Britain Looting Spree

The black Daimler attracted a crowd as soon as it pulled up last week near the burned-out hulk of what had been a postal substation in Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city. Out of the limousine stepped Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, anxious to show his concern. "I'm just here to listen," Hurd told a crowd of residents of Handsworth, one of Birmingham's poorest neighborhoods. But the crowd was in no mood to talk. Hurd was showered first with jeers, then with rocks, and was hustled to safety by police.

Thus began the second day of the worst rioting in Britain since 1981. Before the violence subsided, rampaging youths, mostly black, had reduced part of Birmingham's Lozells Road area to rubble. Two men died in the disturbances, 80 policemen, firemen and residents were injured, and more than 50 homes and stores were left in ruins. Police made 190 arrests. "Utterly appalling," declared Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The violence erupted when youths from the Lozells Road area, described by police as a drug-trafficking center, confronted officers about to ticket a black motorist and then turned on firemen who were trying to extinguish a blaze in a bingo hall. By the time police reinforcements arrived, 300 to 400 youths were looting and burning neighborhood shops, many of them owned by Asian immigrants.

In seeking to explain the outbreak, some analysts pointed to the area's economic distress. Unemployment in Handsworth, for instance, stands at 36%, nearly three times the national average. Yet even the Labor Party opposition was reluctant to ascribe the rampage purely to economic conditions, and Thatcher, for her part, rejected the notion outright. She denounced those who blamed the riot on unemployment as "Moaning Minnies."