What a shocking night London has just experienced. In thirty years of living here I have never witnessed such carnage. For most people it’s an utterly mystifying experience – why are they doing it? Why now?
According to Ken Livingstone, we’re witnessing the despair and anger of a dispossessed generation – young people who face a much bleaker future than their parents. That might be some of the story for some of the people – but if that was it, wouldn’t you expect to see boroughs like Newham raised to the ground?
I’ve talked to people who were in the middle of things in Hackney last night – their view is that it’s the work of organised gangs, straightforward thuggery and robbery. Why are these riots so different from those in Brixton in the 80s? According to someone who was there: “We didn’t have the technology. We couldn’t organise.”
The BBC would have you believe that Twitter and Blackberry are wholly responsible for the simultaneous breakdown of law and order on our streets. Again I think that’s only part of the story. A friend in Clapham put this up on her Facebook:
“It was pretty quiet until the BBC started to say there was trouble at the Junction, then every youth in the neighbourhood went to find out. Never mind new media, broadcast media playing its role in drumming up an audience.”
She’s got a point. At home last night we got a far clearer picture of the spread of the riots from the TV news, than from Twitter. The other thing that came across was that the police were completely overwhelmed and leaving people to ransack shops at their leisure. One report told of a girl who was trying on shoes before she nicked them.
Why is this happening now? Inevitably there will be a combination of factors. The economic situation and the savagery of the cuts to key local services will be one of them. Back in March, Labour MP for Tottenham David Lammy warned that Tottenham could become a hotbed of violence, “akin to inner city America”, if cuts to crucial public services are left unchallenged. He went on to say it was “heartbreaking” to watch his party wield the axe on some of the most vulnerable areas – chief among them a 75 per cent cut to youth services which he claims could spark a rise in violent crime. In a response to a full council meeting at which £41million of budget cuts were voted through by Labour councillors to fierce public outcry, he said: “I cannot support cuts of 75 per cent to youth services.”
So now you have a situation where youths with no money and nothing to do are left hanging around on street corners where they might previously have been engaged in some positive activity at a youth club. Multiply this all over the country and you have a tinderbox situation.
In social vacuums like this gang culture gets sucked in. It offers a sense of belonging, meaning, identity, protection and glory. It’s a tough world at the bottom end of our society – you need to belong to something to survive.
Set this against a backdrop of a diminished and demoralised police force, still suffering the after-effects of the phone-hacking scandal. Oh and, while you’re about it, throw in a complete absence of political leadership – literally every one of them on holiday abroad, while London burned.
This isn’t to excuse any of last night’s sickening behaviour – but it’s helpful, I think, to try and make sense of what we are all experiencing. In an excellent piece in this morning’s Independent, Camilla Batmangheliddjh makes this point:
Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best. The drug economy facilitates a parallel subculture with the drug dealer producing more fiscally efficient solutions than the social care agencies who are too under-resourced to compete.
Hmm. I buy this description of some inner city areas, but Ealing? Nevertheless, Camilla’s article is well argued and comes from a position of great wisdom and understanding. Whether she’s completely right or not may not be the point. She underlines a role that our sector has in this national mess, which is to promote a deeper understanding and prevent fear turning us all into Daily Mail readers.
While the Sun was calling for us to nail Twitter rioters, it was heartening to see social media being put to a better use this morning: #riotcleanup called for the rest of us to get out on the streets this morning and help clean up the carnage. Pictures confirmed that hundreds of people showed up to do just that.
In the meantime it sounds as though we may be in for another rough night tonight. I wish you all safe and sound.
Simon
Tags: Camilla Batmangheliddjh, David Lammy, Facebook, ken Livingstone, London riots, social media, Tottenham, Twitter
Great post Simon! Good things (i.e Twitter) will always be put to bad use by some people. But however much bad comes out of Twitter it seems to be matched by the good. Some wonderful acts of kindness and solidarity are pouring out of my news feed this morning. Got to go now as someone has just tweeted me asking me to bring tea and cake to the Police and community outreach in my neighbourhood ;0)
Social Media is not responsible for this. It may have been an enabler to allow communication between groups of hoodlums but if not social media then it would be texting or going further back paging! Attention should also be focused on the use of social media for the organising of cleanup groups and general goodwill, concern between people the length of the country.
Thanks for the interesting post.
Very good piece, but I must disagree with “David Lammy [who] warned that Tottenham could become a hotbed of violence, “akin to inner city America”, if cuts to crucial public services are left unchallenged.”
First, inner city America is relative to its own past not “a hotbed of violence.” Crime has fallen in most cities over the last 10-15 years, although there is still more gun crime than anywhere in Europe.
Second, I’m skeptical of the cuts in public services explanation–fairly peaceful inner cities in the US have much less in the way of public services then the UK. I think the US has a more robust informal sector than in the UK–albeit a sector that in the black community is largely church-based.
I recently watched Zeitgeist – The Way Forward. The premise being that social breakdown/disorder results from the perceived or otherwise notion, that a society in which those that have against those who have not can co-exist harmoniously is a misconception. And thus follows the insanity of the disaffected. Just look at lab rats huddled together and exposed to extreme stress. These riots never happen in rural areas after all. And it’s not as though they are unable to co-ordinate, given new social media. Is it? Add that to the ongoing furore of bankers et al, and, BOOM!
Social media does seem to sometimes foster and encourage a mob/hive mentality and remove the individual. As in Flash Mobbing, and anyone who’s on Twitter a lot will have seen how fast witch hunts and pogroms form against individuals, and these are often just middle class people talking about food or films etc! Almost fascist, in the literal sense of the word.
And social media does enable fast mobilisation. In my day the riot would have been over by the time I got the phone box to finally accept my ten pence piece.