London's Burning

[grynch]

Originally Posted by Big Sarge

has anyone noticed the racial aspects of this? seems the victim was black and supposedly the majority of rioters are too. seems similar to the riots after the rodney king incident.

btw if somebody points a gun at me, don't expect me to wait to see if it is real or not!!

Sarge, that was true for the intial riot(s) but now there is a very mixed race crowd.. mostly kids from what I see on TV, many simply out for a bit of... what was kid on TV called......fun.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by grynch

Sarge, that was true for the intial riot(s) but now there is a very mixed race crowd.. mostly kids from what I see on TV, many simply out for a bit of... what was kid on TV called......fun.

I can kind of understand what they mean by that. I think we dismiss this as simple criminality at our peril. And just because they can't necesarily articulate their grievance doesn't mean there isn't one. Whatever they think it is that they are doing, they are definately expressing something that runs very deep and has been boiling under the surface for a while now.

About three or four months ago, my ward colleagues and I were discussing a local housing estate in our ward. We were considering ways in which the various partner organisations in the area could try and off-set the growing sense of alienation and helplessness that was starting to set in. It feels like a powder keg, and one of the things that makes it feel that way is how the young people of the estate are starting to behave. There's just an intangible sense of escalation in tension. An electricity in the air, part hopelessness, part excitable destruction.

Obviously we were discussing some more concrete issues, and expected issues as the cuts start to bite and people start losing their homes and as unemployment starts to rise alongside shrinking assistance programmes. But we'd all noticed that frisson.

I was 18 when the country went into recession and the housing boom bust. I'd spent the previous few years being educated in a system that was underfunded to the point that pupils had to share text books, 3 to a book. With the flow of classes intermittently disturbed by teacher strikes. I watched tv as a kid and there were always strikes. And people shouting at each other across picket lines. Police attacking miners, miners shouting at scabs. The army on fire-fighting duty in the Green Goddess, because the Firemen were on strike. Far-right parties marching in town centres and their bootboys spraying swastikas on walls.

Major miscarriages of justice and the police implicated in racist, or homophobic killings. Trust in the police was not high. You trusted the guy who walked about your neighbourhood, but the organisation was not trusted and the racism of the institution was pretty widely accepted.

There were no jobs to go to. What jobs were on offer were awful, low-paid, insecure and hard fought for. And politicians on the telly were all sternly telling us off for not having one.

Meanwhile, the consumer culture was in full swing. The gap between the haves and have nots was at an all time high (now massively expanded). Tv and movies, adverts and schoolfriends, all high-lighted that gap constantly. Shiny, shiny, success and happiness cheek by jowl with hard-edged poverty. Somewhere in the middle where most of us lived things just felt really insecure.

At 18 was a bit of a nihilist. I wanted to tear it all down. Fuck the whole thing up so it has to be built anew. I'd have been watching these reports with a kind of horrified satisfaction back then. It would have felt right. Like, the world really is fucked up, and now we're just seeing what that really looks like. Because this is what it actually feels like.



And I remember the sense of escalation and *thinks* energy and invincibility and rightness that enveloped me when the poll tax demo turned into a riot. Scary at first but then, completely right.

This may not look political. And to many of the individuals involved it may not feel 'political'. But it is. It isn't the articulate political expression of a demonstration against political policies, it's more of a primal yell.