august 2011: a riot of our own

7/24/2019 August 2011: A riot of our own

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August 2011: a riot of our own Jonny Jones

On 7 August 2011 the Observer ran a column by Nick Cohen withthe headline “No riots here, just quiet, ever-deeper misery”.1 After

outlining the Tory attacks on working class people, he states, “These arrantinsults ought to push the most mild-mannered people into revolt. Yetin Britain they provoke only students to riot. The wider public remainsresigned rather than enraged; indifferent rather than incandescent”.2 Thearticle was obsolete before the newspaper had hit the newsstands. Theprevious day had seen the eruption of a riot in Tottenham that was tospread across the country in the biggest wave of rioting for 30 years.

On 4 August the police had shot dead a 29 year old man named MarkDuggan near Tottenham Hale tube station. The reports that emerged weredesperately confused. The BBC website reported that three shots had beenfired, two by police and a third by Duggan.3 The Telegraph was even lesscircumspect, reporting that “a policeman’s life was saved by his radio lastnight after gunman Mark Duggan opened fire on him and the bullet hitthe device. Armed police immediately returned fire and Mark Duggan, 29,

1: The arguments in this article were greatly strengthened by discussions I had, both in

person and online, during and after the riots. I would especially like to thank Ali Alizadeh,Mark Bergfeld, Anindya Bhattacharyya, Robin Burrett, John Game, Steve Henshall, TashShifrin and Mike Simons. Chris Harman’s 1981 article “The Summer of 1981: a Post-Riot

Analysis” remains an indispensable text for understanding the dynamics of riots.2: Cohen, 2011.3: BBC website, 4 August—www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14423942

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36 August 2011: a riot of our own

who was under surveillance, was shot dead in the street in north London”.4 The article went on to quote police sources who referred to Duggan as a“well-known gangster” and, more seriously, “An Independent PoliceComplaints Authority [IPCC] spokesman said: ‘We understand the officer

was shot first before the male was shot’.” Despite this, the police failed tooffer an explanation of events to Duggan’s family. As the community activistStafford Scott explained to Sky News:

Up until now they haven’t come and helped them or advised them. Theyhaven’t met with any family liaison officers at all. We were absolutelydisgusted by that, so we decided that we needed to come to TottenhamPolice Station, because they may not be aware that a murder has beencommitted… We came to the station to have a peaceful demonstration, andit was largely peaceful. [We explained] that we wanted someone senior from

the police service to come and explain to us what was happening.5

The protest of around 200 people had marched to Tottenham PoliceStation on the evening of Saturday 6 August from Broadwater Farm—theestate that had been the location of riots in October 1985 following thedeath of Cynthia Jarrett after a police raid.6 Scott continues: “They kept onprevaricating. The most senior person they gave us was a chief inspector. Wesaid that person wasn’t senior enough—we wanted a senior ranking officerof superintendent or above. Eventually they sent for a superintendent, butby then it was too late”.7

Anger had boiled over. Protesters had begun shouting at police.According to a local eyewitness:

the violence started after a 16 year old girl “threw something, maybe a stone,at the original riot police line”. He added that this was met with a furiousresponse, with around 15 riot officers pounding her with shields. Thisdescription of events was corroborated by another local who spoke to BBCNews. He said that the girl was “set upon” by police and that the crowdsurged forward in anger.8

4: Daily Telegraph website, 4 August 2011—www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8682655/Mark-Duggan-killed-in-shooting-incident-involving-police-officer.html5: Scott, 2011.6: See Ruddick, 2010.7: Scott, 2011.8: Gallagher and Farrell, 2011. Footage of the alleged attack can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=1odqMZJ9hFo

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37International Socialism

Within a few hours the numbers on the streets had increased signifi-cantly: “Many hundreds of people took to the streets. They reflected thelocal population—all ages, black and white, Asian, as well as many Hassidic

Jews”.9 Police cars, buses and shops were set ablaze in a stand-off with

police that lasted until the early hours of the morning. Looting took placeat high street shops and at a retail park, with rioters targeting large elec-tronics firms. According to some reports, “youths stormed McDonald’s andstarted frying their own burgers and chips”.10

The following day saw the rioting spread across London. In Brixton,the annual Splash Festival faced greater than usual policing; it erupted inthe evening as young people clashed with riot police, who had begun touse baton charges and dogs to disperse the crowds.11 Violence also flared inEnfield and in Chingford Mount.12 Smaller incidents occurred in Dalston,where a shopping centre was looted, Islington, where a police car was

attacked, and a number of other areas.13

By the morning of Monday 8 August all 32 London boroughswere on riot alert.14 The Metropolitan Police stated that over 100 peoplehad been arrested and 35 police had been injured in clashes with riot-ers.15 Despite the deployment of 1,700 extra police in London, riotingof varying degrees had spread across dozens of areas of the capital. Storeswere looted and burned down, notably in Croydon where the House ofReeves furniture shop was reduced to ashes. Young people in Hackneyfought pitched battles with the police, often forcing them to retreat underhails of rocks and bottles. Rioters overturned bins and set cars alight asbarricades. In one incident:

Hundreds of young people were running from the police but a bus wasblocking their way. They surrounded it and suddenly realised the driver wasstill inside. Two young rioters knocked on the door and beckoned for her toget off. When she left the bus everyone clapped. Only then did they trash it.16

By the end of the day rioting had spread across the country. In

9: Orr, 2011.10: Gallagher and Farrell, 2011.

11: Jones, Lewis and others, 2011.12: Socialist Worker , 2011a.13: Lydall, 2011.14: Dodd, 2011.15: Jones, Lewis and others, 2011.16: Socialist Worker , 2011a.

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Birmingham police were stopping and searching black and Asian youngpeople in the Bullring shopping centre. One eyewitness reported:

We were pushed out into the street. The police corralled about 1,000 people.

Then they kettled a group of young people who started to get angry becausethey hadn’t done anything wrong. Then they charged into the crowd andpeople started running through the city. The police had started a riot. Therewere black, white and Asian young people together, furious at the way theywere being treated.17

The riot quickly spread across Birmingham and a police station wasset on fire in Handsworth. Police clashed with thousands of young peoplein areas including Bristol, Leeds and Liverpool. In Nottingham police carswere stoned and a police station was attacked with petrol bombs.18

That morning the Guardian had reported a source in the IPCC sayingthat “initial ballistics tests on a bullet, found lodged in a police radio wornby an officer during Thursday’s incident, suggested it was police issue—andtherefore had not been fired by Duggan”.19 The IPCC report the followingday confirmed that Mark Duggan had not opened fire on the police beforethey shot and killed him.20

On Monday evening, David Cameron returned to Britain from hissummer holiday in Italy, just hours after announcing he had no plans todo so. In a statement on Tuesday morning, he denounced the rioting as“criminality pure and simple”, promising to flood the capital with 10,000extra police officers that night, bringing the total to 16,000. 21 This seemsto have had the effect of reducing the rioting in London considerably,though incidents broke out in Manchester and Salford for the first time,and confrontations with the police continued in towns such as Gloucesterand Cambridge.22

On Wednesday, Cameron announced that a “fightback” was underway, and that police would be given permission to use rubber bullets andwater cannons.23 By Wednesday evening all but a few limited skirmishes

17: Quoted in Socialist Worker , 2011b.18: BBC website—www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-1445558419: Laville, Lewis and others, 2011.20: Vasagar, 2011.21: See Guardian website live blog: www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/aug/09/london-riots-

violence-looting-live22: Ross, 2011.23: Sparrow, 2011.

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had come to a halt. It was the end of the biggest explosion of urban rebel-lion in a generation, with police announcing they were pursuing 30,000suspected rioters.24

Who predicts a riot?In April 2010 Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg gave an interview withSky News in which he warned of “Greek-style unrest” in response to theTories failing to win an overall majority in the general election but thenforming an administration which would “then turn around in the nextweek or two and say we’re going to chuck up VAT to 20 percent, we’regoing to start cutting teachers, cutting police and the wage bill in the publicsector”.25 Needless to say, the warnings were swiftly forgotten when Cleggdecided to enter a coalition with the Tories and promptly increased VATto 20 percent and began to make swingeing cuts to the public sector.

One of the first and most visible responses to the cuts was theemergence of a student movement in Britain in November 2010. The50,000-strong protest against tuition fees and the removal of the EducationMaintenance Allowance (EMA)26 exploded into militant action as the Toryparty headquarters in Millbank Tower were laid siege to. Windows weresmashed and protesters rushed into the building, making it as far as the roof.In the protests which followed, significant numbers of young college stu-dents from working class areas of London joined university students. Theirattitude was best summed up by one young man, interviewed on BBCNews on the night of the 9 December protest outside parliament:

We’re from the slums of London, yeah. How do they expect us to pay£9,000 for uni fees? And EMA is the only thing keeping us in college.What’s stopping us from doing drug deals on the street any more? Nothing!27

24: Edwards, 2011. The breadth of the rioting across the country is too extensive to coverin this article. Clashes with police, looting and burning were recorded in dozens of townsand cities across Britain. While this journal does not generally use Wikipedia for referencingpurposes, this permanent link to an entry on the riots includes links to over 200 news articlesfrom around the country reporting on disturbances that gives an impression of the scale as

well as providing a portal to explore specific incidents—http://bit.ly/riotrefs25: Jordan, 2010. “Greek-style unrest” refers to the enormous protests which had

surrounded the general strike in Greece that occurred shortly before the interview. Theseevents had been portrayed in much of the media in Britain as uncoordinated rioting.26: EMA was a payment of up to £30 a week for young people in further education. It wasparticularly important for people from poorer backgrounds as it helped towards travel costsand the costs of stationery and other equipment.27: BBC News, 9 December. Available online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BsTl4QRjI

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The protest saw huge clashes with riot police around ParliamentSquare and resulted in thousands of protesters being kettled on WestminsterBridge for several hours.28 The involvement of large numbers of youngworking class people in the student movement, with its accompanying

destruction of symbols of authority, alongside the experience of harassmentfrom the police, may have made participation in riots a natural evolution.

Less than a week before the riots broke out, the Guardian websiteput up a short film reporting on cuts to youth services in Haringey, whichincluded the closure of eight out of 13 youth clubs. One interviewee says,“They were something for us to do. Now we’re just out here, getting upto no good.” Throughout the film people comment on the senselessness ofthe cuts, before one concludes, “There will be riots”.29

These factors were just the tip of the iceberg for poor young people.Unemployment among 16 to 24 year olds has risen sharply. In 2004 the figure

stood at 12 percent. By the onset of the recession in 2008 it had risen to 15percent, and by 2010 one in five was unemployed—more than three timesthe rate for older workers. In London the figure stood at 22 percent in 2011.30 These averages mask much sharper concentrations of youth unemployment.In Haringey, for example, half of all unemployed people are aged between16 and 24. Some 40 percent of young people in the borough live in pov-erty.31 Racism also plays a role. In January 2010 the Institute for Public PolicyResearch found that “mixed ethnic groups had seen the biggest increases in

youth unemployment since the recession began, rising from 21 percent to 35percent in the period”. This trend echoed previous recessions: in the early-1990s recession, unemployment grew among ethnic minorities by 10 percent,as opposed to 6 percent for the population as a whole. The report indicatedthat while the average unemployment rate for black men stood at around 20percent, among young black men it was a massive 48 percent.32

The other crucial factor that had an impact on the onset of riotingwas the behaviour of the police towards young people. Under New Labourrepeated moral panics and repressive policies targeting young people werelaunched. The introduction of Anti-Social Behavioural Orders (Asbos) wasa key plank in Labour’s “tough on crime” stance. As Owen Jones explains:

28: For more on the events of the protest and the student movement in general, seeCallinicos and Jones, 2011, and Swain, 2011.29: Topping and Robertson, 2011.30: Figures taken from The Poverty Site—www.poverty.org.uk/35/index.shtml31: Socialist Worker , 2011c.32: Figures from IPPR, 2010. For a discussion of how unemployment hits different sectionsof society in different ways, see Harman, 1981b, pp15-19.

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They could be imposed for minor incidents and restrict the individual’sbehaviour in various ways: like banning them from a street, or forbidding themfrom swearing. If the Asbo was violated, the culprit could be sent to prison forup to five years. Originally, New Labour promised that under-18s would have

Asbos served only under exceptional circumstances but, as it turned out, yearon year around half were imposed on the young. Overwhelmingly, those onthe receiving end were both poor and working class.33

For young people living on inner city estates, hassle from the policeis almost a way of life. In May 2008 the then home secretary Jackie Smithannounced that the police “should be harassing badly behaved youths byopenly filming them and hounding them at home to make their lives asuncomfortable as possible”.34 Later the same month, in response to a spateof knife attacks, the police launched “Operation Blunt Two”, which saw

27,000 people stopped and searched between May and early June. Kniveswere found on less than 2 percent of those searched.35 And these powers havebeen disproportionately used against young black and Asian people. Researchconducted by the London School of Economics and the Open Society

Justice Initiative in 2010 showed that the chance of an Asian person beingstopped and searched was 630 percent higher than a white person, while thecomparable figure for black people is an astonishing 2,660 percent. This isall the more shocking since the figures had increased sharply in the courseof a year—up from 1,070 percent for black people and 220 percent amongAsians.36 In 2009 Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human RightsCommission, wrote an article in the Daily Mail suggesting that the charge of“institutional racism” (which had been levelled at the Metropolitan Police bythe 1999 Macpherson inquiry into its mishandling of the investigation of theracist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence) was no longer valid.37 Hewas followed a month later by the then justice secretary Jack Straw.38 Thesepronouncements rang hollow in the light of the stop and search figures.

The killing of Mark Duggan was the immediate spark for the eventsin Tottenham, but behind it lay a long list of grievances. Duggan himselfwas the latest in a series of deaths in police custody. According to thecharity Inquest, 940 people have died in police custody in England and

33: Jones, 2011.34: Wintour, 2008.35: Choonara, 2008.36: Townsend, 2010.37: Phillips, 2009.38: Topping, 2009.

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Wales since 1990, with another 473 killed in pursuit, road traffic inci-dents or shootings.39 No police officer has been found guilty of a criminaloffence relating to any of these deaths.40

What is clear is that the frustrations of young working class people

at a system that was denying them even the future they had expected, letalone the one they had hoped for, were running high. Police arrogance andintransigence in the wake of Duggan’s killing were understandable sparksfor what followed. The Financial Times reported from Peckham that “youngmen from the area told the FT that if any single motivation to riot could beisolated, it was existing methods of police control—particularly the practiceof stop and search, in which officers search people regardless of whether ornot they have grounds for suspicion”.41

Why riot?

One of the most popular responses to the riots was questioning why peoplewould damage and destroy the areas which they themselves lived in. DavidLammy, the MP for Tottenham, summed it up by suggesting that “therewill be profound questions about what has happened with a particular con-stituency of young people that their values are such that they could steal,rob and endanger life in their own neighbourhood in this way”.42

In his landmark study conducted in the wake of the 1981 riotsChris Harman suggested that, while riots had been a long establishedfeature of urban life:

They were among the forms of popular protest that pre-dated industrialcapitalism proper. With the development of forms of struggle based onthe strength workers can exercise at the point of production—with strikesand unions—the role of the riot tends to diminish. But it can re-emerge intwo instances—when strike action alone no longer seems enough to winworkers’ demands, or when sections of workers lose their faith in the abilityof the organisations based upon industrial action to achieve their goals.43

The recent riots clearly relate to both these instances. While it is

39: See the Inquest website—http://inquest.gn.apc.org/website/statistics/deaths-in-police-custody40: PC Simon Harwood has been charged with the manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson at theG20 protests in London in 2009. His trial has been set for October 2012.41: Gainsbury and Culzac, 2011.42: NPR, 2011.43: Harman, 1981b, p6.

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impossible to get a definitive picture of those involved in the riots, researchby the Guardian and the London School of Economics into the demo-graphics of people who have been charged with offences over the riotsshow the vast majority of defendants to be under 25, with over a quarter

under 18. Of these, the majority were not working (whether unemployedor students).44 A separate study by the Financial Times found that, “Overall,two thirds of all suspects live in neighbourhoods with below-averageincome, and only 3 percent hail from the wealthiest 20 percent of areas”.45 While the enormous trade union protest on 26 March and the coordinatedindustrial action on 30 June will have had an impact on many people’s con-sciousness of working class struggle, a large proportion of those involvedappear to have been young, unemployed and un-unionised.

Other groups that might have traditionally provided focus for polit-ical frustrations have also witnessed varying levels of decline in the past 30

years. The Labour Party’s drift to the right under Neil Kinnock and TonyBlair was accompanied by the running down and dismantling of the once-vibrant Labour Party Young Socialist (LPYS) branches. At its height duringthe Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, there were over 581 LPYS branches.However, as Charlie Kimber explains, “to the leadership’s horror, the dom-inant voice was that of Militant . So as a part of making Labour electable, the

youth section had to be purged. Unfortunately for Labour, in the processof saving the innocent youth section from the hands of ‘unrepresentativeextremists’, the leadership also destroyed it”.46 By 1993 only 18 sectionsremained and the LPYS was wound up.

In the same period black separatism declined, as black and whiteworkers were integrated more and more, both at work and in communi-ties.47 But the politics of black self-organisation became more and morebound up with the Black Section inside the Labour Party during the 1980s.The emphasis was on elevating “black faces into high places”.48 Emblematicof Labour’s shift to the right are the contrasting voices of the former

44: Guardian, 2011.45: Gainsbury and Culzac, 2011. This methodology is useful for providing a snapshot ofthose involved in rioting but has limitations when it comes to serious detail. For example,people who have had previous convictions or contact with police are far more likely to be

identified and arrested than those without.46: Kimber, 1993. Militant Tendency, the forerunners of today’s Socialist Party, wasa Trotskyist group operating inside the Labour Party which was witch-hunted as part ofKinnock’s drive to the right.47: Dorling, 2005.48: Richardson, 2011.

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Tottenham MP and Labour left winger Bernie Grant, who said after the1985 Broadwater Farm riot that the police “got a bloody good hiding”, andhis successor, David Lammy, who said in the wake of the riots this summer,“We must never, ever allow gang members and criminals to run the streets.”

He was not referring to the police: he was calling for more of them.49

Taken together, it is clear that for young people from all ethnicgroups there are few consciously “political” outlets available to direct theiranger at the system. The collective action embodied in rioting can be a lib-erating experience. As Harman explained in another article written shortlyafter the Brixton riots of 1981:

Those without hope are capable suddenly, virtually out of nowhere, ofshifting from apathy to anger. And that anger can break through all therestraints that education within capitalist society is supposed to build into

people’s consciousness. The local streets suddenly take on the aspect of arevolutionary battleground, with barricades and burning cars and instantsolidarity against the state.50

This sense of solidarity, of coming together in the face of an oppressorand in revolt against a world that denies the opportunities, means that:

For many of those who took part in the riots, it will have been one of thegreat experiences of their lives. For riots, even more than strikes, providepeople who have often lived desolate, atomised, boring lives with anexperience of solidarity, of collective power, of being able to affect thecourse of society at large instead of merely being on the receiving end. Thatis why after great riots the participants and onlookers rarely express regret atwhat has happened, even though the casualties on their side are invariablygreater than among the police.51

The riots can embody a rejection of the poverty that surrounds therioters. As one bystander remarked in 1981, “I hope they do burn downour homes. They would be doing us a favour”.52 Harman continues, “Thepower of the rioters lies in their ability to drive the police from the streetsand to burn down symbols of oppression. But the streets they briefly

49: Gimson, 2011.50: Harman, 1981a.51: Harman, 1981b, p31.52: Quoted in Socialist Worker , 11 July 1981, p9.

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control are streets of poverty. They burn down parts of the old societybut do not have the means to build a new one”.53 While this points tothe limitation of riots, it in no way downplays why rioting seems such anempowering and relevant activity.

Closely allied to the rationality of rioting is its legitimacy. Why is itthat people involved in rioting should not express regret, not feel as thoughwhat they have done is wrong? In his analysis of food riots in the 18thcentury, EP Thompson suggested:

It is possible to detect in almost every 18th century crowd action somelegitimising notion. By the notion of legitimation I mean that the men andwomen in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defendingtraditional rights or customs…

This in its turn was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of socialnorms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several partieswithin the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute themoral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite asmuch as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action.54

There seem to be two lessons that can be taken from this analysis andapplied to today’s very different context. The first is that rioting can embodya revolt against the diminished prospects of receiving things that a group feltthey were entitled to or likely to acquire (employment, EMA, higher edu-cation, a car, etc). The second is that this affront to a sense of entitlement ismore relevant than absolute poverty—while it’s true that those with nothinghave nothing to lose, they can also feel even more hopeless.

This is one reason why an otherwise helpful piece of research by aca-demics at the University of Essex fails to grasp the dynamics of rioting. Usingsurvey data on people’s general propensity to break the law, they suggest:

Clearly, not all those who were prepared to break the law were involvedin the August riots, but it can be safely assumed that a willingness to violatethe law was a necessary condition for involvement. Sections of the generalpopulation that are prepared to violate the law may therefore constitute a

pool of potential recruits from which potential rioters could be drawn.55

53: Harman,1981a.54: Thompson, 1993, p188.55: Birch and Allen, 2011, p9.

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Such a static view of who might be involved overlooks the sense ofsolidarity one feels from being part of a large group, the feeling that one is

justified in striking back against a state of affairs which has lost all legitimacy.56

For the same reason, one should be wary of left wing arguments which

bemoan the lack of politics exhibited in the riots. Slavoj Žižek, for example,contrasts the rioters’ lack of a message with the student protesters who, whileturning to violence, “were making clear that they rejected the proposedreforms to higher education”.57 David Harvey suggests that capitalism shouldbe put on trial for its crimes, but “this is what these mindless rioters cannotsee or demand”.58 While rioters may not have a formulated list of demands,the riots were clearly a political act. As EP Thompson suggests, “it is notusually helpful to examine [riots] for articulate political intentions”.59 Manyurban riots have been treated as irrational outbursts of criminality at the time,only to later be seen as understandable events which have had arisen from

legitimate grievances and may have even had positive effects in the long term.In 1981, for example, there were “almost no overt politics in most of the bigriots. They were spontaneous eruptions, led by those without worked-outpolitical views, drawing behind them a cross-section of the youth in theirareas. Yet the experience of the riots will have been a very political one”.60 We should bear in mind Frederick Engels’s observation that “contempt forthe existing social order is most conspicuous in its extreme form—that ofoffences against the law”.61

“Burning and a-looting tonight”Looting was undoubtedly a major aspect of the riots. In media coverage andin water-cooler conversations, however, it often seemed as though it wasthe only aspect of the rioting—with reports of stand-offs with the policerelegated in favour of a focus on looting that served to depict rioters as crim-inals blinded by consumerism. It was noticeable that the revelations aboutthe nature of Mark Duggan’s death barely troubled the news broadcasts,their lenses trained exclusively on broken windows and burning shops.

56: It also ignores the fact that all of us are willing to violate some laws under somecircumstances, but we choose different laws to violate, go about it in different ways, and haveclass-related and race-related differential chances of getting caught and prosecuted. I am

grateful to Gareth Dale for this point.57: Žižek, 2011.58: Harvey, 2011.59: Thompson, 1993, p246.60: Harman, 1981b, p36.61: Engels, 1845.

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The liberal left found itself especially confused by the looting. Onecolumnist for the Labour List website complained, “These are poor peoplebut they’re not making a stand against inexcusable wealth, they’re lootingPoundland not Tiffany’s. They’re not looting out of necessity, they just

don’t see a downside”.62 Zoe Williams, writing in the Guardian, echoedthis mood by saying, “I think it’s just about possible that you could see

your actions refashioned into a noble cause if you were stealing the staples:bread, milk. But it can’t be done while you’re nicking trainers, let alonelaptops”.63 But this kind of moral handwringing misses the point.

For many of those who are engaged in looting, it represents takingcollectively, by force, what the system denies you—though in this day andage, it is denied to you only after you have faced a barrage of advertise-ments telling you how much you need it. As Alex Callinicos has suggested,“this reflects the intensive commodification of desires in the neoliberal

era”.64

Stores that sell trainers, mobile phones, large-screen televisions, etc,were the most popular target of looters, alongside bookmakers and pawn-shops. Media coverage focused on this at first, before moving its attentionto the more emotionally affecting plight of small business owners. Yetin reality small businesses seem to have been much less affected than thebigger chain stores. On the morning of 9 August, after the heaviest of therioting was over, the Association of Convenience Stores put out a pressrelease stating that “93 stores had been affected, either directly or in thatnewspaper wholesalers cannot get deliveries to them”.65

Even accepting that small businesses were affected, we should alsoremember that for many of those involved in looting, even small busi-ness owners might seem far more wealthy and privileged than themselves,regardless of their actual wealth. In one revealing interview with the BBC,two young women comment on their involvement in the riots, saying, “It’snot even a riot. It’s showing the police we can do what we want, and wehave.” In response to being asked why the riots have hit local people, theyrespond, “It’s the rich people. It’s the people who’ve got businesses. That’swhy all this has happened, because of rich people. So we’re just showingthe rich people we can do what we want”.66

In fact, it would be a mistake to give too much ground to the novelty

62: www.labourlist.org/ill-keep-looting-til-i-get-caught63: Williams, 2011.64: Callinicos, 2011.65: See www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/aug/09/london-riots-violence-looting-live#block-7266: See www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14458424

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of looting. David Harvey, for example, rightly denounces “feral capitalism”,only to suggest that rioters “are only doing what everyone else is doing,though in a different way—more blatantly and visibly in the streets”.67 Thisis misleading in that it implies a moral equivalence between rioters on one

hand and politicians and bankers on the other,68 but it also overlooks the factthat looting has played a major role in almost all urban riots.

In the wave of riots by black Americans that shook the US between1964 and 1968, looting was a common feature. One study of the impact onsmall businesses in the riot-hit areas argued:

No group experienced so much property damage as the businesses operatingin riot-torn areas… Rioters looted and burned some 100 businesses in theHarlem riot of 1964, 600 in Watts (1965), 1,000 in Newark (1967), anda mind-boggling 2,500 in the Detroit upheaval. According to one “low”

estimate, rioters looted more than 10,000 stores overall... Nearly all of thesebusinesses were small businesses; chain stores avoided the inner city.69

Nor was it true that looting was only of essential items: The targets“often included stores containing goods that could be easily consumed, suchas liquor, cigarettes, drugs, and clothing. Looters generally avoided stealinggoods that would have to be sold”.70 These riots caused a backlash by thosewho suggested that riots had alienated “white allies and supporters”, and yetthey represented the “forcible entry” of the black masses onto the politicalstage. “Black poverty, deprivation and racism in urban areas went from beingpolitical non-issues to one of the most important issues of the decade”.71

Similarly, the riots in Britain in 1981 witnessed widespread looting.Harman’s account of the riots suggests that it occurred in Brixton, Toxteth,Wood Green and Luton among other places. He quotes a Guardian reportstating that “with the area clear of police, ‘there was an assumption thatanyone who was not police would help themselves’ in the wholesale lootingof shops”.72 The riots forced the Tory government immediately to backpedalon some of their cuts. In inner city areas new recreation centres opened upand there was a massive expansion of further education to remove young

67: Harvey, 2011.

68: An equivalence strengthened by Harvey’s suggestion that “Everyone, not just the rioters,should be held to account.”69: Bean, 2000, p169.70: Bean, 2000, p166.71: Taylor, 2011.72: Harman, 1981b, p2.

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people from the streets. The Scarman report that looked into the riots, thoughloaded with the language of racism, had to concede that the police role wascounterproductive and that some anti-racist training had to be introduced.73

Elsewhere in the world similar patterns can be found. In 1989 a

rebellion flared up in Caracas, Venezuela, in response to President AndrésPérez’s decision to implement IMF-approved neoliberal restructuring.What began as a localised protest over price increases soon spread. AsMargarita López-Maya explains:

The Caracazo spread within hours from the capital to all the main andsecondary cities of the country, which suffered barricades, road closures,burning of vehicles, stoning of shops, shooting and widespread looting…The Caracazo was a turning point in Venezuela’s political history, producingan irrevocable change in relationship between state and society.74

Here too, looting was widespread. Documentary footage showspeople streaming out of shops carrying electrical goods and other consumeritems.75 Yet this does not reduce the importance of the events in any way.As Mike Gonzalez explains, “The Caracazo, in some ways, should not beseen as a single event, but rather as the beginning of a continuous processof popular resistance… In many ways, the failed military coup led by HugoChávez in 1992 and the process that it initiated should also be seen as aslow unfolding of the political implications of the Caracazo”.76

Or consider Argentina. As Naomi Klein mentions in a recentarticle, the mass riots that gripped that country in 2001 were known asEl Saqueo —The Sacking:

The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in roughneighbourhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before theneoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushingshopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford— clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a “state of siege” to restoreorder; the people didn’t like that and overthrew the government.77

In a more recent example of mass urban rioting, we saw the explosion

73: Bennett, 2011.74: López Maya, 2002.75: See www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNwrTv93DT476: Gonzalez, 2004.77: Klein, 2011.

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of the French suburbs, the banlieues, in 2005.78 As Klein points out,these riots were “marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor”.79 However, one should not look to some kind of French exceptionalismto explain this. Rather, as the sociologist Michael Fize points out, “the

reason they didn’t loot much in France…is because where they wererioting, there weren’t any shops”.80

As these examples indicate, looting has traditionally played a largerole in urban riots. The comparison between France in 2005 and the riotsthis summer help us see more clearly what made looting so widespread. Inmost British cities, and especially in London, the expansion of the com-mercial sector has seen the development of large “high street” retail parksand shopping centres outside the city centres. So, for example, rioters inTottenham were close to both the Tottenham Hale retail park and theWood Green shopping centre.

This economic geography also played a role in underlining the starkimbalances of wealth in the inner cities: “London is marked by a flagrantpolarisation between rich and poor. It is the most unequal city in the devel-oped world. But, because of how gentrification has developed, you haveneighbourhoods—Clapham is a good example—where rich and poor livecheek by jowl”.81 In fact, gentrification has even swallowed up some ofthe evidence of deprivation—in Hackney, for example, old industrial siteswhich had previously employed local people have been redeveloped intoluxury accommodation that locals could never hope to afford.

The violence that the media and politicians seize upon to create asense of moral panic is nothing compared to violence doled out to youngpeople who face having their hopes for the future dashed. That smallnumber of people whose homes burned when fires spread from shops totheir flats are victims of the riots, but the relevant comparison is with the18,100 homes repossessed in the first six months of 2011—an average ofaround 100 homes every day.82 And what is the looting of a televisionfrom a retail park compared to the looting of the public purse conductedby MPs fiddling their expenses or the bankers getting their bailouts? Somemay find such comparisons crude, but they are an essential antidote to thehypocrisy of those politicians and pundits who wish to exploit the riots tocreate a sense of moral panic.

78: For a comparison of the French and British riots, see Henley, 2011.79: Klein, 2011.80: Quoted in Henley, 2011.81: Callinicos, 2011.82: King, 2011.

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Feral youth and moral panicIn 1978 Stuart Hall and others wrote in Policing the Crisis of how the impor-tation of the US term “mugging” led to a panic, fuelled by racism, aboutstreet crime perpetrated by black men—a panic that had no statistical basis

but served to legitimate police harassment of young black people. Theysuggested that the onset of economic crisis meant that the state’s role inmaintaining its authority—not simply in terms of street crime but also indisciplining organised labour—required a move to a more coercive state.83

Even before the riots of 2011 we had seen attempts to generate amoral panic around the student movement and “anarchist infiltrators”. Thiswas carried through to those arrested during the TUC demonstration of 26March, over “black bloc” anarchists who had smashed some windows andUK Uncut activists who had occupied the Fortnum & Mason’s store. Thesemoral panics involved more than just alarmist news stories—protesters

found themselves receiving or threatened with punitive prison sentences asthe state looked to discourage people from protesting against the raft of cutsit is trying to push through.84

The riots presented a far more visible and far more widespreadobject of panic: “feral youth”. For David Cameron, the riots “were notabout poverty”,85 and proved the need to act against “slow-motion moralcollapse”.86 Similarly, Melanie Phillips wrote in the Daily Mail : “What hasbeen fuelling all this is not poverty, as has so predictably been claimed,but moral collapse. What we have been experiencing is a complete break-down of civilised behaviour among children and young people”.87 There ishere a striking comparison with 1981. Then the riots were condemned asthe result of a “permissive revolution”, stemming from a “revulsion fromauthority and discipline”.88

Much of the media was quick to paint the rioters as being “outside”of normal society. This could be seen in the way right wing tabloids seizedon the “Riot Clean Up”, a largely white, middle class phenomenon

83: Hall, Critcher and others, 1978.84: Philip Green, whose Topshop stores had been targeted by UK Uncut activists overalleged tax avoidance, linked the student protests and UK Uncut actions to the riots,suggesting the police needed to return to “good, old-fashioned policing”—Fletcher, 2011.85: Lewis, Taylor and Ball, 2011.86: Shipman, 2011.87: Phillips, 2011.88: George Gale, writing in the Express, quoted in Pearson, 1981, p4. Pearson’s Hooligan showshow the right have traditionally sought to blame the perceived ills of society on a mythical“moral decline”. While the book is now out of print, the Economist published excerpts in a piece

which is useful in drawing parallels between moral panic now and in the past—Bagehot, 2011.

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originated on Twitter that saw people flock to the streets carrying brooms.An Express front page led with the headline “Sweep The Scum Off OurStreets”, and several papers featured a picture of one woman in a T-shirtemblazoned with “Rioters Are Scum”.89 More worrying was the way the

vigilantes “defending” shops and neighbourhoods were praised as “have ago heroes”. While in some areas these were shopkeepers and their families,in others they were members of the racist English Defence League whosubjected local black people to racist abuse.

The Tory historian David Starkey used the BBC current affairs showNewsnight to launch a racist tirade in which he approvingly quoted EnochPowell and blames black culture for the riots: “What has happened is thata substantial section of the chavs…have become black… The whites havebecome black”.90 Starkey’s intervention was quite calculated, and feeds intothe notion that rioting was undertaken not by frustrated young people but

by what justice secretary Ken Clarke described as “a feral underclass, cut offfrom the mainstream in everything but its materialism”.91

Of course, the extent of this moral panic has gone far beyond mererhetoric. Those who found themselves charged with crimes during theriots have faced crassly disproportionate sentences. A student from southLondon was jailed for six months for stealing £3.50 worth of water from aLidl supermarket. “Anderson Fernandes, 22, took two scoops of coffee icecream, and a cone, from a posh Manchester cafe after finding the door ajar.He took one lick and then gave it away to a passer-by as he didn’t like thetaste.” He was jailed for 16 months.92 Two men found themselves jailed forfour years after “inciting” riots on Facebook—riots that never occurred.93 In fact, emails brought to light by a Freedom of Information request by theGuardian revealed that the sentencing was highly political:

Magistrates were urged to abandon sentencing guidelines when dealing withrioters last month because “nothing like this was envisaged”… The textof two controversial emails circulated to justices’ clerks immediately after

89: Reynolds, Twomey and Flanagan, 2011. It was notable that the “Riot Clean Up” coverage very much resembled the kind of “Blitz Spirit” nonsense that much of the press display in theface of strike action.

90: BBC Newsnight —www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-1451351791: Quoted in Lewis, Taylor and Ball, 2011. Again compare this with 1981: “Brixton is theiceberg tip of a crisis of ethnic criminality which is not Britain’s fault—except in the sense that herrulers quite unnecessarily imported it”—Telegraph, 29 November 1981, quoted in Bagehot, 2011.92: Walker, 2011.93: Carter, 2011.

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August’s disturbances raises questions about judicial independence and theuse of blanket guidance irrespective of individual cases… The documents[were] written by a senior justices’ clerk in the London regional office of HerMajesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service.94

In some ways the sentencing has made it easier for socialists to inter-vene in events. Many people who may have been swept along with the moralpanic while the riots were occurring see that the sentencing is outrageous.Even Ken Clarke has used the row around sentencing to renew the fractiousdiscussions within the coalition government over prison reform. There hasalso been a shift in the rhetoric from Labour. While Ed Miliband was initiallyat pains to stress that the riots could “never be excused…never be justified”,he quickly moved on to criticise the government’s “kneejerk” response andto tie the scandals around bank bailouts, MPs expenses and phone hacking

to the riots.95

Why? Partly it is because the Tory narrative that the riots hadnothing to do with cuts and poverty looked increasingly ridiculous: inter-views with those involved in rioting regularly highlighted these as a reasonfor their activities,96 and public hostility towards the cuts is growing.

As the months pass by, the sanctimonious demands for “condem-nation” are fading and the question of what we do next is posed moresharply. In the aftermath of the riots, large public meetings were held, withhundreds attending meetings in Tottenham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets andelsewhere. Defence campaigns in support of those now facing punitivecharges have started to emerge. These are not only campaigns we shouldbe involved with on principle; they also offer a way for socialists to begindeveloping roots in areas where riots occurred and to try to build up lastingpolitical organisation. It is difficult to intervene directly in riots. Our chal-lenge is to build something out of the aftermath, something that connectsthe frustrations of those who took to the streets in August with the powerof organised workers who are now moving into action.

This is a challenge that socialists all around the world face as wewitness a wave of youth rebellions—from the Chilean student movementthat has sparked general strikes, to the indignados of Spain back to the riotershere in Britain. What all of these (mainly young) people have in common isthe realisation that the future they had been promised is being snatched away

to bail out a system in crisis and to line the pockets of the rich. Žižek suggests

94: Bowcott, 2011.95: Evening Standard , 2011.96: See, for example, Abbas and Holton, 2011.

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that “the fatal weakness” of recent protests is that “they express an authenticrage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of socio-political change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution”. 97 Whilethis is a valid point its message is rather fatalistic. Socialists must be central to

intervening in the processes of revolt, whatever form they may take, seekingto organise alongside those who are prepared to work with us. It is onlythrough involvement and engagement that we can hope to build our forcesand offer direction. As Tony Cliff said in the wake of the 1981 riots:

The riots and looting have been fantastic, but they have not gone far enough.Because they have not been organised, the kids have attacked shops whenthey should have been attacking factories. We must teach them to take thebakery, not just the bread.98

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august 2011: a riot of our own

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