THE GREAT BRITISH TRADITION OF THE RIOT

I watched the recent riots from hospital, through the medium of the BBC. Thus events occurring just a few miles away from me might just as well have been occurring in Tripoli, Tehran or Tunis. Even if I had not been in hospital it is likely that this would have been the case, though I am told that there were disturbances in my own street, unreported by the BBC. This it is how it is now, you live in Cairo, Damascus or Bahrain, momentous events occur a matter of kilometres away and yet you watch these events mediated by the BBC, CNN or Aljazeera.
One of the more erroneous features of the reporting, particularly from abroad is the idea that the riot is somehow un-British, this ignoring the recent protests against the cuts, the student revolts last year, the Poll Tax riots, Orgreave, which was in effect a police riot in the tradition of Peterloo, the battle of Grosvenor Square during the Vietnam war, The battle of Cable Street, the tradition goes back generations through the nineteenth and eighteenth century to the Gordon riots and the Luddites. Looting too is not exactly an un-British phenomenon; more took place during the second world war that has been widely acknowledged.

All riots are condemned at the time as mere thuggary, the passion for a good punch up, looting mere greed and opportunistic criminality and of course the recent riots provided evidence of both. But at their very core all riots are in essence political, the statements of the marginalised and disenfranchised. The riot in Tottenham began after the police shot a young black man. By all accounts he was not a particularly pleasant character, a gang member, however the rumour spread that the police had given themselves permission to simply execute him. Whether this was true or not, and the police evidence is somewhat less than convincing, the event tapped into a well of anger within the local community. Distrust and dislike of the police is widespread amongst young Londoners and the violence soon spread.

Now it is a noble thing to fight for free speech, liberty, the right to education and freedom of assembly and in this light the struggle to possess a flat screen TV can, to put it mildly, seem somewhat shallow.*

Some years ago I appeared in a magistrate’s court and it is only when you experience justice at this level  that you are experiencing the bourgeois middle class passing judgement on the rest of us riff raff. Their vengeance can be terrible; hence the wholly disproportionate sentences currently being dished out; this crazy idea that placing the already disaffected young into universities for offenders for relatively minor crimes would be comic if it were not so tragic.

However as the gap between the extremely wealthy and on a lower scale those who can still enjoy what used to called ‘a reasonable standard of life’ and a growing marginalised underclass whose lives are now about to be disproportionately affected by cuts in services such explosions of largely incoherent rage are increasingly inevitable. The tragedy being that those on the sharp end are just the local community shops and services that still operate in some of the most disadvantaged areas and it is not possible to be sanguine and objective about the political roots of this rage when you have been burnt out of your own home.

*If you want to see how those who are disadvantaged are constantly having their nose rubbed in I recommend a glance at the diet of daytime TV, Cash in the attic, Flog It, Homes under the Hammer, Saints and Scroungers, (I kid you not), Bargain Hunt, Wanted Down Under (property search in Australia), A place in The Sun, Heir Hunters, Escape to the Country. They even managed a programme on aspiring artists called Show me the Monet, gerrit!





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