Riots: The Left Must Respond

By James O’Nions; August 11, 2011 - Znet
http://www.zcommunications.org/riots-the-left-must-respond-b...

Source: Redpepper

If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. - Malcolm X

A depressing YouGov poll today (pdf) shows that 90 per cent of Britons believe police should be able to use water cannons to quell rioting, while a third believe they should have the use of live ammunition – in other words that they should be able to shoot indiscriminately at people with little accountability, as that’s what such a power would amount to. While we should be wary of polls of this kind as a real arbiter of public opinion, it is nevertheless clear that demands for a virtual police state in response to the riots are reaching fever pitch.

There is lots to be said from the left about the reasons the riots are happening, and commentators from Nina Power to Zoe Williams are starting to do so. We can talk about the impact of spending cuts to youth services, EMAs and the rest on cities where unemployment is high and inequality continues to grow. In London in particular, poor inner city neighbourhoods where young people can (very reasonably) see no decent future for themselves, nestle up against much wealthier areas which seem unaffected by the recession and are still living the high life of iPads, regular weekend breaks in Europe and fine dining.

We can also talk about the psychological impact of 30 years of neo-liberalism and the rampant consumerism that goes with it. Hence the phenomenon of ‘consumer rioting’, with high street chains targeted not just for destruction, but for the latest accessories. This could be described as a kind of confused redistribution of wealth – unfair, based on individual smash and grab, and not really redistributing wealth much at all – but nevertheless motivated by keenly felt social injustice. Of course, some of the looting was for what could reasonably be described as necessities too, but any basic collective sentiment, beyond a shared sense of being a generation without hope, was lacking. This was not Athens.

We can and should also talk about the regular, humiliating stop and searches which many of those who have been rioting (and many of their peers who haven’t) undergo. Its no wonder that the shooting of Mark Duggan set some of this off – these kids know just what brutal thugs the police often are. They know this wasn’t a one-off, but part of a continuum of police repression and impunity that will probably see them getting away with it again. And yes, many of them know exactly how useless and toothless the [Independent Police Complaints Commission] is. Of 333 deaths in police custody since 1998, none have resulted in a conviction.

But important though all this is, we need to do more than talk. The right is making the running, and the facts on the ground need changing. While some left commentators (and no, I don’t include Sunny Hundall in that category) have been saying the right things, left-leaning politicians rarely have. Diane Abbott was among the first to talk up the idea of a curfew. Ken Livingstone bashed the government for their cuts, but was most concerned to talk about cuts to the police in London leading to an inadequate response to the riots. He certainly won’t be talking about police violence, given the robust support he’s given to the Met in cases ranging from Jean Charles de Menezes to Ian Tomlinson.

What we need right now are channels for giving voice to the issues which lie behind the riots. This is starting to happen. Last night in Tottenham, 60-70 activists from Hackney and Haringey, called together by the Day Mer Kurdish association and Hackney Alliance to Defend Public Services, met to come up with a response. As a result there will be a demonstration on Saturday from Dalston to Tottenham under the slogan Give Our Kids a Future. Whatever your exact attitude to the rioting itself, its vital to build this demo, and others like it around the country, if we’re to turn the tide of reaction and have a hope of making demands for real social justice. (There is also a similar demo from Deptford High Street at 6.30pm to Lewisham Town Hall today, 10 August.)

All over the world, the rise of neo-liberalism has been accompanied by the rise of the security state. This is no accident. The victory for the capitalist class that neo-liberalism represents produces howls of protest from the oppressed. Sometimes they have political direction, and sometimes they don’t. The response of the Conservatives, and of elites the world over, is to deny any real grievances and unleash further state-led violence. If we want to build an alternative based on economic justice and freedom, our first job is to ensure that ordinary people aren’t cheering them on.

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Riots: A Grim Mirror Image of Neo-Liberal Britain

By Tom Fox; August 11, 2011 - Znet
http://www.zcommunications.org/riots-a-grim-mirror-image-of-...

Three separate links can sum up the violence on Britain’s streets at the moment: two videos, and one news report. The first is a blog by an NBC reporter that quotes an exchange between a Londoner and another reporter who asked if rioting was the best way to express discontent:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

The TV reporter from Britain's ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. "Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

The second is the now much-viewed video of a Hackney resident squaring up to looters. Fearlessly and knowingly, she chastises them, furious that rather than “doing it for a cause” they are destroying homes and businesses, all for some shoes and TVs.

The third is less moving, and in fact bleakly comic: [Liberal Democrat leader and "Coalition" partner] Nick Clegg, after biscuits in his leafy suburban garden, warning Sky News [see video below] back in April last year that if the Tories gained power and inflicted upon the population unmandated cuts, there would be riots.

Taken together, these represent the key elements of the present crisis: police incompetence and arrogance, media complicity and callousness, the short-sightedness of the rioters, and the contempt politicians have had for the public over the past year that evidently continued this week. The dismal conclusion is that we live in a fundamentally sick society, not just unable to resolve its injustices and inequalities but unable even to acknowledge them.

The Petri dish in which the riots emerged was decades of neglect, unemployment and deprivation: most areas affected by the riots have unemployment rates above the London average of 8.8 per cent. Hackney yearly vies with Manchester, Liverpool and Tower Hamlets as the most destitute local authority in the country. In London, the richest tenth of the population possess 273 times the wealth of the poorest, making it the “most unequal city in the West”. Across the country for the last thirty years, wages have dropped as a proportion of national wealth for everyone but a tiny minority. In twenty years, the gap between rich and poor will reach levels not seen since Queen Victoria was on the throne.

This is not an excuse for rampant destruction: for centuries, the poor have suffered, but they have at key moments over the past two centuries responded through organization, protest and mutual aid, and through such united action real achievements have been made in a way that setting alight to their own communities never could. Nevertheless, it is an explanation, and an explanation is clearly demanded.

On top of this is the abysmal record of the nation’s police, particularly the Met [London Police]. Having been deeply involved in the widespread phone hacking criminal conspiracy as co-conspirators rather than investigators, and with numerous high-profile cases of both them and the IPCC clearly covering-up their role in killings on London’s streets, it was hardly surprising that when they shot Mark Duggan they immediately came under angry scrutiny from locals.

Their inability to handle the simple questions they were asked is testament to their arrogance, but this was by no means isolated. The figures for the amount of deaths in police custody and following contact with the police are staggering. Since 1998, 333 people have died in custody with no officer ever convicted.

Their demeaning harassment of the youth through stop and search, with certain communities particularly targeted, is a clear burden incomprehensible to those who don’t have to put up with it. Nor was it very long ago that the Tories were planning to bring back the disastrous Sus laws. It should be unsurprising then that criminalizing entire populations makes them more willing to commit criminal acts.

And where were politicians amongst this? Osborne was in Los Angeles, Cameron in Tuscany, Clegg in Spain, with Johnson refusing to state where he was and evidently reluctant to come back. The problem is not so much that they were on holiday, but more that a foreign holiday is a luxury few can now afford. When Tory MP Oliver Letwin said he didn’t want “people from Sheffield going on any more cheap holidays”, he revealed the class hatred that motivates many of his kind.

Such sentiment is the bitter fuel for the austerity drive that is breaking our country apart, and the targets of this assault are not just the poor youth of our inner city neighbourhoods but also workers such as the fire fighters battling to save those same neighbourhoods from flames. The insanity of the rioting becomes clearest here: we should be uniting against the greed and recklessness of austerity, not replicating it.

Yet some in the left are wrong to refuse to condemn the riots because they are instead the result of structural problems rather than merely bad parenting or the moral failure of the rioters. The early cheering that an “insurrection” was underway in Tottenham was dampened when the targets shifted from police cars to shops, and mostly dissipated when it became clear that hatred of the police was complimented by a desire to loot and burn non-political targets. Looting and burning is not the virtue of the left, but instead of neo-liberalism, and we now have a grim mirror image of capitalism’s savaging of our society over the last three decades.

The rioters are a microcosm of the ethics that resulted from that savaging: self-indulgence, competition, and violence. The reason the left should be condemning rather than excusing violence and looting is therefore precisely because it is the structural problem of a society that promotes wretched values. The woman filmed barracking the looters knew this: build something lasting rather than reflexively copy the dominant principles of the society we live in. We should indeed aspire for luxury for all, but it should be through production, not destruction.

The response has at times been terrifying. Demands for the army on the street and shoot to kill policies are hopefully not representative, or else no lesson has been learned from the disaster of Northern Ireland. The only lasting solution is an end to austerity, exclusion and brutality. More than that, we need a functioning, inclusive left rather than the self-interested and chronically romantic one we’ve been lumbered with over the last two decades, or the wing that pointlessly dreams of the return of a mythical Labour Party.

A proper response needs to constructively direct anger where it’s deserved and properly assault the destructive principles inculcated within us: self-interest and self-indulgence even to the point of violence. When youths loot it’s “sheer criminality”, when the rich loot it’s “austerity”. Both are born of the same society, and both need abolishing. We don’t need austerity, and no-one should need to steal.

From the ashes, communities are coming together to defend, reclaim and clean up their streets. Rage may be directed at rioters, but it is also directed at Nick Clegg and Boris Johnson’s tasteless photo-ops. The principles of mutual-aid and respect exist, and they can and will be more powerful than the army, police or any rioters. But they need to remain as our principles in the face of violence from both the rich and the dispossessed. Only through this can we hope to overcome a pathological society; in the words of the anonymous woman from Hackney, “do it for a cause”.