Riotous Disorders
Riotous Disorders
Paul Thompson: Riotous Disorders
After being dragged back from his Tuscan holiday, an understandably grumpy David Cameron proclaimed that the riots gripping British cities were the result of ?pure criminality.? Well, not really. You don?t get 16,000 police deployed on the streets of London to stop standard criminal behavior. The police don?t normally play a game of hide-and-seek with Blackberry-organized mobile yob mobs across the shopping centers of Manchester and Birmingham.
The truth is that the recent riots have engendered a sense of bewilderment among participants and onlookers alike. They don?t really know why they?re doing it, and neither do we. That hasn?t stopped the usual suspects from expounding familiar and frankly tired narratives?for parts of the Right it?s lack of control, for sections of the Left, lack of opportunity. Or as Deborah Orr put it in the Guardian, the blame belongs to liberalism or neoliberalism, the individual or the system.
For Cameron the riots have provided a means to return to one of his favorite themes: broken Britain, this time with the twist that ?pockets? of society are not only broken, but sick. As is typical for the Right, the moral vacuum appears largely without a social context. Just as a pocket is part of a larger garment, social breakdown is part of a broader fabric that cannot be reduced to individual moral failure. Before the dust from the rubble had settled, some leftist observers were blaming ?the cuts? and even the rise in university tuition fees for providing the spark to this tinderbox. Yet this is also deeply unconvincing. The cuts, wrong and often unnecessary as they are, have barely started to have an effect yet, and the people on the streets are unlikely to graduate from anything other than the university of life. It was notable that the only shop not looted in one of the first and biggest London riots was the bookstore Waterstones. In other words, the search for a context within which to locate the action is right, but the object wrong.
Despite the parallels being drawn, this was not a rerun of the riots in Brixton and Liverpool in the early 1980s. Those were conflicts anchored in particular, largely black communities, and even the Thatcher government reluctantly recognized that the causes and consequences were political. This time, despite their beginnings in the police shooting of a black man in Tottenham, the events have not been primarily about race. Rioting has involved mainly white crowds in northern cities and even in parts of London. Rather than defense of community, the actions have been characterized by mobile looting and rucking with police across urban areas.
Another difference is how the media and citizens now cover such events continually and intensively. As a result, the picture has emerged of the least sympathetic rioters ever?wrecking small businesses in their own neighborhoods, burning down landmark buildings, breaking into local resident?s houses and terrifying the occupants, mugging bystanders, and even beating each other up. And then there?s the looting, from the indiscriminate opportunism of any item that they could get their hands on to the targeting of sneakers and TVs?neatly labeled ?aspirational rioting? by academic Clive Bloom.
One of the most confused and misused words in the subsequent debate has been ?community,? as in ?rioters destroying or disconnected from their own community.? But this slice of the underclass?black and white?doesn?t see the world around them as their community. The moral and practical universe is them and their mates, whether in gangs or admiring of them and the broader gangsta culture. This is not so much the absence of social norms, but of parallel and antagonistic ones. As has been widely observed, fear and shame are no longer deterrents, and impulse control is weak. Many families are fractured and frequently dysfunctional, school an experience to be sullenly survived, jobs a distant folk memory. All this is no doubt familiar to an American audience, but not in a UK context.
Of course, in this media-saturated society, norms don?t develop in a vacuum. The disaffected are shaped by our celebrity- and consumer-obsessed culture, in which status, instant gratification, and entitlement appear to trump effort and expertise. As Mary Riddell put it in the Telegraph, ?the typical troublemaker is an alienated, under-educated outcast whose empty greed mimics the unprincipled avarice of the richest in the land.?
Can we have a mature debate on these issues in Britain? In the short term it will understandably be hard to get a hearing for anything that sounds like explanations rather than condemnation. A further constraint is the absence of any quick fixes to the long-term problems that the riots have exposed. We can talk about family breakdown, parenting, and poverty, but where do you start? Early intervention is a proven if partial solution, but is hard to do, contentious, and expensive. Turning around failing schools in the absence of supportive family and community institutions is difficult. Even assuming that there are partial fixes to schools and families, the most serious problem is the disappearance of well-paid, entry-level manual jobs. What we have left are minimum-wage, low-level service jobs that many young people are unwilling or ill-equipped to take.
Given such difficulties and its own predispositions, the Right?s strategy will be one of containment. The Conservatives? policy is already to write off difficult schools and allow more savvy parents to form academies, or ?free schools.? Cameron has announced that his focus will be on combating gangs and empowering parents and teachers to exert authority. Fine?but more discipline in isolation will do no more than keep the lid on until it blows off again in a few years? time. Cuts, while not the cause of recent events, will certainly make any solutions much harder.
Some on the left are predicting a shift to the right, given the impossibility of owning a narrative about moral and individual failure. It will be hard, but we have to connect those failures to the wider dysfunctions of one of the most unequal post-industrial societies in the world, where the looting of society?s assets by the new financial elites is the moral equivalent of the ?aspirational looting? of our shops. Labour leader Ed Miliband laid the ground nicely with his recent speech about taking responsibility at the top and bottom of society. It will take courage and imagination to create a rival narrative and policies, but the alternative is to tail after a failed politics of containment.
