[Reader-list] Britain’s Riots: A Society In Denial Of The Burning Issues

[A. Mani]

Britain’s Riots: A Society In Denial Of The Burning Issues

by Finian Cunningham

Britain saw its third consecutive night of widespread burning of
properties and looting as riot police failed to contain gangs of
masked youths marauding several parts of the capital, London.

There were reports too of violence fanning out to other cities across
Britain. And some commentators were even suggesting that the British
Army might have to be redeployed from Northern Ireland to help restore
order. Armoured police vehicles are now patrolling London streets amid
calls in the media for the use of water cannons and plastic bullets.

Politicians, police chiefs and the media have reacted to the chaos by
labelling it as the result of “mindless criminality” that has
seemingly sprung from nowhere. ‘The Rule of the Mob’ declared the
rightwing Daily Telegraph. ‘Mob Rule’ is how the more liberal
Independent put it.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25946


Home Secretary Theresa May stridently denounced “unacceptable
thuggery”. London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Tim Godwin vowed
that culprits would be tracked down and brought before the courts. He
appealed to Londoners to identify individuals caught on CCTV and
amateur video footage.

Nearly 500 arrests have been made so far and police numbers in the
capital have been tripled overnight to 16,000, with officers being
drawn in from other parts of the country.

Although the arson attacks on commercial and residential premises do
have an element of criminal spontaneity by disparate groups of youths,
it is simply delusional for Britain’s political leaders, police forces
and the media to claim that it is all a matter of law and order.

The burning issues that need to be addressed to explain the outburst
of arson, looting and rioting are endemic racism endured by Britain’s
black community and, more generally, the deepening poverty that is
increasingly racking British society.

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron cut short his summer holiday
in Italy by flying home to London to hold a special “emergency
security” meeting with other Cabinet members.

Speaking outside Downing Street today and visibly vexed by the
unfolding chaos, Cameron condemned “pure and simple criminality that
must be defeated”. The government, he said, stands with “all
law-abiding citizens”.

Opposition Labour party leader Ed Milliband and the Conservative Mayor
of London Boris Johnson are also making hasty returns to the capital
from abroad to deal with a crisis that seems to be spiralling out of
control. The British Parliament is to be recalled from its summer
recess later this week so that “all parliamentarians can stand to
together” to face down the sudden disorder.

The disturbances – the worst in almost 30 years – began last Saturday
in the rundown north London inner-city area of Tottenham. That
followed the shooting dead two days earlier of a young black man by
police officers.

Mark Duggan was fatally shot by an armed police unit as he sat in his
car. Police claimed that the man was threatening to use a gun.
However, family and friends of the 29-year-old victim strongly denied
that he was armed or involved in any criminal activity. The death is
the subject of a police inquiry, but it has emerged that only two
shots were fired in the incident, both by police officers.

Sinisterly, BBC news reports on the killing have invariably showed
what appeared to be a family photo of Duggan taken before his death in
which he is seen holding up his hand up in mock gangster style.

Angered by what they saw as a gratuitous police shooting and lack of
immediate answers from authorities, the mixed black and white
community in Tottenham held a vigil for the victim on Saturday. With
tensions running high in the area, the peaceful rally turned into a
riot against police, and several properties, including police cars,
were attacked and set alight.

Since then, similar disturbances have now spread to other parts of the
capital, including Peckham, Brixton, Hackney, Lewisham and Clapham. A
Sony factory was reduced to a charred shell in Enfield in north
London. In the outer south London district of Croydon – several miles
from Tottenham – there was a huge blaze last night after a large
commercial property was torched. Even the affluent, leafy borough of
Ealing in west London saw upmarket boutiques and residences attacked
and destroyed by fire.

The distraught owner of the razed family business in Croydon struggled
to comprehend why his 150-year-old furniture shop had been targeted.
Nevertheless his few words of disbelief had a ring of truth that the
politicians and media commentators seem oblivious to. “There must be
something deeply wrong about the [political] system,” he said.

Police forces are seen to be struggling to contain the upsurge in
street violence, with groups of youths appearing to go on the rampage
at will, breaking into shop fronts and stealing goods. A real fear
among the authorities is the spreading of disorder and violence to
other cities, with reports emerging of similar disturbances in the
centre of Birmingham in the British midlands, and further north in
Nottingham, Liverpool and Manchester.

Inner-city deprived black communities in Britain complain of routine
heavy-handed policing that is openly racist. Community leaders tell of
aggressive stop-and-search methods by police that target black youths.
The community leaders say that racist policing is as bad as it was
during the 1980s when riots broke out in 1985 after a black woman,
Cynthia Jarrett, died in a police raid on her home in Broadwater Farm,
London.

In the latest spate of violence – on a much greater scale than in the
1980s – there is no suggestion that subsequent street disturbances to
the initial Tottenham riots are racially motivated. The growing number
of areas and youths involved in arson, rioting and looting do not
appear to be driven merely out of solidarity for the young black
victim of police violence last week, although that may be a factor for
some. Many of the disturbances in London and elsewhere seem to be
caused by white and black youths together and separately.

But there is one common factor in all of this that the politicians and
media are studiously ignoring: the massive poverty, unemployment and
social deprivation that are now the lot for so many of Britain’s
communities.

Britain’s social decay has been seething over several decades,
overseen by Conservative and Labour governments alike. As with other
European countries and the United States, the social fabric of Britain
has been torn asunder by economic policies that have deliberately
widened the gap between rich and poor.

The collapse of manufacturing bases, the spawning of low-paid menial
jobs, unemployment and cuts in public services and facilities have all
been accompanied by systematic lowering of taxation on the rich elite.
Britain’s national debt, as with that of the Europe and the US, can be
attributed in large part to decades of pursuing neoliberal policies of
prosperity for the rich and austerity for the poor – the burden of
which is felt most keenly in inner-city neighbourhoods.

David Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal Coalition government has greatly
magnified this debt burden on the poor with its swingeing austerity
cuts since coming to office last year. Ironically, only days before
the latest burnings and riots, British government spokesmen were
congratulating themselves for “making the right decision” in driving
through crippling economic austerity measures that have so far spared
the United Kingdom from the overt fiscal woes seen elsewhere in
Europe.

But as thousands of Britain’s youths now lash out at symbols of
authority/austerity, breaking into shops to loot clothes and other
consumer goods that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford, the
social eruption may be just a sign of even greater woes to come for
the Disunited Kingdom.

Finian Cunningham is a Global Research Correspondent based in Belfast, Ireland.

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