The London Riots
The last few days have been slightly surreal at More a way of life Towers. The Mrs and I were away at the weekend, so only had a rough sense of the trouble on Saturday night from comments on Twitter and a bit of news we saw. Sunday night we got home knackered and crawled into bed fairly swiftly, so it was only really on Monday that a sense of what had been happening filtered in.
And then Monday night hit and suddenly everything got *really* strange. From early evening the news was recounting trouble in various places, but far more, Twitter was full of references to things "kicking off" all over the city. It rapidly became hard to tell what was a real situation and what was just rumour, speculation or plain old mischief. What did become increasingly clear is that the actual situation, wherever it was happening, was spreading and worsening in its ferocity. The footage of that furniture store ablaze in Croydon was, I suspect for others as much as for me, the moment when the real violence of the situation really hit. The sight of the flames entirely engulfing that block, encroaching on the property around it and threatening homes, lives and livelihoods indiscriminately - that was the moment when I felt London was suddenly an odd, alien place. Not a thing you expect after living in a city for more than twenty years.
And all the while the tweets were flying - Lewisham's trouble was online well before it was on the news, likewise trouble in leafy, suburban Bromley of all places. We were in an odd little bubble between three or four sites of conflict, so although it didn't hit us, there were sirens going by in every direction until the small hours, and helicopters passing overhead all night.
What the news was showing was a lot of property damage, and a lot of looting in the midst of it all. Having been away for the start of things, it wasn't until Tuesday that I saw coverage of the peaceful protest in Tottenham on Saturday that at least ostensibly formed the trigger point for the ongoing trouble. It's obviously hard to see the connection between a group of people protesting the death of a man at the hands of the police (and in particular his family's difficulty in getting answers to their questions about the event) with gangs of people on the other side of London smashing in Currys shop windows and having off with a 40" flat screen TV, but an awful lot of column inches have been given over to people trying to make it.
I'm certainly not going to play armchair sociologist, but I'm in no way deaf to the argument that people left shafted by years of political and financial malfeasance and the creation of a society where the people with least end up paying the most to put right the situation created by the greedy and the mega-rich may seize an opportunity to rebel. What is harder to get is why so many of them ended up striking out at homes and businesses in their own communities, damaging the property and lives of their neighbours, many of whom probably share their situation. The only assumption I can make is that they don't feel that they are their communities. Certainly most of those involved who have been willing to be interviewed (that I've seen) haven't articulated their reasons in political or social terms; it's seemed more like it's about an ill-focused 'anger', a sense of exclusion/injustice and being swept up in a mob mentality that ends with them getting 'stuff' that they wouldn't usually be able to afford. And that overrides any sense of fellow feeling that might put the brakes on smashing a window, nicking some trainers, or setting fire to a building people live in. It's hard to imagine anyone who felt they had a stake in their community being quite so carried away.
Conversely of course, the #riotcleanup hashtag brought out those who actually do feel part of the decimated communities (and the wider community - I know people from all over London who descended on the trashed zones with their brushes and binbags yesterday). The pride displayed in Tweets noting that the clean-up had been organised in a matter of hours when it had taken the vile David Cameron four days even to say anything on the situation, let alone come back from his swanky Tuscan holiday, was more than justifiable. The news last night was full of a wide cross-section of Londoners helping to repair their city even while knowing that their work could be undone if Monday's events were repeated. (And note - 'wide cross-section': A surprising number of people seem somehow only to have seen the non-white participants in the looting. I wonder if they were reversely affected when watching the clean-up.)
Yesterday evening, the city felt really, REALLY odd. I walked home down our local high street, where the shops were all closed far earlier than usual (boarded up in some cases), small groups gathered at bus stops and on corners, and there was a strange feeling/tension in the air. I felt that these groups were standing watch - not waiting to take part in trouble, but to prevent it, the way members of other communities had stood up to the rioters and looters the night before. And again, Twitter was full of contradictions - some blatantly false statements about shops being looted alongside the kind of message I could have posted; "I'm standing right outside the shop in question and NOTHING IS HAPPENING". I can't fathom what people thought they were achieving in posting outright lies in such a potentially volatile situation.
In the end of course, the massive police presence quietened London down while other cities bore the brunt, while we spent the night waiting to hear sirens and helicopters again.
And this morning we're back to hearing Cameron mouthing nonsensical platitudes; promising "a society with a clearer code of values, a focus on better parenting and more personal responsibility" and nothing actually tangible while utterly ignoring any of the legitimate questions about his government's policies and their impact on the society he's theoretically leading. While letting the banks away with ever-more-flagrant pisstaking, attempting to dismantle most of the support mechanisms for those least able to support themselves, and watching his Chancellor getting ready to abolish the highest rate of tax for the highest earning.
This is our city. This is our country. This is our leadership. We're fucked, basically.