Clive Bloom, author of ‘Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts’:
The spate of rioting that spread from Tottenham to Enfield, Walthamstow and Hackney has caught Britain by surprise. Familiar with a new generation of protests over student fees and bankers’ bonuses, few expected a repeat of the scenes last witnessed in Brixton and Broadwater Farm – not least London’s police.
There are superficial similarities between the riots in Broadwater Farm, the area of Tottenham where PC Keith Blakelock was murdered in 1985, and those that followed the shooting of Mark Duggan on Thursday last week. The dubious circumstances surrounding Mr Duggan’s death certainly rekindled that era’s mood of anger, directing it initially at Tottenham police station before it spilt out more widely on to the streets. Yet, underneath, the circumstances are quite different.
The 1980s were a period of institutional police racism, coupled with casual disregard for the feelings of ethnic minorities. To a large extent these problems have been reduced, if not entirely solved. London’s police have mostly cleaned up their act, while police leaders have spent a generation cultivating links with local communities – including a great deal of time spent socialising with community leaders. The conundrum now is why these efforts came to nothing.
The problem is that the source of local tension has changed. In the 1980s there was generalised distrust at many levels between a police force that too often lived up to its racist reputation, and a local community divorced from those who were supposed to protect it. Today, relations between police and community figures in places such as Tottenham have improved, at least on the surface. But, underneath, relations with young black men, and especially those who are economically disadvantaged, have actually worsened.
Sources of tension are easy to identify – especially given that young black people are by far the group most likely to be stopped and searched. The police response to the disturbances – complete with the use of dogs and horses – has also indicated the impossibility of police “liaison” successfully reaching down to the lowest levels of each deprived area. The hope was that improved links with community leaders would allow the police to call on less forceful preventative measures in the event of renewed tensions. That hope has proved naive.
Black youths in London’s most deprived areas are now more self-reliant and inward-looking, even more than their counterparts in the 1980s. A minority rely on drug dealing and petty theft. The social cohesion that once came from youth clubs and churches has too often been replaced by the structure and sense of “belonging” of a gang – a social role with its own morality and self-esteem, but at least one that counts for something in a world of limited prospects. This is a crisis not of straightforward police racism, but of communities facing external economic pressures that, in turn, have exacerbated internal divisions.
That said, the spread of riots into other areas of London is exclusively a function of economics, not racial tension. These are events devoid of political intent: they have little in common with the student violence earlier this year, except their use of social media as an organisational tool – although this time by the disenfranchised poor, rather than the educated, politically aware white elite. These are riots marked out by the looting of Foot Locker and Nando’s – the shopping places of Britain’s new underclass. Those who have grown in a world where social identity comes from consumption find themselves barred in times of economic hardship, except by theft.
London has burned many times, of course. In the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780 more than 280 died as half the City was set ablaze in four days of violence. The 1860s often had daily unrest in Hyde Park, while in 1912 the suffragette Christabel Pankhurst organised secret cells of arsonists to spread fear around the city. London recovered from these traumas, as it did after the violence of the 1980s. Yet this time only aid to communities disintegrating in the face of harsh economic times, rather than provoked by casual police racism, will begin to repair the damage that has been done.
There are superficial similarities between the riots in Broadwater Farm, the area of Tottenham where PC Keith Blakelock was murdered in 1985, and those that followed the shooting of Mark Duggan on Thursday last week. The dubious circumstances surrounding Mr Duggan’s death certainly rekindled that era’s mood of anger, directing it initially at Tottenham police station before it spilt out more widely on to the streets. Yet, underneath, the circumstances are quite different.
The 1980s were a period of institutional police racism, coupled with casual disregard for the feelings of ethnic minorities. To a large extent these problems have been reduced, if not entirely solved. London’s police have mostly cleaned up their act, while police leaders have spent a generation cultivating links with local communities – including a great deal of time spent socialising with community leaders. The conundrum now is why these efforts came to nothing.
The problem is that the source of local tension has changed. In the 1980s there was generalised distrust at many levels between a police force that too often lived up to its racist reputation, and a local community divorced from those who were supposed to protect it. Today, relations between police and community figures in places such as Tottenham have improved, at least on the surface. But, underneath, relations with young black men, and especially those who are economically disadvantaged, have actually worsened.
Sources of tension are easy to identify – especially given that young black people are by far the group most likely to be stopped and searched. The police response to the disturbances – complete with the use of dogs and horses – has also indicated the impossibility of police “liaison” successfully reaching down to the lowest levels of each deprived area. The hope was that improved links with community leaders would allow the police to call on less forceful preventative measures in the event of renewed tensions. That hope has proved naive.
Black youths in London’s most deprived areas are now more self-reliant and inward-looking, even more than their counterparts in the 1980s. A minority rely on drug dealing and petty theft. The social cohesion that once came from youth clubs and churches has too often been replaced by the structure and sense of “belonging” of a gang – a social role with its own morality and self-esteem, but at least one that counts for something in a world of limited prospects. This is a crisis not of straightforward police racism, but of communities facing external economic pressures that, in turn, have exacerbated internal divisions.
That said, the spread of riots into other areas of London is exclusively a function of economics, not racial tension. These are events devoid of political intent: they have little in common with the student violence earlier this year, except their use of social media as an organisational tool – although this time by the disenfranchised poor, rather than the educated, politically aware white elite. These are riots marked out by the looting of Foot Locker and Nando’s – the shopping places of Britain’s new underclass. Those who have grown in a world where social identity comes from consumption find themselves barred in times of economic hardship, except by theft.
London has burned many times, of course. In the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780 more than 280 died as half the City was set ablaze in four days of violence. The 1860s often had daily unrest in Hyde Park, while in 1912 the suffragette Christabel Pankhurst organised secret cells of arsonists to spread fear around the city. London recovered from these traumas, as it did after the violence of the 1980s. Yet this time only aid to communities disintegrating in the face of harsh economic times, rather than provoked by casual police racism, will begin to repair the damage that has been done.
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