Bitter Memories of Ongoing Inequality -
by Akkas Al-Ali
‘They were greedy teenagers looking for freebies, we were told. Melanie Phillips asked whether the ‘liberal intelligentsia’ (liberalism being a synonym for multiculturalism, itself a synonym for immigration) were to blame. Paul Routledge pointed his finger at rap music. What they were really asking was: ‘Is it because they’re Black?’’
How the Riots Are Being Made About Race -
‘The desperation with which many liberals are attempting to make the post-riots story non-racial is testament to the success of postracialism in making us believe that ‘real’ racism is a thing of the past. Hence, for many David Starkey’s outbursts on Newsnight were utterly beyond the pale. However, beyond the fact that Starkey was merely giving voice to the beliefs of many of those who think that water cannons and rubber bullets are necessary, the racial reading of the riots has little to do with overt racism of this nature. Starkey and his ilk are far from extinct. The real racial subtext is less overt and thus more pernicious. It is about the externalisation of those seen as responsible for the riots, their portrayal as bestial and thus as expendable, extinguishable – necessarily and justifiably so. This has always been the aim of racism: a logic for legitimising the discipline, control and even ultimately the murder of those made utterly other.’
Alana was interviewed for Der Spiegel on the #UK Riots. Text in German below. For the record, she was misquoted as saying that ‘EDL members rather take the broom hitting someone’s head than to use it for cleaning up’. Clearly that doesn’t make any sense. Rather she argued that with the EDL’s background in football hooliganism the organisation’s claim that they are helping in the post-riot clean-up operation is to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Sie spielen sich als Hüter von Recht und Ordnung auf, als Bollwerk gegen die Randalierer: Die rechtsextreme English Defence League und die British National Party nutzen die Krawalle in britischen Städten zu ihren Zwecken. Doch ihre verbale Gegengewalt ist so gefährlich wie die Plünderungen selbst.
Hamburg - Nick Griffin tut das, was er am besten kann: hetzen. Er spricht vom “Black Blitz”, vom “Schwarzen Blitz”, und bedient sich, wie so oft in der Vergangenheit, der Weltkriegsterminologie. Griffin ist Chef der rechtsextremen British National Party (BNP) und er ist einer der Menschen, die offensiv versuchen, aus den Unruhen in Großbritannien und den Bildern plündernder Jugendlicher Profit zu schlagen.
Die Randale in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Westerhamshire werden instrumentalisiert - allen voran versuchen rechtspopulistische Gruppen, das Entsetzen der Briten über und ihre Angst vor den Ausschreitungen zu nutzen. Griffin erntete heftigen Protest für seine Äußerung, seine Ansichten sind zu extrem, um gesellschaftsfähig zu sein. In der Rhetorik geschickter agiert die English Defence League (EDL), weniger offen rassistisch, aber nicht minder gewaltbereit. Die Organisation veranstaltet in englischen Städten Märsche, ihre Anhänger machen Stimmung gegen Muslime und geben sich patriotisch.
Am Dienstag hatte die EDL auf ihrer Internetseite eine Stellungnahme zu den Krawallen veröffentlicht. Darin kritisierte sie die “politische Korrektheit”, die die Polizei daran hindere, “die derzeitigen Probleme rasch und entschieden zu beenden”. “Wie alle anständigen Menschen sind auch die Mitglieder der EDL erschüttert und entsetzt darüber, was in den vergangenen Tagen passiert ist”, heißt es dort. Es sei offensichtlich, dass die Polizei nicht den Befehl erhalten habe, “Schädel einzuschlagen”. Vielleicht liege das daran, dass die Plünderer “nicht weiß” seien.
Doch die EDL versucht mehr, als nur die als zu lasch empfundene Polizeitaktik zu kritisieren. Sie versucht, den Protest gegen die Krawalle für sich zu nutzen: Nachts unterstützt man Bürgerwehren, die Häuser und Geschäfte schützen; tags die freiwilligen Aufräumtrupps. Trotzdem klingt die Ankündigung von Stephen Lennon mehr nach einer Drohung als nach einem Hilfsangebot: “Wir werden die Unruhen stoppen, die Polizei ist dazu offenbar nicht in der Lage”, sagte er am Mittwoch. Lennon ist Chef der EDL. Man werde bis zu 1000 Mitglieder auf die Straße schicken, in Luton, dem Sitz der Gruppe, in Manchester, Bristol, Leicestershire und weiteren Städten sollen sie patrouillieren.
Krawalle in England
Viele Briten kritisieren die Zurückhaltung der Polizei, die traditionell eher defensiv gegen Randalierer vorgeht. Das will sich die EDL nun offenbar zunutze machen - ausgerechnet die Organisation, die im letzten Jahr dafür verantwortlich war, dass die Angst vor neuen Rassenunruhen in England groß war: Bei einem ihrer Märsche in Bradford, einer Stadt mit einer der größten pakistanischen Gemeinden Großbritanniens, kam es zu massiven Krawallen . EDL-Anhänger attackierten Gegendemonstranten mit Flaschen, Steinen und Rauchbomben. Zu einer Ausweitung der Krawalle kam es damals nicht, doch der Vorfall macht deutlich, wie wenig davon zu halten ist, wenn die EDL in ihrer Stellungnahme zu den aktuellen Ausschreitungen schreibt, bei ihren Protesten habe es niemals “bedeutsame Zerstörungen” gegeben.
Für Beobachter ist es eine Farce, dass ausgerechnet die EDL nun zu Aufräumarbeiten aufruft. “Die EDL-Mitglieder hauen jemandem eher mit dem Besen über den Kopf, als dass sie ihn zum Putzen benutzen”, sagt Alana Lentin, die an der Universität Sussex zu den Themen Rassismus und Migration forscht.
“Natürlich versucht die EDL aus den Protesten Kapital zu schlagen”, sagt die Soziologin. Einen Imagegewinn hat die antimuslimische EDL dringend nötig, der norwegische Attentäter Anders Breivik bezeichnete einen ihrer Aktivisten als seinen Mentor.
Auf einfache Erklärungen folgen einfache Lösungen
Lennon sagte dem “Daily Telegraph”, er sei in der Nacht auf Mittwoch mit 100 Unterstützern auf den Straßen von Enfield im Norden Londons unterwegs gewesen. Auch in Entham, im Südosten der Stadt, war die EDL aktiv. “Die Polizei ist nicht fähig, die Straßen unter Kontrolle zu bringen”, sagte Jack England, ein führendes Mitglied der EDL. Rund 50 Anhänger seien in den Stadtteil gekommen, um die Bürgerwehr “zu organisieren und zu führen”. So solle sichergestellt werden, “dass sie nicht gegen das Gesetz verstoßen”.
Fragt man die Soziologin Lentin, warum die Jugendlichen die Läden plündern, antwortet sie: “Je mehr du besitzt, desto mehr wirst du respektiert. Respekt erlangt man auch, wenn man den größten Flachbildfernseher besitzt. Die Krawalle werden derzeit nicht im Kontext der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklungen gesehen.” Sie meint die Finanzkrise, die Verschuldung, die Arbeitslosigkeit, die Klassenunterschiede, die kaum zu überwinden sind. “Die meisten der Jugendlichen haben überhaupt keine Chance, aufzusteigen.”
Die Randalierer haben keine politische Agenda - auch wenn die Proteste Ausdruck politischer Fehlentwicklungen sind. Aber genau das macht sie zur Projektionsfläche: Die Konservativen sprechen von “amoralischen, ungebildeten, von Sozialhilfe abhängigen, gewalttätigen” Rowdies (“Daily Mail”). Die Rechtsradikale BNP spricht von “schwarzen Gangs”, die Menschen und Geschäfte überfielen.
“Die Hintergründe sind komplex”, sagt Lentin. “Aber die Unruhen werden zunehmend in einen ethnischen Kontext gesetzt.” Das sei nicht verwunderlich, immerhin habe der Tod Mark Duggans die Krawalle ausgelöst - der 29-jährige Schwarze war durch eine Polizeikugel getötet worden, als die Beamten ihn festnehmen wollten. “Auch die Eliten haben ein Interesse daran, so zu tun, als ginge es bei den Unruhen um Fragen der Rasse.” Denn dann seien die Antworten leichter zu finden.
An ihre Anhänger gerichtet, veröffentlichte die EDL einen Aufruf: Es ginge bei den Krawallen nicht um den Islam, “aber wir glauben fest daran, dass England es wert ist, verteidigt zu werden”.
Die Vereinigung gilt als Zusammenschluss gewaltbereiter Hooligans. Ausgerechnet frühere Schläger versuchen nun, sich als Ordnungshüter zu inszenieren, als Beschützer der Nation. EDL-Chef Lennon ist vorbestraft wegen Körperverletzung, Drogenbesitz und Ordnungswidrigkeiten. Vor rund zwei Wochen wurde er zu 150 Stunden gemeinnütziger Arbeit verurteilt, er hatte im August 2010 eine Gruppe gewaltbereiter Fans des Fußballclubs Luton Town angeführt, als die sich mit Anhängern eines anderen Clubs eine Schlägerei lieferten. “EDL bis zum Tod” soll er noch nach seiner Festnahme im Polizeiauto gerufen haben.
“Wir müssen absolut sachlich bleiben, das ist extrem wichtig, unter anderem wegen des öffentlichen Ansehens”, schreibt ein Mann auf der Facebook-Seite der EDL - um gleich den Beweis anzutreten, was eigentlich Sache der EDL-Anhänger ist: “Macht euch groß, seid laut”, schreibt er weiter, “wenn ihr die schäbigen randalierenden Mistkerle seht: Zerstört die Bastarde!”
Richard Seymour and Darcus Howe on Democracy Now on #UK Riots
Even more seriously, it also looks from initial finds that the police officer who escaped injury when a shot lodged in his radio was in fact shot by a police issue gun.
So, either Duggan had a police issue gun which he used to shoot at officers, or the officer was shot by one of his colleagues.
In any case, the shooting dead of Duggan was just a catalyst, not the real reason for the urban youth rebellion.
The simple message to get out is that police and the black and youth community are not on good terms. In fact, white police officers often treat their black colleagues as if they were criminals just waiting to be arrested. Just look at the ongoing standoff between the Black Police Association and the Met.
There is no hiding the fact that a generation of socially dysfunctional young people, mainly men, are out of order.
This is the generation that has fallen victim to the institutional racism that hits it full in the face the moment its members enter the British educational system at the age of five.
By the time they are ready to enter secondary schools, quite often they have a record of suspensions, police searches, and teacher neglect.
The society has chosen to explain away this appalling treatment as a failure of black parenting, of peer pressure, of lack of ambition.
However, it does not explain why black university graduates do not fare any better than their less qualified counterparts, why women in particular (and black women are among the highest qualified women in the country, better qualified overall than white women) do not get career opportunities to reflect this - although they do much better than men.
Nor, does it explain why every time the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police want to pay lip service to good race relations they go off to the United States looking for ideas - or photo opportunities with black kids in South London schools.
Apart from the fact that all these progressive policing ideas used in the US have failed, it seems that British politicians and senior police managers have not yet realised that the vast majority of black people in the UK have been born in this country and are from a Caribbean and African heritage.
Someone must tell them we are not American and do not have anything culturally in common with black Americans apart from a history of slavery and a love of good popular music.
But the narrative of black youth crime and its fabrication by police is long and sad. Take Winston Silcott, the young man who became the symbol of the 1985 Broadwater Farm uprisings and the aetiology of his criminal history.
Silcott’s first ‘offence’ was for riding a bicycle on the pavement, an anti-social act that can be and is often resolved with a telling off. From there it built up and built up with the petty accusations that the black community knows only so well, ever time going before a magistrate who no doubt saw the courts as the institution to criminalise ‘idle’ young people.
It was easy from there to make the assumption that after the brutal hacking to death of PC Keith Blakelock that the police was determined that someone - anyone - must pay the price. The person, it soon became evident, was Silcott.
Eventually they got him jailed, not for the murder of PC Blakelock, but for the stabbing to death of another youth, an offence for which Silcott pleaded not guilty.
It was widely assumed that his conviction and jailing was in reality punishment for the murder of PC Blakelock. To many, the death of Mark Duggan and the weekend’s uprisings were but the latest chapter in the continuing showdown between Tottenham police and the local black community.
Of course, whatever the prehistory, the apologists and ‘experts’, black and white, have been quick off the mark with explanations of the root causes of the uprisings and ways to prevent any future occurrences.
Diane Abbott, the MP for Hackney and for years out of the Labour Party’s parliamentary loop, went to tongue in Monday’s Independent.
The 1985 Broadwater Farm uprisings, she agreed with her colleague David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, were understandable, but this time things are different.
Over the years Diane and I have had our differences of opinion, but this time she over-stretched herself.
She wrote, in a remarkable revision of history: “I remember the original Broadwater Farm riots clearly. So it was a heart-stopping moment on Saturday night to realise that, 26 years later, Tottenham was in flames again. But in 2011, a lot is different. For one thing, the first I heard about the riots was on Twitter; complete with photographs of burning police cars. And, if I was alerted in that way, I suspect that thousands of others were. For most of us it was just a piece of shocking news. But for some it was a cue to get down there.
“The other thing that may be different is the underlying relationship between the police and the community. My friend David Lammy, who has been the member of parliament for Tottenham since 2000, was correct to point out that, while the original Broadwater Farm riots were a straight fight between the police and the youth, the latest disturbances were an attack on Tottenham itself. It was not just cars and buildings that went up in smoke on Saturday night. It was 25 years of investment, of painstaking attempts to transform Tottenham’s reputation and (above all) of trying to build better; police-community relations.”
Diane Abbott’s memory is not as good as she and other revisionists seem to think.
I also remember the other street disturbances we had in the 1980s. I covered the nationwide uprisings of 1981 for the News of the World, and the 1985 Broadwater Farm disturbances for the Daily Mail. What’s more, at the time, I was also living in South Tottenham, on Fairview Road.
And my recall is nothing like Diane’s. The media described black people then, with out distinction, as animals and savages during the 1981 ‘riots’ and worse. The evidence is there. Just go to the Colindale Newspaper Library in North West London and read the back issues. I still have the clippings in my garden shed.
And, it was even worst after the 1985 Broadwater Farm disturbances, during which PC Keith Blakelock was hacked to death.
To many of us, the cold case reviews, the mass arrests, the quarantining of the estate, all suggested that the police were out to settle scores.
The public is also getting its cues from the politicians, including the London-born, Harvard-educated Guyanese lawyer, David Lammy, whose lack of proper analysis on any important social issue, to my mind, is a disgrace.
One letter writer to the Independent (Monday), writing from Derbyshire, said: “The riots and looting at Tottenham are not the consequence of a single act of the police but a toxic combination of social deprivation and a lack of moral compass where the only code is that of the street gangs.
“In our cities, we are neglecting the young and the old alike, but at least the government can take comfort from the fact that the thousands of elderly people imprisoned in undignified squalor are unlikely to take to the streets.”
So, from this letter writer based in the comforts of Derbyshire, the Peak District no doubt, we can see how official Britain is going to explain away the problem: a bit of social deprivation, but there have been huge investments to deal with this.
Is Ms Abbott talking about the Tottenham in which the police parade around like an invading force, that local businesspeople commute in and out with their huge profits to and from their suburban homes?
Is she talking about local businesses, including the fast food restaurants, in which the customers are black but the owners and people behind the counters are of all other ethnic communities but Caribbean?
And, of course, the letter writer hit upon an issue often discussed in private by the white, professional middle class, but not in public: the lack of a moral compass in Afro-Caribbean parenting.
Just listen to the acting commissioner of police Goodwin appealing to parents to take their children home. Listen to deputy mayor Kit Malthouse echoing that appeal like a stereo.
The world knows that Caribbean people of a certain generation are among the strictest parents in the country.
Of course it is all bogus, all nonsense, all groupthink. Since the alternative view is that young black people, in particular men, are the ones feeling the most pain from this economic maelstrom, but were never the beneficiaries during the boom years. Young black men would not know what a bank bonus was if it hit them full in the face. To the vast majority of black people the London economy is always in recession.
They also know that our friendly prime minister, the Eton and Oxford-educated ‘Dave’ Cameron is out to cut their benefits even more. It is the price of being black in 21st century Britain.
In the finally analysis, the Tottenham uprising has not only exposed our black community political impotence in the UK, it has also emphasised the gap between us and the New Britons - Eastern Europeans, Asians, West Africans, Somalis, Ethiopians, Eritreans, and others - all of whom have left us behind in terms of developing their own business cultures, community cohesion and political organisation.
Most of all, it once again exposes the trickery and deceit of those who aspire to be our leaders. Not a single black ‘leader’ has spoken out in defence of the youths. Not one.
We spend our money at fast food restaurants owned by others and which employ people from other communities; we send our children to school and take no real interest in how they are doing; we vote for politicians who could not care less about our welfare; and we sit on our hands while our young people stab and shoot each other over ‘respect’.
The one institution within the black Caribbean community in this country after 60 years, post Empire Windrush, of any significance is the church and, unlike any other religious group in Britain, the black church badly lacks a social gospel. Our faith leaders are only interested in our offerings.
We do not even have the energy to organise community meetings around these serious issues.
As a post script, it is important to remind people that from television pictures the rioting crowds and their supporters have been composed of all ethnic and religious groups, including Hasidic Jews, but of course the blacks get the blame.
Watch out for the carnival and next year’s Olympics.
Hal Austin, London, August 8, 2011
Zygmunt Bauman on Consumerism Coming Home to Roost -
‘These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.’
Contextualizing Violence by Hana Riaz -
‘… demanding justice and equality is never pretty, easy or comfortable particularly when you are up against White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. It becomes less about how this demand is made, and more about why and what we do next. In light of the historical amnesia Britain perpetually suffers from, I don’t think we should ever forget that when we remember Tottenham 2011.’
Tottenham: Neoliberal Riots and the Possibility of Politics -
‘… capitalism is looting the public sphere’
[video]