Southall demonstration, April 1979

Who: The National Front, which the council allowed to hold an election meeting at Southall Town Hall; the people of Southall, a west London town in the borough of Ealing, which the 2021 census places among the ten local authorities in England and Wales with the most Sikh residents; and the Metropolitan Police, including its Special Patrol Group. Blair Peach, a 33-year-old teacher, was killed.

What: David Renton writes that on 23 April 1979 shops in Southall closed as the demonstrators had asked and several factories voted to strike. The police deployed 2,875 officers, 94 of them on horseback, and by 3 pm several hundred residents were stuck outside the cordons. Renton gives about 700 arrests and 345 people charged, most of them Asians from Southall, about 85 per cent of whom were convicted; he counts 97 police officers and 64 members of the public injured. Wikipedia, citing the police overview, counts 345 arrests.

Peach was struck on the head in Beachcroft Avenue, a side street off the Broadway, in the evening, and died just after midnight at Ealing Hospital. Wikipedia says Special Patrol Group officers entered a house on Park View Road that Peoples Unite used as a first-aid post, that two officers were stabbed, that occupants were beaten with truncheons and that 70 people were arrested at or near it. On 28 April, Paul Foot wrote in Socialist Worker, 15,000 of the Asian people of Southall marched in Peach's memory.

Commander John Cass of the Metropolitan Police led an inquiry that used thirty officers and 31,000 hours. Renton writes that it concluded Peach was killed by a police officer, most likely one of six Special Patrol Group officers, and that Cass recommended prosecuting three officers for obstructing it. Three weeks after Cass reported, the Director of Public Prosecutions announced that no officers would be prosecuted. The inquest, from 28 April to 27 May 1980, returned a verdict of death by misadventure. The Cass report was released in April 2010, after the death of Ian Tomlinson in 2009, when the Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, agreed to release it at the request of Peach's family.

Where: Southall, in the London Borough of Ealing: the Town Hall, Beachcroft Avenue and Park View Road.

Why it mattered: The demonstration followed a killing three years earlier. Benjamin Bland writes that Gurdip Singh Chaggar, 18, was stabbed to death in Southall on 4 June 1976, that hundreds of local Asians protested that weekend, that the Southall Youth Movement formed by the Monday, and that two white teenagers were jailed for four years in May 1977 after admitting manslaughter, with police dismissing racial undertones. No one was prosecuted for Peach's death.