Last week rioters stormed the streets as though out of nowhere. There had been no unrest in the weeks running up to London’s 2011 riots and there has been little trouble since. However, the complexity of the situation goes a lot further than the simple response of a “broken society”.
To start with it’s no surprise that the majority of the trouble stemmed out of some of the most impoverished, crime ridden parts of London, Birmingham and Manchester, as do most gang based environments. Surely this implies that more positive attention needs to be given to these communities by the government all year round, not just when they start acting up.
On the notion of a broken society and the implication of moral decline, it might be worth reminding the Prime Minister about the scuttler knife gangs that marauded Victorian Manchester (a point that was well put on a show on BBC Radio 4 earlier this afternoon). Or you could look at the football hooligans of the 70s and 80s, or the murder of Anthony Walker in 2005, but the reality is that Britain has faced violent gang behaviour many times in the past. It isn’t necessarily a new issue, but it is one that we continue to fail to learn from and change as a result.
Violence has been a part of human nature since time immemorial. There is probably no day in the history of humanity that harboured no violent act. Evolution plays a big part in this, and only if this is recognised, taught and discussed with children at an early age will they be able to recognise it in themselves and take measures to counteract its effects.
However, in addition to the issues of the gang violence that is inherent in impoverished areas of the world, it’s also worth taking note of the finer details of the spark that lit the touch paper: The shooting of Mark Duggan. The incidents of the day of the shooting still appear to be shrouded in more ways than one when you look into them.
The miscommunication about the exchange of fire to the media, the jacketed police round found lodged inside a police radio, the converted pistol found at the scene all lead to more questions about what actually happened that day. Gang crime is obviously inexcusable, but there’s a lot that seems to indicate that more could be done to improve the nature of the police response in similar situations. Would the riots have even happened if the police had arrested Mark Duggan, instead of shooting him dead?
However, of the greed and thuggery that the Prime Minister has talked about recently, this is obviously something that needs to be tackled. In a world of vast inequality, there will always be conflict, but when the inequality seems to relate more to iPhones and clothes from Debenhams as opposed to food and water, clearly there is something more status and envy at play that goes to the heart of modern day economic models.
In the past, as was the case of the scuttler gangs, community involvement projects and groups were put into place to take children and teenagers off the streets at night and give them something other than violent overtones to occupy their minds. This could be used again to some success, but the reality may be that if this kind of violent outbreak is to be curbed before it can ever start again, a move away from the current “invisible hand” model of economics and the negative aspects of demand-cultivating promotion of modern businesses could well be the answer.
Only through a society wide shift towards a more altruistic panacea will the troubles of last week truly end, but this needs to be driven from the very heart of societal structures, in particular through economics and governance.
