INTERNATIONAL

1981/2011 Racism, Injustice and Hypocrisy

Amrit Wilson

In early August, the ‘riots’ which began in Tottenham, a working class area of London with a significant black community, spread rapidly to other parts of London and then to other major cities in England. Many commentators have focused on the parallels and differences with the riots which took place in 1981. Like the recent events, the 1981 riots, dubbed ‘uprisings’ by many at the time, were not conflicts between communities. They involved youths of African-Caribbean, Asian and white origin taking to the streets and engaging in running battles with the police. They took place during the first wave of Thatcher’s neoliberal restructuring, attacks on state provision and rapidly spiraling unemployment. A major focus of the anger was the acute racism of the police and the brutality and criminalization faced by black youth. The 1981 riots forced the British state to modify its strategy for controlling working class black (including Asian) communities, introducing ‘multicultural’ policies which involved channeling state funding to ‘community leaders’ who could be manipulated. More recently however this strategy has again been reversed with a return to the promotion of a monolithic ‘Britishness’ and intensified repression in the context of Britain’s ‘war on terror’.
While the British media and spokespersons for the state preach ‘morality’, they seem to have forgotten that the riots began as a result of a man being killed on 4th August. Mark Duggan, a 29 year old Black father of three, was shot dead in Tottenham, North London not by rioters but by the police. His family have still not been told why he was murdered. And when on 6th August they and their grieving friends organized a peaceful protest outside the police station, demanding to know the truth, they were treated not with compassion but to further violence – with a 16 year old girl allegedly being assaulted by the police. Meanwhile a false story was circulated in the media that Mark Duggan had fired at the police. Is this perhaps what the state calls ‘morality’?
Not surprising then that the events of early August have been so easily reconstructed not only by the state but also by liberal, even supposedly left-leaning commentators. So while Mayor of London Boris Johnson screams for stiffer sentences for underage offenders, Kenan Malik, for example, tells us that we are misguided in drawing comparisons with the 1981 riots: “Those riots were a direct challenge to oppressive policing and to mass unemployment” whereas today’s riots are about “inchoate anger” [descending] “largely into arson and looting with little sense of political motive or cause”. But aren’t riots always, by their very nature, about ‘inchoate anger’? Can they ever be without burning political causes?
We are being asked to believe too that the riots this time –unlike in the eighties – were not about racism. And yet we know that they started with the murder of a Black man, and came against a background of police killings of black people – 333 people , the vast majority of whom are black, have been killed in police custody since 1998 (with not a single officer convicted). And yet these murders rarely make the front pages of the national media, and are often not reported at all. As a Black passerby interviewed in Hackney recounted bitterly “two dogs died in a police car… They started an enquiry there and then, officers got suspended. When [Mark Duggan] got shot, nothing got said, they didn’t even go and see the family. This told everybody in this environment that we’re nobody…”
Today, as in the eighties, the laws on Stop and Search are being used to routinely to harass and criminalise Black and Asian men. And as in the eighties, the rioters were not only black people but in each area represented the ethnic make up of the locality.

Then, as now, political commentators outdid each other to declare that the riots were really about a problematic culture which was imported into Britain. In the wake of the recent riots, the BBC subjected us to historian David Starkey pontificating about white people ‘becoming black’ and glorifying Enoch Powell; and in another programme a white interviewer insulting veteran campaigner Darcus Howe and accusing him of having ‘taken part in riots’ himself. In one Channel 4 discussion programme, a question about Mark Duggan’s death was quickly fobbed off by the anchor saying that this was not really the subject of discussion. Over and over again, we see attempts to raise the underlying causes of the riots suppressed with the accusation that the speaker is ‘trying to justify’ what happened, and the message being promoted by all major politicians – that the riots are primarily about ‘criminality’ and ‘immorality’ is once again reinforced.
David Cameron talks about “attitudes and assumptions that have brought parts of our society to this shocking state” and proceeds to blame it on “children without fathers, schools without discipline and communities without control” where the “twisting and misrepresenting of human rights that has undermined personal responsibility”. Behind this apparently garbled nonsense characteristic of such utterances is the attempt to use the riots, which have come in the wake of devastating cuts to public services and benefits, to disengage even further from any state responsibility for people’s welfare or even survival – and to justify further attacks on human rights and civil liberties.
Thus police numbers are to be cut massively, but at the same time they have been given even more powers – plastic bullets and water cannon will now be available for use on demonstrators, climate change activists, those defending their communities from fascists, and all others who oppose the state.
Here once again there are echoes of 1981, when the police were given increased powers and methods used in the north of Ireland were imported into Britain. So if these are similarities, what has changed between July 1981 and August 2011?

Firstly, laws have become even more racist and state violence has intensified. While the US and Britain attack and loot countries whose resources they want, they now have the powers to silence all those who oppose these policies at home, with draconian anti-terrorism laws.
Secondly, poverty now stalks vast areas of the country. Recent figures showed that 1.6 million children were growing up in severe poverty in Britain, with this set to increase sharply with job losses and welfare cuts. Everywhere communities have been fragmented, trade unions shackled, collective action stamped on, and individualism and consumerism glorified. Corruption has grown to gigantic proportions at the highest levels of society – from bankers to MPs to police commissioners – venality has become commonplace and goes unpunished. As big corporates hypocritically complain that their ‘brand image’ has been tainted by the looting which can be seen as the logical extension of the brand-based identities they have promoted, people in Britain are being shown once again that property under capitalism is more valued than human life, as the government which ignored so many young people’s deaths in custody and through gang violence instructs courts to hand out draconian jail sentences for looting during the riots.

So what are the causes of the 2011 riots? Was it the rage of youth who feel betrayed, feel they have no future and nothing to lose? Was it the cruel cuts to public expenditure which have already claimed lives and are likely to claim many more? Was it a response to the neoliberal doctrine that acquiring commodities is the ultimate goal in life? Was it perhaps all of these embodied in the periodic release of the pent up tensions building up for years in the intolerably unjust society created by capitalism in decline?