It also had a soundtrack in a perfectly timed and appropriately named number 1 hit by the Specials, their creative peak – Ghost Town. What is now known as the 1981 Summer of Riots came to symbolize the disillusion of British youth with anything that smelled like government and authority. Hit the hardest were people from the African-Caribbean community, as not only their odds of landing a job were slim, but racial tensions and discriminatory police tactics threw them into a violent spiral in the streets.
No less than one million people became unemployed between 19, bringing the total folks looking for a job to a staggering 2.5 million, the highest in UK recorded history at that point. Two years after the conservative party won the election with Margaret Thatcher at the helm, the aggressive economic policy of increasing interest rates and taxes reduced the inflation, but had a negative impact on the man on the street.
If you were a young man in the summer of 1981 and you lived in one of Britain’s urban areas, you had, as the title of UB40’s song, a one in ten chance of being on the dole.
