Britain burns - Chavs ruin civilization

[Duque de Bragança]

I haven't even heard of the expression 'Pão camado' in my entire life! Or would it be 'Pão Queimado?' (which I haven't ever heard, either)

Are you azorean?

burnt stick. I can't spell in portuguese lol. Can read it though. I was born in canada but my mom is from nazare and my dad is from Lisboa. Most of the portuguese people where i grew up were azorean so i picked up a lot from them. Front what i've been told my speaking is a weird mix of pronounciation and terms from sao miguel, lisboa, and nazare.

An accent that has to be awful. Quick, get on the plane for the next Languish meet in Europe!

[Duque de Bragança]

The thing is, we did keep law and order; services still kept going, and vast swathes of the city did not experience anything. The riots did not get anywhere near the French level; and riots did not strike the same place two nights in a row. This was just an orgy of looting borne of a moment of perceived impunity. For me, a real breakdown in law and order would be something much more serious. Rather, this was a brief challenge to law and order, and the law is coming down hard in sentencing barely 48 hours after the fires were extinguished.

If you want to see a breakdown in law and order, look at the riots of the 1980s.

No people killed in the French riots indeed and no trouble in the Parisian city centre. Just 10,000 burned cars in the lousy suburbs and I wasn't under siege in Paris unlike Brazen in London. Some RER/S-Bahn/whatever non-existing English equivalent disruption so I had to take the Métro instead for a while.

[Martinus]

How dare you tell the Brits that their country is more disorganized and lawless than France? That's the only thing keeping them alive.

[Gups]

We have chucked resources at these rioters. But violent young men will always be with us, so let's not panic

Politically committed people of very different beliefs can take exactly the same events and discover in them a precise vindication of their own original worldview. And so it has been this week. A certain kind of rightwinger fits the riots into the pattern of moral and social decline that she imagines has afflicted British society since the 1950s: multiculturalism, soft policing, family breakdown (ie, sexual tolerance and feminism), liberal teaching, welfare dependency and immigration are all part of this elaborately imagined world.

In the other ideological corner the causes are alienated youth, "cuts", police harassment, unemployment, poverty, tuition fee increases (which, if the poverty explanation holds, none of the rioters would have to pay), and neoliberal economics, which allows bankers to earn bonuses usually described as "obscene". Remarkably, a Guardian reporter on the fringe of a riot even found "a bystander" to weave reaction to the Iraq war into the reasons for the looting.

Not that either position is entirely wrong all the time. But none of us escapes our prejudices easily. Vicars blame materialism. And I, pursuing past battles against the civil liberties lobby, rail against identity-obscuring head and facewear and am inclined to demand more CCTV and a rethink of the scrapping of identity cards.

But imagine that we came to this innocent of all beliefs. Suppose we looked at events since Saturday and just asked the basic questions of who, what, where, when and why.

So first, who? And how many people actually took part in rioting, looting or violence since Saturday? I've been wondering about this since I accidentally stumbled on the original demonstration outside Tottenham police station that was supposed to have been the birth moment of the Week of Shame. Actually standing in Tottenham High Road, blocking the way, I'd estimate no more than 100 people. Standing in doorways and on pavements, I'd say another 100 or so. Bear in mind that I'd just come from a Spurs pre-season friendly match attended by 25,000.

The highest realistic estimate I've seen for rioters in one place was 200, and pictures of that event suggest that it was too high. It also seems that one must make a practical distinction (if not a moral one) between rioters and looters — people who entered shops already broken into to steal goods. There is some evidence of the same people moving from one location to another. With the number of arrests at about 500, I seriously wonder if many more than a few thousand people were involved in rioting.

This is important because it tells us two things. First, we are not dealing with a mass criminal insurrection. And second, that a remarkably small number of people, if they are mobile and use surprise, can cause mayhem out of all proportion to their numbers. I was told this by Tony Blair once, in the context of terrorism, and it's true.

Even so, who are these few? They're mostly (but not entirely) teenage boys from poorer areas, black from black areas, white from white areas, the same demographic as that for gang violence, street robbery and vandalism. In other words, their actions are a spillover into the "nicer" world of what is already going on in theirs. (The links between pre-existing criminality and looting are suggested by reports of vans and cars turning up as stores are emptied, and by gunfights over looted goods.) This is important too, because it simply isn't true that they have, in the past few years, been affected by cuts, lack of attention to their education or lack of investment in their areas. It is pretty likely that they attend (or play truant from) newly rebuilt schools, with highly motivated teachers who put significant emphasis on citizenship and social responsibility. They will often return to estates that have been improved out of all recognition since the riots of the 1980s. They are very much less likely than their fathers to have suffered from police harassment and violence. Far from their being forgotten and marginalised, a lot of time and effort has been spent on them and their peers. What we haven't managed to do is to persuade them into qualifications, or unglamorous starter jobs. It's not for lack of trying.

Then the "what" and the "where". The looting has suggested to many that this is a form of self-Sherwooding, a white-goods redistribution from rich to poor. Especially as some of the on-street self-justification has been of the "we're poor, you're rich" variety. Well, what would you say if you were a slightly guilty looter? Intercepted looters' messages, not designed for third-party scrutiny, seem to show few such heroic inclinations.

And there's another clue. While some have clearly gone for upmarket stores, others have been completely undiscriminating about which shops they've emptied. And while a few symbolic targets have been selected for vandalism and arson, most had no symbolic value at all. In other words it is not what they represent — but what the act of destruction represents.

This, and that the ostensible cause of the rioting (the shooting of Mark Duggan) had just about no resonance outside one area in North London, tells us a lot about the motivation. In short, at the weekend — the word spread by 24-hour news, social media and messaging — a section of society discovered that they could do something and that the something they could do was a lot of bad fun. They could go on the streets, create havoc, make money, be violent, get drunk, behave as if they were the tyrant kings of an area — the mini-Sopranos of Enfield or Croydon, the gangstas of Chalk Farm — and there would be no immediate retribution (immediate being the only kind of anything that means something to a 16-year old boy). They had the thing that in their own lives they lack — power. Just as a gang of black-flag anarchists has when it stones a police line into retreat or — before Heysel — football hooligans had when they "took" the other side's end and sent the opposition into flight.

Because, yes, we have been here before, with a relatively small number of young men, high on violence and low on personal skills, finding a way to drive the rest of us mad. This analysis is both gloomy and hopeful. It suggests that, short of a world war to send them to, difficult and violent young men will always be with us. The numbers matter, of course, and we can and should whittle away at them with firmness. But we won't eradicate them altogether, and if improvement is always slow and adapting difficult, we can — of course — make things worse quickly, by reacting with impatience, prejudice and stupidity.

Column by David Aaronovitch in the Times. I was out of teh country until Tuesday night so don't know if his estimates of the numbers involved are at all accurate.

[Martinus]

It seems to follow my original assessment (people behaving badly because they can get away with it) but that doesn't necessarily explain the perps who do not quite fit the profile of a "juvenile male". Writing them all off as sociopaths doesn't exactly help either, because it doesn't explain why such a small group of sociopaths managed to wreak such disproportionate havoc - it is not some third world country but one of the richest countries in the world. Something went wrong. "Chavs will be chavs" doesn't quite cut it.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I'm not too sure about his numbers Gups, over 1600 have been arrested so far, though that is a national figure.

The Guardian has been collating details of those charged :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/aug/11/uk-riots-magistrates-court-list

The average age of the rioters seems to be older than many commentators are making out. The Daily Mail, for example, is in paroxysms over some 11-year old kid who looted a bottle of wine. No doubt the child in question is a ghastly urchin who needs some strong guidance, but I can't get het up about it myself, he saw an opportunity and took it because he had no moral training, at only 11 he is not a lost cause. I'm willing to make excuses for those under 18, we deny them full citizenship rights and responsibilities for good reason; but it seems that about 80% of the rioters were aged 18 or more, just saying they are young doesn't cut it, they should know how to behave by then.

[Brazen]

Another disturbance round our way last night. Blues and twos, chopper and about 15 police officers charging down the end of the road. One part of me hopes it was a dawn raid on a looter, the other half hopes the looters weren't that local.

In other news, it makes me feel very old to read of 26 year old looters and think, "I was married with a mortgage and running my own IT consultancy when I was 26." No excuse for the primary school teacher either, they earn far more than me.

Gups, Aaronovitch's analysis seems about right for what I witnessed in Enfield, though I don't put the arrival of cars and vans down to pre-existing gangs, just that today's feckless noodle-armed yoof are too lazy to carry their TVs and trainers home.

[CountDeMoney]

Are you people still rioting?  What the hell?  Even the negroes at Watts and Compton managed to go home for dinner.

[Brazen]

Are you people still rioting?  What the hell?  Even the negroes at Watts and Compton managed to go home for dinner.

No, you can't move for coppers. Like I said I suspect this was a police raid.

In other local news the Sony warehouse in Enfield that looters set fire to on Monday is still burning and is likely to for another two days. It stinks as you go past on the train. It's apparently badly affected the UK's independent music production.

[Brazen]

There's talk of taking away benefits and council housing from rioters who can appeal under human rights legislation AND local authorities might be obliged to rehouse them...

[Josquius]

"[Britain is] two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor."
- Benjamin Disraeli

This isn't 1870 anymore.  Otherwise, you would be busy getting beaten to death in the Russian Empire for you unsavory crimes.

This reminds me of something a history lecturer of mine said. The Russian Empire was quite gentle with its subject peoples compared to some. When in 1905 some Finns staged a protest against the Russian government, they were dispersed by cossacks with whips. The British Empire would have sent in the machine guns.

Finland is hardly representative of the Russian empire.

[Brazen]

The Sun reported that an organic chef, Fitzroy Thomas, 43, and his 47-year-old brother Ronald, denied smashing up a branch of the Nando's chicken restaurant chain.

Well, that was obviously just a question of taste

[Gups]

There's talk of taking away benefits and council housing from rioters who can appeal under human rights legislation AND local authorities might be obliged to rehouse them...

There's nothing in the ECHR which gives a right to housing. There is a duty on local authorities to try to house people who are homeless, particularly if they have children. This predates the Human Rights act by some decades.

I think we need to consider some of the interpretations of the HRA and if we need to derogare from some of the rights in relation to law enforcement but rights to welfare and housing have nothing to do with it. Of course that won't stop the Telegraph and Mail blaming the HRA for everything.

[Brazen]

There's nothing in the ECHR which gives a right to housing. There is a duty on local authorities to try to house people who are homeless, particularly if they have children. This predates the Human Rights act by some decades.

I think we need to consider some of the interpretations of the HRA and if we need to derogare from some of the rights in relation to law enforcement but rights to welfare and housing have nothing to do with it. Of course that won't stop the Telegraph and Mail blaming the HRA for everything.

Ah OK.

In the Metro today there is a Q&A (page 4 of the e-edition, not online sadly):
Q: Can tenants claim protection from eviction under the HRA?
A: yes. Tenants facing eviction often cite the 'right to respect for private and family life' in a bid to keep their homes, or the 'right to a fair trial' if they believe the proceedings have not been handled correctly. However, if the local authority or housing association has followed the correct procedure judges are generally reluctant to uphold the claims.

http://e-edition.metro.co.uk/2011/08/12/

[Gups]

Yep. That a pretty fair assessment. You always know that the opposition knows they've lost the case when they start to plead the Human Rights Act.

I worked for a local authority in the late 90s and early 2000s straddling when the HRA came into force. My job was to try to get people evicted for rent arrears (the glamour!). The human rights act made absolutely no difference whatsoever. The biggest factor was the judge you got.