A Bit of Hell In Notting Hill

Bloody summer for the bobbies

Organizers had billed it as "A Little Bit of Heaven." But by the time the annual West Indian carnival in London's Netting Hill district ended last week, Europe's largest celebration for Caribbean immigrants had turned into a nasty bit of hell--for the second year in a row.

The carnival began in a holiday spirit as thousands of revelers calypsoed through the streets behind steel bands. Black organizations had signed up 130 voluntary stewards to help keep order, hoping to avoid a repetition of last summer's rioting in which 608 people (including 408 policemen) were injured. At twilight, however, violence erupted. Bottles were tossed into the crowd of 50,000 celebrators; fights broke out. Wary of charges that the presence of 1,600 uniformed policemen at last summer's carnival provoked the street fighting, cops at first tried to maintain a low profile; before the outbreak, several officers even joined in the street dancing.

The cautious police attitude led quickly to charges that they were allowing violence to occur without interfering. The following night, police, aided by stewards, actively tried to break up gangs of black youths who were menacing black and white passersby. The bullyboys turned on the cops and stewards, showering them with stones, bricks and bottles. Then an order went out: "Move forward! Plenty of noise, lads." Phalanxes of goggled police, whooping and beating their 5-ft. plastic riot shields with batons, charged through mobs of petrified teenagers. When the battle ended half an hour later, the day's injuries totaled 233, including 170 police. Scotland Yard tallied 56 arrests for the two-day carnival, most of them young blacks.

It was the kind of violence that Britons had come to expect in Northern Ireland but not in their own traditionally peaceful streets. But this summer has changed that, as poor, unemployed blacks and whites have turned their frustration on one another--and the police. For British cops, the Netting Hill riot was their third violent racial clash in as many weeks. The earlier fights, in which 115 cops were injured, were provoked by demonstrations of Britain's National Front, a 4,500-member neofascist organization that wants to send the country's 2 million black and Asian immigrants back to their countries of birth. In each incident, left-wing extremists, egged on by the Socialist Workers Party (S.W.P.), showed up to protest the virulent racism of the Front, only to turn on the police also.

Police blamed the carnival violence on "disaffected youth gangs, not much older than children." Most of the toughs, they said, did not even live in the Notting Hill area, but had traveled from as far as Manchester, 183 miles away.

One black community leader charged that the Socialist Workers had, in fact, encouraged West Indians to disrupt the carnival. He told London's Daily Mail that the party "simply wants to use blacks to foment trouble." Not so, protested S.W.P. Committee Member Alex Callinicos, who insisted that his group was "categorically not involved in any way" in either the vandalism or the attack on the police. Party members at the carnival, he said, were there only to enjoy themselves. Not all of them, evidently. During the celebration, several S.W.P. members were hawking a party pamphlet. One of its headlines: POLICE ARE THE REAL MUGGERS.

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