With its Indian restaurants, market stalls, bagel shops and louche charm, London’s Brick Lane had many attractions in the late 1970s and early 80s, but was disfigured each Sunday by the menacing presence of National Front supporters selling their odious newspaper. As the son of West Indians, I despised and feared the NF, but suspected their vitriolic anti-immigrant stance was harboured quietly by many Britons, including politicians and police officers.
This ugly period of recent British history, the focus of Joe Thomas’s novel White Riot, was characterised by opposing sentiments: growing nativism coupled with free-market Thatcherism, versus race and working‑class allyship. The title is taken from the Clash’s first single, which Joe Strummer described as a call to arms for white youth to resist state-sanctioned poverty and over-policing, in the same way as their Black compatriots.
