 Who
broke Britain?
On Thursday 4 August police shot dead Mark Duggan
on the streets of Tottenham. Local outrage at the killing was the spark
for what followed in north London but the conflagration – the most
severe social disturbances in a generation – spread far and wide across
English cities. SARAH SACHS-ELDRIDGE looks at the seven days in August
that raise the question, in response to the establishment politician’s
moral posturing: who broke Britain anyway?
AUGUST’S EXPLOSIVE EVENTS have exposed the reality
of British capitalism: the enormous wealth gap, persistent racism, and
the impact of the cuts, particularly on services such as fire-fighters
and youth facilities. It has revealed a class society in crisis where
all but the very rich are struggling and massive anger, boiling below
the surface, can burst out at any time.
The rot starts with the pampered and corrupt
millionaire government and the super-rich. While millions of working-
and middle-class people struggle with ever increasing food and fuel
bills and shrinking incomes, the richest 1,000 individuals in the UK
have amassed a combined wealth of £396 billion. With that they could pay
for chancellor George Osborne’s £81 billion of cuts nearly five times
over. But the Con-Dems, like their counterparts across the world, are
intent to gouge the cost of deficits, resulting from enormous bank
bailouts, from working-class communities and families.
Departing for their summer break in July, the Con-Dems
faced gathering storm clouds. The Murdochgate scandal has exposed
corruption in the police and the big-business press. It leads directly
to prime minister David Cameron through his association with former News
of the World editors Rebekah Brooks, a personal friend and,
particularly, Andy Coulson, another ‘friend’ and a former Cameron
employee.
Images of furious fires and seemingly out of control
crowds – social disturbances on a scale and ferocity unseen for a
generation – sent a wave of shock, as well as fear through the country.
But these events were not unpredictable. In mid-June many newspapers
were talking about a summer of discontent. None had imagined such a
sudden and fast-spreading outburst of rage from young people, normally
invisible to the general public.
These events have been discussed and commented on in
all corners of the world. Many have speculated on the impact on the
Olympics, planned for 2012 in the very areas where rage erupted.
Symptomatic of their lives, for most youth in the area, the Olympics
have brought neither jobs nor the opportunity to partake in the sporting
spectacle, given ticket prices and the need for a healthy bank account
to even try.
The initial spark was the fatal police shooting of
Mark Duggan in Tottenham, north London, on Thursday 4 August and the
subsequent cover-up by the so-called Independent Police Complaints
Commission. When hundreds protested outside Tottenham police station on
the following Saturday their demands for justice were ignored.
Frustration spilled over. Buildings were burnt and shops looted.
In Hackney, it was provocative and aggressive police
stop-and-search action on 8 August that ignited the explosion of anger.
These were complicated events, reflecting a multitude of issues. The
characteristics of the outbursts varied from area to area. In Manchester
and Birmingham, city centres were the focus. In London, it was areas
local to those arrested. The Guardian’s analysis of ministry of justice
data from the courts disproves the claims of Tory work and pensions
secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, that ‘outsiders’ and ‘organised gangs’
were largely to blame. Tory attempts to classify all involved as
criminals aim to hide the fact that working-class young people have so
much to be angry about.
It was that abundance of flammable material, a
generation robbed of its future and treated like criminals, particularly
young black people, that led to the rapid spreading of the eruptions of
anger across England. This included growing anger over the number of
deaths at the hands of the police. More than 300 deaths have taken place
over ten years and not one officer has been charged. In Brixton, the
hated ‘sus’ laws were a major source of resentment that contributed to
the 1981 riots there.
Today, black people are 26 times more likely than
white people to be stopped and searched under the provisions of the 1994
Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. That is a further condemnation of
the police’s inability to act on the 1999 Macpherson inquiry into the
murder of Stephen Lawrence which confirmed the existence of
institutionalised police racism. In 2010, 48% of young black people were
unemployed while the rate among white young people was 20%.
On the scrapheap
BUT, WHILE RACISM was a factor, certainly in the
initial flare-up, it was not the major issue behind August’s outbreaks.
Footage of stand-offs against the police involving black, white and
Asian youth shows young people whose lives are boxed in by poverty and
dogged by the police feeling that they could challenge those conditions.
The Financial Times quoted a young person from Croydon: "Where are we
supposed to go to meet? We just get pushed around wherever we go". He
continued: if "they tell me where they want me to go where I can just
hang out with my mates without a babysitter, I’ll go there". Now many
are facing jail.
Joblessness is a key factor in this outburst of
rage. The Guardian’s analysis backs this up: fewer than 9% of those
charged in the special 24-hour courts are in full-time work or study.
And August’s unemployment figures show a dramatic increase, with
unemployment among women at Thatcher-era levels. On average, 1,200
joined the dole queue every day in July. For young people the outlook is
devastating: one million have no jobs, 100,000 have been out of work for
more than two years, and 36.7% of 16-17 year-olds are unemployed.
Society has cast these young people onto the scrapheap and abandoned
them.
Couple this with the looting of the Education
Maintenance Allowance (EMA), the skimpy, means-tested payments of up to
£30 a week, which at least enabled many 16-18 year-olds to continue in
education. A survey by the National Union of Students from 2008 found
that around two-thirds of recipients would not be able to continue their
studies without it. The Con-Dems’ scant replacement is tokenism. August
has also seen the A-level results, with record high grades. What a
criminal waste that, on the basis of cuts, 250,000 young people will be
chasing 40,000 university places in ‘clearing’. University is
increasingly being cut off to all but the rich, with average student
debt estimated to be over £50,000 within a few years.
The looting of cheap supermarkets such as Aldi and
Tesco for items like nappies and food reflects deep poverty. Clasford
Stirling, a youth worker who runs the football club on the Broadwater
Farm estate in Tottenham, points out that some young people "didn’t even
bother covering their faces. They’re not trying to rob the banks,
they’re going to Currys, they’re stealing trainers, they’re that poor
that they’re risking going to jail for a flat screen television".
None of these conditions are new. But normally the
frustration is vented within the confines of working-class areas, which
can result in drug use and crime.
Hijacking the fightback
ON THE OTHER end of the spectrum, dragged back from
their lavish holidays, the Tories have leapt on August’s explosions of
anger as an excuse for ramping up repression and stepping up their
anti-working class attacks. They hope that pointing the finger of blame
at sections of ‘broken Britain’ will permanently undermine the struggle
against cuts. Has the establishment politicians’ adage of ‘never letting
a serious crisis to go to waste’ ever been more strenuously pursued?
Despite Osborne’s increasingly pathetic sounding
assurances, the economic outlook is grim. As the cuts hit home, support
for the Tory/Liberal brutal cuts agenda and confidence in the
government’s economic policy is on the slide. On 4-5 August, a YouGov
survey for the Sunday Times found that 35% had less confidence in the
government’s economic strategy than in February. Over a quarter answered
that there was no change, they still had no confidence in the strategy.
Initially, no one from the government was available
to comment on the outpouring of rage on England’s streets. Deputy prime
minister, Nick Clegg, was the first minister to give up his holiday, but
home secretary Theresa May launched the government line on 8 August: "No
excuse for thuggery, for looters or violence", she said. TV news
provided a terrifying, endless loop of raging fires in Hackney and
Croydon as she appeared repeating the mantra.
May was intermingled with sound bites from Diane
Abbott, a so-called Labour left MP, who demanded curfews, with no
attempt to explain the conditions that led to the anger or the events
that sparked its flare-up on the streets. Savage Con-Dem cuts, sitting
atop decades of neo-liberal attacks that have seen wages stagnate and
public services privatised, are the underlying factors.
But nothing can take away from the tragedy of the
loss of life that has taken place, as well as the ruin of people’s homes
and small businesses. The destructive acts that resulted in the deaths
of six people must be condemned. Similarly, those that left over 100
people homeless and damaged shops, pubs, clubs and restaurants in 28
town centres. All must be re-housed by local councils, and small
businesses compensated by the government immediately.
Forced to recall parliament for the second time this
recess, Cameron, as The Economist put it, "aired his old trope of the
‘broken society’ but no new ideas". He talked of "pockets of society
that are not just broken but frankly sick", and the causes of the riots
as "criminality pure and simple". "Our security fightback must be
matched by a social fightback", he said, ripping off the language of
anti-cuts campaigners.
Support for repression?
THE QUESTION IS: will the Tories be successful in
their attempt to hijack the ‘fightback’ and turn society against working
people generally, and the most excluded and marginalised in particular.
In the long run the answer is no. This is a fundamentally weak and
unpopular government, facing an economic disaster. But widespread fear
and shock led to a sense of insecurity. Hoping to ride this wave, the
Tories have raised a variety of repressive measures, including water
cannon. While sermonising against violence, Cameron has hypocritically
recommended the use of rubber bullets for ‘riots’. Rubber bullets have
been used in Northern Ireland since 1969 as a ‘deterrent’. In that time,
17 people including eight children have been killed by them.
Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief
Police Officers (ACPO), has clashed with the Tories over this. He has
written that water cannon are "useless" apart from when aimed at "static
crowds". Recent events in England were not organised political actions
as those in Egypt earlier this year, which faced water cannon, tear gas
and bullets from the regime. And right-wing politicians use the riot
label loosely. Last December, Heidi Alexander, Labour MP for Lewisham
East, referred to a protest at Lewisham town hall by trade unionists and
local campaigners against £20 million of local government cuts as a riot
and, disgracefully, riot police were called in by the Labour-led
council.
In the short term, the Tories may find some support
for a tough response: 216,180 people have signed the e-petition calling
for "convicted London rioters" to lose all benefits. On the other hand,
that is less than half of those who marched against cuts in jobs,
services and benefits on 26 March, and a third of those who took
collective strike action against attacks on public-sector pensions on 30
June.
The government response on the e-petition website
explains how it plans to ramp up its existing attacks on benefits, such
as considering "whether further sanctions can be imposed on the benefit
entitlements of individuals who receive non-custodial sentences", and
"increasing the level of fines which can be deducted from benefit
entitlement". The Con-Dems are already in the process of removing
housing and disability benefit from tens of thousands of people,
threatening major increases in homelessness and spiralling poverty.
They have already agreed to mete out ‘collective
punishment’ by evicting the families of anyone charged for ‘riot-related
offences’. Tory-controlled Wandsworth council in south west London has
already served notice on the mother of an 18-year-old charged with
violent disorder and attempting to steal electronic goods.
A YouGov poll, conducted on 10 August, showed that
90% of British adults supported the use of water cannon, 78% were in
favour of the use of tear gas, and a third agreed that police should be
able to use plastic bullets against rioters. However, given their deep
unpopularity, there has been no discernable increase in Tory support in
the polls at this stage. Two Sun/YouGov surveys of voting intention on
8-9 August and 17-18 August showed support stubbornly stuck at 36%.
Not so clear cut
ANGER WAS DIRECTED at Con-Dem politicians who dared
to take to the streets. Clegg was booed and heckled in Birmingham.
London mayor, Boris Johnson, was unable to answer when asked how young
people would get vital job-seeking support when Connexions advice
services were shut down.
Within only a fortnight of the first events there is
growing concern about the harsh sentences being handed down to the
thousands arrested. Although the Tories deny that they have intervened,
the heavy sentences are widely seen as a political response, and that
crimes against property are particularly severely punished. Two young
men have been given four years for failing to organise a riot – posting
Facebook messages to which no-one responded – in their local town
centres. This is the same length of sentence given for recent
convictions for rape or, in one case, being part of a £10 million heroin
supply network. The Socialist Party has called for the setting up of a
democratically run inquiry into the riots involving elected
representatives of trade unions and community organisations, that could
also set the parameters on how the offences are dealt with, with the
right to review sentences already imposed.
There has been disagreement among coalition
politicians, even within the two parties. While the Tories have been
banging the ‘law-and-order’ drum they have insisted that the cuts to the
police go ahead. But Johnson, with London elections next year on his
mind, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: "This is not a time to think
about making substantial cuts in police numbers".
Working-class people in the areas affected have been
frustrated by the lack of police presence to defend their homes and
livelihoods. Even young people express frustration that the ‘service’ is
not available to them when they require protection and help.
Fundamentally, the police are a part of the state machine and act in its
interest. They are widely hated for that role. We need police
accountability through democratic control, with elected committees
involving representatives of local people and trade unions.
While Clegg has generally marched in line with the
Tories, some Lib Dems have been uneasy about the sentencing and about
the moves to evict families. The Tories appear to be unmoved by their
partners’ queasiness. They know, as does the dog on the street, that the
Lib Dems are too broken to consider triggering a general election and
have no option but to shut up. When asked by The Independent how the
Tory right wing would react to Clegg’s proposals to conduct interviews
to establish why anger erupted, one Tory minister replied: "Oh they
don’t mind all that as long as they know the rioters are going to have
their goolies chopped off".
Filmed amid the fires in Hackney, Abbott asked: "who
is going to give jobs to people in these communities?" That’s the
question that a lot of people in her borough of Hackney ask, where there
were fewer than 500 job vacancies for more than 11,000 claimants. But
her question also summed up a key part of the government’s line: placing
the blame for unemployment and the problems working-class people face on
families and individuals rather than on the millionaire Con-Dems and the
rich and powerful people they represent.
Cameron talked about putting "rocket boosters" under
the "clear ambition" to "turn around the lives of the 120,000 most
troubled families in the country". This and his other big idea, the ‘Big
Society’, are ideological justifications for cutting back on state
provision of public services, that families should be responsible for
their own welfare and suffer the consequences. He is echoing his guru,
Margaret Thatcher, who famously claimed that ‘there is no such thing as
society, just individuals and families’.
Duncan Smith has talked about investment in early
years interventions. But the Con-Dems snatched away the baby element of
the tax credits, the health in pregnancy grant, and cut back on Sure
Start provision. To claim they intend to support poor and vulnerable
families is sheer lies and hypocrisy. Instead, they are criminalising a
generation of young people, locking up many with no previous record in
overcrowded ‘colleges of crime’.
Capitalist values
SEEMINGLY WITHOUT IRONY, Cameron writes in The Daily
Express: "There are deep problems in our society that have been growing
for a long time: a decline in responsibility, a rise in selfishness, a
growing sense that individual rights come before anything else". These
are the very qualities that are promoted and respected in the capitalist
society he defends.
Just a few minutes walk from Tottenham police
station is Tottenham Hotspur football ground at White Hart Lane. Current
manager, Harry Redknapp (previously the manager at Portsmouth FC), is a
director of a housing company, Pierfront Development. Portsmouth council
has a housing waiting list of 2,553 applicants, but this company has
been allowed to flout legislation that demands all housing developments
include cheaper social housing. Pierfront will pay less than a quarter
of the funding for the agreed number of affordable housing units. Even a
Lib Dem councillor had to describe it as "simply profit before people’s
lives". This is just a small company on a small scale doing what major
companies do on a major scale every day.
Even right-wing commentators like Peter Oborne in
The Telegraph have condemned the "almost universal culture of
selfishness and greed" among the super-rich, including expenses grabbing
MPs. But he harks back to the ‘good old days’, saying that "the last two
decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British
governing elite". Of course capitalism, built on the wealth accumulated
by slavery, is a brutal, bloody system that has always been based on the
private ownership of wealth by the few and massive exploitation. What
Oborne is referring to is the decades of neo-liberal policies in which
today’s young people have spent all their lives.
‘Greed is good’ has been the motto. The state
provision of services, jobs and utilities has been privatised in the
interests of profit, resulting in cuts, insecurity and soaring prices.
The share of wealth going to the working class has been slashed with tax
concessions for the rich and virtual wage stagnation as trade union
rights have been attacked.
Not only have the super-rich looted wages and public
purses, they are hoarding their wealth, finding no profitable outlet for
it. Instead of fulfilling their role in investing in production,
providing jobs, the capitalists are buying gold, the only safe place for
their riches, given the weakness of markets as cuts hit consumer
spending.
As Karl Marx first explained, capitalism is an
anarchic and chaotic system. In Britain, 2.5 million people have no job
while an estimated £60 billion sits in British banks ‘waiting to be
invested’ in new businesses, unspent because of ‘weak confidence’.
Mass civil disobedience
RIOTS, ALTHOUGH A chaotic and inchoate expression of
protest, have not changed the world. Some on the left, such as the
Socialist Workers Party, have written and spoken about looting "by poor
working-class people" being a "deeply political act" (Socialist Worker,
13 August), that the looters were "expropriating the expropriators",
effectively redistributing wealth. This makes a mockery of socialist
ideas that a mass working-class struggle has the potential to replace
the capitalist system with one in which the resources of society are
democratically owned and controlled by the working class with a plan to
meet the needs of all.
Unfortunately, given the ideological shift to the
right by the mass social democratic parties and many trade union leaders
over the last two decades, Marx’s ideas are not widely known and
understood, especially among Blair’s children and Thatcher’s
grandchildren, today’s young generation. The recent explosive events
show despair and the absence of understanding the potential power of
working-class people to, not just express anger at our conditions but to
change them, including bringing down the government.
Most of those who raged against the police and
looted shops were not born when the mighty anti-poll tax battle was won
at the beginning of the 1990s. That movement, led by the Socialist
Party’s predecessor, Militant, was fundamentally based on mass,
organised ‘law-breaking’. Under the hated and unfair poll tax, every
adult was charged the same rate, massively penalising working-class
people. Huge numbers simply could not afford it. But having succeeded in
defeating the heroic miners’ strike in 1984-85, Thatcher presumed that
she could take on the entire working class at once, threatening brutal
repression, prison and bailiffs to anyone who did not pay. But the
movement she provoked ultimately removed her from power.
On the left and right there are claims that the riot
at the end of the mass anti-poll tax demonstration in London in March
1990 was the key to the victory. That violence had been triggered when
the police launched an all-out attack on the demo. But the movement’s
victory was in fact achieved through organising democratic local,
regional and national anti-poll tax federations that painstakingly built
confidence in the tactic of non-payment. Eighteen million people refused
to pay the poll tax on an organised basis. This made it unworkable.
Although the tax was brought into law, within a couple of years it was
removed from the statute books.
One aspect of the anti-poll tax movement was the
organisation of ‘bailiff busting’ teams which, without Twitter or mobile
phones, developed phone trees and networks to protect the homes of
non-payers from Thatcher’s henchmen – the bailiffs in England and Wales,
the sheriff officers in Scotland. Such organised defence of communities,
with elected organising committees, provide a useful model for community
self-defence.
The big question
IN 2006, CAMERON said: "Understanding the
background, the reasons, the causes. It doesn’t mean excusing crime but
it will help us tackle it". Needless to say, this approach is being
ignored. Comedian Russell Brand, surprisingly wisely, pointed out: "I
remember Cameron saying ‘hug a hoodie’ but I haven’t seen him doing it.
Why would he? Hoodies don’t vote, they’ve realised it’s pointless, that
whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the ‘we don’t
give a toss about you’ party".
The absence of a political voice for the working
class has been a weakness of the anti-cuts movement and these events
further emphasise that. David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, has put
himself around in the aftermath of the riots but neither he nor his
party provide any alternative to the Con-Dems. Labour deputy leader
Harriet Harman has muttered a little about the effects of the cuts to
EMA on young people. They have argued, like Johnson, against police
cuts. Fundamentally, however, New Labour supports the slashing of public
spending. New Labour’s last chancellor, Alistair Darling, made a
pre-general election promise to implement cuts worse than Thatcher’s.
Building a new workers’ party is clearly an urgent task.
There was a well-written article on the
publicfinances.co.uk website which pointed to many of the contributing
factors behind August’s events. Disappointingly, it finished by asking:
"The big question is, where to now?" The author was named as ‘Lewisham
resident’ Heather Wakefield. Wakefield is also the head of the Local
Government Service Group of the UK’s largest public service trade union,
Unison, representing over 700,000 of the union’s 1.4 million members.
Why isn’t she providing an answer to ‘the big question’. The conditions
for further outbreaks of anger remain and a clear response from the
trade union movement is required, not just passive commentary.
The August events can be seen, in some ways, as the
second call for back-up from the youth to the TUC trade union
leadership. In November and December 2010, tens of thousands of school,
college and university students protested against education cuts.
Breaking the consensus that the cuts were necessary they inspired
millions to support them. But they faced demonization and brutal
policing, including mass arrests and kettling. Shivering inside a
freezing nine-hour police cordon, students asked where the trade unions
were, how come they had not supported them and joined the
demonstrations? The Socialist Party called on the TUC to organise a mass
demo before Christmas to provide the angry young people with a channel
for their anger, and link them with the wider struggle against
public-sector cuts. This was delayed by five months, until 26 March.
Then the summer came. A number of cuts had gone through – particularly
for youth services, EMA, etc – and still nothing had been organised to
follow up the March demo by the TUC leadership.
The trade unions must reach out to young people –
workers, students and the unemployed. This requires a programme around
which they can fight. The demands of Youth Fight for Jobs (YFJ), with
the support of six national trade unions, can be very attractive: reopen
and expand youth services; nationalise the banks and use the money to
create jobs; government investment in house renovation and building to
provide cheap social housing; no cuts in benefits and end lower youth
rates. These must be combined with a defence campaign against the
heavy-handed sentencing and ramping up of repression.
It is not the case that every young person will be
won to such a campaign immediately. And it does not mean that there are
not racist, sexist, individualistic and other poisonous ideas among
them. Indeed, in the absence of an alternative being provided, in the
context of deteriorating living conditions, those reactionary ideas can
be nurtured under capitalism, and individual, nihilistic or terroristic
tendencies can develop which harm working-class people and do not
advance the struggle.
Tariq Jahan, the father of one of the young men
killed in Birmingham, has been widely praised for his call for community
unity, guarding against a racist backlash. Five thousand attended the
rally in an area where people know the cost of ethnic tension. However,
it is working-class unity and organised struggle that is required to not
only guard against a fracturing of society but also to build a mass
movement that takes society out of the hands of the greatest looters,
those who ‘break society’, the capitalist class. |