Reflecting on the riots

Like many of you, I spend a lot of my time arguing, advising and generally agitating about the problem of urban deprivation and the potential for urban renewal.

And I suspect many of you share my frustration at how these issues are addressed by most of the mainstream media. It usually takes a civil disturbance or an individual tragedy for the problems to be aired, and only then in the most simplistic and sensationalist way.

Complex factors and simple facts are subsumed by sweeping generalisations. Newspaper headlines transform deprived areas into ‘wastelands’ and ‘ghettoes’. Struggling communities are depicted as a seething and disconnected ‘underclass’. The criminal activity of a minority is presented as the local norm in places that are somehow different, other, separated from the rest of us.

Any attempt to understand the problems facing hard-pressed households is twisted by armchair pundits into a crusade by the PC brigade – that mystical but seemingly all-powerful force – to excuse and explain away criminality.

For those of us concerned about urban deprivation and renewal, the disturbances that occurred first in the Tottenham area, and then in other parts of the capital and the country, pose an opportunity and a threat at the same time.

The opportunity is that the problem of deprivation, including the impact of cuts to services which are basically invisible to better-off people, will be aired and discussed. The daily frustrations experienced by people in their interactions with potential employers and public services, including the police, can be exposed and sorted out.

That’s not to say that deprivation caused all or most of what occurred. The idea that living in poverty can function as a guilt-free invitation and standing excuse for criminality infuriates millions of hard-pressed families, community leaders and local activists.

As Councillor Steve Reed, the Labour leader of Lambeth, put it after surveying the damage in his borough, for some people ‘It wasn’t about social issues, it was an opportunity to go on the rob’.

The problem remains that there are large numbers of young people with little structure, few prospects and still less hope in their lives. The fact that so many of those apparently involved in the copycat disturbances were teenagers should make us think.

During the long boom of economic prosperity, many young people were under-qualified and disconnected from the job market, and some were living totally unstructured lives. Today, when highly qualified graduates are fighting for entry-level jobs, they’re being left further and further behind.

The disturbances can’t be sociologically excused, or even worse celebrated as some kind of proto-socialist insurgency against the establishment. But they should create a debate about how to help these young boys and girls to help themselves.

The threat is that the debate about urban deprivation and renewal will be ill-informed, partial and riddled with all kinds of spoken and unspoken prejudices and assumptions.

The contours of that debate are well-established. It’s not our problem. It’s theirs – the chavs, the scallies, the gangsters, the scroungers. Take away their benefits, let them starve, stick them in jail, throw away the key.

The debate is coming. Those of us interested in a progressive, unifying response to the riots will need to be articulate and loud to shape it.

I tweeted (as @metlines) about the need for a progressive, unifying debate, on Sunday afternoon. I quickly received this reply from a well-known blogger and commentator:

What is a progressive response to Tottenham? Sending the little dears on holiday to Barbados? Or throw money? Do tell!

I suspect he was exaggerating for effect, and simplifying to meet the character limit of Twitter.

Nonetheless, the debate which this kind of response invites is exactly the one which we need to resist. The right accuses the left of namby-pamby liberalism, the left accuses the right of crowd-pleasing authoritarianism. On and on they go. Politicians and commentators bellowing clichés at each other.

Away from this echo chamber of democratic dysfunction, everybody else just wants to feel safer at night. And the people who live in the poorest places worst hit by the violence want the chance to talk and lead the response.

Just as there are thugs who will turn a protest into a riot, so there are people who will turn a riot into a political campaign. And we know that deprived areas make a very tempting battle ground for political wars to be waged.

The first thing we need to do is understand what happened. Nobody does yet, despite the confident assertions swirling around Twitter that the riots can be attributed to inequality / immorality / police clampdowns / police cuts / capitalism / consumerism / criminal families / family breakdown / feral children / fear of children and so on and so on.

How about we stop making reality fit our dissertations, and ask the people living in the areas affected by the riots what they think?

As I finish writing this, the sounds of my neighbours’ kids playing on the estate mingle with the screech of sirens and the thudding whir of the police helicopter.

By Tuesday afternoon, most of London felt calmer, if still edgy. After a traumatic Monday night, thousands had came out to sweep up, to check on their neighbours and to perform small but poignant acts of solidarity and, for want of a better word, love for their city.

To understand if the events of the past few days were a freakish outburst or the start of a recurrent pattern, we need to talk and to listen, and to put aside assumptions.

The first assumption we need to reject is that people living in deprived areas are part of the problem.

I’ve worked with activists and public servants in some of the places affected by the disturbances. I can imagine their trauma at the prospect of years of hard work being wiped away in a few days of lunacy.

But I can easily imagine their determination to make good the damage, make phone calls to the parents of those involved (a formal police interrogation will be nothing compared to some of the conversations going right now), and start a clamour for rebuilding and reconnecting.

Neither punitive prison sentences nor top-down government programmes can address the root causes of the disturbances. Nor can the residents of the areas affected, by themselves, but they need to be at the centre of the debate about how to respond.