London Burns

Aug 15, 2011 Editorial

While all eyes were on Greece, where IMF imposed austerities had triggered mass protests, London suddenly exploded into riots, violence, arson and widespread looting. The disorders quickly spread to the cities of Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham and Bristol. Five are dead, dozens wounded (including policemen), hundreds arrested and hundreds of millions of dollars in goods and property destroyed or stolen. What is going on?
The trigger for the current rioting may have been the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, aged 29, a drug-dealer and gang member, when police stopped the car carrying him in Tottenham area, one of London’s poorest neighbourhoods, on the night of August 4. The following day events went out of control at the end of a peaceful gathering by Mr. Duggan’s family outside a local police station — and within hours, rioters were on the rampage.
This was not a rerun of the inner city riots that shook Britain in the late seventies and the eighties. Those riots were a direct challenge to oppressive policing and to mass unemployment. They threatened the social fabric of Britain’s inner cities and forced the government to rethink its mechanisms of social control. While Britain has imposed cutbacks during its ongoing financial crisis that precipitated some amount of protests, these have been comparatively muted.
While Duggan was Black, the riots were not particularly about race. Many on the left have seen them as a response to racist policing. Many on the right have been pouring out racist vitriol against ‘immigrants’. In fact race has played little role in the violence. Whites constituted the majority of the rioters and three of those killed were Asians. Many of the shops looted and torched were also Asians. This is not to deny that young black men continue to be the primary target of police stop and search (an issue that has been shamefully ignored in recent years). Nor is it to deny that there is a legacy of bitterness about, and resentment of, police tactics in many inner city communities. But the riots were not in any way defined by racial divisions, antagonisms or resentments.
The polarisation between the touted claim on one hand that ‘the riots are a response to unemployment and wasted lives’ and on the other hand, the insistence that ‘the violence constitutes mere criminality’ also makes little sense. There is clearly more to the riots than simple random hooliganism. But that does not mean that the riots, as many have claimed, are protests against disenfranchisement, social exclusion and wasted lives. In fact, it’s precisely because of disenfranchisement, social exclusion and wasted lives that these are not ‘protests’ in any meaningful sense, but a mixture of incoherent rage, gang thuggery and teenage mayhem.
Disengaged not just from the political process – largely because politicians, especially those on the left, have disengaged from them – but also from a sense of the community or the collective, there is a generation (in fact more than a generation) with no focus for their anger and resentment, no sense that they can change society and no reason to feel responsible for the consequences of their actions. That is very different from suggesting that the riots were caused by, a response to, or a protest against, unemployment, austerity and the cuts.
The most glaring feature of the riots that demand explanation is the extreme youthfulness of those that dominated the mayhem – most in their teens. Ninety-one percent of those arrested were also males and their general motivations were the same as that which has earned British soccer fans the sobriquet of “most violent” in Europe. The timidity of the police in confronting the rioters was also striking: there were numerous instances where the police actually ran away from the fray.
In the end, class might be the common factor that ties the various elements that have merged to create a situation that has shaken Britain to the bone. The rioters were overwhelmingly from the lower classes and the damage was mostly confined to the poorer neighbourhoods. The riots, it would seem, may be a consequence of the increasing gap between the rich and the poor.

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