They were talking about reparations for slavery and colonialism, Israel and Palestine, etc. The US and Israel walked out on it, and nothing definitive was ever settled on, but that delegations were even discussing these things was a huge deal. IIRC, the conference ended a week before September 11, and it was almost completely forgotten about after that.

[Janik]

That such an event was being held is a little bit of the bubble E10 was describing. It only really makes sense to do that in a post-racist world, as you can't set repartitions for something that is ongoing. And as we know...

Hands up - I have absolutely zero recollection of the urban disorder E10 is talking about, though I do have vague recollections of stuff happening at England-Pakistan cricket matches. Presumably I knew of the riots at the time, but they clearly never struck me as important enough to register in the long-term memory.

[Tactical Genius]

That such an event was being held is a little bit of the bubble E10 was describing. It only really makes sense to do that in a post-racist world, as you can't set repartitions for something that is ongoing. And as we know...

Hands up - I have absolutely zero recollection of the urban disorder E10 is talking about, though I do have vague recollections of stuff happening at England-Pakistan cricket matches. Presumably I knew of the riots at the time, but they clearly never struck me as important enough to register in the long-term memory.

Dude, we were all on OTF at the time arguing about it.
As for that reparation debate at the time, I was (as I am now) an advocate of it and got into some robust debates on here. For many years afterwards. I even (in a rare bout of humour) used it to guilt free drinks off OTF members at 'thons.

I made a note of those who bought me full pints, those who bought me halves and those who offered no drinks at all...............

The last sentence was a joke BTW

[NHH]

I remember canvassing in 2001 in Lancaster, and the stunning apathy was, well stunning. People were absolutely fed up with Labour, hacked off that it'd been so weak, and stating clearly that whilst they'd not vote Tory (obv), they'd need to be dragged out to vote, and because it was a marginal, resented the forced choice of voting to keep the Tories out. I remember people in the Labour Party coming away thinking 'that was a warning' and the MP saying that the talk in Westminster was about how the second term had to seriously deliver what felt like a Labour government in reality, rather than name only.

That was going to be the buzz at that year's Party Conference in Brighton. And then someone hjakced some planes, and the entire focus of the government got absorbed into Blair's messianic bullshit. By the time 2005 came around, people were defecting in drives - to the Lib Dems, to the Greens, to UKIP, and the damage had set in. The idea that 2008 created 2010, and created 2016 is a comforting one; everythig was going so well until the fucking banks.

But, aside from the fact that the fucking banks were allowed to be fucking banks by fucking stupid governments, the period wasn't some wonderful period where things kept getting better and better, but a period where the sociology and psychology of Brexit and modern Britain was laid down.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

The first Roginette was born in 2001, on the same day that Liverpool won the Cup. You'll forgive me for not remembering much of the political stuff that happened in the summer, although I do remember when something happened in September that changed everything.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

I got my first real six-string.

[Satchmo Distel]

Asylum seekers were being vilified by the Blair government, not as badly as now but in a way that set a precedent for it:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3152982.stm

[Amor de Cosmos]

The first Roginette was born in 2001, on the same day that Liverpool won the Cup. You'll forgive me for not remembering much of the political stuff that happened in the summer, although I do remember when something happened in September that changed everything.

Yeah. I was going to mention that. (The September event not Liverpool winning the cup.)

[Tactical Genius]

Asylum seekers were being vilified by the Blair government, not as badly as now but in a way that set a precedent for it:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3152982.stm

My username at that time was actually Asylum Seeker.

[Patrick Thistle]

I don't remember the riots. I had a lot going on with work and family.

I remember giving my MP a hard time when he came around canvassing. I told him the minimum wage wasn't high enough.

[Lucy Waterman]

Significant that no one has mentioned the Tories - and understandably so, since in 2001 they seemed utterly marginalised, and seemingly for ever. Their comprehensive failure to make any improvement on 1997 meant that people expected the debate about the future of the country to be one internal to the Labour Party and the left more broadly.

[tee rex]

Before resorting to Google, I consulted my own memory files and came up with ...

End 2000: Bush/Gore saga, from hanging chads to Supreme Court. (Reinforced since by various books, documentaries, etc).
2001: Foot and Mouth. Prescott's punch. Exeter City winning at Scunthorpe to stay in League.
Otherwise nothing, for about 9 months.
Then ... 9/11.

I don't expect my brain to match the internet, but I would have hoped something might have lodged in there. But no.

1970's Cup final line-ups, easy. World in 21st century, not so much.

[NHH]

The asylum seeker shite was where this all started. I was working at Rochdale Council at the time, and the rules at the time were like the EU's - the council where the asylum seeker was 'discovered' was the council which had the responsibility for processing and 'managing' them.

This was placing a massive burden on Kent and inner London boroughs, so a new policy came in to allow those councils to disperse the asylum seekers around the country. However, it didn't need agreement from the receiving council, and crucially, there was no money behind it because 1) New Labour were like rabbits in the headlights of the assault from the Mail and the Sun about spending our money on these scum, and b), we were in the middle of Brown's spending freeze to prove he had as big an austerity cock as Ken Clarke's.

As as result, we had the shocking examples of councils in the SE hiring vans and drivers, filling them up with asylum seekers (many of whom were Kosovars) and driving them to Rochdale (and, I assume, other cities in the North) and literally turfing them out onto the main drag in Rochdale and driving off, so they became the problem for the new authority.

Those people would be put into the only spaces the councils had, the already-under pressure social housing, absorbing them like the other people these estates had to absorb, contributing to the tensions on these estates between people who saw these places as home, and people who were utterly bewildered to be there, and people who were so off their tits on drugs that they didn't give a fuck about anything but going on the rob to feed their habits. This was against a backdrop of Tory underinvestment in social housing which Labour had yet to lift a finger to deal.

This toxic brew did an awful lot to create the tensions in these northern towns, part of which led to the riots in 2001 in some places, but a lot created a real and palpable sense of communities on the edge being loaded with more strains, like a Buckaroo game.

As I worked in the press office at the Council, we had to read all the papers. I remembver one day where I read a Jack Straw column in The Sun saying more people than ever were being kicked out of the country, and a piece in The Guardian saying that more people than ever were being let into the country. New Labour in a fucking nutshell.

[NHH]

Asylum seeker, at this time, became the weasel word for racists. Throughout the 80s and 90s, anti-asian and anti-black graffiti was on the decline but Asylum Seeker became a means to resurrect racist sentiment; it was a hop skip and a jump from there to immigrant and thence legitimate concerns.

[Patrick Thistle]

Wow. That's an insight from NHH there. I had no idea that happened.

Genuinely shocked.

[Satchmo Distel]

The racist mantra was something like "Labour is giving free council housing and thousands of pounds in benefits to Kosovans" that are denied to honest Brits

Forgetting that:

1) Thatcher had sold off the council housing

2) Labour had just been bombing Serbia because those Kosovans had been threatened with genocide before they fled.

3) In reality, most asylum seekers were in slum landlord properties that had due for demolition before the government bribed the slum landlords to take in the asylum seekers, who were then left to rot.

4) Asylum seekers were also committing suicide in detention centres run by Securitas etc.

https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/files/files...on-uk-2005.pdf

[Moonlight Shadow]

Asylum seeker, at this time, became the weasel word for racists. Throughout the 80s and 90s, anti-asian and anti-black graffiti was on the decline but Asylum Seeker became a means to resurrect racist sentiment; it was a hop skip and a jump from there to immigrant and thence legitimate concerns.

Pretty much that...I have recollections of the Oldham riots (best not try to recall the discussions at the after football pub sessions in Wigan about Oldham incidentally...) but not even sure what caused it. Tensions between communities?

I recall high interest rates, obsession about property, vividly recall what I was doing when 9/11 happend, being scared for Femme Folle...

[Giggler]

Didn't Oldham's riots start after an elderly white gent was attacked in a park by Asian youths, with everything there and in Oldham spilling on from that?

I was dreading it coming to Bury and though there was every chance it would, after an Asian taxi driver was killed by his own car in 2000.

[ursus arctos]

From Wiki

One, largely shared and corroborated view of the events which led up to the riots on Saturday, 26 May 2001, were the following, based upon eye-witness accounts, media interviews and police evidence;

• At 8 p.m., a fight occurred between one Asian youth and one white youth near the Good Taste chip shop on the corner of Salford Street and Roundthorn Road in Glodwick. The fight, which was witnessed, and included racist language from both sides is said to have ended abruptly, but led to the hasty gathering of a gang of white youths assembled via mobile phone.
• Following this earlier fight between the two youths, further violence erupted as a gang of white men attacked an Asian business and threw a projectile through a window of a house in the Glodwick area, where a heavily pregnant Asian woman was in residence. Violence spiralled from this group as they rampaged through Glodwick attacking a number of persons and properties.
• Retaliatory violence soon followed, as large gangs of Asian men gathered and began to rally. Some of the earlier, but then dissipating group of white men were found and attacked. Further to this, a number of cars and commercial windows were also smashed in retaliation.
• The (white-owned) Live and Let Live pub was targeted and pelted with bricks, stones, bottles, and then petrol bombs. Cars were driven to block the fire exits, in an attempt to stop the patrons from escaping the flames. Cars in the surrounding roads were ignited, and police were called. Police officers were pelted by groups of Asian males. A night of violence began and riot police were quickly drafted in to the Glodwick area, rife with both Pakistani and Bangladeshi rioters. It is understood that both the Asian and white communities were furious with the recent events in the town. Asians were angry with media coverage and police handling of the various incidents and this may have intensified the riot.

This attack took place more than a month earlier

• On 21 April 2001, a mugging and attack upon 76-year-old white World War II veteran Walter Chamberlain by three Asian youths was amongst the first major provocations which led to the riots. Mr. Chamberlain was approached as he walked to his home after watching a local amateur rugby league match. He was mugged and badly beaten, receiving fractured bones in the face amongst other injuries. His battered face appeared on the front of the Manchester Evening News, and the story spread to all the major national newspapers. In the Mail on Sunday, his story was told under the headline 'Whites beware'. In the Mirror, his face appeared under the headline "Beaten for being white: OAP, 76, attacked in Asian no-go area". Media pundits began to speculate on the apparent transformation of young Asian males - from the stereotype of hard-working boys, who respected their parents, to the new stereotype of angry, violent thugs.An Asian male (a Mr. Fokrul Islam) was ultimately charged for the crime of racially aggravated grievous bodily harm on 1 October 2001, some time after the riots. Walter Chamberlain and his family in an attempt to try to calm tensions in the borough stated at the time that the mugging was just that, and not at all racially motivated."It was a violent assault on an elderly man", said Mr. Chamberlain's son Steven. "As a family we don't think it was a race issue at all."Since this story was attributed to fuelling further hatred in the local communities race crimes against all sections of society are no longer reported as such for fear of further trouble.

[EIM]

Live and Let Live pub

Ironic.

[EIM]

Anyone read this? I remember enjoying it at the time.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...d-bnp-football

[Ray de Galles]

Asylum seeker, at this time, became the weasel word for racists. Throughout the 80s and 90s, anti-asian and anti-black graffiti was on the decline but Asylum Seeker became a means to resurrect racist sentiment; it was a hop skip and a jump from there to immigrant and thence legitimate concerns.

Of course, it was around this time that the perfectly good, non-pejorative word "refugee" became usurped by "asylum seeker" and the agenda built up around that term.

On a related note, I recall the mid to late nineties being the period when the whining about "political correctness" really took hold in the UK.

[Patrick Thistle]

You're supposed to feel sorry for refugees.

The thing about asylum seekers was, according to the press, most of them weren't really refugees. Ergo, you didn't have to feel sorry for them.

I remember a Ugandan lady I knew in about 2005 who was awaiting deportation. She had appealed for asylum because she thought that was how you could become a British citizen. I'm not sure where that information came from. Her deportation was put on hold because she was pregnant, which may or may not have been an attempt to delay deportation, I never could ask but other acquaintances thought it was. She was deported with her daughter when her daughter was 6 months old.

It was really sad. She was a nice person.