by Gareth Millington
You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you’ll have to answer to
The guns of Brixton ([1. Lyrics from ‘Guns of Brixton’ by The Clash included on the album London Calling (1979, Columbia Records)])
In August 2011 young people from the margins and periphery of London unleashed a fury not seen in the capital for over a quarter of a century. The riots provided an unsettling mix of the familiar and unfamiliar- an act of mimesis somewhere between repetition of previous events and the advent of something utterly distinctive. Commentators invoked ghosts of London’s turbulent past but rioters just seemed bent on escaping an oppressive present. An older generation searching for political motive in the scenes of shameless, indiscriminate theft and violence that flooded news channels felt short changed- where were the activists, the spokespeople? The police shooting of Mark Duggan ([2. Duggan was shot by Metropolitan Police officers and died Thursday 4 August.]) sparked anger but what followed defied all attempts at categorisation. Yet as historian Peter Ackroyd observes, London is a moody and irritable city whose claustrophobia encourages a sudden appetite for ‘wildness and licence’ ([3. Ackroyd, P. (2001) London: The Biography (London, Vintage) p. 391]). Perhaps also our definition of the political is too narrow. It is worth remembering Marx’s avowal that the political soul of revolution consists in the desire of classes without influence to end their isolation. For sure, in the disturbances that broke out from Tottenham- to Hackney, Enfield, Ilford, Croydon, Ealing and beyond- you could sense the libido for a ‘unity of disunity’ ([4. A notion first raised by Marshall Berman (1982) in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: the experience of modernity (London, Verso) p.15]). In a fragmented metropolis riots spread by resonance rather than contamination. Post-code beefs ([5. A common feature of gang life in London’s estates.]) were suspended for the interim as London’s youth asked simply ‘How do we find each other?’ ([6. See Invisible Committee (2009) The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles, CA, Semiotext(e)) p. 18.])
The union momentarily attained by rioters did not lead to the appropriation or capture of a centre. It was the corner shop or local branch of Aldi rather than Regent Street that was smashed up, looted and set ablaze. London’s political, financial and consumer centres retained their stonyhearted composure. In contrast to London’s post-war ‘race’ riots- Notting Hill, Brixton- the disturbances of August 2011 were peculiarly scattered and self-contained within their moment and location of enunciation- in the main at the extremities of the bloated global city. This time there was no organic heart to the riots which ironically is what caused authorities to panic so much. In August 2011 London experienced its first anti-riots: dis/connected disturbances ostensibly lacking in concentration and political coherence- a series of detours without destination. Whereas it was the guns of Brixton that provided the blowback to racism and inequality in the 1980s, London now wakes to the reality that none of its endz([7. London street slang for estate, neighbourhood or area of residence.]) are gonna come with hands on their head.
The closest the riots got to bourgeois London were Clapham where kids from local estates temporarily invaded the cosy milieu of florists, delis and baby boutiques. The following morning Clapham’s streets were thronged with self-styled ‘clean up wombles’ armed with brooms and pots of tea, a bucolic scene disrupted only slightly by a young woman pictured wearing a vest bearing the carefully hand-stencilled slogan: ‘Looters Are Scum’. David Cameron praised clean-up volunteers as representing the very ‘best of Britain’. In the blighted 1970s and early 80s there was a sense that that London was up for grabs; ownership of the city is not in question now. In Clapham a modest family home costs upwards of £600,000. Pictures of the Clapham clean-up, where photographers struggled to find non-white faces ([8. See The Guardian, Wednesday 10 August 2011, pgs. 22-3.]), illustrated with precision which strata of Londoners have the greatest sense of entitlement to the city. For thousands of young people in Other London the ‘possible impossible’ extends no further than raiding Footlocker for the latest trainers or Comet for a wide screen TV. While the right to the city is a means and an end for some, it remains a horizon for others.
Three weeks on nobody is really sure how things have changed or indeed why. Anyone with opinions for sale can find evidence to support his or her perspective. The response of the political class has been to condemn the riots as ‘criminality, pure and simple’- looters are greedy and arsonists- sick. Yet in Broken Britain it’s hard for politicians to occupy the moral high ground. Internet message boards and the blogosphere have provided a platform for the so-called ‘silent majority’ to call for the birch, the removal of benefits and an end to political correctness- in the process egging on right-wing commentators to speak in racially codified terms about bad parenting, single parenting, a degenerative welfare culture and, predictably- hip-hop. Some distinguished intellectuals have dared face the ‘r’-word head on, notably retired LSE historian David Starkey who claimed that London’s polyglot metropolitan culture was to blame, with the problem being that ‘the whites are becoming black’ ([9. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH5HAg7RTKk]). Of course he didn’t mean all whites, just those lower class ‘borderline whites’ ([10. See Garner, S. (2007) Whiteness: an Introduction (London, Routledge).]) who mixed with and spoke like blacks; and he didn’t mean that blacks were necessarily trapped within their inferior culture- education in a prestigious white institution could always remedy that. Encouraged by government rhetoric about individual responsibility and moral vacuums, sentencing has been astonishingly draconian with youngsters receiving lengthy custodial sentences for petty theft or conspiring in their bedrooms via the Internet. Meanwhile academics, left wing politicians or columnists attempting to explain the disturbances using a conceptual framework other than the post-riot doxa have found themselves disgraced as apologists, the most shameful example being the attempted humiliation of Trinidad born writer and activist Darcus Howe in a hostile BBC News interview ([11. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biJgILxGK0o&feature=related]). As Howe explained the dishonour experienced by young London blacks disproportionately apprehended and searched by police, he was repeatedly asked whether he condoned the violence (Howe called it an ‘insurrection’) before finally being dismissed by his interviewer as someone who is in fact ‘no stranger to riots’.
So what happens now? Well, for good reason London is renowned as a city curiously unmoved by its crowds or their passions.([12. Ackroyd, P. (2001) London: The Biography (London, Vintage) p. 397.]) Politicians will think and act within the confines of the political field they are invested (can we ever expect anything more?). Academics will work under their own constraints but for scholars in London it’s time to echo the cry and demand of the dispersed and seriously consider ‘the city’ once again- the city as a totality- rather than its separate elements or functions. We must press ahead with a critical agenda informed yet not dictated by events of this month. For those trapped in the crevices of the most unequal city in the Western world the future is likely to consist of continued hardship. In the light of spending cuts, rising youth unemployment, a rise in university tuition fees and a reinvigorated security effort in preparation for the Olympics, prospects may get bleaker still. Let’s not forget them or ignore the mechanisms that jeopardise their right to the city. It’s not ‘sociological nonsense’([13. Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, visiting Clapham on Tuesday 9th August 2011; reported in national press.]) to state that riots are a symptom of structural injustice, or to point to the intense fragmentation / hierarchization of Londonspace (a social, material and mental phenomenon) as an incitement of disquiet. Riots remind us of what we know but prefer to forget. They are the answer to a question that somebody forgot to ask.
Gareth Millington is Senior Lecturer of Social Sciences at Roehampton University, London and author of ‘Race’, Culture and the Right to the City: Centres, Peripheries, Margins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
