Voices of Hackney and Peckham after the riots

I came across this on the BBC website. It's a gallery which you can move about and zoom into of post-it notes pinned up in Peckham by local people.  I think it is really powerful.  If you read the notes there are some general themes - yes things are really difficult and no we don't think people understand this but stop taking it out on your local community.

While the clean up campaign continues, our attempts to understand the rioting in London and elsewhere and what it all means takes ever more depressing twists and turns.  I think it is important to try and understand what happened in order to best make sure it doesn't happen again.  That seems obvious to me but it does seem to have a little wilfully slipped the attention of much of the media and the Coalition Government.  I am going to try and offer a bit of an opinion on it all but I would start off by saying that I don't live in the communities where civil disorder took place and I believe that it is local people, particularly young people, who we should be listening to just now.

That said, there seem to be a few schools of thought.

England is in the grip of 'Moral decay'.  Prime Minister David Cameron likes this one.  It reminds me a little of Mrs Thatcher's 'enemy within'.  As I understand it, we have a generation of 'feral youths' with no respect for civic obedience, no pride in their communities or their country, a culture of welfare dependency, a consumer culture which marks out the unobtainable as fair game in the midst of a riot, rampant use of social networking to coordinate lawlessness and a crack in the moral fabric of English society.  Solution - hammer the perpetrators in the courts by deviating from legal procedure and sentencing guidelines (4 years in jail for setting up an event on Facebook to organise a riot which nobody (apart from the police) turned up to?  6 months in jail for stealing a bottle of water?), consider a ban on social networking (lol) during periods of unrest, intervene in 'problem families' and train the police in dealing with riots and let them use water cannons.

Others want to go further and here we hear the predictable yell for all the things that stopped people in London and elsewhere rioting before (apparently) - bring back National Service!  bring back corporal punishment!  hell why not bring back capital punishment as well!  no more single parents!  no more welfare society!  make them work! back to basics! make them go to Church!  change our consumer culture!  no more rap music! (David Starkey you numbskull) on the same theme, reverse the 'odious tide of multiculturalism'!

I had a little look and as I suspected, it turns out that we have a bit of penchant for rioting.  We have been engaging in civil disorder on a large scale for some time.  This, for the English Defence League, was even before mass immigration (another apparent 'cause' of the riots).  It was even before the EDL themselves started fighting with the police and I am assuming that there was no Twitter, Facebook or Blackberry messaging then.

Moral decay - not a fan.  So what then?

It all seemed initially to kick off' after the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham.  The police failed to communicate appropriately about the circumstances of his death and a public inquiry will start in December 2011.  Cue back drop of community and police tensions going back years.  Check out Darcus Howe here (it's quite uncomfortable viewing I have to say),

Martin Luther King Jr once said that, "a riot is the language of the unheard".  If we assume this to be correct, who are the 'unheard' in this context and what is it that they wish to be heard about?

If we look at some of the post-its from Peckham, we see people talking about not having enough to do, not having enough amenities or services and a lack of opportunity.  The economy is in meltdown and public services have been hard hit.  There has also been a significant political shift in Parliament and the language of 'underclass' and 'welfarism' is common fare.  English economic austerity has enabled the fast tracking of a philosophy of a culture of the 'undeserving poor' amongst the political classes and by extension through media collusion and facilitation, in the psyche of wider English society.  This is a very interesting read on the role of the media during the riots. 

I can see that there are large communities and / or large groups of people who feel disenfranchised politically, socially, culturally and financially.  I therefore think I understand why people took to the streets and rioted.  I don't agree with it, but I think I understand it. 

I less understand the looting and destruction of local businesses and communities.  Pauline Pearce is spot on here.  To ransack and nick things from your own community is diversionary and stupid (there is swearing in this I warn you).

In terms of a response, to deny a sociological analysis of the recent riots in London, Birmingham and Manchester is short sighted and in my view, dangerous.  A response that fails either out of idiocy or deliberate exclusion, to consider multiple disenfranchisement, is a response doomed to fail.  We need to listen to people in local communities and we need to use the structures and processes that local communities use to do this.