[dehai-news] Panic On The Streets Of London


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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Thu Aug 11 2011 - 14:30:44 EDT


Panic On The Streets Of London

*By Laurie Penny *

09 August, 2011
*Pennyred.blogspot.com*<http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2011/08/panic-on-streets-of-london.html>

I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my
city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running
street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of
roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham.
Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there
have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be
a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of
rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool,
Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago
were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging
the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Britain is a
tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this
happen? And what are we going to do now?

In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened
with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that
arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be
obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now.
David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder 'mindless, mindless'.
Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless, opportunistic theft and violence'.
Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who
has finally decided to return home to take charge - declared simply that the
social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was
"utterly unacceptable." The violence on the streets is being dismissed as
‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’
This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest.
Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on
their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it.
Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping
itself apart.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a
smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those
who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there.
Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark
Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police
cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A
peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community
where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and
order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and
trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer
entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across
the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the
capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is
teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few
people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not
watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the
television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985.
Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the
disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in
a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the
police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from
school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and
certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and
harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a
better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report,
a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

*"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't
riot, would you?"*

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all
blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the
press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

*Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews
and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.*

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to
unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re
paying attention now.

Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down
entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go
out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming
closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least
fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and
communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on
rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised
young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and
nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are
utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.

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: structural
inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few
pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only
for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being
told that 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. And now people
have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days
to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not
anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how
desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty 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.

I’m stuck in the house, now, with rioting going on just down the road in
Chalk Farm. Ealing and Clapham and Dalston are being trashed. Journalists
are being mugged and beaten in the streets, and the riot cops are in retreat
where they have appeared at all. Police stations are being set alight all
over the country. This morning, as the smoke begins to clear, those of us
who can sleep will wake up to a country in chaos. We will wake up to fear,
and to racism, and to condemnation on left and right, none of which will
stop this happening again, as the prospect of a second stock market clash
teeters terrifyingly at the bottom of the news reports. Now is the time when
we make our choices. Now is the time when we decide whether to descend into
hate, or to put prejudice aside and work together. Now is the time when we
decide what sort of country it is that we want to live in. Follow the
#riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. And take care of one another.

*Laurie Penny*, 24, journalist, author, feminist, reprobate. Lives in a
little hovel room somewhere in London, mainly eating toast and trying to set
the world to rights. Drinks too much tea. Has still not managed to quit
smoking. She blogs at
*http://pennyred.blogspot.com/*>

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