Police car set alight by working class youth in rebellion against the capitalist economic crisis in Britain. The government has ordered 16,000 cops on to the streets in London to put down the unrest., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
Riots and the underclass
Tuesday, 16 August 2011 02:00
Reprinted From the Zimbabwe Herald
What's a riot without looting? We want it, they've got it! You'd think from the press that looting was alien to British tradition, imported by immigrants more recent than the Normans.
Not so. Gavin Mortimer, author of The Blitz, had an amusing piece in the First Post about the conduct of Britons at the time of their Finest Hour: "It didn't take long for a hardcore of opportunists to realise there were rich pickings available in the immediate aftermath of a raid - and the looting wasn't limited to civilians.
"In October 1940 Winston Churchill ordered the arrest and conviction of six London firemen caught looting from a burned-out shop to be hushed up by Herbert Morrison, his Home Secretary. The Prime Minister feared that if the story was made public it would further dishearten Londoners struggling to cope with the daily bombardments...
"The looting was often carried out by gangs of children organised by a Fagin figure; he would send them into bombed-out houses the morning after a raid with orders to target coins from gas meters and display cases containing First World War medals. In April 1941 Lambeth juvenile court dealt with 42 children in one day, from teenage girls caught stripping clothes from dead bodies to a seven-year-old boy who had stolen five shillings from the gas meter of a damaged house. In total, juvenile crime accounted for 48 per cent of all arrests in the nine months between September 1940 and May 1941 and there were 4,584 cases of looting.
"Some of the looters in the Cafe de Paris cut off the people's fingers to get the rings," recalled Ballard Berkeley, a policeman during the Blitz who later found fame as the 'Major' in Fawlty Towers. Even the wounded in the Cafe de Paris were robbed of their jewellery amid the confusion and carnage."
A revolution is not a tea party, sniffed Lenin, but he should have added that it often starts off with a big party. Perhaps he was acknowledging that when he said a revolution was "a festival of the oppressed." After the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917 everyone was drunk for three days, conduct of which the prissy Vladimir Illich no doubt heartily disapproved.
The riots in London last week started in Tottenham in an area with the highest unemployment in London, in response to the police shooting a young black man, in a country where black people are 26 times more likely to stopped and searched by the cops than whites.
Stop-and-searches are allowed under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, introduced to deal with football hooligans. It allows police to search anyone in a designated area without specific grounds for suspicion. Use of Section 60 has risen more than 300 per cent between 2005 and last year.
Between 2005/06 and 2008/09 the number of Section 60 searches of black people rose by more than 650 per cent.
The day after the heaviest night of rioting I saw Darcus Howe, originally from Trinidad and former editor of Race and Class, now a broadcaster and columnist, being questioned by a snotty BBC interviewer, Fiona Armstrong.
Howe linked the riots to upsurges by the oppressed across the Middle East and then remarked that when he'd recently asked his son how many times he'd been stopped and searched by the police, his boy answered that it had happened too often for him to count.
To which point Ms Armstrong, plainly irked by the trend in the conversation in which Howe was conspicuously failing in his assigned task - namely to denounce the rioters - said nastily, ""You are not a stranger to riots yourself I understand, are you? You have taken part in them yourself?"
"I have never taken part in a single riot. I've been on demonstrations that ended up in a conflict," the 67-year old Howe answered indignantly. "Have some respect for an old West Indian negro and stop accusing me of being a rioter because you wanted for me to get abusive. You just sound idiotic - have some respect." The BBC later apologized to those offended by what it agreed was "a poorly phrased question."
Back in 1981, I interviewed Howe in his Race and Class office after the Brixton and Toxteth riots. Overweening police power and state racism were fuelling unofficial racism, with innumerable murderous attacks on blacks in a Britain ravaged by Margaret Thatcher's economic policies. At the start of April, 1981, the police launched Operation Swamp 81 to combat street crime. More than 1,000 people were stopped and questioned in the first four days.
The uprising in Brixton began on April 9 and lasted through April 11. There were 4,000 police in the area and 286 people arrested. By the weekend of July 10-12 riots were taking place in 30 towns and cities - black and white youths together and in some case white youths alone. They were scenes, as Lord Scarman said of Brixton, "of violence and disorder... the like of which had not previously been seen in this century in Britain.
"The riots opened up an entirely new political ethos," Howe said to me back then. "To understand the organizational stages that we are moving to, it is essential to know that in the late 1960s there were black-power organizations in almost every city in this country. A combination of repression - not as sharp as in the United States - but repression British style and Harold Wilson's political cynicism undermined that movement.
What he did was offer a lot of money to the black community, which set up all kinds of advice centers and projects for this and projects for that. So, in some black communities, if you have a headache somebody is onto you saying, ‘Well, look, I have a project with blacks with headaches.'
That paralysed the political initiative of blacks. It was done for you by the state and, as you know, Britain is saturated with the concept of welfare.The riots have broken through that completely, smashed it to smithereens, indicating that it has no palliative, no cure for the cancer."
That was a interchange at the start of the Eighties. Here we are thirty years later, structural unemployment etched ever more deeply into the economy of Britain, now in a melding of Thatcherism and New Labor's follow-on from Thatcherism, abysmal poverty and hopelessness in Tottenham and similar districts coexisting at close quarters with profligacy and corruption saturating the higher social tiers and the political sector in one of the most unequal, class-divided cities in Europe.
As the Daily Mash puts it: "Many of these kids are less then two miles away from people who get multi-million pound bonuses for catastrophic failure and live in a culture where the material excess of people who are famous for nothing is rammed relentlessly into their faces by middle-brow tabloid newspapers.
"And of course later today the looters will be condemned in Parliament by a bunch of people who stole money by accident."
Bands of youths make for stores in Central London in part to exact revenge on places that contemptuously rejected their applications for a job. One group methodically worked its way through a tony restaurant in Notting Hill Gate, relieving the clientele of their wallets.
Britain had its Notting Hill Gate riots in 1958, and Justice Salmon sent nine white Teddy Boys to long terms in prison, saying, "We must establish the rights of everyone, irrespective of the color of their skin . . . to walk through our streets with their heads erect and free from fear."
Twenty years later, in 1978 Judge McKinnon ruled that Kingsley Read, head of the fascist National Party, was not guilty of incitement to racial hatred when he said publicly of 18-year-old Gurdip Singh Chaggar, set upon by white youths and stabbed to death, "One down, one million to go."
In the interval British governments, both Conservative and Labour, falteringly, with occasional remissions and bouts of bad conscience, proceeded down the path to racism. Pace David Cameron's recent pronouncement of its death, between the late 1940s and the late 1960s the chance of establishing a multiracial society was squandered.
The price for decades of this mythmaking and cop boosterism?
It was summed up in the absurdity of the declaration of the US Supreme Court, in 2000, that flight from a police officer constitutes sound reason for arrest. Actually, it constitutes plain common sense.
Emergency laws, rushed through by panicked politicians, are always bad. It will take America many decades, if ever, to restore civil liberties, approach crime rationally - and this will only come with courageous and inventive political leadership in the poor communities. Britons should study carefully the lessons of Americans' 40-year swerve.
Back in 1981 Howe put the right questions on the agenda. We've got further away from answering them, and in fact the left rarely asks them at all, bobbing along in the neoliberal backwash that began in the early 1970s.
Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com
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