It’s not often that one could imagine British politicians looking to Iran for advice on civil liberties and how to deal with angry mobs. This week, however, Iran’s foreign ministry was quick to offer suggestions about how David Cameron should deal with the thousands of rioters who looted and destroyed high streets across London, Manchester and other large British cities.
The UK government should “exercise restraint and behave in a controlled way,” counseled Ramin Mehmanparast, President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s foreign ministry spokesman. He went on to recommend that the authorities investigate the killing of Mark Duggan – the man whose death sparked the first unrest on Saturday – in order to “protect the civil rights and civil liberties.”
A curious moment of schadenfreude, perhaps, but the fact that Iran finds itself in a position to suggest the UK repair its civil society is a stunning demonstration of how damaged British society appears. One of the most surprising aspects of the rioting is the speed at which damage was inflicted: in the space of four days the violence, robbery and mass arson has resulted in more than £100 million (Rs. 735 crores) in damage, 1,500 arrests and the deaths of five people.
Equally surprising, however, was the lack of urgency in the government’s response during the early days of the crisis. As late as Monday afternoon, the second full day of rioting, the Prime Minister’s spokesman was still giving assurances that the situation was not serious enough to necessitate Cameron cutting short his holiday in Italy to return home. It was particularly curious behavior from a man who built his election campaign around a vision of a “Broken Britain” whose communities are disintegrating, and who earlier this year declared that multiculturalism was a failure that was causing the breakdown of community relations.
Widespread rioting in an area that is both very multicultural and one of London’s most deprived neighbourhoods, would appear to be the perfect demonstration of the social malaise that Cameron and his supporters were so keen to decry. But to what extent were the riots a manifestation of discontent and community break-down linked to ethnicity, and to what degree did they have roots in wider social unrest?
What became a spate of mob unrest and robbery began with a protest. The family, friends and neighbours of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man killed by police officers during an attempted arrest last Thursday (4th August), marched from Broadwater Farm, a notoriously deprived community with North London, to Tottenham Police Station. The demonstrators stood outside the station for three hours demanding that a senior police officer give information about the circumstances of Duggan’s death, without success. Soon after some angry members of the crowd set fire to two nearby police cars. Within a few hours of those incidents, the nearby high street was being ransacked.
It’s not the first time one of the city’s most crime-afflicted neighbourhoods has turned its anger on the police: in 1985 a riot in Broadwater Farm broke out after Cynthia Jarrett, a black woman living on the estate, died of a stroke during a search on her home by police. The unrest came a week after a similar riot in Brixton, sparked by the shooting of Dorothy Groce, a Jamaican immigrant whose son was being sought by the police.
In the first 24 hours of the 2011 riots, many commentators understandably drew parallels with 1985, seeing the violence as continued evidence of the dysfunctional relationship between the UK police and large parts of London’s black community. It’s a relationship that, to many, has not improved markedly in the past quarter-century: the 1999 Macpherson report into the police investigation of the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence declared London’s Metropolitan Police Force to be “institutionally racist”. In recent years the force has been accused of being slow to respond to knife crime in the capital, an offence that the Met’s own statistics suggest is mostly perpetrated by, and against, black youths.
There were two other obvious comparisons to draw with racially motivated riots. Firstly, the Birmingham riots of 2005, in which violence broke out between the black and British-Asian communities of the city over allegations of the gang rape of a black woman by British-Asian youth. Secondly, the 2009 riots in Birmingham that were sparked by clashes between Islamic campaigners and anti-fascist campaigners. So it’s seductive to see this week’s chaos as being part of a narrative of unrest centred on Britain’s ethnic minority communities.
Those who were convinced by Cameron’s rhetoric, and blame the country’s multiculturalist approach for the breakdown of communities, were doubtless surprised by last week’s events. The majority of the participants were not black Britons motivated by anger at the police’s perceived indifference to their communities. Instead they are drawn from all ethnic backgrounds, and have often found themselves facing the strongest resistance from immigrant or ethnic minority communities: apart from the three British-Asian men tragically killed in Birmingham, eyewitnesses in East London remarked that Turkish shopkeepers – a large constituency in the area – were among the few who tried to personally resist the looters by standing guard outside their properties. Neither was the rioting restricted to socio-economically disadvantaged Londoners: young professionals were involved too. Among those facing criminal charges is the daughter of a millionaire businessman.
The factor that set the rioters apart from their victims was age. The majority of those arrested so far have been under the age of 21. According to some of the mobile phone messages that rapidly mobilized rioters in one community after another, mostly using the BlackBerry Messenger platform, the rioters were not motivated by anger at the police, let alone the death of Mark Duggan. Instead they seized on the impotence of the police force to protect their high streets, and the free availability of consumer goods to anyone willing to take them with a minimum of force.
The recession and savage cuts in public spending may have made looting a lower-hanging fruit for some would-be rioters. Attention has focused on the Conservatives’ decision to scrap the Education Maintenance Allowance, a grant of £30 (Rs. 2200) per week given to 16-19 year olds from low-income families; youth groups working in London’s most deprived neighbourhoods suggested the funding provided a critical incentive for teenagers to continue their education rather than venturing into the weakened job market and likely becoming unemployed.
Neither race, nor consumerist greed, nor the socio-economic environment provides a full explanation of the riots. That lies, most troublingly for the government, in the fact that within days, the crime of robbery had become sufficiently normalized that youths from across communities saw looting as a consequence-free action – or at the very least, an action to which the authorities would be slow to respond.
This time, unlike the Brixton riots of 1985, the government and the police now stand disunited. The police blame cuts in government spending for the lack of resources available to respond to the riots, while David Cameron said too few police officers were deployed and the wrong tactics used.
Cameron’s proposed remedy to prevent future riots involves restricting the wearing of facemasks in public and a review of public curfews.
Neither of those policies will resolve either the breakdown of the public’s faith in the police to protect British streets, nor the police’s lack of confidence in dealing with the country’s most deprived areas.
To allow communities to heal, the government has to investigate the killing of
Mark Duggan. Instead of focusing on Broken Britain, David Cameron would do better to examine the broken establishment of which his government is a part.
Rodrigo Davies is a journalist based in Mumbai and has previously reported for the BBC, Bloomberg and The Guardian in the UK.
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