Scum, thugs, feral rats, wolves, an army of ants on their BlackBerrys ... the dehumanising epithets flew like bricks through a JD Sports window last week. Then came the fightback to mend what David Cameron called “criminality, pure and simple” in our “sick” and “broken” society. The government seems to blame the recent havoc across England solely on individuals with too many rights and too few responsibilities, and appears to think that badly parented kids just woke up one morning and decided to do a bit of free shopping.
There is even talk — from the very same David Cameron who not long ago was saying the State should not intervene to change individuals' behaviour — of curfews, banning face masks, evicting criminals from council housing (social housing), tougher court powers, curbing social media, not to mention more “robust” policing and teaching parenting skills. “We've got to get out there and make a positive difference to the way people bring up their children ... and we've got to be less sensitive to the charge that this is about interfering or nannying,” Cameron said on August 15.
I studied in Liverpool in October 1981, three months after the Toxteth riots. I then moved to Tottenham, north London, in the wake of the Broadwater Farm riot in 1985, and then — after 15 riot-free years in the capital — on to Bradford, northern England, not long after the 2001 riots.
Race a major factor
In all three conflagrations, I remember race being a major factor — between the black community and the police in Toxteth and Tottenham, and between the Asian and white communities in Bradford. There were other factors, too, such as recession and unemployment, to the extent that the Scarman report after Toxteth (though prompted by the 1981 Brixton riots) blamed poverty and deprivation for the troubles. Yet the spark (for Toxteth, Tottenham and Bradford) was a racial one.
The so-called sus [suspicion] laws — heavy-handed stop-and-search methods by police — had been taking their toll, and the arrest of a black man in public led to nine days of rioting in Toxteth. On the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham four years later, the death of a black woman during a police search of her home triggered a battle with police that ended with the murder of a policeman.
During the Bradford riots 10 years ago, Asian and white youths turned on each other and the police, caught in the middle, were accused by the Asian community of failing to provide protection.
Ted Cantle's subsequent report on the Bradford riots concluded that part of the problem was segregated communities living “parallel lives,” and coined the concept of “community cohesion,” later adopted by the Labour government.
Since the riots of 1981 and 2001, Liverpool and Bradford have undergone major regeneration and racial tension has ceased to be an overriding issue. Research published last month (July) by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggests that Bradford's real problem — poverty — has been overlooked, and that is despite the £3bn regeneration. Broadwater Farm saw major redevelopment, leading to a dramatic drop in crime and improved community spirit.
Criminality in these riots
Cantle, now founder and executive chair of the Institute of Community Cohesion, believes that last week's riots were not about race.
“In the 1980s, the riots were definitely about the black community, who were discriminated against, disadvantaged and had a hard time from the police and felt abused by them. A lot of that has changed. With the current riots, clearly, there's an element of basic criminality and sheer vandalism and opportunism. People look around and see newspaper hacking, burgeoning debts, the scandal of bankers' bonuses, MPs fiddling expenses, and they think, ‘This is our turn to get our noses in the trough.' People forgot the difference between right and wrong.” But he thinks the issue of parenting is more nuanced than the government has portrayed it. “There's been so much emphasis on outsourcing parenting — pretending schools, Sure Start centres [for pre-school under—5's] and community organisations are there to look after the kids, rather than reflect that actually parents are still responsible — that I think there's a major concern about how parents have partly felt disempowered by all that, but have also been prepared to take advantage of that disempowerment,” he says.
But Claudia Webbe, an independent adviser to the (London's) Metropolitan police's Operation Trident, which aims to tackle gun crime in the black community, says underlying issues around stop and search remain.
“If you look at young black people in Tottenham now, they are still six, seven, eight times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts. Young people generally, black and white, are facing increasing stop and search. It's meant to be a tool of last resort used with the consent of the community,” says Webbe. “A lot of tension around stop and search was bubbling up and part of that spilled over.” According to Steve Kavanagh, Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner, there was a fear of stop and search in the early 2000s but he insists that as long as it is used appropriately, communities support it.
Street robbery
“In Haringey, north London, this year, there was a 100 per cent increase in street robbery. Now that is people from the black, Asian, Turkish and white communities being robbed of their mobile phones, jewellery and everything else. The overwhelming number of black community representatives don't want us to be fearful of engaging around young, black, disenfranchised people who are committing crimes. They want a police service that is sensitive, professional, but assertive when it needs to be.” Police-community links, he adds, were strong throughout the recent rioting. “The police were not going to solve this alone, they were always going to solve it with the communities. We've had communication teams trying to get rid of rumours, getting emails out with messages that we've all signed up to. That's a hell of a journey from Scarman and even [Stephen] Lawrence was [Stephen Lawrence was a teenager who was murdered by a gang of white racists and the botched ensuing investigation showed the police to be “institutionally racist“]. It's not a race issue or an age issue.”
For Stephen Nze, who was involved in the action in Toxteth as a “naive 16-year-old” in 1981, last week's riots were a combination of reaction to the government and the banking crisis, as well as unemployment — youth unemployment is running at 20 per cent in the U.K., according to the Office for National Statistics. Now a youth worker in Toxteth, he says: “Everywhere's on a tinderbox, with the government and the bankers and all that. These kids are not stupid. I don't agree with violence and looting, none of it — this time round I've been out on the streets supporting the police and trying to stop kids from getting involved — but I do understand it. They went out and reacted. A little five-year-old has a tantrum, well these kids had a tantrum on a big scale.
“Some of these kids, whose parents were most likely involved in 1981, are saying, ‘[The government's] just cut out EMA [educational maintenance allowance, ie a small grant to students staying on in education after 16], we can't go to college or university, they can't give us a job,'” he says. “You've got to think as a young person thinks, and some think there's no future, no hope.” Webbe agrees that a lack of jobs or opportunities were a factor in Tottenham. “The local authorities and other institutions put investment into Broadwater Farm to help to rebuild it, yet they did nothing about the circumstances of the people,” she says. Cuts to youth services are not helping either, she says.
A survey by the Unite union shows that up to 3,000 local authority youth workers in England face losing their jobs by next April, with average budget cuts of 28 per cent this financial year.
“The cuts meant youth services went, such as summer programmes for children and young people who can't afford to go on holiday. This is where the youth services are supposed to step in,” she says. “Connexions services — which are about information, advice and guidance, for example on careers, or health — they've cut all those as well. So a 16— to 17—year—old who can't get an EMA and who can't sign on [for social benefits] until they are 18, there's no one for them to talk to.”
Cantle, though, claims that the riots weren't about poverty — a view he shares with the prime minister. “A lot of the people arrested were not jobless, not without hope and not without money. There were some middle—class people arrested as well,” says Cantle.
But he believes that government cuts could fuel tensions: “I think the cuts will make things worse. What we need at the moment is more investment in social institutions. We're not going to get out of this by heavier policing, however, it has to be done by communities and society itself. That requires money and a change in our values. The way we value things seems to rely heavily on materialism, possessions, the consumer society. But everybody would be suspicious of any government initiative on values. It's got to be a community—led process.”
( Matthew Connolly has lived through the aftermath of previous unrest in Toxteth (Liverpool), Tottenham (north London) and Bradford. ) — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2011
