Resistance through rituals: Theoretical and methodological legacy

Introduction

First, a personal note about Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). As a research assistant during 1974 and 1975, I shared an office with Paul Willis during his fieldwork and writing up for Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977). My desk looked across the corridor to Stuart Hall’s office, who characteristically had an open-door policy, through which a daily stream of local young black men passed to talk and seek counsel. I imagine it was uncommon for a university research centre Director to be so locally engaged with issues of such concern at that time. His counsel to me was that the most important thing I could do was learn to touch type, which was foolishly ignored.

In retrospect, Hall’s visitors must have had much to say about their likely troubled relationships with the police and the media following an earlier ‘mugging panic’ in the early 1970s, said by the media at the time to have been of ‘epidemic’ proportions and reappearing again in 1974. These young men were already living through an uneven but very focussed fixation on black crime, rich in racial connotation. At the same time, the CCCS Mugging Group were preparing the ground for an inquiry into the ‘relationship between the societal control culture and the news media, and the construction of a law and order campaign’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976: 75). Although appearing only as ‘notes’ in Resistance through Rituals (RTR) this theoretical and conceptual sketch became fully developed and refined in Policing the Crisis (PC), which began from an apparently simple case study of ‘a mugging gone wrong’, that again, carried racial connotations. The book’s analysis of the ‘politics of mugging’, street robbery and violence, then and still today, identifies a fixation on a false enemy: the black mugger. Involving three mixed ethnicity 16-year-old perpetrators handed exemplary sentences of 10–20 years, the case received extensive media coverage crystallising the operation and disclosing the shape of the whole news process.

We shall return to the key importance and influence of PC in the conclusion. Suffice to say that PC is about the crisis of British society in the early to mid-1970s, in which popular themes of race, crime and youth become condensed into the image of ‘mugging’. This popular imagery comes to serve as an articulator and cultural conduit of crisis, as well as sowing divisions between the black and white working class. These themes and connotations associated with race, crime and youth became in their variegated ways a consistent thread that has given coherence to my own work. Below, the article reflects on the legacy and influence of RTR on the author’s general approach, scholarship and research, drawing from the sociological imagination to marry individual biographies and subcultures with social structure. To do this, the theoretical and methodological hinterland from which RTR emerges and to which it continues to be linked is discussed below. The discussion develops and refines RTR’s theoretical outline and approach to the study of subcultures, culture and class in terms of the conceptual legacies and influences inherited from the work of CCCS members.

Finally, my particularly singular contribution to RTR was a conceptual mapping of a planned empirical study of middle-class youth subculture, initially found in the British commune movement, with a view to widening this to Europe in some cases to extend an appreciation of the range of themes found in the movement. I began from living in a commune, and knowing a markedly contrasting commune, both in Birmingham. The contribution was singular in that mine was the only contribution that focussed on middle class young people’s subculture whilst the remainder of RTR was about essentially working-class youth subcultures. Completing some of the fieldwork as postgraduate MPhil research student at Bradford University my research grant was abruptly cut by the then Labour government in the university funding crisis of the late 1970s!

The structure of the article is to identify RTR’s understanding of the meaning and source of ‘culture’ as expressive of, and mundanely grounded in, the material issues of everyday life and as a means of reproducing social order. It goes on to discuss the approach and method of subcultural theory favoured by RTR, influenced primarily by the work of Phil Cohen, which links subcultural group conflict with class conflict as this is experienced by young people, crucially as ways of working out and giving voice to parental and generational dilemmas influenced by wider social change. Cataloguing these local changes in work and community in the 1960s and 1970s, Cohen delineates their polarisation of place, work and community in London’s East End, which are also likely to have occurred in specific ways in other places, as my case studies of Keighley, Bradford and Teesside – outlined here – show. For example, Cohen’s influence on my empirical study of subordinate racist violence among young people found in his notion of ‘neighbourhood nationalism’, which operationalises wider racism at a local level.

The next section delves deeper into the theoretical and conceptual hinterland and legacy from which RTR draws from based in Stuart Hall’s work, which precedes and supersedes RTR. Hall’s prescient conjunctural analysis and political economy of 1970s Britain anticipates both Thatcherism and subsequent forms of governing crime through the build up of a law and order society and a drift to the Right.

Following this, three case studies are outlined representing and drawing from different aspects of my empirical work, which it is hoped, provide exemplars of the early influence of RTR and the wider CCCS body of work. Of course, they are developments from this general corpus of work and do not necessarily reference RTR at all. They represent a certain sympathetic style and approach rather than rigid adherence to CCCS’s version of cultural studies. They should speak for themselves,

RTR’s view of where does culture come from?

If the focus of Resistance through Rituals (RTR) was youth subcultures in post-war Britain, its wider, if somewhat implicit, aim was to elucidate where culture comes from. Eagleton’s (2024) answer usefully encapsulates RTR’s fundamental approach, which is that the origin of culture is found in its material base, in labour. By this Eagleton means that culture in the sense of thinking, creating, inventing and ruling, emerge after labour and the economic surplus it produces have been seen to. At the same time culture in its more ideological guises is used both to legitimate the social order and contain conflict as well as resist dominant ideas and powers. In this, culture can offer a degree of freedom and autonomy, individual agency. In RTR’s telling, young people join subcultures as authors of themselves, revealing crucial vulnerabilities in the reproduction of social order.

While youth subcultural symbolic and aesthetic expressions are separate from the instrumental, existing purely for their own sake, as ends in themselves, perhaps as the sole recourse to elevated or universal ideas and values. At the same time, according to Eagleton, culture is also the home of the routine, the everyday, the banal, of customs, habits, sentiments, prejudices and the like. It is also compensation for conflict and inequality – of common ground – a solution to strife.

Subcultural conflict, class and social change

Turning to the underlying approach, organisation and method of RTR, it brings ethnographic and subcultural study together with analysis of local and national social and economic structural causes.

Phil Cohen’s theoretical and empirical work on youth subcultures was an important early intellectual influence on the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from whence RTR collectively emerges from the writing of Centre members. First and foremost, Cohen’s (1972) ‘Subcultural Conflict and Working-class Community’ (SCWC) ¹ provided a coherent theoretical vision inspiring, developing and widening subsequent thinking seen in RTR.

In SCWC, crucially for Cohen, subcultural conflict between different groups serve to express and displace parental dilemmas worked out in terms of generational conflict. The latent job of youth subcultures is to resolve ‘magically’, the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture. The youth subcultural styles of the time – Mods, Rockers and Skinheads – reflected in their different ways, an attempt to retrieve some of the social cohesion destroyed in their parent culture. It is this anchoring of youth subcultural forms to material intergenerational relationships and therefore economic and social change that most marks Cohen’s approach.

Locality: Work and community

Cohen catalogues the changes in working-class cultures and communities in the 1960s and 1970s that give rise to the problem of class belonging and its resolution in different, conflicting youth cultural codes or styles that expressed continuity and discontinuity. These ‘rituals of resistance’ were firmly located in class analysis and structure, anchored in observations rooted in urban ethnography and local economy, out migration of white working-class families to adjoining new estates, outer London boroughs and towns further afield, neighbourhood gentrification and decline. Redevelopment, impersonality and physical isolation in new tower block living and the dispersion and breakdown of wider kinship networks were all part of the wholesale change in the East End’s economic infrastructure from traditional small-scale industries linked to the docks to larger scale, specialised, skilled and well-paid jobs and routine, dead-end, low-paid and unskilled jobs associated with the service industries. The resulting isolation among adults brought with it renewed emphasis on public space replacing the street among young people. Although young men felt the brunt of these changes, girls overall negotiated the transition to the new service-based economy more easily (McRobbie and Garber, 1976).

This polarisation in the structure of the labour market became reflected among young men, just out of school, who lacked openings in their father’s old trades, whilst lacking the qualifications for the new industries. As traditional sources of leadership in the parent culture disappeared and young people were less likely to follow family traditions, workplace and community become bifurcated, just as opposed downward and upward pressures of social mobility on the respectable working class resolve into respectively, downward mobility into the ranks of the casual poor and upward mobility to the new suburban working-class elite of skilled manual workers and clerical work. Caught and pulled apart, the East End respectable working class ‘had the worst of all possible worlds’ (Cohen, 1997: 56). Once again, predicaments registered most deeply on the young, whose existing labour market aspirations and locations had become disrupted or downright untenable because disappeared or moved elsewhere.

Cohen provides an analysis of subcultures that is at once historical, structural and phenomenological, or the way the subculture is lived out, wanting to express independence or difference from parents, whilst also identifying and supporting them: ‘Subculture invests the weak points in the chain of socialisation between the family/school nexus and integration into the work process which marks the resumption of the patterns of the parent culture for the next generation’ (Cohen, 1997: 59).

Another consequence begins as a break in the continuum of social control that can easily become a ‘permanent hiatus’ in the lives of young people leading to for example, to provide a way into membership of delinquent groups, such as drug dealers, petty criminals or drug users (‘junkies’). Furthermore, this is all invested with territoriality, or conflict within territoriality, simply expressing ownership of public space. Albeit marginalised forms of subcultural expression and relationships to family, school and at work. For example, so-called ‘gang’ formation outside the family, refracted through the peer group situation.

Youth transitions and ‘neighbourhood nationalism’

In Cohen (1997) Rethinking the youth question went on to examine youth transitions through the formation or construction of cultural identities and the cultural ‘transmission of skills and competences’, an overall approach which continues to influence and impress. Cohen went on to talk about the rudiments of a materialist analysis of youth transitions as dynamic involving shifts in an unfolding ‘life-historical process’ (p. 200), which influenced the Teesside Studies of Youth Transitions studies I was involved in (Shildrick et al., 2012), which constituted an empirical materialist view of poor transitions codes. This approach has recently been brought to particularly imaginative effect in Dorling’s (2024) Seven Children – his imaginary children growing up and located at different positions in the class structure. The Teesside Studies used this biographical approach to capture changes in different dimensions of individual transitions over time using life grids constructed from interview data according to the following themes: education-training-employment; housing; family; social networks; drugs-alcohol-crime. Dorling uses a version of this approach to show how children are ‘classed’ from an early age.

But it was Cohen’s (1993) later work on youth-based ‘neighbourhood nationalism’ that directly triggered the thinking behind my own long term ethnographic study of racist violence among young people in the Bradford area of West Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom, from 1989 to 1995 (Webster, 1997). A study book-ended by an ongoing crisis of youth unemployment begun 1981 and the Manningham riots in Bradford in June 1995. Already driven by the general approach found in RTR, Cohen’s notion of ‘neighbourhood nationalism’, resolved as a sort of banal nationalism scaled down and lived out in neighbourhoods marked by locally, territorially based popular racism and the imagery and metaphor of ‘home’. These are not grand stories of nationalism and colonialism but of the banal and more intimate ways racism is produced through a succession of ‘homely images’ informed by memories of play areas, streets, parks, nodal points to hang out, landscape and a sort of centring of physical ‘place called home’, affected by the fond memories of ‘happy’ or indeed, ‘unhappy’ childhoods; an organic image of life and landscape now threatened by an alien presence.

Here, these dreams of home are of ‘defensible space’, a place with secure and effectively guarded borders, a territory topographically and semantically transparent and legible, a site cleansed of incalculable risks, which transforms merely ‘unfamiliar people’ (whether white or black) into downright enemies. An imaginary ‘safe territory’ or ‘safe area’, as remedy for the distress and danger of town life, among strangers that do not mix. Leading to territorial warfare as the only expression of home and border skirmishes as the only practical means of rendering the borders, and the home itself, ‘real’. It is only through the declared presence of the stranger, of a stranger conspiring to trespass, to break in and invade, that makes the gap between safety and danger tangible.

Manifestations and rationalisations such as ‘white flight’ (whites leaving the area) and myths of local origin feed imagery of the ‘home’ and ‘home territory’, among young people’s repertoires of space, safety and security. Whilst offering the thrill and danger which accompanies the transgressive possibilities of ‘going out’ and ‘leaving’ safe territory, creating ‘local heroes’ who venture out and by so doing, enter the racialised local stories of being victim or hero through being in the wrong place and time, successful retaliation, fighting back and so on. Eventually, ‘colour coding’ of residential areas, housing estates, parks or public amenities as ‘white’ or ‘black’, articulated through images of confrontation – ‘front lines’, ‘no-go areas’ – becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, creating social, cultural and economic segregation, compounded by white flight.

In applying and testing Cohen’s (1993) conceptual framework outlined above to analyse the empirical ethnographic, participant observation and survey data generated by my ‘Local Heroes’ study, the study used scientific or ‘critical realism’ (in its most recent iterations) as a philosophy and method to understand the causes or generative mechanisms generating this form of territorially based racist violence among young people. Effectively, combining a more urban ethnographic approached than managed by RTR and cultural analysis with study of local generative mechanisms to discern cause and effect.

RTR’s legacy: Biography, subculture, place and social structure

At this point, it may be worth reviewing and linking the theoretical and historical hinterland from which RTR emerged and is itself linked to the structural and economic contexts and explanations of youth subcultures shown in our case studies of racial violence and entrepreneurial drug dealing in Bradford. This intellectual hinterland includes 1970: Birth of the law and order society (Hall, 1978), Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 2013 [1978]) and The great moving right show (Hall, 1979). These prescient and influential works need to be understood in terms of the social and economic conditions of young people that immediately followed their publication. They show that subcultural and ethnographic study and analysis alone aren’t enough as these studies reveal what is symptomatic of a wider and worsened malaise among working class young people (and increasingly wider social groups of young people today) and underlying structural political and economic conditions and causes.

Resistance through Rituals (RTR) was published (but not altogether written) mid-point between Hall’s periodisation of the ascendancy of the right from 1970 to Thatcher’s 1979 election. If Hall’s (1978) essay ‘1970: Birth of the law and order society’ marked the beginning of this transformation of Britain, then Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 2013 [1978]) conveys its consolidation and resolution on the eve of Thatcher’s victory. RTR is best positioned as capturing the unfolding conjuncture that transformed Britain, through its most vulnerable and expressive demographic – its young people. From the point of view of authority (and sociology), young people are society’s ‘weak link’ in the chain of socialisation and reproduction of capitalist class societies, most exposing and critiquing such formative transformations, their contradictions and dysfunctions, as the old disappears and the new emerges. As such, RTR was both mirror and insight into what was happening.

Hall (1978) argued that to equate the ‘swing to the right’ as a simple expression of economic crisis and recession is to ignore or neglect what is specific and particular to this historical conjuncture. This ignores how recession is presided over by a weakening social democratic party in power, and how it is ‘lived’ as a practical reality, for increasing numbers of people, through ideological representations based on active popular consent. All this amounts to a decisive shift to a new sort of ‘settlement’.

By the end of the 1960s the UK economy had already dipped into full-scale recession, and the apparent social democratic consensus begins to be destroyed from the right, as the contradiction within social democracy becomes apparent of winning from key sections of capital whilst representing the interests of organised labour. What emerges are anti-collectivism and anti-statism accompanied and replaced by the identity of ‘nation’ and ‘people’, the restoration of competition and personal responsibility for effort and reward, the images of the over-taxed individual and welfare coddling, etc. As time goes on these themes merge to inform a myriad of policies from education seen in a shift to vocationalism and work preparation to law and order seen in a rise of authoritarian moralism, inextricably bound up with race. It is here that Policing the Crisis’ prescient analysis perfectly predicts Thatcherism.

Perhaps key here is that youth unemployment nearly doubled in 1981, thus beginning a general social and economic crisis of poor youth transitions on a seemingly unprecedented scale. Youth unemployment in the UK rose dramatically between 1980 and 1981, and by July 1981, youth unemployment was a highly significant problem. Between 1979 and 1982, the overall unemployment rate in the UK approximately doubled, from 5.4% to 10.7%, reaching double figures for the first time since the interwar depression. The situation was particularly bad for young people, with unemployment among those under 18 reaching 30.8% by July 1981.

The build-up of a law-and-order society were begun a decade earlier in 1970, marked amongst other things by the press inventing ‘incipient [black] ghettos’ associated with crime, deviance and resistance to authority, amplified and linked to the importation of problems found in the United States, immigration to Britain and racial violence by among other public figures, Enoch Powell MP (Hall, 1978). This law-and-order theme quickly became deployed as a key aspect of Shadow Tory electoral strategy, lifted from Richard Nixon’s highly successful Presidential election campaign in the US, which used the same themes (Perlstein, 2008). It coincided and was connected to other abrasive measures such as the strict discipline of the market mechanism and curbing the power of the unions. Whilst these tough pre-election linkages and actions spoke to popular and populist fears and stereotypes among the ‘silent majority’, serving to bring young people and crime into sharp focus, they created a wider convergence with disorder and supposed attacks on authority. The use of discordant themes plotted together raised a wider spectre of the ‘enemy within’, conspiracy and generalised panic leading to the June election in 1970, marking a profound shift in the balance of class relations and the balance between consent and coercion in the state. As a precursor of Thatcher’s election in 1979, Heath’s government was also the beginnings of an important difference in English political perspective. The build-up of the law-and-order campaign not only returned the Tories to power but marked a slow ‘shift to control’, which simultaneously mobilised moral pressure from below and control from above:

Above all. . . the law-and-order campaign of 1970 had the overwhelming single consequence of legitimating the recourse to the law, to constraining and statutory power, as the main, indeed the only, effective means left of defending hegemony in conditions of severe crisis. (Hall, 2017: 165)

This disciplining, restraining and coercion of criminality, deviance and subordinate classes – harnessed to ‘order’ – connects to a supposed growing ‘extremism’ of working-class militancy, which threatened the new Heath economic strategy, using legal sanctions, overwhelmingly supported by the media’s conspiratorial reading of Britain’s ‘troubles’. If everything moves up to public perception of transgressing the threshold of ‘law’ in 1970, increasingly public perceptions of transgressing the threshold of violence comes to dominate the 1970s.

Case Study One: Researching racial violence

The aforementioned study (Webster, 1997, 1998) was of the experiences and perspectives of Asian and white young people who were victims and perpetrators respectively of racial violence, living in a place and time when the study area had the worst public record for racial violence in the country outside London. It is a close up account of what happened in the experiences of several 100 young people over 6 years as they negotiated and traversed an urban landscape of shifting danger and group enmity. The study helped further knowledge about why, how and under what conditions racial violence occurs. In particular, the extant research evidence at the time ignored relationships between victim and perpetrator groups, focussing on victim perspectives and experiences rather than those of perpetrators too – ignoring how the meanings and actions of these groups influence one another, and the character and nature of perpetration. The existence of racial violence was assumed in an unproblematic way to be an extreme expression of ubiquitous white racism.

The Bangladeshi and Pakistani born British Asian men joined through chain migration by wives through arranged marriage arrived in the 1960s and 1970s as replacement labour employed in the West Yorkshire textile industry. They comprised the parent culture of the young people studied here and had earlier resisted racism and discrimination focussed on the workplace, through trade union and industrial action. Some responded to racial violence and discrimination in altogether more ‘politicised’ ways focussed on public places. Their defence of ‘Asian areas’ against politically racist hard Right organisations and incursions from outside localities and city areas defined an earlier social movement of Asian youth. This long-standing defence of racialised, colour coded or Islamised areas by their British Asian Muslim young people against Islamophobic incursions and attacks has become ubiquitous with the rise of the far right in Britain, recently extended to areas of migrant settlement (see Webster, 2019). Their children in turn were the first British born generation and as a younger cohort grew into their teenage with an altogether ‘rougher’ response to everyday racial violence emerged within shared public space and localities. In studying this younger cohort of British born Asian and white young people a different sort of territorially rooted relational racial violence was uncovered based on ‘neighbourhood nationalism’. It was felt then that a proper understanding and explanation of racial violence among young people was more likely through study of its local expression and dynamics rather than focus on racial violence as an expression of wider societal racism. That the expression of racism in violence, its nature and motivation, resistance and prevention, depended on the interaction between perpetrators and victims, on factors particular to an area and the nature of the groups involved.

To establish reliability, the study traced spatial patterns and processes over time in the use of, and movement within public space, as well as describing incidence, frequency, patterns and locations of racial violence; provided opportunities for the research subjects to describe their experiences in their own terms; and most importantly, studied perpetrators. This was done through a detailed self-report 7% survey of 13–21-year-old young people, close participant observation by joining a detached youthwork project; a longitudinal study of victims and perpetrators; a follow-up study of young people.

This was an adolescent or youth racism that possibly prefigured a more ‘respectable’ societal racism. A theory of youth racism emerged from the study based on the significance of social interaction and contact, cognitively or mentally mapped by all young people in the study area, which provided cues and clues about their locality in terms of where was safe to go or to be and where they must avoid danger and conflict. These perceptual maps then label places and routes that become entrenched and self-fulfilling, creating neighbourhoods to be defended from ‘outsiders’ whilst countered to places perceived to embody real or imagined threats. Localities defended and bounded morally and metaphorically – ‘colour coded’ as ‘Asian’ or ‘White’ – serve as territories in which actors and movement are informally and internally controlled, whilst warding off potential conflict from outside. The control of people through the control of public space both resolves the problem of security and danger in urban neighbourhoods whilst ascertain with whom it is safe to associate.

Methodology: A scientific realist approach to the study of racial violence

Scientific realist methodological principles were deployed in the study. This was an attempt to overcome some of the well-known problems and criticisms of purely qualitative, ethnographic approaches that offer ‘thick descriptions’ whilst avoiding questions of causality and structure. Approaches that sometimes characterise the methods of RTR, CCCS and Cultural Studies in general. Critical Realism as a method offers the possibility of bringing causation back in using ethnographic and biographical data. These principles are that young people are knowledgeable about why they act in the way they do, and proffer reasons for their actions when asked themselves, volunteering why they behaved in the way they did. Rationalisations or excuses for a course of action can be subject to detection and controls. Fundamentally, though, intentional human behaviour is caused by the reasons people offer for their behaviour, whether at the time of the action the person was aware of the reasons (Bhaskar, 1979: 115–123). The study thought that it was as important to ask perpetrators about the reasons for their actions as it was to ask victims.

The context of people’s knowledge about why they do things is found in what they say, their language use and social interaction (Sayer, 1992). Realism’s concerns are most distinguished by its view or model of causality (Bhaskar, 1979; Pawson, 1989; Pawson and Tilley, 1994; Sayer, 1992) and this became important to explaining the study data, through using a triangulated approach of both naturalistic and formal techniques over time and in different situations, to see if the data converge. But this does not in itself provide causal explanation. The connection between causes and their effects is found in the underlying process or mechanism which activates, triggers or brings about particular sequences of event (Pawson, 1989: 128). The study therefore offered an account of the regularity and entrenchment of racial violence in the locality studied and why these regularities exist in terms of the mechanisms that generate them. Racial incidents or violence are not discrete ‘events’ but are really the components of a local system, key to understanding causality is how this system passes from one state to another and it is this changed state that reveals the underlying mechanisms and relationships between the parts of the system.

This meant the discovery at various points over the 6-year study that there had been a changed state in the prevalence and targets of racial violence from high levels of white on Asian violence found at the start of the study, to increasing Asian on white violence, followed by a general decline of racial violence in the locality towards the end of the study revealed causality. This suggested that the underlying generative mechanism was changing territoriality based on racially exclusionist local community discourses and practices of neighbourhood nationalism, boundary drawing and group enmity. The use of a longitudinal approach, where it has been possible, in both this study and the Teesside Studies is considered the ‘gold standard’ for reliability in social science research.

If the empirical or observed properties of the local system were found to point towards underlying mechanisms of a particular form of local racism based in territoriality and neighbourhood nationalism, then this was only revealed by the local system’s transformation from one state to another. The mechanism was territoriality as neighbourhood nationalism wherein changes in the availability, willingness and opportunity of perpetrators; the presence of racial motive; and the availability and vulnerability of victims; all transformed over time from one state to another in the local system. From the dominance of white territorialism to the dominance of Asian territorialism as Asians grew older and were better able to defend themselves and their areas and in some cases attack and retaliate against white young people (usually perpetrators). Initially whites ‘defended’ and extended their neighbourhoods by making incursions into adjoining ‘Asian’ areas and attacking Asians. Eventually, Asians began to retaliate, creating for themselves their own ‘defended neighbourhoods’. Towards the end of the study period whites and Asians ‘agreed’ a ‘settlement’ of which group ‘owned’ which territory. Colour coded areas were ‘known’ based on a form of segregation and established ‘invisible’ boundaries based on routine activities of where it was safe to go and where it wasn’t.

Concluding the author’s own case study, a particular type of subordinate racism among Asian and white young people was uncovered which produces different patterns of racist response among perpetrators and responses to racial violence among victims. This racism is subordinate in the sense that the ‘objective’ power differentials between the two ethnic groups were much less because of their shared subordination as youth, than the ‘subjective’ perceptions of one group of the other. This is quite different in its power ratios between minority and majority ethnic groups and more likey to be found in RTR, where youth racism is discussed at all, than in PC where the racism analysed is a hegemonic or superordinate racism found in the control culture of the police, judiciary and media, among other ‘authoritative’ sources.

Bradford Case Study Two: British Pakistanis and desistance

Our relatively recently completed case study from Bradford is again illustrative of the early influence and vision of RTR, which is a political economy approach to race and class, studying desistance from crime among British Pakistani drug dealers and their fathers (Qasim and Webster, 2024). A political economy approach in two senses of focussing on drug dealing and distribution and rioting by British born Pakistani young men through the lens of entrepreneurial criminality as a response to deindustrialisation. As an economically marginalised ethnic group positioned predominantly in a self-employed labour market and service economy British Pakistanis are segregated from the mainstream ethnic majority economy. The second sense of a political economy approach draws for the political economy of crime and punishment tradition.

The focus and scope of the study meant that the study population comprised three groups: British born Pakistani drug dealers selling heroin, crack and cannabis (‘The Boys’); British born ex-rioters imprisoned for riot and violent disorder in the Bradford Disorders 2001/2; and a sample of Pakistani born fathers (PBF) who raised sons in poverty belonging to the same generation as the drug dealers and ex-rioters. Studying the influence of social relations on moves towards and away from crime among the younger men studied it was found that their economic marginalisation and criminality emerge from self-employment and entrepreneurialism, avoiding discrimination. The study shows how local opportunity structures shape identity and social integration and their place in British society. Our political economy approach revealed the confluence of biography and social structure, and that entrepreneurial criminality was an attempt to recover from local deindustrialisation where they lived in Bradford. In some ways there are parallels here with RTR and certainly with the wider corpus of the CCCS approach and certainly with PC, as has already been implied. It is worth noting here too, that the Teesside cohort studied were born on the cusp or in the depths of the deindustrialisation of Teesside.

The Boys (drug dealers) in the study, although not normally practising Muslims, their Islamic faith was paradoxically the most important facet of their life, more than their British Pakistani identity, from which they hoped to become ‘better Muslims’ one day and stop offending altogether. At funerals and crisis moments they practiced and prayed more, growing closer to their faith. Inside prison, the possibility of a ‘purer’, redemptive identity through faith was accrued then postponed upon release from prison, faced with surviving without rehabilitative support, amplified by criminal records and few skills.

The Boys were in a place at a time that their home city was an ‘entrepot’ for heroin, crack and cannabis, somehow connected to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Selling drugs was like running a business, with all the requisite commercial skills, risks and unpredictability. . . and law enforcement!

British born Pakistani dealers shifted from selling drugs to whites to Pakistanis, seen as less risky trade, accompanied by a shift from selling heroin to selling cocaine, which was more profitable. Accruing status by making money – expressed through lavish and ostentatious consumerism – could be a struggle when facing excessive competition caused by too many dealers.

As far as the ex-rioters were concerned the long-term consequences of early imprisonment as would be expected, were dire, even though they had no appreciable history of offending at the time of their arrest. They were among 200 individuals sentenced to 4- and 5-years imprisonment in 2001/2. Bradford’s youthful and often segregated Pakistani population – the poorest in England – began an anti-police riot amongst rumours of police brutality and defending Muslim areas against far-right incursion. Poor teenage judgement, early imprisonment and criminal record destined them to deeply troubled lives, unsupported and trapped. For many, ‘harsh’ prison sentences generated hatred for the judicial system, some turned to selling drugs, and although policing improved, the riots’ legacy damaged the local economy.

Like RTR, we were interested in the relationships between these criminal subcultures and the parent culture and through interviewing fathers were able to discern the intergenerational effects of deindustrialisation in Bradford. Very early on with the collapse of the textile industry in the mid-1980s fathers had been thrown into acute poverty upon becoming unemployed with young children and wife to support, fathers felt abandoned by ever diminishing unemployment benefits, without retraining or language support. Among fathers, adversity and deindustrialisation were offset by renewed commitments and availability to family and religious obligations, helped by flexible self-employment, relying too on wider kinship support and the communal upbringing of children. Fathers began to imbue their sons with a sense of risk, precariousness, competition and individualism associated with a growing licit and illicit entrepreneurial culture of takeaways, taxis, garage franchising and by extension, drug dealing.

Overall, the boys and ex-rioters grew up surrounded by abandoned textile mills and struggled with employment. Many became drug dealers because of few legal opportunities and the benefits of established dealer status.

Besides, they were stuck in place by safety, solidarity and friendship, as well as religious, family and cultural obligations and duty. Those who refused to grow up were not consoled by Islamic identity, whereas others were showing signs of desistance despite continuing difficulties with ‘unsuitable’ employment, but neither were their generation helped by economic, welfare, education, training and penal policy from 1980, which unintendedly encouraged crime. Guided by their moral code of loyalty, solidarity and mutual support to one another, they would, if they could, stop offending, if only because of their sense of honour and embarrassment they sometimes felt as Muslims.

Conclusion and discussion

To complete this concluding review of the corpus of work that came out of the CCCS of which RTR has proved key, perhaps of most note and influence on my work has been its drawing upon the legacy and approach of Hall et al. (2013 [1978]) Policing the Crisis (PC). This has certainly been the case over the longer term of my analytical and intellectual development. Perhaps because my professional teaching duties and research interests have been driven by the sociology and criminology of race, ethnicity and crime. But not just that, because PC is the most important text that has drawn on original macro and structural arguments and evidence built from case studies of racialised youth transitions and subcultures. PC is a conjunctural analysis that predicts the emergence of British neoliberalism under conditions of crisis and transformation, in which race becomes an important conduit and lens through which to see this transformation.

Exemplifying an empirically based, theoretically and methodologically sophisticated and influential approach to doing social science, PC shows how youthful crime and deviance become a crucial point of vulnerability for the reproduction of order and develops this theme in terms of moral panics and societal reactions to deviance and social contradictions in the wider class system. PC’s analysis is structured around three organising ideas that continue to inform my own historical, political economic, sociological and criminological work. First, the idea that crime and deviance cannot be understood outside the total interconnectedness of crime and deviance with wider social, economic and cultural structures and processes (Totality). Second, the process whereby the state or the ruling class come to have their right to rule challenged, and therefore their capacity to maintain their authority by dominating cultural and political ideas (Crisis of Hegemony). Third, societies offer a unique blend of contradictory social and political developments and forces at any one historical moment (Conjunctural Analysis).

Again notably, PC’s scope about the crisis of British society in the early to mid-1970s is offering an ambitious theory of change, it nonetheless deploys and rests its case on a single case study of ‘a mugging gone wrong’, to show how popular fears of race, crime and youth become condensed into the image of ‘mugging’ and this popular imagery somehow comes to serve as a conduit of crisis. These repeated themes, in the mass media and by authoritative figures such as senior police officers, politicians and the judiciary, serve as sources of social anxiety and malaise - a sense that order is breaking down. Eventually these themes serve as an ideological mechanism for the construction of an authoritarian consensus, a conservative backlash, the slow build-up towards a law-and-order society. In a sense the study predicts both Thatcherism in 1979 and the Urban Riots of 1981.

The afterword of the second edition of PC concluded that: ‘The discourses and practices of coercion that were emerging in the 1970s have been everywhere extended, deepened and, so to speak, put on steroids’. (2013: 396). Arguing that the movement towards an exceptional or law-and order state traced in the 1970s is now ‘thoroughly normalised’, more recently focussing particularly in supplementing a shrinking state by privatised forms of security to reduce public anxieties about crime. This is still the case today.

PC is arguably more important than RTR, itself an important earlier building block in PC’s emergence to correctly conceptualise and define the rise of a new distinctive Thatcherite neoliberal economy and a new political movement to control, seen in The Great Moving Right Show. The continued salience of race and ethnicity for the cultural props accompanying Britain’s political economy is ample evidence for PCs verisimilitude today.