More on London burning

 



I got some pushback from Kate Ames and Sarah Cain (hi guys!) on Facebook for that last post. I partially blame my long-windedness because I think I was trying to say the same thing as them, that the riots across the UK are a case of the chickens coming home to roost for the politics of austerity.

That said, I'm very reluctant to suggest that this is some sort of direct response to the world's economic turmoil. Indirect, maybe. But apart from a few old-style anarchists who may be mixed in and probably taking fright at all the genuine anarchy going on, I don't think the motivations of the rioters are very political. Many of the perpetrators appear to be experiencing this as a sort of carnival of disorder: they seem to be revelling in their liberty, to use that word in its old, amoral sense.

In many ways, what's going on now is unusual more in its widespread nature than in the depth of the criminality. When I was living in Whitechapel with Duncan and Paul, we were at various points harassed by gangs of local kids; at one point (I was away on this occasion) we had bits of concrete chucked at us while walking down the street; our front door was egged, and rubbish bags set alight on our doorstep when Paul was home one day. Burnt-out cars were a fairly familiar sight on the streets nearby, and in the Diwali-Guy Fawkes period of autumn I used to joke that it felt like Kandahar from all the bought and rebuilt fireworks going off round the estate. You tended to keep to busy areas in that period: even in Harringay, Kate and I once had a firework shot at us when walking down the Harringay Passage.

So what's unusual is really that this has spread so far, and I think that's more a result of things like impunity, which in themselves may result from the weaker-than-usual response of demoralised emergency workers.

All that said, I think indirectly it is a response to the political and economic situation. I wasn't especially well-informed as a teenager, but I knew the Berlin Wall had fallen, what the US and USSR stood for, and had a vague sense of what it meant when one of those empires fell. I think in the same way, most teenagers in Britain have a vague sense that some impossibly rich people lost a lot of money a few years ago, and that everyone else is now being expected to pay for it with reduced benefits and prospects at a time of sharply rising living costs. In that sense, they likely feel they're being treated with contempt, and it's not so surprising if they return the compliment by lashing out at whoever or whatever looks financially secure but physically vulnerable.

I think this is probably made a bit worse by the fact there is a Tory-led government in power, although the scale of the structural adjustment needed in the national budget suggests that Labour would have made cuts on a similar scale (Alistair Darling has admitted as much). The government has made a bunch of unforced errors which have doubtless worsened the situation: the NHS debacle, which seemed ideological and dishonest; cutting housing benefits in London, which may well come to be seen as a factor in this outbreak; and treating cutting the 50% rate of income tax as a priority.

But the biggest problem is probably something they're not wholly responsible for: the fact that the Tories will always be seen as the party of the rich. If a Labour government instituted cuts on this scale (which it inevitably would have done) the labour movement would have torn itself apart between its left and right wings. But at least the unrest would have kept within the family. With a Tory government the disenfranchised feel even more distant from the levers of power, and it's the country that ends up tearing itself apart.