Riot police with batons drawn on the streets of Hackney on Monday (Pic: Guy Smallman)
The following eyewitness reports from Tash Shifrin, Jonny Jones, Ali Alizadeh, Steve Henshall and Sam Bogg, were published on the British Socialist Worker website.
Riots of the poor and dispossessed spread through Britain this week. The police struggled to crush an uprising against their own racist brutality and poverty.
The riots reveal the deep-seated social tensions at the heart of Tory Britain.
The streets weren’t the police’s any more—they belonged to the angry, disenfranchised and the poor.
A young African-Carribean man pointing to the police told Socialist Worker, “These people are supposed to protect us—when I see them at night I run the other way. How can any of us feel safe when they’re shooting people?”
