1979 Southall – a riot and its consequences
1979 saw tensions fuelled by extreme Right activity reach breaking point in Southall as a riot broke out. Tony McMahon looks back.
Politics
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What motivated skinhead attacks in the 70s?
The late 1970s saw a wave of attacks on LGBT people and ethnic minorities by young thugs of identifying as skinhead so what was the motive? Tony McMahon investigates.
1982 – looking back after forty years!
1982 was a stormy year that saw the Falkands War, mass unemployment and a scandal involving the Queen’s bodyguard
Financial scandals that crashed Thatcherism
A series of financial scandals marked the end of Thatcherism as Tony McMahon remembers having been a financial journalist back then
The turbulent Labour Party of the 1980s
The Labour Party in the 1980s saw a stormy civil war that ended in purges as Tony McMahon remembers from a misspent youth
It’s a Sin – LGBT in the Thatcher era
The Russell T Davies series It’s a Sin shows what it was like to be young and gay in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher and with AIDS
LGBT woes in the early 1980s
LGBT people faced discrimination, the AIDS virus and homophobic legislation from the Thatcher government in the 1980s as Tony McMahon reports
Labour MPs leaving in 2019 – and 1981
The departure of the Gang of Four from the Labour Party to form the SDP in 1981 was a big event unlike the exodus of MPs in 2019 such as Chuka Umunna
Grim times for LGBT people in the 1980s
Margaret Thatcher is sometimes presented as a gay icon, but in the 1980s she led an onslaught on LGBT rights at the height of the HIV crisis
The Miners Strike and my student union year
In the academic year 1984-85, I was Deputy President of Liverpool University student union during the miners strike of that year