Walk Through a Storm

MISERY and DESPAIR. By the late 1970's misery and despair stalked the streets of Liverpool, like an invisible but poisonous miasma. Merseyside was one of the worst hit areas for work in the whole of Britain. The official unemployment rate for young people in Liverpool was among the highest in the country. In Toxteth it was higher again. Among black, adolescent, males the reality of unemployment was eighty or ninety per cent. The ordinary cops who walked the...
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MISERY and DESPAIR.

By the late 1970's misery and despair stalked the streets of Liverpool, like an invisible but poisonous miasma. Merseyside was one of the worst hit areas for work in the whole of Britain. The official unemployment rate for young people in Liverpool was among the highest in the country. In Toxteth it was higher again. Among black, adolescent, males the reality of unemployment was eighty or ninety per cent.

The ordinary cops who walked the beat, in the deprived inner-city areas were placed in the unenviable position of trying to be police officers, social workers, truant catchers, housing advisors, surrogate parents, marriage guidance counsellors, mental health professionals, drug, and alcohol experts, domestic abuse staff, and to cope with all of the other, assorted and associated, problems, caused by the unemployment, racial discrimination, deprivation, poverty, and despair of Liverpool in those days.

The result of all of this was the Toxteth Riots of 1981.

I was there,

This is that story.