London's burning: any clues?
Having not followed any news over the weekend or yesterday, I discovered today that there have been three days of rioting in London (and now elsewhere in England), with one man dead and over five hundred arrested and perhaps £100 million worth of property damage, including widespread arson. The discussion boards are alight with people calling for water canons and baton rounds (a.k.a. rubber or plastic bullets), curfews and the deployment of the army, none of which have been used on the mainland UK in living memory. Last time I was in London a couple of months ago, I stayed in Hackney, not far from the area where the trouble started.
Has anyone come across any good analysis or does anyone have any personal insight into this situation? Please include links in the comments.
Posts
42 comments:
Dave Hill: Things I believe about the London riots.
Telegraph: London riots: the underclass lashes out.
Guardian: There is a context to London riots that cannot be ignored.
Bright Green: London riots: of course they are political. Make sure you read the article in order to understand what is meant by this headline.
Is this earlier post irrelevant or not?
I posted this a few hours ago, Byron: http://christpantokrator.blogspot.com/2011/08/london-riots.html
Nick Clegg (April 2010): “There is a danger in having any government, of whatever composition, led by a party which doesn’t have a proper mandate across the country, trying to push through really difficult decisions. I think a lot of people react badly to that.”
Interviewer: “But rioting in the streets? It’s a bit much.”
Clegg: “I think there’s a very serious risk…”
[...]
Tessa Jowell, Tory MP: "This is Walthestow in north-East London, not Athens or any other Greek city, and I think that British people are not going to react in that way."
Thanks Terry - that was a helpful reflection. I hope you are able to bring some of the peace of Christ to those around you at this time. Thanks for also pointing towards this prayer.
Pretty much all of the shops round our way are now shut. There's a sense of fearful anticipation in the air.
What I like about most of the (serious) analysis is a sense of bipartisanism. Truly thoughtful consideration is being given to the issues surrounding the context of the riots from those that I understand to lean left (Dave Hill) and those more associated with leanings to the right(The Telegraph). From my experience of teaching, living, socialising and worshipping in a largely black, largely deprived context in South London over 7 years, the articles you've posted here ring true (although I have to say, I've met a lot of ungrateful, self-righteous little snots who just want everything handed to them on a plate and scream like a particularly petulant 2 yr old if they don't get it and insist on being destructive no matter how many opportunities they're given to engage.) But in addition to the economic and political analysis out there, I'd be really interested, once this is over, in some statistics and relevant analysis of the family structures and situations of those convicted. How many are from single parent families? How many have an unstable home life? Of course, even if there is a pattern (and there quite possibly is not), the quality of home life provided to any given child is inextricably linked to the broader historical, social and economic context, but I still think it's worth looking at and attempting to address, somehow, if there is a trend. "Something" needs to be done about the system and by the sytem, but it needs to be targeted as strategically as possible, especially when there isn't a lot of money around (yes, I know that's another can of worms...) One of the articles referred to a society that's running off the cliff; politics and economics is a huge part of that and can't be ignored, but I don't think that's all there is to it. Plus, more broadly speaking, the moral health of Britain is declining, young people aren't given any sort of compass to help them navigate through troubled times or life in general because there's no longer any such thing as north and the population density of these shepherdless sheep is staggering. It's just such a big, heartbreaking mess. We need Jesus!
I've been thinking a lot about some of the great Christian leaders and reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries whose work paved the way for reform and revival and arguably pulled Britain back from the brink of the revolutions seen in many countries in Europe at the time. I hope we'll see more of this in our times. What form do you think this is taking/ will take in our context? (By the way, I think I might have referred to "Lord Salisbury" last week. Constant problem of mine - James and his sister were born in Salisbury and Shaftesbury respectively and I always get them muddled and can't remember which is which. I meant Lord Shaftesbury. He was fab.) One thing I will personally be doing as a result of all this is talking to James about directing some of our giving to the London City Mission.
Kath - Great reflections and I entirely agree. The problems are incredibly complex and involve personal failures, familial breakdown, alienation from communities, political, policy and and policing inadequacies, a society that has lost its way and worships empty idols, a global economy destroying both creaturely and human ecologies on a vast scale unrivalled in human history, and a creation groaning under the bondage of decay and the destructive usurpation of the prince of the air.
because there's no longer any such thing as north
On this one point, speaking as a resident of Scotland, I must disagree on cartographical grounds alone.
;-)
Laurie Penny: Anarchy reigns and a nation struggles to understand why:
"Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything - literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night.
"No one expected this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after 30 years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong.
"And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain't Twitter."
Camila Batmanghelidjh: Caring costs - but so do riots. A view from a charity working with street kids.
Independent: Lessons to be drawn from mindless violence. A warning against drawing any lessons too quickly:
"Attempts to trace this outbreak of lawlessness to deprivation and the social marginalisation of Britain's inner-city youth need to be handled with care. A lack of economic opportunity and aspiration in our inner cities is unquestionably a problem that local and political leaders must address. But it is spurious to draw a connection between that disaffection and specific outbreaks of violence of the sort we have seen in recent days. The urge to draw lessons is understandable and appropriate. But, equally, we must beware drawing the wrong ones – especially before we know the full facts."
Clifford Stott: Getting into the mindset of a mob mentality. Views from a senior lecturer in social psychology specialising in the psychology of riots.
Michael McCarthy : What has been lost in the riots? A: A society based on unwritten civility. In its place will rise a greater emphasis on written laws.
Al Jazeera: London's Burning: Failed Society or Society's Backlash?. A 25-min special report.
There is a longer version of Laurie Penny's piece in the SMH (linked above) on Common Dreams.
Zoe Williams: The psychology of looting: "just because there is no political agenda on the part of the rioters doesn't mean the answer isn't rooted in politics. [...] The type of goods being looted seems peculiarly relevant: if they were going for bare necessities, I think one might incline towards sympathy. I could be wrong, but I don't get the impression that we're looking at people who are hungry. If they were going for more outlandish luxury, hitting Tiffany's and Gucci, they might seem more political, and thereby more respectable. Their achilles heel was in going for things they demonstrably want."
Jonathan Freedland: The year we realised our democratically elected leaders can no longer protect us. An analysis of impotence in major news stories of 2011: "It's striking that the targets have not been town halls or, say, Tory HQ – stormed by students last November – but branches of Dixons, Boots and Carphone Warehouse. If they are making a political statement, it is that politics does not matter."
Zygmunt Bauman argues that such social minefields are the inevitable consequence of inequality under conditions of consumerism.
BBC: What turns people into looters?
"He says looting makes "powerless people suddenly feel powerful" and that is "very intoxicating" [...] Numbers are all important in a riot and the tipping point comes when the rioters feel in control, he adds. [...] Psychologists argue that a person loses their moral identity in a large group, and empathy and guilt - the qualities that stop us behaving like criminals - are corroded. "Morality is inversely proportional to the number of observers. When you have a large group that's relatively anonymous, you can essentially do anything you like"."
i've read a lot of analysis, but this on the BBC blew it all away.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoFak7MRBJw&feature=youtu.be
Karl, can you explain in more detail what you found most interesting about that clip?
Jimmy Reid: Alienation. An address from the past with probably even more contemporary relevance than it had on the day it was delivered.
Paul Lewis and James Harkin: Who are the rioters? Young men from poor areas... but that's not the full story.
The Conversation: The English riots - it wasn't youth gangs. An interview with a senior lecturer in criminology at Manchester University.
Aditya Chakrabortty: Political classes see what they want to see.
"If you're a leftwinger, the causes of the violence and looting are straightforward: they're the result of monstrous inequality and historic spending cuts; while the youth running amok through branches of JD Sports are what happens when you offer a generation plastic consumerism rather than meaningful jobs.
"For the right, explaining the violence is even simpler – because any attempt at understanding is tantamount to condoning it. Better by far to talk of a society with a sense of over-entitlement; or to do what the prime minister did and simply dismiss "pockets of our society that are not just broken but, frankly, sick".
"[...] "just a 1% increase in the [economic] growth rate decreases the expected number of riots by over 5%". Recessions are good for riots: perhaps no surprise, there. What matters, they argue, is when people suffer abrupt drops in living standards – and that goes for Hackney as well as Athens."
Mike Ovey: Looters: them or us? Perhaps the best piece of commentary I've read. The last two points could do with some further development, but very important things in this post.
Seumas Milne: Riots reflect a society run on greed and looting. Amazing how many commenters assume an article like this condones the looters' behaviour (when it explicitly does not).
Deborah Orr: Society must change fundamentally if we are to move on.
"Bankers, journalists, politicians – all these wealthy groups have been recently exposed as the perpetrators of antisocial and immoral behaviour themselves, behaviour they appeared to believe was perfectly justified and only fair. Their own belief in their "relative poverty" – compared to the money they could earn in another country, the money they would be earning in the private sector, the money that the celebrities whose phones it was OK to hack were receiving – seems robust. So, the idea of relative poverty is used to justify of all sorts of selfish behaviour. Looters are just the most crude and inarticulate among such excuse-makers."
Rowan Williams: Address to the House of Lords.
MWH: Looting of more than one kind.
Resistance and Renewal: Taken over by The Fear: the spiritual roots of the riots. An insightful post reflecting on multiple forms of poverty and their relation to anxiety through the lens of a Lily Allen song. (H/t Chris Playford on FB).
BBC: 10 different causes of rioting.
(H/t Kath for the second link).
Gary Younge: These riots were political. They were looting, not shoplifting:
"Insisting on the criminality of those involved, as though that alone explains their motivations and the context is irrelevant, is fatuous. To stress criminality does not deny the political nature of what took place, it simply chooses to only partially describe it. They were looting, not shop-lifting, and challenging the police for control of the streets, not stealing coppers' hubcaps. When a group of people join forces to flout both law and social convention, they are acting politically. (The question, as yet unanswered, is to what purpose.) [...]
"The fact that their actions were political does not therefore make them wise. The primary consequences will be greater authoritarianism, more police powers and an emboldened far right."
Charlie Brooker: How to prevent more riots: "Since I write for a newspaper, I am now legally required to write an agonised hand-wringing article in which I attempt to explain why the riots happened. Which is tricky because I don't have a clue. Some blame the parents. Or the education system. Or the economy. Or our unequal society. Or just the rioters themselves. I'd guess at some soupy combination of all the above."
Somehow Charlie manages to be both clueless and on the money at the same time, both lighthearted and to open a dark vein.
Gene Kerrigan: Ruling class rioters don't wear masks.
Naomi Klein: Two kinds of robbery.
MWH: Jeremy examines the responses of David Cameron and Ed Milliband and finds common ground, as well as a disappointing lack of focus on consumerism.
Zygmunt Bauman: Consumerism coming home to roost.
Guardian: a new study conducted by the Guardian and LSE which conducted in-depth interviews with 270 people involved in the riots offers more insight into some of the (self-reported) motives of the rioters. Some very interesting things here.
Rowan Williams: Reading the Reading the Riots report.
MWH: Jeremy reflects on another govt report into the riots, specifically discussing the place of consumerism and advertising. Excellent stuff.
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