Condemnation without understanding won’t change anything. Call the poor and desperate “scum.” Call them “thugs,” and “feral” and “rats”. You are free to. Make the call that the police who shot a man dead just days ago should be more brutal, and give them weapons. Fifty-two people die every year in police custody; fine, make the call regardless. It is the call many are making, and if the fires on the street are fed by social divide, so are yours. Yours are fed, too, by racism, by hatred of the working class, of the poor, of the young.
You will have to watch it keep happening. You can keep it down, you might seem to have stopped it, but that desperation will remain, and it will resurface. More repression than suppression, and I’m sure you’re familiar with the “bottling up” analogy that pop-psychologists love so much. It explodes.
Or, you could do what only a few are trying to do: figure out why. There is not a gene for social disruption, there is not a gene for rioting. What there is in abundance is poverty. There is poverty, and the idealisation of possession, the argument made in advertisements that you are what you own. There is demonization, because you have been making these same claims for years. You have already called these people “scum,” and “feral,” and “thugs.” The ASBOs were used to limit their freedom of movement, and the headlines about “hoodies” have made them feel already unhuman. There is a lack of education, and the recent cut of the EMA will mean that even fewer will continue their education past sixteen, because they will not be able to afford to. Those who will are deterred from applying to university by the threat of larger debt than ever. There are no jobs. Those who live on the job seeker’s allowance are further demonized and criminialized.
It’s still not right, and my thoughts are with those threatened, with the firefighters, with the family of the young man who died earlier today in hospital. But there is no line between the members of the community who riot and those who do not. They are all suffering, and we have to fight for all of them.
But without understanding where it comes from, it will never end, and your sweeping, discriminatory condemnations will make things a whole lot worse. That you are claiming again, and again, and again, that this is not political is absurd. What is political if a response to oppression is not? Those who are on the streets are there because they have nothing. They are not scared, as Cameron earlier today warned, of “ruining their lives.” What lives?
So the reason I am curled in a ball is not that I fear those rioting. It is that I am fearful of what will come as a response. The social divisions- the demonization, the poverty- will be worsened. The police may well be given new powers. The BNP and the EDL and other such racist organisations will use it to boost their membership numbers. The Conservatives will come down hard, in an attempt to be seen to take control- if they are thought to have lost that, they will lose the next election. What has happened will be used as an excuse for many things, it is likely. And it is likely that they will not be fun.
