The political responses towards the 1981 riots diverged from emphasising the problem of “insensitive” policing and unemployment to blaming the riots as “sheer criminality” (Benyon 1985: 413-414). The Scarman Inquiry endorsed a link between youth unemployment and the riots and blamed “racial disadvantage (which) is a fact of current British life” (1982: 209). However, the government rejected the social reasons for the disorder and emphasised the issue of law and order. Mrs. Thatcher, as prime minister, delivered her speech on television on 8 July 1981 and appealed to the rule of law: “a free society will only survive if we, its citizens, obey the law and teach our children to do so” (Unsworth 1982: 78). The political responses after the 1985 riots shared some of the same characteristics as those in 1981, but even stronger links were made between lawlessness and crime and the supposedly pathological characteristics of inner city residents. This resulted in responses that emphasised the need to strengthen social control (Solomos 2003). Similarly, the matter of “law and order” was continuously discussed after the Northern disturbances in 2001. The response of the local criminal system was extremely repressive to those arrested for the riots, but at this time at a national level attention was focused on “community cohesion” (Bagguley and Hussain 2005: 209).
The lack of cohesion in society was raised as an issue in the debates surround the 1980s’ disturbances. The Metropolitan Police’s Chief Constable argued in his speech made after the 1985 riots that “our membership of neighbourhood is transient; we do not have time to put down roots and to develop relationships which daily reassure us of the normality of being law-abiding (Newman, 1986 quoted in Solomos 1988: 221)”. However, the debate of “community cohesion” after the 2001 riots was explicitly different from that of the cohesion of two decades ago. The Community Cohesion Review Team established by the government to investigate the causes of the riots published the report titled “Community Cohesion” to emphasise the lack of unity among different ethnic and religious groups (Cantle 2005: 48). Segregation of Muslim communities from contemporary society was the central issue of the debates. These events were widely reported to indicate the failure of multiculturalism in Britain by the media as well as politicians. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett publicly denounced “forced marriage” and suggested the introduction of immigration tests (Back, etl. 2002). As a consequence, immigrants and ethnic minorities have been placed under extreme pressure to follow the British values and assimilate to “the British way of life”.
