There was near silence from the government and the press. This had been the climate for many years: families being burned out of their homes, migrants attacked and murdered in the street. The police were at best indifferent and at worst party to the hostility.

On 2 March 1981, thousands of black people and their allies gathered at Fordham Park in Lewisham. It came to be known as the Black People’s Day of Action and was the largest political gathering of black people in British history at the time. Organised by underacknowledged British activists such as John La Rose, Darcus Howe, Sybil Phoenix, Alex Pascall and many others, the intended route went from Lewisham to Hyde Park. It was raining. No demonstration had crossed a bridge in London for centuries. As the demonstration approached Blackfriars, the police tried to push the crowds back. People ran. This flowed into Fleet Street, once home of the media, where journalists leaned out of the windows and spat and jeered at the march.

After a belated response to the deaths of the thirteen young people (addressed to the activists, not the families), a police initiative began in retaliation to the Black People’s Day of Action, and ostensibly to curb crime in South London. The hated SUS laws gave licence to SWAMP 81, an operation in which close to a thousand black and ethnic minority people were stopped and searched in South London in five days. The name of the operation was seen as an insensitive reference to Thatcher’s 1978 speech in which she said, “People are really rather afraid, that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture … people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.”

During the tense time of SWAMP 81, the attempted arrest of a man who had been stabbed prompted the Brixton uprising in April 1981, also known as the Brixton riots. Since the blame for this lay firmly at the door of the police, an investigation was commissioned producing the Scarman Report, ‘The Brixton Disorders 10–12 April 1981’; it found the police guilty of causing the riots due to its refusal to listen to the community it was supposed to serve. This triggered a new era in race relations in the UK, in conjunction with the ongoing activism and resistance of the black, Asian and ethnic minority organising groups.