Picture this. It’s 30 years in the future, and your child/grandchild (for the sake of argument lets call her Geraldine) is sitting an A-level in Historical Studies. The module is ‘The Shit That Went Down In 2011’. She never got to grips with the Murdoch saga, passes on the Greece question, doesn’t like the question on the US debt deal and has literally no idea who Usama bin Laden is. But you can see the relief in little Geraldine’s eyes when she sees one question in particular. “What caused the England Riots of August 2011?”
She could argue that it was the shooting of Mark Duggan that caused rioting in areas as diverse as Walthamstow, Clapham, Liverpool, Birmingham and Bristol, but she’d be marked down for showing only a superficial knowledge of the issues. She could argue that there are socio-economic reasons for the riots, and that the cuts and a feeling of disenchantment have fuelled discontent.
But the riots lack a political message, so this can’t be it. Only one phrase will guarantee our Geraldine the A*+ she so needs to get into her PHEF (private higher education facility) of choice. For the examiners see “out and out criminality” as holding the key to explaining the devastating and shocking violence of the last few nights. Throw in a paragraph on the role of Twitter in organising the rioters, as if the Met could have seen #maraudingimbeciles trending and seen where was to be targeted next, and she’d be well on the way to full marks.
Or maybe, maybe, that’s not how it works. “Out and out criminality” is a reassuring phrase, as it writes off huge swathes of society as lawbreakers who deserve what is coming to them, but it fails to do two things. Firstly, it doesn’t offer an adequate explanation as to why people are rioting now when they weren’t a week, a month or a year ago, and second and more importantly, what is to be done to stop future rioting, and what we should do with the rioters. Because clearly, out and out criminality is a trait of out and out criminals, and we all know there’s one place for out and out criminals — jail. But jail doesn’t really seem to solve many actual problems — eventually, these kids will be released, even more disaffected and unemployable than before.
However, the unmitigated and total “bleeding-heart liberal” approach is a tough sell. Socio-economic conditions also fail to explain many things, such as the riots’ timing, and the anger in Tottenham over Duggan’s shooting has been exploited for opportunism in unrelated areas. Amnesty for rioters is not an appealing prospect when the thing that is fuelling these riots is the sense that if you break into a shop and nick a soundsystem you won’t be held to account.
It is not being fuelled by ideological conviction, and, for example, if we tried to map out areas of rioting, we’d see a correlation with retailers of expensive electrical goods and jewellers rather than with tax-dodging companies or areas of particular social deprivation. And this becomes more true the more copycat rioting springs up. Chief Constable Chris Sims put it bluntly when talking of the looting in Birmingham city centre on Monday night. ‘This was not an angry crowd, this was a greedy crowd.”
And more’s the shame. If only it were an angry crowd! What I’d give for an angry crowd at this point in time. People have so much to be angry about! A stagnant economy, a media unbounded by law, destructive reforms in both health and education, and to top it all off an arrogant government that shrugs off most criticism with a jibe and a laugh. People like David Mitchell defended criminal damage at Millbank on the grounds that when people are angry, they can target their anger and do so in such a way that people don’t get hurt: taking out the Tory HQ is a somewhat more powerful way to make your point than mutely marching to Westminster. The latter option involves remaining nice and peaceful so you can round off the 6 o’clock news bulletin without comment, be thoroughly ignored by parliament and as the saying goes, “tiptoe through life, so carefully, to arrive, safely, at death”.
The claim of politicians that the rioting was the work of “professional anarchists” rung false in the Millbank case as the political class once again seemed hopelessly out of touch with the real and legitimate anger of young people. Oh, what it it was to have something to fight for! “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” Now to be young is to be smashing in a Footlocker.
Those words written about the French Revolution are poignant, as they reflect an idealism completely absent from this week’s anti-revolution. Even the riots of ’81 are being looked at through the rose-tinted glasses: that that was a movement, and this is no such thing. But isn’t that part of the problem? The fact that people don’t see themselves as having a role to play in society, even if it is ultimately trying to bring it down?
There is a genuine issue of deprivation at the centre here, however mindless and unjustifiable the violence. Riots are scary because they threaten order, order is so valuable because it helps us protect what we have. If you don’t have anything to protect — money, property, a “stake in society” (whatever that is), then the question turns from being less a case of needing a reason to riot and more a case of why the hell not riot? You could even bag a free Nintendo Wii out of events, as well as a misplaced sense of empowerment. EMAs provide an example of something which, though small, deprived kids could hold onto as a reason to stay in school, and gave them something that needed protecting. Ken Livingstone tried to suggest that there was a social context to what was happening, and got vigorously and unartfully interrogated — but wasn’t this all just a case of “out and out criminality”? Yes, he reasonably answered, it was. But a social context for criminality surely isn’t so incongruous an idea so as to be dismissed totally by our media, albeit one which has never been adept at incorporating nuance into reductive narrative.
That people are naturally conservative (in the non-loaded sense of the word) is no surprise. But one thing scarier than a riot is a mindless riot, as the targets are more arbitrary. At Millbank, if you weren’t a Tory then the chances of having your property ransacked was greatly reduced. Indeed, other companies used the same building, and there was a sense of injustice when they were adversely affected. Here, it’s all injustice. You live above that carpet store? Tough shit. You own that furniture store in Croydon, that Richer Sounds in Bromley, or that barbershop in Tottenham? Oh well. All martyred in the cause of… nothing.
In the one interview I have heard with a rioter (the media doesn’t give too much time over to that side of the story), he was asked why he was looting shops. He said he didn’t have much and that stuck-up people don’t understand. He was then asked about how he felt about the livelihoods that have been destroyed by these riots. His reaction was a shrug, and a  mumble along the lines of “that’s the way it goes”. No it’s not. You can protest the shooting of a local man on dubious grounds, absolutely. You can riot if you feel let down by your police, that is understandable. You might even think you can steal things because the people you steal from are richer than you, if you’re some sort of neo-Robin Hood who doesn’t believe in progressive taxation (and presumably doesn’t believe in sharing). But you simply cannot burn down people’s businesses and homes because “that’s the way it goes”.
In doing so, you riot because you have nothing and so you reduce people’s businesses to nothing. You riot because you’re angry at stop-and-search, and thereby bring about a situation where every young person in those communities will receive hassle from the police for the indefinite future. You riot against the treatment of the young people by authority, and thereby cause authority to crack down on young people further. You may riot with a point — it is lost in the wind of mindless destruction.
Like all good old-fashioned riots, anyone who has followed it, anyone who has listened, has been angered. Anyone who has heard a member of the Reeves family speak, or has seen certain Guardian photoblogs, or knows anyone who lives in any of the boroughs affected, has been angered. Angry like this lady. Angry at the rioters themselves. And if you had told me at the start of the summer I would be angry over a riot, I didn’t think it would be this way around.
