Did London get the riots it deserved? In other words, were last week’s events the work of a mindless minority on the rampage or were they the direct result of a deep resentment felt by a broad underclass of people and cheerfully ignored by the state and its various hangers-on?
The question is not original. At the height of the Paris riots in 2005 Le Monde carried a letter by Alain Badiou, professor of philosophy at one of the city’s prestigious Ecoles. Badiou described how his adopted son had been arrested six times in 18 months and how injury had been added to insult on most of these occasions. The lad’s ‘crime’ was that he was black. ‘Paris’, Badiou concluded, “has the riots it deserves”.
Former London Mayor KenLivingstone said much the same thing, if less elegantly, aboutLondon. He blamed the mayhem on the government’s austerity drive. This had created “social divisions” which were forcing the police into conflict with “local communities”. Joining pointing fingers with him was among others academic and Guardian columnist Nina Power. As she put it, “there is a context to the London riots that cannot be ignored”.
This then is the first type of reaction to what happened – that the riots were, to paraphrase Wordsworth, the spontaneousoverflow of powerful and justified feelings of marginalisation and socio-economic deprivation.
The second type is the one we’ve seen more often in these past few days. It’s simply a matter of falling over each other to find the best adjective - ‘appalling’, ‘disgusting’, ‘shocking’, and so on – and going on to match it with an appropriately appalling, disgusting, or shocking image. It’s been a proper field week for the BBC’s ‘In Pictures’.
Neither of the two leave me too moved. The second is really so much fodder. Shock and especially disgust sell well as far as themedia are concerned and the temptation to indulge must be quiteoverwhelming.
As for the first, I’m not convinced. This was not France 2005. That all started when two teenagers were electrocuted during a police chase. The response by then Home Affairs Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was shocking to say the least. He provoked people by denying the police chase and saying he would rid the suburbs of the racaille (riff-raff). I don’t recall David Cameron using that kind of language about Mark Duggan.
There are also important differences between the Parisian banlieues and London townships. And in any case there was not an ounce of public sympathy for the rioters.
Which is why Labour MPs were so careful last Thursday not to play the context tune. Instead they went on about good old-fashioned law and order, rubber bullets, and water cannon. Which was intriguing.
None of the context-type arguments I’ve heard hold much water. Yes, austerity measures and cuts and so on can’t have helped, but I doubt they were directly related to the riots. It’s rather like saying that high utilities bills cause marriage breakups – rings sort of logical but is actually pretty far-fetched when you think about it.
What took the biscuit for me was Tory MP Gavin Barwell’s point that government should make sure people have something to do over the summer holidays that is not rioting. So patronising, and to think an MP believes that it is the function of the state to entertain people in their free time.
Be that as it may, there were at least two things that struck me about the riots. The first had to do with rhetoric or rather the obscene level of community-babble rammed down our throats.
The ‘hoodie community’ attacked the ‘business community’, causing untold suffering to the ‘law-abiding community’ in the process. The police should have spent more time ‘talking to local communities’, some of whom formed impromptu ‘broom communities’ to help clean up. The torture went on and on.
This is getting seriously pathological. Private Eye has for quite a few years now been poking fun at the terminological inflation. It has also linked the community blah-blah to a general clunkiness about the keeping of law and order. The drift is that the police should spend less time filling out forms about community relations and do a spot of actual policing for a change.
The second thing about the riots I found interesting (and shocking and appalling and disgusting of course) was the looting. It really showed how volatile social conventions – in this case the sacredness of private property – can be. I’d like to think of looting as an extreme type of consumer behaviour. A 100 per cent-off sale if you will, a literal take on ‘buy, borrow, or steal’.
There really is no contradiction between looting and consumerism generally. The logic is basically the same: Must Have.
It’s all about glass really. The implications of a shop window would make the Marquis de Sade scratch his head. On one hand, it makes objects visible and therefore desirable. At the same time, it sets up a physical barrier between object and viewer that can normally only be overcome by resources that will be unavailable to many. There’s so much to the metaphor in ‘window dressing’...
It takes a lot of training to learn that the sheet of glass between one’s good self and the flat screen is sacred, more so since it’s so damn breakable (a perverse streak of its character made necessary by the improbable compromise between visibility and untouchability).
My feelings about the week’s events are mixed. Yes, they were ugly and damaged the lives of thousands of people. They also left four men dead – and that’s not counting Mark Duggan, who everyone seems to have forgotten. For that there can be nothing but revulsion and sympathy.
But I’m not worried in the long-term. London did not deserve these riots and it will leave them behind as sure as night follows day. Nor am I terribly astonished. The logic’s available in all good shops.
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