Phil hits the nail on the head when looking for the reasons behind the London riots:
What people are saying (self included) is that politics doesn’t stop when crime starts. There are reasons why people steal and smash windows; more importantly, there are reasons why most people don’t steal and smash windows, most of the time. (Sunny was more or less on the right track here – but I don’t think the calculation that you wouldn’t get away with it is the only reason why people tend to obey the law, or the most important one.) One or two people whose behaviour isn’t governed by our usual reasons to obey the law is a problem for the police, the social services and politicians, in that order. The problem becomes political first and foremost when lots of people start acting differently – when all those reasons suddenly stop working in a particular place and time.
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What’s it like to grow up in this world – a world where your only consistent role is to ‘consume’, because nobody, at any level, has any interest in you as a worker? What’s it like to be told that you’ve got to take whatever job you can get, on whatever pay you’re offered, and not to depend on the job still being there for you next year or next week? What’s it like to be told that you’ve got to prove you’re actively looking for work before you can sign on as unemployed – or that you’ve got to prove that you’re incapable of work before you can claim disability benefit – and you’ve got to prove these things to someone who won’t get paid if they believe you? And what’s it like to have grown up in a world like this, and then to be told by a government of unprepossessing Old Etonians that you’ve had it far too easy up to now? And then, what’s it like to read that those same politicians, and the people who write the papers you buy, and the police who keep everything under control, are all involved in a network of corruption and deceit?
The riots should not have come as a surprise. The proximate cause, the police murder of Mark Duggan under very dodgy circumstances was exactly the same sort of incident that set off the riots in France back in 2005 and like then you have a large group of marginalised, criminalised young people with no prospects and nothing to lose who have long felt the police to be their enemies, not unjustified. Frustration and anger kicked off the first night of riots once it became clear peaceful protest didn’t achieve anything, the unexpected success of that first night meant the riots would spread, as other frustrated groups took inspiration, while the heavyhanded police repression after the fact added new fuel for anger. Voila, nationwide riots.
The looting and rioting itself is not political, let alone revolutionary, but they had been made possible through the politics of both the current Tory government as well as the previous Labour governments. My coblogger Palau has been predicting them for years as she saw earlier than most how particular groups of young people (young Black men especially, but “chavs” too) had been written off, condemned to a life on the margins of neoliberal Britain. Take enough angry young men, stoke the flames long enough and they will riot.
Which of course is not an excuse for the riots and I feel for the people trapped in them, abandonded by police and under siege by neds; quite a few friends, both pretend internet and “real” ones are living in or near the affected areas and they must be shit scared and angry and I don’t wish this experience on anyone. This is not a game and because this is not a game we need to understand what drives these riots, even if many of the rioters themselves do not quite know why they’re doing it, or are just doing this for kicks. This is too important not to put it in a political and economical context.