6 - The struggle for the city

Summary

In 1978, Stuart Hall and a set of co-writers published Policing the Crisis, in which they examined the media frenzy over Black “muggings” in the early 1970s. Hall argued that this phenomenon was a manufactured “moral panic”. In fact, “mugging” was not a term recognized in British law, but was rather slang imported from the United States, which referenced violent and opportunist robbery, especially of elderly (usually white) women. Hall (1978) was concerned to understand how fear of “black crime” was being mobilized in a political turn towards a “law and order” agenda. Such concerns were to eventuate in specialist police operations, including Operation Trident, run by the Metropolitan Police, which focused in particular on Black violence.

As the Butskellism compromise – such as it was – started to unravel in the 1960s, the prospect of naked class struggle became ever more worrisome to the establishment. Enoch Powell’s interventions had built a platform on which to bring the white working class into alliance with business and political leaders in opposition to Black and Asian immigrants who took resources away from “indigenous” working men and, of course, the “traitorous” white elites that defended these newcomer’s equal rights. Hall connected such populist developments to the problem of working-class solidarity in times of economic crises.

Hall argued that Black workers were a “sub-proletariat” that lived their class experience through the modality of race. In this respect, a united front of workers could only coalesce if racism was considered by mainstream working-class organizations to be a legitimate injustice for the labour movement. Racism was not just an issue of industrial relations but of class struggle in and of itself. Alternatively, Powell had cast anti-racism as a project that undermined the legitimacy and worthiness of British subjects (worker and elite) at the hands of illegitimate non-white workers and their white elite defenders. By this logic, the moral panic over mugging channelled Powellite politics in times of crises; it was the wedge with which working-class struggle would be blocked.

Of course, mugging was mostly reported to happen in areas that bred “black crime”. As we saw in the previous chapter, by the end of the 1960s, slum clearances had become driven by cost concerns rather than by the Bevanite principle of general needs and universal social uplift.