When the Tories came to power in 1979, fighting crime was high on the agenda. There was even a flirtation with the idea of restoring capital punishment, which Thatcher was understood to favour. But the landmark policy was the introduction of the so-called Short Sharp Shock regime with special detention centres imposing military-style discipline on…
Young Boomers in the 1980s weren’t all rich and privileged – millions were out of work and in poverty, as Tony McMahon discovers
2021 will be the fourtieth anniversary of the 1981 riots and the tenth anniverary of the 2011 riots so what lessons have been learned?
NOLS and the LPYS were the two youth wings of the Labour Party in the 1970s and 1980s and they couldn’t have been more different
Short Sharp Shock was a prison regime introduced by the Conservative government in the early 1980s for young people that was brutal and didn’t work
The first night of the Toxteth riot in 1981 saw a botched arrest followed by minor scuffles but then the whole thing escalated in the following days
Was anybody on the People’s March for Jobs in the early 80s?
The stop and search SUS laws were based on the Vagrancy Act of 1824 and caused massive resentment among black youth in the 1980s
Unemployment in the eighties was endemic in the United Kingdom with millions out of work and an underground dole culture emerged
