Unfortunately for anyone who has spent time in the UK in the last few years this round of riots will come as no surprise. Terrible yes, alarming yes, but unexpected? No, sadly not. It is becoming ever more apparent that rioting and violence has become a quintessentially British exercise for its citizens dealing with malcontent.
When I first visited England in 2004 I was a doe-eyed 15-year-old finally visiting the land of my father’s family, The Beatles, punk music, football and all the other wonderful things that have come from the UK that I’d looked forward to experiencing and relishing in. The country I’d dreamed about delivered upon my expectations and some and I came home planning my escape to the UK for as soon as school/money/mum and dad would allow.
Circumstances allowed me to visit again in 2006 and this time I had my father with me, showing me more about the country I’d fallen in love with from afar. We spent weeks together wandering around the streets of London and I finally began understanding so much more about the music that had been written about this wonderful town. Only something was still puzzling me, something that only dawned on me when I got home in early 2007 and re-watched the Julien Temple documentary The Filth and the Fury about the birth of the Sex Pistols. As I watched the birth of the punk music unfold before me on screen I began to realise that all the anger that I saw on the faces of those young men I hadn’t seen on anyone’s face while I was in the UK.
As Temple, Johnny Rotten and the rest of the Pistols explained, the band was formed in a period of serious unrest in England in the late 1970s. Britain was going through a tumultuous phase in its history - coal mines closed, strikes were common place and the working class felt an immense sense of dissatisfaction with the government. The Sex Pistols, and indeed the whole punk movement, was the artistic explosion that came from the rage bubbling up in the working class British psyche. In this case art was created from unrest, but looking back at post-war Britain that is not always the case when tensions boil over.
When I arrived in London for a third time in late 2010 I was met with an entirely different city. Something had changed in the people and in the feeling around the place. A lot has changed for the UK in the last few years, as it has the whole world. The Pound is weaker globally, Britain is facing some of the harshest cuts in public spending in decades and I found that the people of London had lost the sense of pride in their city that I had lapped up in my previous visits. The place I was living was also starkly different to the places I had previously stayed. When we walked around Walthamstow when we first arrived I was very displeased with my father. Gone were the nice neat houses of Lewisham and Brockley around South London, replaced with endless shop fronts with languages I didn’t understand selling things I didn’t recognise, messy townhouses and ugly pubs. But I as I explored Walthamstow more it felt more like home and I started to like it. Sure it was at the END of the Victoria line, sure no-one was really smiling and sure there was NOTHING to do around town but it was a suburb I now felt comfortable in.
Boredom soon encouraged me to branch out to neighbouring suburbs to visit a new friend. He lived in Hackney and I realised that it wasn’t too far away from me and after a few tries the trip between Hackney and Walthamstow felt like second nature. Hackney was nicer than Walthamstow but it still had that dingy North London feel to it. But again, the more time I spent there the more it grew on me. It was with horror then on Tuesday that I watched the streets and shops I had walked along only months before burn. I knew things were bad in these places, but never had I imagined it would turn this bad.
Britons love a riot- it’s almost become a caricature, the “lets ‘av it” mentality, bursting with bravado looking for a muppet to flog. Looking back at the periods since the wars there has been a recurring theme in Britain. A quiet anger has been brewing and every once in a while it pops its head up again to remind the government, police or whoever the protesters are angry at, that it is still simmering away. Political disenfranchisement is often a good excuse for people to protest, and in some cases a peaceful protest can actually effect change. But politically protests are highly emotional and emotion can have an awful effect on a mob.
Anger is a dangerous emotion at the best of times, but when you fuel anger with the anger of other people around you there are rarely peaceful solutions. What is concerning about these latest riots is the fact that an emotional reaction to an event lead to a night of violence which lead to an excuse for others to take their own violence out onto the streets. The catalyst for the rioting is clear, yet misbehaviour is the only clear reason for the nights that followed.
Political dissatisfaction is not the only thing that Britons have rioted over in recent decades however. Football riots were a huge problem for the British Government in the 1970s and 1980s and had a nasty flow on effect in the rise in street violence. Although it was not the first time deaths had occurred due to football riots, the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 was enough of a tragedy for the British Government to take notice and for legislation to be passed to try to stop hooliganism. The Football Spectators Act 1989 was designed to target offenders specifically at football matches in England and Wales and although it has had amendments it is still active legislation. Walk into any pub in England and you’re likely to see signs which say something along the lines of “no football colours”. As an avid football fan I understand the passion and emotion which football brings out in fans but loving my team does not make want to me go out and smash up Manchester United or Millwall fans. My question then is whether or not football rioting was a bi-product of passion, or something more deeply set.
Clasford Stirling is a youth worker in Tottenham who spoke to the ABC’s Lateline program on Wednesday night. He told Tony Jones that he was not surprised by the riots in his suburb. He explained that tensions had been boiling up between young people in Tottenham and local police and that although it “wasn’t the right way” the riots were just a way for the young people in his area to have their voices heard.
I feel so sad for a country that I still love so dearly that this sort of thing should be happening. At a time where Londoners should be looking forward to the Olympics next year, they are being forced to watch the city they love burn. Although the unrest is spreading, there was at least some reprieve amongst the anger. The images that came out on Wednesday of people on the streets of Croydon out with brooms, sweeping up the mess and helping one another was just as powerful as the images of a city in flames. Perhaps not as shocking, and perhaps dare I say it, less expected, but none-the-less inspiring. I don’t condone violence in any form, I truly believe that the privilege of being an evolved species is that we have the ability to communicate rationally with one another and violence is an irrational behaviour.
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