The Utopian

By Alexander Lee.

“If there is a single underlying cause for the riots, it is to be found in the shocking social problems in Britain’s depressed suburbs and in the gradual abandonment of social questions by mainstream political discourse.”

__________________________________________________________________

For four days and nights, England burned. Catalysed by the shooting of 29-year-old gang member Mark Duggan by police, a wave of violence fanned out across the country. Beginning in North London, riots quickly spread to Birmingham, Nottingham, Salford, Gloucester, and Bristol. Mobilised through social media, tens of thousands of rioters confronted police in debris-strewn streets in an orgy of looting and destruction. Shops of every description were stripped bare, innocent bystanders were killed, and countless homes and businesses went up in flames. Still grossly outnumbered despite a massive campaign of reinforcement, police struggled to contain the chaos.

Even by comparison with similar incidents in the past, the scale and brutality of the riots beggared belief. Images from the streets of Britain’s largest cities revealed huge, angry mobs comprising individuals of every age and ethnicity committing acts of staggering brutality and wantonness. By the time the riots finally subsided on August 11, more than 1,500 arrests had been made across Britain, and over 600 people had been charged with offences ranging from arson, assault, and burglary to dangerous driving. Tens of millions of pounds of damage was done to property, hundreds of businesses were ruined, and dozens of people were left homeless.  

Commentators have been at a loss to explain these events. Although all are agreed that the death of Mark Duggan was little more than the spark which ignited the inferno, no consensus has yet emerged as to the causes. Both left and right appear to be struggling to comprehend the terrible events of recent days. The riots have been attributed to everything from consumerism and social media to “gangsta” society and racism, and from the “swamp of dependency” to spending cuts and weak policing.

As a consequence of the lack of consensus with respect to the causes of the riots, similar confusion has arisen with regard to solutions. Everything, from increased police powers and the reintroduction of a culture of “discipline” to the extension of outreach programmes and the withdrawal of welfare support has been proposed. Considered collectively, such suggestions are remarkable for their lack of both clarity and consistency. Although some – including Timothy Stanley – have rightly drawn attention to the fact that liberal discourse in modern Britain is ill-suited to dealing with violent unrest, it is nevertheless apparent that in the absence of a clear understanding of the underlying causes of the disturbances, no adequate measures can be taken to prevent future riots.

THE RIOTS WERE a complicated affair: just as the targets of the violence were very diverse, so too those who took part in the riots differed wildly in age, race, origin and socio-economic status. Although police records indicate that the majority of rioters arrested in London were aged between 15 and 24, some 31% were aged over 25. Far from being restricted to those of Afro-Caribbean origin – as some have suggested – the rioters were drawn from almost every ethnic group, and images from the riots in Birmingham, London, and Salford reveal the inadequacy of classifying the unrest as having been the preserve of any one ethnicity.

This is not to say that there was no consistency whatsoever during the riots. In socio-economic terms, a pattern does emerge. Despite the fact that schoolchildren, the unemployed, and blue- and white-collar workers were represented, the overwhelming majority of those arrested fell within groups C2 and DE, and the unrest itself was largely confined to areas with high rates of unemployment, high ethnic diversity, low average incomes, and a low incidence of higher education. So, too, the ‘targets’ of the riots display a measure of consistency. The majority of attacks against property was confined to buildings connected with the state (such as the Handsworth police station, which was burnt down), and private businesses. While some of the enterprises targeted were sizeable concerns, the greater part of businesses his were small retail shops or modest-sized retail chains, and although everything imaginable was stolen, looting mostly focussed on shops selling electronic items, clothing, and jewellery.

The diversity of the riots perhaps helps to explain the range of interpretations offered in the British press.  But there is nevertheless sufficient clarity to suggest that none of the explanations is completely adequate in isolation. To one extent or another, they are all partly correct, and it would be invidious to dismiss any one of these interpretation in its entirety. However, there is sufficient clarity to suggest that none of the explanations is completely adequate in isolation. It would therefore be equally inadequate to say that the riots can simply be explained by a random hodge-podge of different causes. In reality, an analysis of the backgrounds of the rioters and of their targets indicates that all of these explanations can be traced back to a fundamental crisis at the heart of British – and European – political life.

THE RIOTS THAT transfixed France in 2005 provide an instructive parallel in seeking to uncover the underlying cause of the disorder in Britain. Beginning with the protests in Clichy-sous-Bois which erupted after the deaths of Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna during a police chase on 27 October 2005, a campaign of civil disorder fanned out across France. For three weeks, Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Lille and many other cities were consumed by brutal street battles. The violence was particularly pronounced in the banlieues, the vast, concrete suburbs inhabited by the poorest and most ethnically diverse elements of French society.

It is not difficult to see why the deaths of the otherwise unknown Zyed and Bouna acted as such a powerful catalyst. Two African immigrants living in a depressed suburb of Paris, they encountered the worst examples of first-world poverty. Lacking the security of education, income, or employment, they turned to crime; although their death in an electrical substation was accidental, it was almost inevitable that they should have been chased by the police. To those who lived in the run-down banlieues, in which poverty and crime were a way of life, and in which the state was a distant irritation, the deaths of Zyed and Bouna were a tragic encapsulation of their dissatisfied, downtrodden lives.

Like the riots in England, the unrest in France in late 2005 was underpinned by a multiplicity of different problems. Low incomes, appalling employment prospects, poor education, and a failure to integrate immigrant groups all played their part in the violence which followed the deaths of Zyed and Bouna. Similarly, a widespread hostility towards the police undoubtedly did much to fuel the disturbances.

But a far more serious political problem lay beneath the surface of the French riots. All of the social issues which contributed to the unrest in 2005 had been evident in France since at least 1993, when similar riots highlighting the social afflictions of the banlieues broke out after the shooting of Makomé M’Bowole, a Zairean immigrant. In the ten intervening years, however, the French government consistently failed to address the social issues which had driven the disturbances. Once the unrest had been suppressed, living standards, social identity and integration, and popular relations with the organs of government quickly passed from the centre of policy debates. It was as if the riots had never happened.

In fact, French political discourse progressively moved further and further away from the “social” as a sphere of human action between 1993 and 2005. Even amongst the centre-left, economic liberalism and a free-marked ideology became the watchwords for a new crop of politicians who saw themselves in managerial terms. While the shift in political manner from Mitterrand to Sarkozy may have been eminently sensible in itself given global economic changes, the effect of abandoning the social dimension of politics was devastating. In the banlieues, living standards continued to fall, the incidence of crime remained high, racial tension escalated, and the sense of dislocation from politics grew more pronounced. The frustration that this generated grew to new and more violent proportions. A powder keg was created, and the deaths of Zyed and Bouna were merely the spark that lit the fuse.  

Even after the 2005 riots, the French government continued to overlook social issues. As the global economic situation worsened from 2008 onwards, Sarkozy’s government remained implacable in its adherence to its fiscal policy, and its preference for cuts over the amelioration of social conditions in the most run-down areas of France. Even on the centre-left, the growth of managerialism only accelerated.

IT IS ANGLO-SAXON hubris to imagine that France is unique. The riots in Britain this summer arose out of the same social problems, and were fostered by the same political failures.

The majority of the rioters were from the most down-trodden suburbs of the United Kingdom’s largest cities, and endured social conditions comparable to those in the French banlieues in 2005. The areas from which they came – Tottenham, Salford, Winson Green, Handsworth – are among the poorest in England. They have staggeringly high rates of unemployment, poor standards of education, and a high level of ethnic diversity. These areas have been hardest hit by recent economic developments. The adverse effects of declining consumer confidence, lower investment, and rising unemployment which have accompanied the global economic downturn have been felt more severely in the run-down suburbs of London, Birmingham, and Manchester than anywhere else. The aspirations of consumer society remain high, but those in the lowest socio-economic groups have found themselves being drawn further and further away from their dreams of comfort and security.

At the same time, British politics has moved progressively further away from constructive policy solutions to the social problems in the inner cities. Among the opposition, the transformation has been radical. The Labour Party – still recovering from its defeat at the 2010 election – has continued down the managerialist path first trodden by Tony Blair. and driven by the capture support from the political centre ground has The party has substituted vague talk of “social justice” for its former communitarianism, drifting even further towards a moderate form of economic liberalism. As for the government, despite David Cameron’s much-vaunted talk of the “Big Society,” both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats have overlooked social issues in favour of wide-ranging budgetary cuts, and have embarked on a series of unpopular measures – especially with regard to education – which have restricted, rather than increased, opportunity.

The effect of this has been to produce a lethal combination of worsening social conditions in inner-city suburbs and a dislocation of the most disadvantaged socio-economic groups from mainstream political discourse. Confidence in the government has declined significantly in recent months, and the violent protests in London in November 2010 and May 2011 are a testimony to the extent to which dissatisfaction with both government and opposition has taken hold amongst certain elements of society. This has been accompanied with a growing tendency either to look outside mainstream political discourse for solutions, or to abstain from the political process altogether. At the same time as electoral turnout has declined in recent years, the fortunes of minor – and often extremist – political parties have improved. Having quadrupled its share of the vote in the period from 1997 to 2005, the British National Party succeeded in having three MEPs elected in the last European elections, all from the region around Manchester. Meanwhile, parties like the hard-right UK Independence Party or the left-wing populist Respect alliance have seen their support grow in the inner cities.

Worn down by severe social problems, lacking prospects, dislocated both from government and mainstream political discourse, and staring economic crisis in the face, frustration – perhaps understandably – reached boiling point amongst the inhabitants of Britain’s run-down suburbs in early August. Longing for a prosperity which they could not attain, and abandoned by Westminster, the people of Tottenham, Winson Green, Salford, Handsworth and similar areas simply took matters into their own hands. The seemingly anarchic riots were little more than an outpouring of justified anger and political dislocation, and the looting and violence were an expression of an inchoate sense of addressing the bewildering multiplicity of frustrations which their participants felt welling up within them.

IF THERE IS a single underlying cause for the riots, then, it is to be found in the shocking social problems in Britain’s depressed suburbs and in the gradual abandonment of social questions by mainstream political discourse. There is no simple or easy solution. What is needed is a complete transformation of British political thought. As the economic outlook grows more bleak, the pressures on the public purse will inevitably grow more intense – but throughout everything, there is a pressing and burning necessity for the socio-economic conditions of the poorest and most marginalised sections of society to be improved dramatically and quickly. This requires a recognition that the lives of ordinary men and women cannot be figured merely as numbers on a balance sheet: notions of social identity, of the collective, of the function of government, must be reconsidered anew. A new communitarianism, marked by a desire to help those with least rise from their privations, is essential, and the economic liberalism and anodyne managerialism of the past must be set aside.

Should this not be accomplished, privation, hatred, and violence will rise to a level greater than ever experienced, and the riots of August 2011 will prove to be but a taste of what is to come.

Alexander Lee is an editor of The Utopian.