The England riots - 2011 (essay)

The England riots - 2011

Another day is done. The moon is out and shining.
But behind you, the TV is burning.

 ~

England is burning. Frightening, but not surprising. After all, didn’t we say this would happen? Didn’t we warn that this would happen? The kids will have enough eventually, we insisted. The cuts are going too deep, and they will fight back, it’s only a matter of time. It’ll happen all over again! Remember the ‘80s? we said.

We said that this would happen.

Or did we? Is this what we really meant? Is this what we had in mind? Is this what we foresaw?

People’s homes smoked-out, smouldering skeletons; streets shells of their former selves; local shops looted and livelihoods lost; young men run over and shot.

No, this isn’t what we meant, we couldn’t have imagined…

What has happened? To make things feel much more wrong? Something’s changed, things have changed, I don’t know what to think, to be honest; but something has changed.

 ~ 

By 4pm, rumours of a riot about to kick off in the city centre are circulating in the office. Buses have come to a standstill. Cars are on fire. Shops are putting their shutters down early. Even Boots, it must be bad.

Walking down one of the main shopping streets, you think: it could happen here, this street looks similar to that one in Croydon before it got smashed up last night; they could get something to mask their faces with from the costume shop opposite Poundstretcher, they do Halloween stuff.

There’s not tension in the air as such, more an agitation, the sense that we are about to lose control. Each siren that sounds that day signals something more sinister. The workmen drilling the road suddenly make a deep thud, setting off a nearby car alarm, followed by more sirens, there’s been a road accident, so a traffic diversion, and by the time you’ve reached Asda? Defiant beats blasting out from a young man’s headphones.  It’s like everything’s been tuned to a different pitch. My head feels a bit weird. And we’re all wondering: will it be our city next?

(Do we want it to be our city next? No, we don’t want the violence. But perhaps just to catch some of the illicit thrill that bounces off of it all? To have something wake us up, disrupt routine, instigate change?

But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish, illicit excitement of wartime […] a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessnesss. […] Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook)

By 10pm, I hear police helicopters hovering overhead.

~

Don’t attempt to politicise what has happened, they say. There are no deeper social or economic explanations for this, they say.

But there’s no need to try and politicise it, for it already is political. Everything is political. Same for social and economic context. Everything happens within a social and economic context. You can’t escape it.

And you do have to ask: ‘why’?  Why is this happening? Who is doing it, and why? And why now? Yeah, I know hearty, arty analyses aren’t on trend these days, but we do have to ask, ‘why?’ We do have to go beyond, ‘they’re just a bunch of mindless yobbos, lock ‘em up and throw away the key’. And in doing so, that doesn’t mean we condone the violence, want to hug the hoodies. We’re not seeking to justify the violence; but the reasons for it, the underlying causes:

Poverty, perhaps? Police racism; cuts to EMA; a consumerist, social-mediated culture that breeds selfish individualism; bad parenting, failings of the education system? The effect of growing up on estates, in cities, that have a history of this sort of thing - violence, antagonism, hostility towards authority, where things never seem to get any better, and there’s not much left to lose?  In Birmingham, they say it’s inter-racial tensions; for London, police racism lies at the root of it; for Leicester, Salford, Wolverhampton, it’s maybe none of the above, all of the above, and more. It defies simple explanation, an ultimate all-encompassing conclusion.

But it is sad, this sickness, it is sad (and remember, you can ask: ‘why?’, seek to understand, and still condemn); kids having slipped through the cracks now trying to crack everything up. Many have asked:  ‘where were their bloody parents?’ Well, maybe the kids would like to know too. ‘Chuck ‘em in prison’, the kids with nothing to lose - and why not? They’ll get fed, and perhaps the chance to train up in a trade; more than they get now.

Though it wasn’t just young unemployed lads, children, looting and robbing and setting things on fire. Respectable middle-class newspapers have been wringing their headlines in shock at the young middle-class girls – ballerinas! uni graduates! Olympic ambassadors! - who have been charged for theft and criminal damage. ‘How could this happen’, they cry? As if we can get our heads round the male underclass going out on the rampage . But nice, respectable, middle-class girls? What on earth could possibly make a nice, respectable, middle-class girl suddenly flip?

(Remember, you can ask: ‘why?’, seek to understand, and still condemn).

~

Turns out there was a riot in the city last night.  The women in the office are on it: ‘It’s just mindless.’ ‘It’s awful’. ‘Have you got a Metro?’ ‘They should be made to pay, why should we?’ ‘No-one was talking on the bus this morning, everyone was reading the newspaper’. ‘Why are they doing it?’

Walking down the same street as yesterday, Poundstretcher’s been smashed; windows are boarded-up (though hang on, hasn’t that one been boarded up for a while now?); shattered panes of glass; sloppily scrawled anarchy signs on the outside walls of the train station, and police on patrol, as another day dims, and we wonder whether it’ll happen again. It’s 5pm, but nothing more untoward as yet.

A couple of community support officers stop by a fast food restaurant to check in on an elderly man, dishevelled, head in his hands, slumped over a table by the window which looks out onto the smashed-up street.

 ~

(Remember, you can ask: ‘why?’, seek to understand, and still condemn).

But then a part of me doesn’t want to attempt to analyse this situation, fix it into a theoretical framework, contextualise it, X, Y and Z it. Quoting Marx, going off on one from some intellectual pedestal, referencing history, economic factors, and social indicators, can be useful, important, in helping us to understand all of this (whilst also maybe making ourselves feel better, and somewhat superior, in the process).

But with that, there’s the danger of becoming too detached from the human tragedy of it all. Of it leaving you cold. To theorise moments such as these almost feels like an exploitation of the situation, a commodification of it. You can stuff your book on ‘Deconstruction and Feminism’, it’s about time we started building things back up again. What can theory say to those families who had to escape from their flats in fear as the fires started to rage last Saturday night? What can it say to those shop owners who’ve just witnessed their lifetime’s hard work go up in flames? How does theory xyz relate to the tears and the terror of it all? What can it do?

Some things happen which you cannot comprehend, cannot think much about beyond, ‘this is sad, inexcusably bad’, and you just need to feel it, and not think too much about it, ‘cause thinking doesn’t seem be able to get you anywhere, anymore. It can’t always bring back what’s been lost.

(No, this isn’t what we meant, we couldn’t have imagined…)

~

Along a different street this time, one of Waterstones’ windows has been smashed, the one that displays the Costa Coffee sign. But wait a minute, (walking along, there seems to be less people in town today), why are you feeling sorry for a corporate chain that’s had one of its windows smashed? I thought you were down with that sort of thing! You felt pretty righteous on seeing those chain stores smashed up along Piccadilly in March. After all, those corporations can afford to fix a single window.

But why does it all now seem so wrong? ‘Fires’ and ‘riots’, ‘riot girls’, have taken on a different tone, they leave a different taste in the mouth, conjure new meanings in the mind.

Yes Mr Cameron, it is sickening, (nice to see you by the way, four days after the first fire was lit, and you’re attacking the police for not doing enough, quickly enough? Nice holiday?). Yes, it is sickening, seeing a young injured man, bleeding onto the pavement, being robbed; reading that Age Concern buses and independent music warehouses have been torched, and hearing the callous laughter of young rioters as they delight in ruining someone’s livelihood.

And yet, in response to the kids who may just have had about enough of the cutbacks, this week it was Cameron’s turn to say ‘Fightback!’ (Yeah, let’s get on it, MAN!).

Something else co-opted, twisted; things have changed, and I don’t know what to think, to be honest.

~

Could the cycle repeat itself, before too long? (2008 – stock market crash; 2010 – the cuts; 2011 – the riots. And again; 2011 – stock market crash…) Those bloated men in suits working Wall Street are looking panicky again.

Oh, but none of it’s connected, they say. None of it’s connected.

And they’re right, it’s not connected - in any simple, coherent way. We don’t automatically go from the arrogant assumptions of the American president, to banking collapse, through to announcements of government spending cuts, resulting in people on inner-city estates finally feeling the pinch too much, so they end up punching back. No, it’s not as clear-cut as that. But the connection, the thread linking it all, albeit in a knotted, messy kind of way, is there. Though it never gets teased out, because they say none of it’s connected. And so those in power responsible for a lot of the mess get away with it; ‘cause if the global economy does collapse again, it won’t be Murdoch’s mates in government and on Wall Street who’ll pay, and take the blame. We’ll end up having a go at the teachers who dare strike for one day to protect their pensions.

And because those in power never get called out, we shouldn’t be surprised if all this does happen again: the crash, the cuts, the riots. (But this isn’t what we meant…) With a Prime Minister who insists what we’ve seen on the streets this week has nothing to do with poverty, and a Chancellor of the Exchequer who refuses to budge on his economic policy… no, we shouldn’t be surprised. ‘Cause with such stubborn intention to put ideology before reality, reality will only end up biting harder.

In the office, colleagues are cutting jobs, of the low-paid/part-time/admin variety, resulting in a fair number of women with children becoming unemployed. And I’ve had e-mails from kids who were unsuccessful at getting a place on the council’s apprenticeship scheme this year, begging for a second chance, ‘cause without this, they just.don’t.know.what.they.are.going.to.do.

Oh, but none of it’s connected, they say. None of it’s connected.

On the streets of this city, you can smell the stench of poverty, it lingers, it's always there.

Oh, but that has nothing to do with what happened in town Tuesday night, they say.

On Newsnight, a debate on the riots saw the older white participants shout down the two young black participants.

Oh, but that is in no way indicative of what lies behind what’s been happening on the streets this week, they say.

And on the news, reports of what sparked the first riot, the shooting of a young black man by police, and how he didn’t shoot first, are buried at the bottom of the bulletins.

Oh, but that doesn’t hint at what else may lie behind what’s been happening on the streets this week, they say.

(Remember, you can ask ‘why?’, seek to understand, and still condemn).

And whilst we're on the subject of the media, well, Murdoch and co., and their pals in Parliament and the police, have also shown themselves to be callous, cruel and completely amoral. Oh, it’s all been spilling out this summer! The whole system’s corrupt, no wonder we’re f*****!

Oh, but none of it’s connected, they say. None of it’s connected.

~

We board up the windows, sweep away the glass, the question that’s now being asked is: ‘What can we do to improve London’s image in time for the Olympics?’ Priorities, people! We must quickly paper over the cracks, no time for those hearty, arty analyses. Shut up and get on with things. Keep calm and carry on. We’re good at that, us Brits. Bits of gift shop tat are adorned with the slogan, we sell it right back to ourselves.

But then, who can blame us? For just wanting to carry on. Isn’t that what we all do, as individuals, every day, anyway? Put our faces on and pretend everything’s okay, even though it’s not (it’s really not)?  To stop and attempt to probe further, to ask: ‘why?’, 'what's really going wrong here?' can seem frightening, too overwhelming. It might mean we have to change.

~

It’s all so hard to comprehend. You try and get your head around it: ‘the worst scenes of violence the police have ever seen’; living through history; (another trip to the photocopier, you try to get your head around it), ‘it looked like a war zone’.

We’d heard about this sort of thing happening in the ‘80s, when our parents were the age we are now. (But no, we couldn’t have imagined…) We’re familiar with those tales of urban unrest, we’ve sung about Ghost Towns and White Riots, insisted those songs still spoke to us, still meant something today.  But now that it’s actually happened, to us, in our time, now; well, things have played out slightly differently, and those songs don’t quite up sum up 2011.

(No, we couldn't have imagined... What has happened? Something’s changed, things have changed, I don’t know what to think, to be honest.)

And then you go back to that one big question:  what can you do?  We grasp at the small glimmers of hope shining through, those things which make England good: local communities coming together to clean up the wreckage, multi-faith peace rallies gathering in city centres, to spread a more positive message.

And yet, there’s the sense that something much bigger needs to shift, it’s not enough. But you don’t know what. It’s all too massive, too much. And even if you think you come close to an explanation, there’s really no-one listening (is there?), those powers-that-be, they don’t want to know, for, ‘it’s got nothing to do with poverty, society’, they say. It all comes back to the individual.

The individual must take responsibility.

And yet the individual seems ultimately, insignificant. Unable to make any real difference.

This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention. Perhaps […] we do not believe enough. Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. He would go into Parliament and make fine speeches – but what use are fine speeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters?

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

~

Another week is done. No moon tonight. Too cloudy.
Behind you, the fires on the TV have burnt out.

But outside, sirens still sound.

By Michelle Wright

Summer 2011