New Crass Massakah:Uprising.

"but stap, yu noh remembah how di whole a black Britn did rack wid rage, how di whole a black Britn tun a fiery red" - New Crass Massakah, Linton Kwesi Johnson

Paul Ruddock, like everyone, had an interesting life. He'd been involved in a motorcycle accident and while recovering in hospital made a lifelong friend with the boy in the next bed, Andrew Hastings. On leaving hospital he falls in love with, and marries, Sandra. Following his accident, he'd been told he'd never be able to father a child but him and Sandra become pregnant with a little girl who will take the name Janine.

In the early hours of 18th January 1981 he is brought out of a burning house at 439 New Cross Road in South East London on a ladder put to service as a makeshift stretcher. He'd run back into the house in an attempt so save his friends and family who were still in there. He would eventually die, some days later, in hospital on Sandra's 22nd birthday. She was, at the time, five months pregnant with Janine.

Paul Ruddock was twenty-two years old when he died and Paul Ruddock was the oldest of the thirteen young black British victims that died in the New Cross house fire on that day. All of the victims' stories were equally tragic and all of them were equally needless. That an initial inquest, and then another - in 2004, resulted in an open verdict and nobody was ever charged with the murders is a stain on British history that can, and should, never be erased.

Steve McQueen's masterful, incisive, and powerful - yet all too human - Uprising (BBC1/iPlayer) tells the story not just of the fire but of the events that led up to it and the events that followed it. As well as the story of what it was like to be black and British at a time when there were many in the country, and sadly some are still out there now, who considered those two identities to be wholly incompatible.

If you can watch it without crying you're either tougher than me or you have no heart. If you can watch if without feeling intense anger coursing through your veins then I'm not sure you're the sort of person I want anywhere near me.

Interspersed with contemporary news footage, testament comes from survivors, families of victims, police - both black and white, forensic investigators, local councillors, journalists, activists, photographer Syd Shelton, Alex Wheatle, Mykaell Riley of Steel Pulse, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Laila Hassan Howe, Andrew Hastings, and Paul Ruddock's widow Sandra. The fact that many of them hail from Dulwich, Peckham, Camberwell, Lewisham, and Lee Green places the events firmly in a part of London I call home but, really, this is a story that should hold relevance for anyone who cares about equality, anyone who cares about unity, and anyone who cares about justice.

Which, if you were black and British, in the late 70s and early 80s, was not something you could rely on the police, the press, or the government for. In that era, as one observer succinctly put it, "colour mattered". London was covered in National Front graffiti, jokes were made about 'banana boats', police were known to regularly fit young black men up with offensive weapons and bags of drugs, monkey noises were not uncommon, there was talk of 'repatriation' - even for those born in Britain, and there even emerged a British branch of the KKK.

This terrifying state of affairs had appeared to reach its apogee, or nadir, with a National Front march through New Cross and Lewisham on the 13th August 1977. As local black families boarded up their houses to protect themselves, anti-fascists of all colours took to the streets to fight with the NF. It was the NF who had the protection of the police. Many police were NF sympathisers. Some were even members.

On 14th December 1977 the Moonshot club in Deptford was burned down and in July of 1978 the nearby Albany theatre was also razed. Both were, not coincidentally, popular hangouts for the local black population. These events, and others like them, would never result in any arrests.

The year after Margaret Thatcher came to power and she seemed far less interested in bringing about unity and instead talked of "a clear end to immigration" and suggested the country was being "swamped".

Against this backdrop of hatred, discrimination, and unabashed racism young black British people were trying to get on with their lives as best they could and, like everyone else, that involved having parties to celebrate their birthdays.

One of these took place on Saturday 17th January 1981 at 439 New Cross Road. We hear about sound systems being set up, afros being cut, new clothes being bought, furniture being put in the basement, and curried goat, rice and peas, and chicken being prepared. It was a big party. People were excited about it. Very excited.

The music played, people danced to lovers rock (the soundtrack to Uprising is, of course, excellent:- Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, Junior Murvin, Philip Bailey, Wailing Souls, Gregory Isaacs, George McRae, Wild Cherry, Jean Adebambo, and, heartbreakingly, Randy Crawford) and continued dancing to it until 5.30am the next morning.

Ten minutes later the house was one fire. There were reports that somebody had thrown something from a passing car into the house. Wayne Hayes, one of the evening's selectors, describes his skin peeling off his face and then falling off a drainpipe, trying to escape the inferno, and on to an outside toilet which left his hip in hundreds of pieces and his body smashed up seemingly beyond repair.

Another man describes jumping out of a second floor window to save his life. The party was still full of kids. When the fire brigade arrived the house was full of the bodies of those kids. The ages of the victims ranged from 14 to 22 years old.

In the aftermath, Andrew Hastings's father (Andrew was classed as 'walking wounded') was looking for his son when a policeman asked "what does your son look like?". "Well, he's white" replied Hastings Sr. To which the copper responded "doesn't matter. They're all black now".

Things got worse. There was criticism of teenagers partying so late at night, victims' families received racist letters and even death threats through the post, there were threats to bomb the funerals of the victims, the Queen offered sympathy to victims of a bomb attack in Ireland but none to those who only lived a few miles from Buckingham Palace, and the local police joked that New Cross should be renamed Blackfriars.

That's about all they did do. They didn't appear shocked by the murder, they offered no sympathy, and they, ultimately, took no action. Instead they looked to blame the victims. It soon became apparent that the police were prepared to go to any lengths to disprove it was a racist attack and that the fire had started inside the building. That it had been started by a partygoer. That it had been started by a black person. Even hassling an eleven year old female survivor in ways which would not be legal now and were certainly dubious then.

The outrage eventually led to, as it had to, action being taken by the local community. The New Cross Massacre Action Committee was formed and a vigil was held outside 439 New Cross Road. A public meeting was called, offices were set up in Brixton, and a day of action was announced. People came from all over the country to join it.

Even school kids clambered over the school gates to join in the march which was being held on a week day so as to cause maximum disruption and to send a message to the media in Fleet Street. A street where upstairs office windows were opened so that staff could boo and shout racist abuse at the marchers below. Due to minor skirmishes on Blackfriars Bridge, The Sun felt emboldened to run the headline 'The Day The Blacks Ran Riot In London'!

At that time, Brixton was seen very much as the centre of black London and Railton Road in Brixton had gotten the nickname of 'the frontline'. We hear reports, from former police, of police breaking up parties, stamping on every single record there, and taking people to cells to administer brutal gang beatings.

The SUS laws that gave racist police carte blanche to hassle black people even borrowed Thatcher's terminology and were named Operation Swamp in Brixton. How the Brixton riots of 1981 began is somewhat uncertain but why they began, if you've read this far, should be patently obvious.

Hundreds of black teenagers filled the streets of Brixton, bricks were thrown, vans were turned over, shop windows were smashed, people were hit with baseball bats, and people were hit with dustbin lids and even scaffolding poles. A notoriously racist pub was burned down and when police arrested the rioters they did it as if they were in a TV drama:- "you're nicked".

178 police were hurt in the Brixton riots and 163 arrests were made in the first night alone. Riots continued not just in Brixton but in Southall, Woolwich, and elsewhere in London and then across the country:- Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Hull etc;

Years of societal racism and institutionalised police brutality had resulted in rioting across the country but nobody died in any of these riots. Thirteen people did die in the racist attack on 439 New Cross Road and not one person was ever found guilty, or even taken to court, over it.

For those who lived through this era, though, there was at least one positive to come out of it. The actions taken by the black community meant that at least the police were unable to stitch up an innocent black man and send him to prison for the fire. The events that took place in SE London across the late 70s and early 80s gave rise to a different kind of thinking among those who had suffered, and were to continue suffering, racism in the UK and Uprising ends with the words of Bob Marley's Redemption Song. One line that seems to encapsulate everything is "emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds'.

Steve McQueen's Uprising was forcefully told, trenchant, and, in places, heartbreaking but it was a crucial piece of television as, finally, we begin to tell the truth to each other about some of the more shameful episodes in our shared past.