Riots in London and other English cities

Has Britain become a lawless society? The question was asked by a French journalist some weeks before the recent riots in London and other English cities in an article he wrote about the Westminster parliamentary expenses affair in 2009 and this year’s phone hacking and police bribery scandal. No doubt, had he composed his piece this week, the writer would have made a link between the greed in high places and the looting in the streets of Tottenham, Hackney and Croydon.

The English riots in August 2011 made front-page news and received top billing in newspapers and on TV across the world and would have featured even more prominently had it not been for the financial crisis in the US and Europe.

Depending on the politics of their media outlets, foreign commentators provided their readers with different analysis of the violence, destruction and looting in many London boroughs and other English cities. Conservative and centre-right media described large sections of British youth as hooligans living in a society that has long ceased to offer them any prospects.

Liberal and left-leaning newspapers, TV stations and internet blogs featured Britain as a country that has lost faith in any authority – the politicians, the church, the media and the police.

The Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) wrote that the British elite had systematically compromised themselves in recent years. They ceased to be a role model or trustworthy. The newspaper said that in the 2008 economic crisis the financial establishment declared bankruptcy and British politicians became mired in the expenses scandal of 2009. Then this year the media and politicians have been damaged by the Murdoch scandal. “When the country's elites don't take the law seriously, why should the rest of us? No question is more dangerous for a society,” the FTD declared.

Germany’s leading business daily Handelsblatt believes that the riots revealed the decay of society at its edges, brought on by the erosion of social norm, great frustration and a lack of opportunity for the lower classes.

The centre-left Süddeutsche Zeitung described the two faces of Britain today. “Who would believe that only three months separate this year’s Royal Wedding from events that made large parts of London resemble a war zone,” the newspaper asked.

In the US, all media dedicated extensive coverage to the London riots. The most damning piece was written by a retired British prison doctor and psychiatrist. In an article for the New York Daily News. Anthony Daniels described young British people as among the most unpleasant and potentially violent in the world. “It took determination on the part of my countrymen not to notice it,” he continued.

Daniels believes that the rioting is only the extreme end of the spectrum of bad behaviour by British youth and young adults. “The characteristics, common to all classes, are arrogance, a sense of entitlement and an unwillingness to moderate their behaviour for the convenience of others. The main difference between the classes is that the rich can pay for what they feel entitled to, while the poor have to wheedle, cajole, swindle and steal it. But the inflamed sense of entitlement is the same,” he argues.

Daniels does not consider that poverty explains the quick resort to violence or the obvious taste for vandalism of the modern British. “This is now the British way of life. We are afraid of our own children; many carry knives. The number of knifing injuries in London rose from 941 in the three months between November 2010 and January 2011 to 1,070 in the three months between February and April 2011; that is to say, by nearly 14 per cent. And knifings with victims ages 13 to 24 rose 30 per cent over this equivalent period between 2008-09 and 2010-11,” he explained in his article.

City Mayors’ Scotland correspondent observed that whilst the children and teenagers involved in the riots were mixed girls and boys, the adults were nearly all male. “ I’m not remotely surprised by that. Even women who were wild teenagers tend to become more sensible and responsible as adults and think about consequences,” he writes.

Many Brazilian newspapers reported that the London riots were triggered by the police shooting of Mark Duggan and the force’s initial attempt to claim self-defense. They compared the death of the young man from Tottenham, North London, to the shooting in July 2005 of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was killed by police on a London subway train. Officers from Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist unit mistakenly identified the young Brazilian as a terror suspect.

10 August 2011: Even before the current crisis, which has engulfed daily life in the capital began, London’s police were already stretched to budgetary breaking point and found themselves without steady leadership following the unprecedented resignation of its most senior officer Sir Paul Stephenson and one of his key assistants.

Regardless of the circumstances in which weekend protests at the lack of public information regarding the death of a young man by armed police turned into opportunistic looting over successive nights, questions are now asked by Londoners as to why its police simply cannot cope or prevent wide-scale looting and burning across the capital.

Questions were also being asked of both UK Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson, both of whom initially refused to cut short their holidays as London burned.

The initial response to the crisis, which quickly flared up as a protest march in the North London district of Tottenham turned to violent anger when police refused to meet the deceased Mark Duggan’s family, was handled by a succession of Metropolitan Police assistant commissioners who took to the airwaves to attempt to provide public reassurance.

In truth the Met has been without a Commissioner since the resignation of Sir Paul Stephenson last month, with his deputy Tim Godwin acting up until a successor can be recruited from among the narrow pool of qualified senior police officers in the UK. While several commentators have denied a leadership crisis in the Met and rallied to its support, a number of retired senior police accused it of lacking any kind of strategy.

The August vacation season has therefore delayed this process and even seen the UK authorities caught napping by dint of being overseas, assuming their juniors were capable of deputising in their absence. It was only by the fourth day of the crisis that UK Prime Minister was able to return from holiday to convene the top-level COBRA security committee to coordinate a response.

The scale of the violence and theft across London has led to a number of calls for a more robust response from police, from calling in the armed forces as back-up (who in truth are overstretched by overseas commitments in Afghanistan and Libya, not to mention recent troop cuts) or deploying Northern Ireland-style water-cannon and armoured vehicles.

Both demands have been faced down by the Met and the UK government, who prefer an escalation in numbers of available police from surrounding counties and reservists. While a robust and timely response from the London mayor has definitely been lacking, his Deputy Mayor for Policing Kit Malthouse attempted to calm nerves and appeal for restraint. Although the Prime Minister claimed that rioters would “feel the full force of the law”, police sources admitted that England’s overcrowded jails and congested courts system was one reason young people felt secure enough to loot and burn at will.

The issue is likely to re-ignite the debate over whether or not to split the Met between its constituent functions of territorial policing for the capital and its national role in organised and serious crime, with current untidy arrangements remaining in place for administrative and political convenience.

As local residents stayed at home and relied on Twitter to monitor the spread of riots, pondering the lack of police response, one Met source admitted to City Mayors that many officers felt powerless to intervene, as recent prosecutions of police over the 2009 G20 London Summit policing meant that they were simply too afraid to risk confrontation.

9 August 2011: Britain has been hit by several nights of riots, which took place across London but also in Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol. While government politicians and the police insisted that the violence had been carried out by opportunistic criminals, underlying social issues probably also played a role. Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said it was needless, opportunistic theft and violence - nothing more, nothing less, while the police spoke of copycat criminality. But Rodney Barker, professor of government at the London School of Economics, accused the authorities of simplification.

"One will have seen across the world, quite recently actually, that whenever there is public unrest - whether it's in Iran, or Syria, or the United States, or the United Kingdom, the government says 'this is all the work of a small group of agitators, criminal elements, terrorists.'  Governments always say that. But it isn't a criminal conspiracy. Any crowd in civil unrest is made up of all kinds of people with all kinds of motivations," he explained.

Prof Barker continued to say that the shooting by police of Mark Duggan last week was a trigger. The broader context, he says, is social and economic. He says spending cuts implemented by Britain’s current Conservative government have created a volatile situation.

The riots come as Britain’s economy is suffering and the government is making deep public spending cuts and hiking up taxes. Neil Prothero, an economist at London’s Economist Intelligence Unit, says the austerity measures, aimed at reducing Britain’s debt, are taking their toll on a local level. “In real terms the actual spending reduction programme is the most painful if it all came to fruition since the 1940s in terms of its actual squeeze on the levels of public spending," said Prothero. "It's something that the UK has not endured for many, many years.” He says austerity is only just beginning and in the coming years spending cuts will have an ever larger impact.

"This is our slight concern is that the actual spending cut-backs, which affect vast swathes of the population in one way or another, whether it's through benefits or just reduced public services in general - that is still to flow through over the coming years," he said. "It's a concern and it's a worry as to what may happen in terms of the social unrest and the general economic weakness going forward."

A columnist with the London-based Economist warns that it would be wrong to just blame the riots on groups of youths and opportunistic looters. “It is reasonable to ask why people are doing this now and not five years ago. The high level of youth unemployment (20% of those aged 16 to 24 are out of work), the inequality of incomes and wealth and the effect of local authority spending cuts on youth services are all factors that might have contributed,” he writes.

The Economist also warns of wider implications for Britain and London. “There has been a kind of smug British attitude towards the problems of Europe - those rioting Greeks with their corrupt economy - that ought to be challenged. There was talk, as recently as yesterday, of Britain as a safe haven: a big economy with an AAA rating and a liquid bond market. London has been advertised by estate agents as a bolthole for wealthy Europeans to buy property; that appeal might look a little hollow today.”

The Economist columnist believes that the image of London around the world has already suffered. “Tourists will be put off and those considering buying UK government bonds may have second thoughts.”

In the aftermath of the riots, which gripped the UK capital this week, a significant majority of London businesses surveyed believe the disorder has damaged the capital’s reputation globally. The survey conducted by ComRes on behalf of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), found 83 per cent of firms believed the riots had caused substantial damage to the capital’s reputation, while 73 per cent agreed that there was the potential for civil disorder during the Olympic Games next year. The UK government is currently refusing to reconsider its plans to cut police funding, even in light of recent events, insisting that efficiencies can be made in bureaucracy without harming the frontline response, despite the resources required for a safe 2012 games.

The survey also uncovered that over one quarter of businesses (27%) were considering closing early for the foreseeable future, damaging the capital’s fragile economic recovery. In the days that followed, several masked rioters spoke to TV crews to argue that economic policies and government cuts had given them little hope in the future, with university or decent careers seen as pipedreams by most London teenagers. The vast majority (91%) of firms however said they supported more robust police tactics to deal with wide-scale civil unrest in future. 

Colin Stanbridge, Chief Executive of the LCCI, said: “With the Olympics only a year away, the eyes of the world were already turning to London and unfortunately the events of the last few days are what international audiences have seen.” “At a time when the capital's businesses should be focusing on growth and job creation, the riots have prevented them from going about their day-to-day business. Many firms have had to put contingency plans in place, with some forced to close early in order to save their property from possible criminal damage.” The London Mayor’s office refused to be drawn on whether it would make extra funds available for the capital’s promotion agency London & Partners to mount a campaign to deal with the negative perceptions raised, pointing instead to his announcement of £50m in funding for Outer London’s recently hit shopping centres. The LCCI welcomed the announcement however.