The United Kingdom may be spending the first few days of its summer holiday season in a state of shock at the speed and scale of rioting and looting in London and other major cities such as Liverpool, Bristol, and Birmingham. Leading politicians have returned early from family holidays, Parliament has been recalled, and more than 16,000 policemen will be out on London streets on Wednesday. The trigger for the current rioting may have been the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, aged 29, when police stopped the car carrying him in Tottenham area, one of London's poorest neighbourhoods, on the night of August 4. The following day events went out of control at the end of a peaceful gathering by Mr. Duggan's family outside a local police station — and within hours, rioters were on the rampage. Since then, mobile phones and other electronic gadgets have been used to specify meeting points for more violence and looting across London and elsewhere. Chain stores have been targeted, but so have local shops and businesses of long standing and good reputation, in what amount to bouts of consumerist looting. There is growing public anger against the failure of the police to act effectively and in time, and even calls for vigilantism.
What is clear is that the government is doing its best to obscure the serious underlying issues, which have to do with crime on the streets but even more with deprivation, joblessness, and low morale in society. In the current financial climate, the poorest have been hit hardest by public spending cutbacks. The local council, Haringey, has cut its youth budget by 75 per cent at a time when the central government abolished maintenance allowances that have kept young people in education for the crucial two years after compulsory schooling; it has also ended job-related youth funding. Even the police, like all other British public services, face cuts and have to work under target-driven management systems, which load frontline staff with paperwork and leave their seniors remote from life on the beat. Those factors, quite apart from persistent tensions between the police and Britons of Afro-Caribbean descent, may well have been responsible for the police's failure even to meet Mr. Duggan's family and friends in what was to have been a one-hour silent vigil. The protesters were kept waiting for four hours, at the end of which the event was hijacked by outsiders, who may have had their own resentments over being excluded from consumer benefits in an increasingly divided society. This whole chapter holds a mirror up to contemporary British society, and the image is not a pretty one.
