Tuesday 9th August 2011 was a strange day. As a (bleeding-heart) liberal, I’ve always felt a sense of pride about my faith in humanity, my belief that people are generally good. I believe that strangers anywhere can connect with each other. I’ve also been trying to be more positive this year, to lessen my outrage at stuff that’s just a a bit shit.
But then last night, on my 13th wedding anniversary, I watched Twitter explode and the TV news coverage descend in a storm of petrol bombs and violence against innocent people and their property. What had ostensibly started a couple of days earlier as a community protest over the police shooting of a local man in Tottenham somehow metamorphosed into something approaching urban warfare. Gangs of (mostly) young men, their faces (mostly) covered, were running amok. Buildings and businesses all over London were torched. Flats above shops were burnt out, their inhabitants forced to jump from windows to save themselves. Restaurants and shops were attacked and looted. TVs were torn from the walls in bookies. Supermarkets were raided for their alcohol stocks, sports stores ransacked for their trainers. Cars were set alight. For a few hours it genuinely felt like anarchy.
My faith in humanity was dealt a pretty heavy blow. The behaviour so clearly on display betrayed a complete disconnection, a total absence of empathy, an amorality and selfishness that ignored the feelings of anyone else. These were disenfranchised youths attacking and destroying their own community. There seemed to be nothing racial about it – Chinese restaurants were attacked just as Turkish shops. There seemed to be no cause or focus for the violence, nothing specific. A friend described it today as ‘recreational arson’.
My pinko-middle-class liberal sensibilities were sent reeling throughout last night and today as more and more clips and testimonies came out: shopkeepers assaulted, restaurant diners robbed, even injured teenagers mugged, kids laughing to news reporters, blaming “the government … the Conservatives … whatever … the rich people”. I was bombarded with the calls to bring in the army, water cannons, tear gas, curfews. And I could see they had a point.
Like a dog lying in the corner they will bite you without warning,
Look out!
They’ll tear your insides out…
But I know in my heart that it truly is more complicated than that. The idiots who attacked their own neighbours and trashed their own neighbourhoods must be stopped, identified and punished. A lot of last night was about people who don’t have any sense of community or belonging. Where did all that come from?
- Decades of growing inequality exacerbated by an increasing awareness of, proximity to and access to that inequality through technology (many of these so-called impoverished kids are using very expensive phones to talk to each other)…
- And yet while we’re all more aware of the everyday minutiae of the lives of the wealthy and famous, they seem to live in increasingly isolated worlds, far away from the reality of the rest of us. We can buy their replica perfumes, fashion lines and phones, but we’re still struggling to pay the bills while they their incomes soar…
- The ruling classes of bankers, politicians and the media have all been shown to act in their own (a)moral universes in recent times, wrecking the stability of the worldwide economy, fiddling their expenses, and tapping phones in the name of selling papers. And so far, they seem to have got away with it…
- At the same time the poor are taken to task for being poor or for claiming benefits they might not be entitled to. Community services are slowly dismantled, community charities have had their funding cut, all the little things that can make a difference are whittled away, and replaced by nothing…
The words of bloggers I trust held no easy answers, perhaps because there aren’t any easy answers today. Steve from Until Next Year mirrored my feelings earlier today: a mix of rage, sadness, and disappointment with the leadership vacuum that seemed apparent. Billy Gotta Job was first off the mark this morning with a more coherent attempt at an explanation than I can muster, and Extranea seemed to more closely match my despair this afternoon.
Nevertheless, the green shoots of some kind of Big Society emerged pretty quickly today. @riotcleanup grew on Twitter like the only plant amidst the desolation of Wall-E’s future world laid waste. People flocked to London to clean up the debris, to reclaim the streets; and they did it with a sense of humour, becoming #riotwombles for the day. Politicians were taken to task at the same time as they tried to spout banalities about ‘restoring order’ and recalling parliament. It seemed that we were ready to demand more from them.
It seems that London is quieter tonight, although Manchester and Birmingham are suffering their own disturbances. I hope this can be calmed down quickly, and that leadership can come from both the bottom-up, and from the top-down. This leadership must re-establish the feeling of community, of interdependence, of looking after each other. And it must tackle both the short-term and longer-term issues, the root causes as well as the suppurating boils on the surface.
It’s time for our leaders to step up and prove themselves. But if we don’t show them that this time we want and deserve better, we can’t expect them to go far enough or deep enough.
