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GlobeandMail | These are not race riots: Though they began, on Saturday afternoon, with a small protest in Tottenham, north London, over the shooting of a dark-skinned man by police under suspicious circumstances, they quickly became a much wider and less purposeful explosion of youth criminality.
Tottenham was the site of the terrible Broadwater Farm riot of 1985, which also began with a protest over a police shooting – but that was another London, deeply divided along racial lines, with a furious and socially excluded Caribbean community battling an all-white and explicitly racist police force. This week, by contrast, both the rioters and the police are multicoloured.
Nor are these explicitly political riots: There is no message, no motive, no cause, no slogan. Efforts by some opposition politicians to link these events to Prime Minister David Cameron’s spending cuts have been met with incredulity in the affected neighbourhoods, where those cuts have not yet had any municipal effect.
But this is clearly an event with far deeper causes than simple random hooliganism. A night of protesting and looting in one neighbourhood is not an unusual phenomenon in London, where a certain sort of mass drink-fuelled petty crime and low-level rioting never lies far beneath the surface. But three nights, spread across a dozen large neighbourhoods covering the entire expanse of this city of 10 million with scores of buildings set alight – this is an event of a much different magnitude.
There are some things uniting the London rioters. Almost all are under 20. Police reported that the youngest arrested over the weekend was 11 years old, and that almost all were born in the 1990s.
And most, according to their own accounts in interviews and Facebook postings, come from the same neighbourhoods they are looting and burning: Mostly poor neighbourhoods, thick with public-housing towers and short on employment opportunities.
“I think that there was disillusionment among some segments of the rioters,” said Heidi Alexander, the Member of Parliament for Lewisham, south London, where huge fires and large-scale rioting erupted Monday night. “There are high levels of youth unemployment in my district, they have trouble staying on in work or getting education, and they get caught up in this.”
Whether the thousands of rioters actually did express disillusionment – some did say they were angry at police or the world, but many appeared gleeful or greedy – it is clear that most had nothing else to do with themselves, and no reason to fear or feel responsible for the consequences of their actions.
This is a chronic problem in Britain, which has a “lost generation” of young high-school dropouts far larger than most other Western countries.
One European Union study this year found that 17 per cent of Britain’s youth are classified as “NEETs” – for Not in Employment, Education or Training, in other words high-school dropouts with no prospects of employment – the fourth-highest percentage in the European Union. There are 600,000 people under 25 in Britain who have never had a day of work.
Why these disenfranchised youth so explosively made their presence known in such a devastatingly violent way, and how this will all end, is not yet understood. But it puts a dark punctuation mark on what had, until this weekend, been London’s brightest modern era.
Tottenham was the site of the terrible Broadwater Farm riot of 1985, which also began with a protest over a police shooting – but that was another London, deeply divided along racial lines, with a furious and socially excluded Caribbean community battling an all-white and explicitly racist police force. This week, by contrast, both the rioters and the police are multicoloured.
Nor are these explicitly political riots: There is no message, no motive, no cause, no slogan. Efforts by some opposition politicians to link these events to Prime Minister David Cameron’s spending cuts have been met with incredulity in the affected neighbourhoods, where those cuts have not yet had any municipal effect.
But this is clearly an event with far deeper causes than simple random hooliganism. A night of protesting and looting in one neighbourhood is not an unusual phenomenon in London, where a certain sort of mass drink-fuelled petty crime and low-level rioting never lies far beneath the surface. But three nights, spread across a dozen large neighbourhoods covering the entire expanse of this city of 10 million with scores of buildings set alight – this is an event of a much different magnitude.
There are some things uniting the London rioters. Almost all are under 20. Police reported that the youngest arrested over the weekend was 11 years old, and that almost all were born in the 1990s.
And most, according to their own accounts in interviews and Facebook postings, come from the same neighbourhoods they are looting and burning: Mostly poor neighbourhoods, thick with public-housing towers and short on employment opportunities.
“I think that there was disillusionment among some segments of the rioters,” said Heidi Alexander, the Member of Parliament for Lewisham, south London, where huge fires and large-scale rioting erupted Monday night. “There are high levels of youth unemployment in my district, they have trouble staying on in work or getting education, and they get caught up in this.”
Whether the thousands of rioters actually did express disillusionment – some did say they were angry at police or the world, but many appeared gleeful or greedy – it is clear that most had nothing else to do with themselves, and no reason to fear or feel responsible for the consequences of their actions.
This is a chronic problem in Britain, which has a “lost generation” of young high-school dropouts far larger than most other Western countries.
One European Union study this year found that 17 per cent of Britain’s youth are classified as “NEETs” – for Not in Employment, Education or Training, in other words high-school dropouts with no prospects of employment – the fourth-highest percentage in the European Union. There are 600,000 people under 25 in Britain who have never had a day of work.
Why these disenfranchised youth so explosively made their presence known in such a devastatingly violent way, and how this will all end, is not yet understood. But it puts a dark punctuation mark on what had, until this weekend, been London’s brightest modern era.
1 comments:
A different touch here but growing
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/city/127284253.html
Flash Mob curfew
I was such a reader that my mind recently, remembers and recalls the great warning of our great writers, which actually began in the 1950's. I don't read many fiction these days. I try to read more foriegn writers like Haruki Murakami. I am quite a short story lover.
The end of any nation's dominance over economic is here, what it means is unfolding quickly in front of us. Marx was correct but his historical allusions were wrong, but how can one predict so far down the road.
Why I say in a way we are returning to hunter/gathering beginnings, but on a new level and game. The buyers and sellers (in whatever) will play dominance over the debters. S_t they selling human parts already. I always did like the Hunter Warrior even if in urban settings. For I gave up on permanence long ago.
The Empire is Dead. The Mayan after their fall, never again looked for Kings; it wasn't to the fight for Boliva that they elected a national leader, wow, now that are beautiful people.
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