Everything Must Go - Riot Night in London

As I write this, I sit in a flat above a row of shops on a market street in Catford, Lewisham.  The shop below me has boarded up its windows.  The sun is shining and the street has an uneasy good humour but the fallout from three nights ago is palpable.

Three nights ago, I arrived in my road and walked straight into a discussion between the shop owners and stall holders.  Everyone was closing up.  Even as we stood together, figures in black hoods moved through the street, first in ones and twos and then in larger groups.  People stepped out of their way.

I went into my flat and turned on the news.  Riots had already broken out in Hackney, Croydon and then, Lewisham.  At the other end of Catford High St, two cars were on fire and rumours of looting were growing.  BBC News elicited panicky phone calls from my relatives.  It was heading my way.  I put some bits in a bag and headed over towards my girlfriend's house.

At the top of Catford High Street, I found a small crowd of residents with two maligned-looking police officers at their centre.  An African man asked the officer if 'It was safe to walk down the High Street'.  The officers looked at one another.  One of them then responded.
'Well, I'd walk down it.'
Master of the non-committal response.  We could hear the sound of distant alarms.

Some of us began to walk down it and arrived into the middle of a mob of around 200 'youths' in the process of smashing their way into Argos.  The size of the group was both surprising and ridiculous.  We watched as they forced their way inside and then began to emerge with HD cameras, arms full of jewelry and wide screen tvs on their shoulders, their faces masked or hooded, some with Halloween masks.  The looters milled around, some actually queuing to get inside the shop.

There was no reaction from the police.  Nobody stopped them for the 30 minutes or so I could see them.  I couldn't get a signal on my phone.  Either the network was overloaded or the Police were dampening it out of their fear of twitter.  Just as I headed down a back street towards my girlfriend's house, three riot vans finally arrived.  They didn't even stop beside the rioters but some of them broke off, legging it down the same street with their new televisions.

I suddenly found myself isolated amid a group about twenty masked looters.  They were laughing and joking amongst themselves, euphoric.  At that moment I realised that I was completely cut off.  My phone didn't work and even if I could call the police, nobody would have come.  If they wanted to rob me, it was entirely up to them.
As it happened, they had other things on their mind.  Some carried their new appliances into pleasant, well built houses on the quiet suburban road and the rest vanished into another side street.  I walked on to my girlfriend's house and the sight of people vanishing loot into the house opposite.

We then watched as the riots spread from borough to borough.  Still David Cameron refused to break from his holiday.  It seemed that only when the pleasant, middle class area of Ealing was hit that Cameron had something he could understand.  In the Londo-Caribbean household in which I then sat, there was discomfort at the number of hooded black faces, but there were others too.  As the riots spread to Birmingham and the North of England, the colour of the faces changed but the problems were the same.

'Unacceptable'  Scolded Theresa May uselessly.  A more upper class, haughty woman would be difficult to imagine.  What could she possibly say when she has no mental comprehension of or physical association with the areas and people who were bringing the capital to its knees.  When Cameron returned, the Conservative government's fears and priorities became obvious.  They adopted exactly the same tactics faced by every ruling elite in a civil uprising.  Criminalisation and sounding tough, denigrating the numbers of rioters (small of course).  Before even the results of the Mark Duggan inquiry were concluded, phrases such as 'No possible justification' were heard.  How could they know before the facts had been established?  Their greatest outrage was at the national embarrassment caused with 2012 looming.  Cameron blustered and soundbit but clearly could not comprehend how he had become the first Prime Minister to face riots on this scale in living memory.  This was not the country that Dave was born to rule.

Many people have tried to offer reasons for why the city's order failed so badly over those nights.  The thing that struck me was the total disconnection between those in power and the people and areas hit by riots.  This disassociation was not just with the politicians.  The media were spectacularly guilty of this, misidentifying Lewisham and mistaking Hackney for Deptford.  The most embarrassing was their quotation of a rioter's incitement via twitter to hit the streets in which they translated 'endz' as meaning 'gang'.  Anyone who has been to South London wouldn't make that most basic and sensationalising of mistakes.  They looped riot footage from previous nights and turned the event into a spectator sport, whilst at the same time missing key developments and information that would have been useful to the public.  But more serious is the complete inability of politicians to recognise what happened as anything more than a spate of criminality arriving as a bolt from the blue.  In this, Cameron is like the child who puts his hands over his own eyes and believes himself invisible.  Just because he can't see, doesn't mean it isn't there.  As with every walk of life, if you cannot identify when you have a problem, what hope can you have of finding a solution.

In any case, a solution is no easy thing.  Being white and middle (ish) class, my own perspective and understanding is far from complete, but as someone who has worked in Hackney and lived in Brixton, Streatham and Lewisham, I am not blind to the world in which the riots materialised.  One of the things that has struck me in the days after the action has been the pleasant reassuring feeling of seeing police, not even that many police in Catford's case, on patrol, walking down a High Street at night.  This is something I have scarcely seen in my time in Lewisham or Brixton.  In South London particularly, we're all used to the sirens and the occasional flash of a high vis Ford Focus, (unlike some places, sirens are nothing new in Catford) but to see police on the streets has a calm purpose and civility that cannot be bought by one hundred invisible rapid response teams.  In short, the number of police on the street two or three nights later does not feel excessive to me.

As for the rioters, whilst there have been a number of high profile exceptions - the ballerina, the teaching assistant, the millionaire's daughter non-withstanding - Cameron cannot and should not attempt to communicate with them directly.  So vast is the gulf of empathy that seeing millionaires like Cameron, Osbourne or May purporting to have any clue about life on an estate is stomach turning.  They need to find people who understand, make them visible.  They need to stop hiding behind the bottled bluster and Daily Mail outrage that does nobody any favours.

The lives and often, the values of people left to fester out of sight and mind, not in-keeping with the 2012 presented view of Britain are toxic to a degree we haven't even begun to understand.  Places where teenagers kill one another over 'respect', where the successful guy with the nice car and good house is the local drug dealer.  Places where adults are killed by gangs of children and smart young men shouldn't stand up for their girlfriends for fear of brutal, violent reactions long divorced from any reason, proportion or perspective.  That toxicity was the true cause of the riots.  It already existed.  Over the weekend it was merely focused by a dealer's death, targeted by twitter and BB chat and emboldened by the fact that for three days, nobody stopped it.  It is not evil, or even 'sick' as the Prime Minister labelled it, presumably in another mistaken usage of urban slang.  It is a mantra, a way of life that has risen out of places so forgotten by 'clean cut' society that the darkest of actions carry limited consequence.

In those places, if you don't work at school or work outside of it (in the legal economy), the state will provide housing and care that will increase with the number of children you have.  If you are under 18, you are ideally qualified for holding guns and hiding drugs as the state cannot meaningfully punish you and the gang can cast you adrift at any moment.  That this way of life has become normalised, packaged and even glamourised has created ghettos, not just of people and places - of 'endz' in its proper usage, but also of values so skewed that those who do not know or conform to their rules can and do end up dead.  This is because these areas are not policed by police.  In places like that, the police are occasional visitors, like the clean freak aunt who occasionally drops in for a dawn raid or one off arrest.  The everyday policing is left to the gangs and their codes of respect, an ideology shaped too by the playground mentality of children in which the latest trainers or Iphone denote more status than any GCSE could ever hope to.  This creates a terrifying, urban (Unlike with Cameron, not a byword for black) Lord of the Flies society, but one in which the adults are actually present and at best powerless, at worst complicit as shown by the accounts of parents in Lewisham dropping their kids off by car so they could go looting.

The most terrifying thing about the London riots is that they have shown what is possible.  They have shown that outside of these ghettos of values, wider society is not so strong.  Cuts, efficiencies and the death of values in politics have left us vulnerable to the cynicism and instant gratification of the ghetto ideology as shown by the number of 'ordinary people' who joined in and fanned the flames, 'caught up' in the riots.  The police are beleaguered and lest we forget, recently decapitated by the seemingly distant phone-hacking scandal.  The press, especially 24 hour rolling news has been shown to be devoid of value and context, playing the riots more for its own ratings than to give information to people who needed it.  News 24 was like a puppy dog chasing its own tail, excitable but bemused as riots bounced around like so many brightly coloured balls.  The Conservative government by its makeup alone is a slap in the face to any hope of social mobility even without their policies on EMA and University tuition, and lest we forget, it is less than a year since the expenses affair showed our politicians to be truly, madly, deeply corrupt.

But whilst the institutions and their leaders may fail us, there is no shortage of evidence that good people still exist and in large numbers.  The broom army, the nobility of parents who lost children but still appealed for calm, the dignity of so many victims.  London in particular has never ceased to surprise me in the number of selfless displays of humanity from a purportedly unfriendly big city.  But to my mind, what we lack is a social alternative, a positive ideology that we can take to the grim places and present as a different option to 'respect', to merely accruing big tvs, big trainers and big cars.  Cameron's Big Society is flawed in every way apart from the necessity to create a means by which everyone can invest themselves for a positive end.  The Big Society in its current form fails because it asks people to volunteer their time whilst cutting services, expecting sweeping, common magnanimity to take the place of government social provisions.  What Cameron has failed to realise is that a wide-scale social change like the one he hopes for does not come out of a blue sky focus group to be implemented from the top down by people who are actually above society, insulated by wealth and breeding.  Rather social change comes out of unrest, anger even, in short, exactly the kind of scenes we have just witnessed and for it to happen, the status quo, and the institutions that perpetuate it must be fundamentally altered.

Chief amongst this is for us to elect people who properly understand the people they represent.  A coalition of  teachers, youth leaders, engineers, scientists, outreach workers, business people small and large.  We must get rid of this young, airbrushed, branded professional politician who is good for nothing more than playing politics.  In doing so, we must not expect them to be squeaky clean or without prejudice.  The politicians we have now are a response to the sanitising, corrosive effect of media scrutiny, but with Murdoch's power on the wane, we have a chance to put some real people into power.  Politicians need to be seen as people who have succeeded in their chosen field and won the true, actual respect of their community.  They need to have a connection to the communities they represent.  They don't need to be perfect but accountable, accessible and as recognisable to the people on the estate as to those in the ghettos of Eton and Oxford.  I suspect that there are some politicians like this in our parliament, but they lurk on the back benches, cowed by the superpoliticians into keeping their real opinions in party line check.

Whilst it may be a pipe dream, the best way to improve society is to properly represent the society that you govern, so that when issues arise, you have a means by which you can understand them and not, as both Cameron and Mayor Boris have done, incomprehensibly argue that massive city-wide social unrest is not in some way, a product of the way the country is run.