The riots: put away your Karl Marx

I happened to be in London last week for the riots. I was there when my old hood in East Dulwich got smashed: the Londis, the Post Office, the Palmerston, a pharmacy and a launderette, all done in.

The consensus was that it would have been worse if ED offered anything the rioters wanted. Being mostly a place of maternity and health stores, it didn’t give the looting opportunities of other areas.

Things were worse on nearby Peckham high street: Burger King, Clark’s, Ladbrokes, etc, all raided; Greggs, the baker’s, completely burnt out, front to back.

The riots were enough to produce a kind of hysteria among East Dulwich’s shop-keepers. Told that a mob was already tearing up Forest Hill and coming their way, the whole of Lordship Lane closed down in 10 minutes — at 2 in the PM.

The rumour turned out to be completely wrong, but it showed what panic can do. You don’t even have to have an actual mob to make people skittish.

But what were these riots? What caused them? How come a sleepy place like East Dulwich was affected?

There have been plenty of explanations: from police cuts and Britain’s softly-softly policing style, to festering youth alienation and lack of opportunity. People have blamed the financial crisis and expenses scandal for lowering the moral bar (as in, if they can steal and cheat, why shouldn’t I?). They have decried Britain’s consumerist culture, the boredom of the summer holidays, and the lack of better things to do.

My own feeling is that all the above have some truth to them — especially the last. There was not much better on offer in August, that’s true; smashing up things is fun; and there was an opportunity with police understaffed. Chuck in the organising influence of technology and you have yourselves a dangerous mob.

The images that stayed with me were both from walking around Peckham on Tuesday morning. The first, overhearing a “youth” of about 15 excitedly tell his friends about the “madness” of the night before, a big smile on his face; the second, a normal-looking couple at the back of Greggs, reaching into a garage that had been smashed, and filching a couple of bags from inside.

The riots, which ignited over serious police brutality, became nothing more than entertainment: an excuse for madness. Once started, they created opportunities for others to get involved, as the couple did the next day in Peckham. My bet is they were not the sort of people who would normally have looted a lock-up at 11am, with dozens of people around.

What annoyed me in the aftermath was to hear so many people use the moment to push their own agendas. There are the obvious cases, such as Ken Livingstone drawing attention to Boris Johnson’s foppishness, or Ed Miliband drawing attention to the government’s cuts. But other more subtle ones as well: from the academic who called for more money for youth research (presumably benefiting herself, as much as the youth), to religious groups calling for a return to church, to activists like Naomi Klein (see here) describing the riots as a protest against capitalism. (Strange how the riots were both consumerist and anti-capitalist).

The danger is that such discussions become about all sorts of issues that people want to push, rather than about the thing itself — i.e a series of fairly disorganised youth disturbances. Theoretical and political explanations can be useful, but not if they distract from the basic data — which to me points to something more banal. Unified explanations aside, it could be that the riots were about very little at all.

(Image: J@ck!)

Tagged as: Boris Johnson, Clapham, East Dulwich, Ed Miliband, Ken Livingstone, London riots, Peckham