The English Riots of 2011

A Summer of Discontent

Briggs, Daniel

• Publisher: Waterside Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781904380887
• eBook ISBN: 9781908162205
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

"From Facebook, Twitter, BlackBerry and gossip to hard facts, research and empirical investigation, this outstanding collection looks at the nature and causes of the English Riots of 2011 one year after they occurred. Though worrying in their nature, speed and scale, the book points out that rioting is nothing new - even if technological advances have altered their 'organization', the way in which the police respond and the incessant nature of media coverage. From 'moral panics' to 'broken Britain' and anxieties about youth crime, the book looks at various flashpoints of the riots such as the killing of Mark Duggan by police marksmen, the widespread looting, the political and criminal justice responses and a growing discontent about the current neoliberal order. The book rejects Coalition Prime Minister David Cameron's much-publicized assertion that these events were 'criminality, pure and simple', just as it counters attempts to lay blame on sections of the community or 'outsiders'. Looking at phenomena such as 'shopping for free' and the idea that the Lawlessness represented some kind of instant carnival, it concentrates on how order was restored and individuals fast-tracked via police cells and courts into harsh sentences as well as issues of marginality, hopelessness, political and economic corruption and media distortions. Wide-ranging and expert in its analysis, it also considers the modern-day global context for riots as well as comparing Brixton 1981 and other iconic events of the past.Further highlights include: the role of new social media in terms of recruitment, resistance, and surveillance; the role of the urban street gang; gender, racialization, resentment, post-riot rhetoric and the profiling the 2011 rioters. It looks at how the riots spread to other cities in the 1st including Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham - as well as examining events and attitudes in places such as Spain, Greece, and those of the Arab Spring.Asks Who, When and Why?Includes first-hand accounts from 2011 rioters, victims and the publicApplies historical, cultural, structural and social perspectives to the English Riots of 2011Considers the aftermath of the riots and the wider picture of global social unrestDr Daniel Briggs is a Reader in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of East London who also works with the most vulnerable people to the most dangerous and the most misunderstood. His work has taken him into prisons, crack houses, mental health institutions, asylum institutions, hostels, care homes, hospices and places for the homeless. He is the author of Crack Cocaine Users: High Society and Low Life in South London (Routledge, 2011). In this book he is assisted by contributions from some 20 leading commentators: Stephanie Alice Baker, Tim Bateman, Steve Briggs, Joel Busher, Celia Díaz-Catalán, Rebecca Clarke, Aisha K. Gill, Steve Hall, Simon Harding, Vicky Heap, Steven Hirschler, Liz Kelly, Axel Klein, Lorenzo Navarréte-Moreno, Geoffrey Pearson, Hannah Smithson, John Strawson, Sheldon Thomas, Simon Winlow and Ricardo Zúñiga."

Part I: Rioting in Context

3

Everything Changes, Nothing Moves:

The Longue Durée of Social Anxieties about Youth Crime

Geoffrey Pearson

Geoffrey Pearson is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests concern crime, drugs, drug markets, youth studies and historical criminology. From 1998 to 2006 he was Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Criminology. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Deviant Imagination (Macmillan, 1975), Working Class Youth Culture (Routledge, 1976), Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (Macmillan, 1983), Young People and Heroin (Health Education Council and Gower, 1985), The New Heroin Users (Blackwell, 1987) and Middle Market Drug Distribution (Home Office, 2001).

Introduction

While the riots of 2011 announced a new chapter in violent youth disorder Britain was already in the thick of a moral panic concerning its young people. Its constituent elements were gangs, shootings, stabbings, family dysfunction, lack of community cohesion, and the hovering background ambience of ‘gangsta rap’ music. Indeed, when interviewed about youth behaviour during the riots, Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, said that Britain had cultivated a ‘lost generation’ of young people. But really this worry was nothing new. As this chapter will show, there is a long history of social anxiety that finds its crystallising focus in a preoccupation with the rising youth generation, and the crime and violence for which it is responsible. History shows there is a common structure of preoccupations linking the past with the present — family breakdown, the declining influence of religion and education, lack of respect for authority, the erosion of community, the influence of demoralising popular entertainments — that are brought into play around quite different social and historical circumstances, which involve a profound historical amnesia and a deep cultural pessimism. When these features are perpetually reproduced, a sudden and radical discontinuity with the past is implied which confuses us in our attempts to fashion realistic responses to the current actualities and dilemmas.

Post-War Lift Off: Teds Under the Beds

It goes without saying that there have been a number of moral panics concerning young people since the Second World War. Indeed, Stanley Cohen’s seminal work Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) was formulated in response to one such set of incidents — the mod/rocker disturbances at southern English seaside towns in the early 1960s. Since then there have been numerous episodes of alarm — about football hooligans, skinheads, muggers, punks, chavs and hoodies — leading into the current concerns with street gangs, stabbings and shootings. However, it was the 1950s that gave the post-war years lift-off in the context of youth panic. Summarising the concerns of the previous decade, in 1960 the British Medical Association (BMA) decided to inaugurate a discussion on a ‘Special Topic’ and predictably chose ‘The Adolescent’. Young people were said to be growing up in an atmosphere of ‘bewildering change’:

… the whole face of society has changed in the last 20 years … unaccustomed riches … materialism without effort … in his worst light the adolescent can take on an alarming aspect: he has learned no moral standards from his parents, is contemptuous of the law, easily bored … vulnerable to the influence of TV programmes of a deplorably low standard…

BMA, 1961: 5-6

It goes without saying that for the BMA, the ‘adolescent’ is a boy, not a girl, and nor were they writing about other doctors’ children. Rather, it was the ‘Teddy Boy’ they were concerned with, described by Paul Rock and Stanley Cohen (1970: 289) as ‘the first and greatest’ of the post-war emblems of shocking modernity. Dressed in their finery of long drape jackets with velvet collars — originally tailored for City toffs who wanted to sport a bit of retro Edwardian chic — the ‘Teds’ were instantly recognised as symptomatic of affluence. Although as one of the informants in T R Fyvel’s The Insecure Offenders (1963: 40) described them, ‘they were market porters, roadworkers, a lot of van boys, all in jobs that didn’t offer a lot—labourers would cover the lot’.

One notable feature of the Teds was their attachment to the new rock-and-roll music from the USA. In Richard Hoggart’s portrait of the ‘juke-box boys’ in The Uses of Literacy (1958: 248) they were ‘boys between 15 and 20, with drape-suits, picture ties and an American slouch’. This effortless, ‘Americanised’ appearance where ‘Americanisation’ figures in the English imagination as a signifier of modernity and a portent for the dreadful future, was central to the structure of feeling arranged around ‘unaccustomed riches’, ‘materialism without effort’ and ‘sex in shiny packets’ as Hoggart described it. This trope was put to even more outlandish use elsewhere, as when the Daily Mail ran front-pages editorials on ‘Rock ‘n Roll Babies’ in response to cinema riots greeting Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’. These described the music as ‘a communicable disease’ and ‘the music of delinquents’. ‘Rock, roll and riot’ is sexy music. It can make the blood race. It has something of the African tomtom and voodoo dance’. And then, the awful unblemished truth about the musical force that was rocking the nation:

It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro’s revenge.

Daily Mail, 4-5 September 1956

Since the War: Which War was That?

The Teds were tailor-made for the post-war lament that from politicians, the police, the media and other social commentators began to organize itself around the youth question, describing how everything was going to the dogs ‘since the war’. The complaint had been perhaps first fully rehearsed in the post-war years by the Conservative Party publication, Crime Knows No Boundaries, in the mid-1960s which declared:

We live in times of unprecedented change — change which often produces stress and social breakdown. Indeed the growth in the crime rate may be attributed in part to the breakdown of certain spontaneous agencies that worked in the past. These controls operated through the family, the Church, through personal and local loyalties, and through a stable life in a stable society.

Conservative Party, 1966: 11

One must ask oneself: was this ‘stable life in a stable society’ meant to refer to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the ingrained worklessness and poverty, the unemployed riots of 1931, the General Strike of 1926, and the bitter aftermath of the First World War? No matter, the British people know this post-war lament off by heart; it runs in our veins, it is part of our DNA. It is part of the daily gossip in pubs, launderettes and bus queues, TV chat shows and popular journalism. Here it is again:

That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere … radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over … There’s something that’s gone out of us in these 20 years since the war.

And again:

The passing of parental authority, defiance of pre-war conventions, the absence of restraint, the wildness of extremes, the confusion of unrelated liberties, the wholesale drift away from churches, are but a few characteristics of after-war conditions.

And yet the immediate problem is that each of these last two complaints about what has gone ‘wrong since the war’ were both written before the war. The first is from George Orwell’s pre-war novel Coming Up for Air as the main character, grumpy old George Bowling hunts around for traces of his lost boyhood (Orwell, 1939: 26, 168). The second is from James Butterworth’s Clubland (1932: 22) where a Christian youth worker reflects on his experiences in the Boys’ Club movement in the Elephant and Castle area of working-class London.

This ‘post-war blues’ was widespread in the inter-war years. ‘Post-War people, compared with Pre-War people, have lost confidence in things human and divine’, wrote F W Hirst in 1934 in his summary of The Consequences of the War to Great Britain. Continuing, Hirst (1934: 74) stated ‘The post-war generation suffers from a sort of inward instability … There seems nowadays to be no desire to provide for the future or look beyond tomorrow’. Writing in The Law-Breaker in 1933, Roy and Theodora Calvert (1933: 60-1) believed that ‘this rejection of conventional standards’ and ‘the greater freedom from constraint which is characteristic of our age’ meant that ‘we are passing through a crisis in morals’. In the cultural sphere, one active focus of discontent was the ‘Scrutiny’ group gathered around F R Leavis at Cambridge that repeatedly thundered against ‘this vast and terrifying disintegration’ of social life. ‘Change has been so catastrophic’, Leavis wrote in 1930, that ‘the generations find it hard to adjust themselves to each other, and parents are helpless to deal with their children’. ‘It is a breach of continuity that threatens’, Leavis warned, ‘It is a commonplace that we are being Americanised’ (Leavis and Thompson, 1933: 87; Leavis, 1930: 6-7).

Fears of ‘Americanisation’ often figured centrally in these troubled discourses on ‘post-war’ social change — just as they do now. In the 1930s, this fear was most forcibly registered in the response to the demoralising effects of the Hollywood movies, and from their very beginnings the silent movies that had been condemned for ‘the distorted, unreal, Americanised way of life it presented’ (Russell, 1917: 6).

The silent movies, and then later the ‘talkies’, also invited the more specific charge that they encouraged imitative crime among the young — a complaint that we usually think of as belonging only to the age of television and video nasties. So, Hugh Redwood in his book God in the Slums (1932: 43) described how boys ‘are children in their love of pictures and music’ and that ‘Hollywood’s worst in the movie line has recruited hundreds of them for the gangs of race-course roughs, motor-bandits and smash-and-grab thieves’. A correspondent in The Times (12^th April 1913) had earlier alleged that many children ‘actually begin their downward course of crime by reason of the burglary and pickpocket scenes they have witnessed’. In his book Children in the Cinema (1939) Richard Ford collected a number of such accusations. So in 1938 one psychiatrist had confidently asserted that ‘seventy per cent of all the crimes were first conceived in the cinema’. In the same year, the Central Women’s Advisory Committee of the Conservative Party described their own view of the problem: ‘We all know that there is a very great increase in juvenile crime … It is the considered opinion of those who know that this is very largely due to the effect of unsuitable films upon children and the youth of today’. Even among those who clearly did not know, such as a 70-year-old magistrate who proudly boasted that ‘I have never been to the pictures in my life’, the view still held: ‘These lads go to the pictures and see dare-devil things, and they are imitating them’ (Ford, 1939: 71-2).

The theory connecting cinema to copy-cat crime had...

Table of contents

• Copyright and Publication Details
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editor
• Introduction
• Part I: Rioting in Context
• Part II: Who, How and Why?
• Part III: The Aftermath
• Part IV: The Wider Picture: Social Change and Global Discontent
• Concluding Thoughts
• Index
• Waterside Press: Putting justice into words