Why we never learn

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We’ve been here before and Seamus Milne nails it.

The Daily Mail thundered that blaming cuts was “immoral and cynical”, echoed by a string of armchair riot control enthusiasts. There was nothing to explain, they’ve insisted, and the only response should be plastic bullets, water cannon and troops on the streets.

We’ll hear a lot more of that when parliament meets – and it’s not hard to see why. If these riots have no social or political causes, then clearly no one in authority can be held responsible. What’s more, with many people terrified by the mayhem and angry at the failure of the police to halt its spread, it offers the government a chance to get back on the front foot and regain its seriously damaged credibility as a force for social order.

But it’s also a nonsensical position. If this week’s eruption is an expression of pure criminality and has nothing to do with police harassment or youth unemployment or rampant inequality or deepening economic crisis, why is it happening now and not a decade ago? The criminal classes, as the Victorians branded those at the margins of society, are always with us, after all. And if it has no connection with Britain’s savage social divide and ghettoes of deprivation, why did it kick off in Haringey and not Henley?

To accuse those who make those obvious links of being apologists or “making excuses” for attacks on firefighters or robbing small shopkeepers is equally fatuous. To refuse to recognise the causes of the unrest is to make it more likely to recur – and ministers themselves certainly won’t be making that mistake behind closed doors if they care about their own political futures.

It was the same when riots erupted in London and Liverpool 30 years ago, also triggered by confrontation between the police and black community, when another Conservative government was driving through cuts during a recession. The people of Brixton and Toxteth were denounced as criminals and thugs, but within weeks Michael Heseltine was writing a private memo to the cabinet, beginning with “it took a riot”, and setting out the urgent necessity to take action over urban deprivation.

This time, the multi-ethnic unrest has spread far further and faster. It’s been less politicised and there’s been far more looting, to the point where in many areas grabbing “free stuff” has been the main action. But there’s no mystery as to where the upheaval came from…

Watching the ‘debate’ in the Commons today, it was difficult to know which had been the more depressing: the looting, or the Establishment’s boneheaded reaction to it.

Oh, and by the way, isn’t it interesting how an organisation that was only last week widely regarded as incompetent, corrupt and institutionally racist has suddenly become our heroic bulwark against anarchy. I refer, of course to Inspector Knacker of the Yard and his colleagues in the Metropolitan Police. I bet the Murdochs cannot believe their luck. A week is indeed a long time in politics.

Christian tolerance, US-style

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This is a snapshot of a graphic on from Andrew Sullivan’s blog. He reports that Blair Scott, a spokesman for the American Atheists, Inc., was subjected to over 8,000 death threats and other violent rhetoric after appearing on Fox News. The illustration shows some sample responses. Apart from shedding light on some of the attitudes of the US religious fundamentalism, it also rather undermines my theory that forcing people to use real names in Internet discourse increases the likelihood of temperate, reasonable online behaviour.

Dear Photograph: the power of images

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At first sight, this seems an extraordinary site. People post photographs that are meaningful to their lives — and life-stories. Many are touching, moving, happy, sad.

But…

The only thing wrong with it is the exploitative licence that the site insists on. It reads:

When you submit your materials, you grant dearphotograph.com a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to use the work to be used, copied, sub-licensed, adapted, transmitted, distributed, published, displayed or otherwise under our discretion in any and all media.

Nauseating.

Panic on the streets

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Thoughtful piece by Laurie Penny in openDemocracy.net.

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything: “Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you? 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.”

This is a very good piece.

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night.

The democratic deficit

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The London/Manchester/Nottingham/etc. riots (and the wrangling over the US Debt Ceiling) are just the latest demonstrations of an ugly truth — that our so-called liberal democracies have been hollowed out. We saw that three years ago with the bail-out of the banks. Jonathan Freedland has a good column about this in the Guardian.

This scepticism toward the potency of democratic politicians – and therefore democratic politics itself – is oddly echoed by the looters themselves. Certainly no one outside the Iranian state media is calling them "protesters", but even "rioters" seems the wrong word, carrying with it a hint of political purpose. For some, especially at the start in Tottenham, there was clearly a political dimension – with the police the prime focus of their anger. But many of the copycat actions across London and elsewhere have no apparent drive beyond the opportunistic desire to steal and get away with it. It's striking that the targets have not been town halls or, say, Tory HQ – stormed by students last November – but branches of Dixons, Boots and Carphone Warehouse. If they are making a political statement, it is that politics does not matter.

And while the revulsion at the looting has been widespread and bipartisan – with plenty of liberals admitting to "coming over all Daily Mail" at the ugliness of the vandalism – that sense of the impotence of politics is widespread, too. One aspect of the phone-hacking scandal that went deep was its revelation that those we might think exert authority – police and politicians – were in fact supine before an unelected media corporation. The sheer power of News Corp contrasted with the craven behaviour of those we elect or entrust to look out for us…

“Recreational looting” in perspective

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This was the term coined by Gavin Essler Esler on Newsnight last night as he struggled to comprehend the mayhem in London. What’s interesting about the media coverage — and the public utterances of politicians as well as members of the public who have been interviewed by reporters — is its demonstration of how anger disables rationality. At the moment, to even attempt to argue that this “mindless” violence takes place in a wider context is seen as tantamount to condoning the madness.

Nevertheless, here goes.

1. The looting, mayhem and arson that’s gone on is just that. It doesn’t have any political motive or justification. Some of it is hard-headed, organised theft (for example, the looting in Birmingham). We shall probably see evidence of this emerging as some looters are caught and prosecuted, because they are not people from the area where they’ve been apprehended, but incomers from outside the area who have come looking for stuff to steal.

2. But mostly what’s gone on looks like vandalism on an extreme scale — chiefly because it involves youths trashing their own neighbourhoods. Vandalism is always puzzling because it seems motiveless. But it’s socially determined, nevertheless, in the sense that it occurs only in certain contexts. (Which is why, for example, one sees so much of it in Britain and Ireland and so little in some other societies.) In Britain, vandalism is a sign that kids feel no sense of responsibility towards their environment, which in turn reflects a sense of alienation from it. The environment is not something they value, because their perception is that they get very little from it. So no matter how “mindless” their behaviour appears to be, it takes place in a context. And that context is shaped by economic and social conditions.

3. Most of what passes for “analysis” in the mass media can’t seem to grasp the point that behaviour is a multi-causal phenomenon. That’s why it’s idiotic to look for the thing that is “causing” looters to loot. There are lots of forces at work — a system of ’causes’, if you like, and the outcome at any given time is the resultant of those causes at that time.

Larry Lessig pointed out many years ago that behaviour is determined by the interaction of several things — norms, laws, markets and architecture. Norms are socially determined; laws are framed by legislatures and implemented (or not) by security forces; markets have their own impersonal logic, and are often skewed by cartels and monopolies; architecture is determined by planners and developers. Young males growing up in the poorer parts of British cities have been affected by all three: social norms that are normally shaped by regular employment, education and stable family life are warped by poverty, crime and deprivation; the law is implemented in a discriminatory way (as shown, for example, in the way young blacks are regularly singled out by the Met for stop and search); the job-market is effectively closed to thsm; and the architecture of housing estates and run-down streets is ugly, alienating, dispiriting and intimidating to a degree rarely appreciated by the middle-classes, who never visit these places.

4. The spread of rioting from borough to borough and from city to city is clearly viral. The mass media are busy blaming “social media” for this, but in fact the ‘virus’ could just as plausibly have been spread by television images (as it was, for example, in the Watts riots in LA in 1965.

Either way, it’s just a contemporary manifestation of an old phenomenon. It reminds me of the famous psychological experiment in which two identical cars were abandoned, one on a street in Palo Alto, the other in a downmarket part of New York. The New York car was vandalised and stripped instantly, but the one in Palo Alto remained untouched for a week. Then the experimenters smashed its windscreen — with the result that the vehicle was comprehensively trashed in a day. In other words, in normal circumstances, the behavioural barrier to smashing a shop window is quite high. But once one shop has been violated, then the barrier is immediately lowered. When a dozen shops have been done, then effectively all restraints vanish.

And — please note — this is not a justification for the smashing of shop-windows but a plea for a serious attempt to understand what underpins the current crisis. If we don’t learn from it then we’re screwed.

5. Finally, there’s a stink of hypocrisy in all this. Our politicians are all incensed and enraged over the torching of cars and buildings and the looting of a smallish number of shops. But they passively tolerated the looting of our entire economy by bankers — who instead of being made to feel “the full weight of the law” (to coin Boris Johnson’s phrase about the looters) have been allowed to award themselves £14 billion in bonuses this year. It makes one sick.

London’s burning: the context

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It’s interesting (and drearily predictable) to see the media and the government co-operating to formulate a narrative (“mindless violence, thuggery, etc.) as the sole explanation for what’s going on in London right now. But we’ve known forever that explosions like this stem from deeper causes — as Nina Power points out in this excellent Guardian comment piece. The levels of social and economic inequality in Britain and the US have become so obscene that the only viable strategy for the established order is to try to focus attention somewhere else.

The policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms, but the context for social unrest cuts much deeper. The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday, where it appears, contrary to initial accounts, that only police bullets were fired, is another tragic event in a longer history of the Metropolitan police’s treatment of ordinary Londoners, especially those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and the singling out of specific areas and individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.

One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC, but there should be nothing surprising about this. When you look at the figures for deaths in police custody (at least 333 since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police officer for any of them), then the IPCC and the courts are seen by many, quite reasonably, to be protecting the police rather than the people.

Combine understandable suspicion of and resentment towards the police based on experience and memory with high poverty and large unemployment and the reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear. (Haringey, the borough that includes Tottenham, has the fourth highest level of child poverty in London and an unemployment rate of 8.8%, double the national average, with one vacancy for every 54 seeking work in the borough.)

Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.