London Riots: Race, Class or Criminality?

By Steve Hynd

As the Newshoggers resident ex-pat Brit, I have of course been following events in Britain as closely as I can the last few days. Riots that began in the Tottenham area of London after the death of a man at police hands have spread over the last few days, involving several injured and as much as $100 million in property damage. First, the riots spread to other poor areas of London, then to other deprived inner city areas. There have been reports of rioting and looting in Bradford, Birmingham, Croydon, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Salford, Wolverhampton and West Bromwich. Britain hasn't seen such civic unrest since the days of the Poll Tax riots back in 1990 - and before that in the infamous riots of the early 1980s immortalized in many song lyrics of the time which are being quoted anew today.

So what's happening? Over at Lenin's Tomb, there's a key insight in an overall excellent post:

Until now, the claim has been that this is merely a criminal enterprise. At a stretch, it was orchestrated criminality, using Twitter and Blackberry messenger. If you're following what's happening in the UK, that's an impossible position to sustain. A few looters here and there might be evidence of little more than opportunism. But clashes with police in several major cities, including the two largest cities, doesn't look like mere entrepreneurialism to me. And as it spreads to hitherto unexpected places, it certainly doesn't look orchestrated.

...The truth is that riots almost always hurt poor, working class people. There's no riot that embodies a pure struggle for justice, that is not also partly a self-inflicted wound. There is no riot without looting, without anti-social behaviour, without a mixture of bad motives and bad politics. That still doesn't mean that the riot doesn't have a certain political focus; that it doesn't have consequences for the ability of the ruling class to keep control; that the contest with the police is somehow taking place outside of its usual context of suspicion borne of institutional racism and brutality. The rioters here, whenever they've been asked, have made it more than abundantly clear what their motives are - most basically, repaying years of police mistreatment.

Obviously there's more driving the unrest than rioters being "simply criminals", as both David Cameron today and Margaret Thatcher back in 1981 have described them. Instead, as the Guradian's Patrick Kingsley correctly describes the situation, the riots are, now as then, rooted  in "acute unemployment, severe social deprivation, and the almost total breakdown in relations between police and certain sections of society". And also now as then, the conservative government's reaction is to use the police to treat the symptoms rather than the cause, in what is destined in the long run to be an entirely ineffectual application of COIN principles: winning territory maybe but never hearts and minds by flooding affected areas with officers in riot gear and talking about CS gas, baton rounds or even the army.

Same as it ever was. Nina Power at the Guradian provides the economic context:

Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago, the country has seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities, several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march and now unrest on the streets of the capital (preceded by clashes with Bristol police in Stokes Croft earlier in the year). Each of these events was sparked by a different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures. The government knows very well that it is taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest on a scale we haven't seen since the early 1980s. With people taking to the streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and serious losing streak.

Brutal cuts, forced austerity, and the police used as the enforcement arm of a conservative government's asset stripping of the common people to finance corporate giveaways. Same as 1981. Same as 1990.

That economic background is one that affects all equally, black or white. But then add in that the London Met and English inner city police forces in general are overwhelmingly staffed, even at the street level, by right-leaning white men. Although there have been improvements since 1981, racism is still institutional in England's police forces, especially the London Met and especially there among specialist units like the TSG riot response unit, ten years after the Macpherson inquiry.

A decade on from Macpherson, black people are still seven times more like likely to be stopped and searched than white people in England and Wales, with Asians twice as likely � figures which are a major impediment to good race relations. The Commission believes that these differences cannot be justified by detections, since only around one in six people in all racial groups are then arrested.

And finally, what about the example politicians and senior police officers have set the youths of these deprived inner-city areas when it comes to criminality? Reuters:

"Everyone's heard about the police taking bribes, the members of parliament stealing thousands with their expenses. They set the example. It's time to loot," the youth said.

One of those who was there at the beginning of the current unrest, Stafford Scott, writes:

We are from Tottenham: we have seen Cynthia Jarrett, Joy Gardner and Roger Sylvester killed by the police and do not expect finite answers from an investigation that has barely begun. All we really wanted was an explanation of what was going on. We needed to hear directly from the police. We waited for hours outside the station for a senior officer to speak with the family, in a demonstration led by young women. A woman-only delegation went into the station, as we wanted to ensure that this did not become confrontational. It was when the young women, many with children, decided to call it a day that the atmosphere changed, and guys in the crowd started to voice and then act out their frustrations.

I am appalled, dismayed and horrified by the level of destruction that took place. I wouldn't defend the indefensible; however I would like to provide an insight into the mindset of someone willing to burn down their own neighbourhood as I believe that on this point, little has changed since the disturbances on Broadwater Farm 26 years ago.

To behave in this manner young people have to believe they have no stake in the neighbourhood, and consequently no stake in wider society. This belief is compounded when it becomes a reality over generations, as it has done for some. If the riots at the weekend and the disturbances around London today have come as a surprise to the police and that wider society, the warning signs have long been there for those of us who engage with black youths.

The warning signs have indeed been there for a long time. They aren't the ones the American right wishes they were - Britain, like America, has squandered its cash on interventionist wars and big business giveaways rather than on saefty nets for the poor. Nor are they the signs the Gellar-esque bigots of the far right in the UK, with their empirically false claims that "London stopped being an English city some years ago" would wish them to be.