The Fires Of London

Over the last few days I’ve had a lot of telephone calls from friends in India and Bangladesh. People have asked two questions. First ‘Are you all right?’ — because the TV images suggest that all of London is in flames — and second ‘What is happening in your country?’ (An interesting reversal, since until now it has usually devolved on people from Britain to initiate such calls, asking people if they have survived the cyclone, the flood, the communal riot, the earthquake). One man from India who had spent some time in Britain said ‘It looks like the Blitz all over again, only without the heroism.’

The second question is being widely posed here also. Very few people, it seems, know quite what is occurring in front of us. Not for the first time, it is astonishing how social evils can remain ‘unknown’, and even unnamed, before they can be acknowledged.

Thirty years ago, the most significant disturbances since World War II broke out in Britain’s cities, most notably in Toxteth and Brixton. Images of burnt-out cars, glass-strewn streets, buildings gutted and the sky visible through their smouldering rafters, giant glass cobwebs of shattered shopfronts, and youths in masks and hoods hurling rocks at police, and making off with goods taken from broken shops, as they realised that only glass lay between desire and possession.

Reactions to the sad events in London, and subsequently the rest of Britain, remain much as they were in the last outbreak of serious rioting in 1981 in the depth of the de-industrialisation of Britain. They show how little has changed, despite the protestations of lessons learnt in our showy parade of progress and enlightenment. Police, politicians, officials, trembling with indignation and anger, appear, declaring that ‘this is criminality, pure and simple’ (as though ‘criminality’ had arisen spontaneously from the hearts of the young, like the smoke over torched buildings), that these were ‘mindless thugs’ (as opposed perhaps to the highly mindful thugs in charge of policies cutting youth services, facilities for learning, educational maintenance grants and the agencies that offer hope to the poorest.) This is ‘copycat violence’. The ‘perpetrators’ will be hunted down and feel the full force of the law. They will be brought to justice. And justice means punishment.

Of course, victims whose homes and businesses have gone up in flames, did nothing to merit such a fate; and there is nothing to be gained by minimizing the wrongdoing that has evicted those who have lost everything. But it would be even more foolish to assume that the events that have convulsed London, Birmingham and Manchester are ‘gratuitous’ or causeless.

There is always an event that ignites (literally) the disorder. In the case of Tottenham, it was the shooting last week of a young man who, the police claimed, had opened fire upon them — from a minicab — and was shot dead. Some of the questions around this incident have been answered: the bullet the man is supposed to have fired was police issue and he could not, therefore have started firing. Although the family of the dead man dissociated themselves from the subsequent fury, this, soon ran, like the fires set by enraged youth, out of control.

But perhaps the most telling images remain, in 2011 as in 1981, of looting — electronic goods, clothing, furniture, supermarkets, mobile phones, sportswear, the livery of group and gang-belonging; and the flight of young people carrying off as booty goods they could not, in ordinary circumstances, think of buying. As the week went on, looting became the first objective of the young people — some only in the early teens; and although it was rare, a few examples of young children children were sighted helping their parents to fill supermarket trolleys with stolen goods.

And here emerges the long-term story to which these sad events are testimony and of which they are a continuing symptom. It is not only the growing inequality and impoverishment of those who have nothing, the ebbing of the already exhausted social hope of people born to the social immobility of the rock bottom, and who have nothing to lose by running away with the merchandise which lies, suddenly exposed and vulnerable, to the chill August night. It is also a question of the profounder changes in British life, and our steady progression from market economy to market society to market culture.

The young people involved are essentially children of the market: formed by and within its compulsions. No wonder they are regarded with fear by those schooled to the more sober disciplines of society. Looting is, as it were, only a more brutal form of shopping by those who do not have the medium of exchange for approved transactions. They have been brought up in a culture, in which millionaires regularly read the Financial Times supplement every Saturday which advises them ‘How to Spend It’; while they live on the edge of destitution. What visiting the full majesty of the law upon those who have nothing will achieve is unclear: they may, contrary to the instincts of Kenneth Clarke, fill the jails with new apprentices to yet more sophisticated crime, but no plans have yet been published that suggest that the outcast and the wanting of another generation are going to receive anything but more victimisation, more abuse and more blame for a predicament they never chose and certainly never made.

Authority is anxious, as ever, to close down any discussion of why these events occur. The same thing happened in the wake of the terror attacks in London in 2007. Any effort to explain, to account for, to illuminate or provide reasons for such sad phenomena is immediately condemned as ‘excusing’ or ‘justifying’ whatever events those in power wish to maintain in darkness, and dissociated from anything they, in their sagacity, or according to their ideological theory, may have done. This is why it must be ‘caused’ by a version of an uncurbed human nature which is fundamentally evil, violent, greedy and self-seeking. Politicians live in the constant apprehension that these sombre events might have social roots, and that some of the alienation, estrangement and volatility may be traceable to their own actions or failures to act. There is no complexity, no multiple causation, no ambiguity: only the pure simplicity of their selective common sense.

Everyone knows that the developmental model which now dominates the globe requires, for the most modest relief of poverty, the creation of more, much more, wealth. It is only through the grace of the rich and their excesses that hope for the poor may be kindled. For in this revised version of global capitalism, the rich are no longer the antagonists of the poor, the expropriators and monopolisers of their substance, but are the sun around which their destinies revolve; and they should, therefore, be grateful for whatever is bestowed upon them. (Hence the resurgence of charity, philanthropy and ‘private’ benevolence).

In the aftermath of further riots in the period since the 1980s, in Bristol, Brixton (again), Bradford and Oldham and elsewhere, considerable networks of ‘community groups’ were entrusted with the task of maintaining social peace; and significant sums of money underpinned these initiatives. This suggests another cushion between destitute and hopeless young people and their rulers, which further distances the latter from the ferment below; and even that has been largely swept away by the present government, cutters of red tape and abolitionists of bureaucracy.

So condemnation, revulsion and an appalled state of shock remain the blocking mechanisms, whereby deeper causes of disturbance and disorder remain unaddressed. The pattern is familiar and predictable. There are no excuses. The full rigour of the law. Perhaps an enquiry, the findings of which acknowledge ‘problems’ or ‘issues’ — policing of poor areas, the discriminatory use against ethnic minorities of the notorious ‘stop and search’ strategy, how to attach the disaffected to a society which for them scarcely exists. Public money will doubtless be found from somewhere to pour into the stricken areas. We have learned the lessons. It must not happen again. Relief and self-satisfaction all round.

This time, there is a new imperative. Images of London’s fires appear in newspapers and on screens all over the world. With London promoting the best-Olympics ever, the same destructive neglect cannot be allowed to descend upon the abandoned sites of disaffection. Perhaps, after all, this is the moment to open questions about fundamental relationships in society, and to question the abiding wisdom that the poor must remain poor, even when the rich, have become abusively, insultingly and destabilisingly richer.