ABSTRACT
Racialised discourse has been used both to explain and marginalise the complex social dynamics which have lurked in the shadows of urban unrest. It is suggested that the racialisation of disorder in the 1980s and the claim that Britain had been a traditionally orderly nation were complementary processes that both have a long history. It seems clear that racialised ideas were used in each case of public disorder to rationalise complex social processes, which could have been explained in any number of other ways. Ideologically, the primacy of concern about law and order in the 1980s resonated with other key themes of the New Right political project. In Liverpool in 1919 it can be seen that the normative standards, which were held by politicians, newspaper editors, civil servants, and senior police officers, were that public disorder was deviant from British traditions. The interaction of particular and more general discourse is evinced by the contradictory and varied nature of racialised debates.
