Young men with a flagrant disregard for the law; vandals who knew that any punishment they might face would not deter them or fit the crimes they were committing. With their parents nowhere to be seen, they smashed property and terrorised local businesses. But it didn’t matter. Whatever they did, their path in life had already been drawn. Whether they were caught or not would have no bearing on whatever career they might choose as the cards they held had already been dealt. Despite their brushes with the law, three of these gilded young men would go on to be some of the most powerful politicians in the country.
David Cameron and Boris Johnson - who have spent the last few days denouncing some of the poorest, most marginalised, under-educated people in the country - along with chancellor George Osborne, whiled away their university days as members of a notorious gang who got their kicks trashing local restaurants, terrorising fellow students, and smashing car windscreens. Johnson, the London mayor who has blamed this week’s riots on “an excessive sense of entitlement”, says he spent a night in the cells after smashing a restaurant window. “Some of us were whimpering for our mothers”, he pleads.
Was it “bad parenting”, “bad morals” or a ”lack of discipline” in their Eton classrooms that caused these uber privileged young men to turn to criminality (these were the three causes of the riots offered by David Cameron this week)?
Ironically, and given that members of the Cameron, Osborne, Johnson Bullingdon club used to throw money at the restauranteurs they had terrorised, it was more likely their “sense of entitlement” - the very accusation Boris Johnson throws at the rioters of Tottenham, Peckham, Hackney and Brixton.
So what of the rioters who looted, burnt and terrorised their own communities across England this week? According to the home secretary Theresa May, “the only cause of crime is a criminal”. For the prime minister: bad parenting, morals and school discipline are to blame. Boris Johnson says it’s an “endless sense of entitlement”. Labour leader Ed Miliband lists our “take what you can culture” and the somewhat vague ”questions of hope and aspiration”.
While politicians have fallen over themselves to denounce the criminality of the rioters, you would struggle to find more than one or two offering a plausible explanation for why the riots happened or what would prevent them in the future (clue: more police, more prison places, tougher enforcement won’t).
While there has been plenty of hot air expelled over police tactics and numbers, there has been virtually no discussion of what drives thousands of young people to loot, burn and vandalise with no apparent fear for the consequences. There has been no discussion of London’s unenviable status as the most unequal city in the developed world, where some of the poorest people in the country live cheek by jowl with some of the richest, and what effect this has on the pysche of young people without hope or opportunities. One young looter told the BBC she was targetting ”the rich people”. “We’re showing the rich people we can do what we want”.
While there have been calls for rioters to “get a job”, no one has explained how they’re suppose to ”get” one when there are 2.5 million people chasing just 500,000 vacancies nationwide. In Tottenham, where the riots began, there are 54 people for every one job vacancy. In the main, people with decent jobs or the prospect of one don’t go out looting.
There has been little acknowledgement that the people rioting – young, poor and marginalised - never have their story told. Record youth unemployment, the tripling of tuition fees, the scrapping of education maintenance allowance, and now youth services being cut and youth clubs being closed. It is largely young people who are bearing the brunt of the economic disaster that broke in 2007 but they are not listened to or spoken to by politicians or the media. One young Tottenham man told NBC news, “Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us…. it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”
That is not to say this was a march for cheaper universities, for jobs or for more youth clubs. This was chaos and violence seemingly without rhyme or reason. People dismissed the looters, muggers and arsonists as rioters without a cause. But looking for a political message among the wreckage misses the point. As someone called Martin Luther King Junior put it,
“Living with the daily ugliness of slum life, educational castration and economic exploitation, some ghetto dwellers now and then strike out in spasms of violence and self-defeating riots. A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. It is the desperate, suicidal cry of one who is so fed up with the powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored.”
Remember this is all taking place against the backdrop of a huge global financial crisis where the poor are being made to pay for the greed and folly of the rich. And it follows a political crisis which saw the very MPs who are falling over themselves to denounce the rioters defrauding taxpayers for (whaddya know) plasma screen televisions, housing costs and massage chairs.
Is it any wonder that a disenfranchised, uneducated group of the poorest people in a hugely unequal country have lashed out in this way? These are young people who can see little hope or opportunity for their future but who have seen those at the top – those who lecture them from positions of power, wealth and privilege - getting away with murder.
I should probably say at this point, I’ve taken it as a given that no one wants to see violence and thuggery, homes and businesses destroyed, innocent people being mugged. But dismissing all this as ”mindless” and calling, as Boris Johnson has, for an end to ”economic and sociological justifications” will not get us anywhere. There’s a reason people are rioting in Hackney and Haringey but not in Henley-on-Thames. It doesn’t take much to work out what that reason is.
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