Major strikes occur again in the 1980s as Republican prisoners go on hunger strike in Northern Ireland, and miners across the country go on a year-long walkout. Race riots also continue, due to the police’s excessive use of force and stop-and-search powers on black youth: there are riots in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leeds (1981), and again in London and Birmingham in 1985.
New Beacon Books, Race Today Collective and Bogle L’Ouverture found the inaugural International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in 1982. The fair takes place in London and will continue until 1995, with writers, publishers, booksellers, distributors and artists coming from the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Central America, the US, Germany, France and Belgium to take part. The decade also sees the founding of Peepal Tree Press (1985), who will go on to become one of the premier publishers of Caribbean and black British writing, and Apples and Snakes (1982), a weekly ‘poetic cabaret’ that grows to become the UK’s lead performance poetry organisation.