Running through riotous London
Pennie R Quinton | 10.08.2011 12:01 | August Riots | Other Press | Policing
esterday, the streets of London were full of the rage of youth.
When I went out to photograph events, the situation was scary and volatile - but I met children who looked out for me, covering my back when I was using my camera, telling me when gangs and thieves were stalking me.
In the Hackney district of the city, the youth were intent on fighting the police. One boy told me that he was sick of being stopped and searched and that this was a settling of scores with the "Feds", as he called the police.
In 2009, Lord Carlile, reviewing police stop-and-search powers, found that Black and Asian youth in Britain were seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.
Amid the volatile chaos on Monday night, criminal gangs took advantage of the situation. What self-respecting criminal gang would not? I saw a couple of 40-year-old white men heading into the middle of a stand-off between youngsters and police lines, carrying power tools and hammers. A bunch of boys were following, asking each other: "Are they are really going to do so-and-so's shop?"
When I went out to photograph events, the situation was scary and volatile - but I met children who looked out for me, covering my back when I was using my camera, telling me when gangs and thieves were stalking me.
In the Hackney district of the city, the youth were intent on fighting the police. One boy told me that he was sick of being stopped and searched and that this was a settling of scores with the "Feds", as he called the police.
In 2009, Lord Carlile, reviewing police stop-and-search powers, found that Black and Asian youth in Britain were seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.
Amid the volatile chaos on Monday night, criminal gangs took advantage of the situation. What self-respecting criminal gang would not? I saw a couple of 40-year-old white men heading into the middle of a stand-off between youngsters and police lines, carrying power tools and hammers. A bunch of boys were following, asking each other: "Are they are really going to do so-and-so's shop?"
A young girl of about seventeen leaned anxiously out of her front window
Lack of awareness
On Twitter late last night, following the main bulk of the riots, I was astonished at the incomprehension generally expressed as to why they had occurred. There seemed to be an extraordinary lack of awareness that working class youth in Britain are being punished for the financial excesses of the banking collapse.
The public spending cuts this year meant many of the youth summer schemes in London did not run. These riots suggest boredom - and inarticulate rage. The youth are smashing and grabbing the things society tells them to want.
The coalition government's austerity measures have hit this generation hard. There will be no higher education for those who cannot take on burdensome debt. The chance of ever being able to afford to buy a home in London seems remote - except for those whose wealthier parents can provide the deposit for a home loan.
A generation of young people have been left behind by this coalition's policies and the policies of previous governments. How can these young people see that they have anything invested in British society that will enable them to become fulfilled and successful adults?
The comments on Twitter and Facebook, following Monday's riots in London, starkly reflect the class divides within Britain today.
Hitting the streets
After spending much of the day deliberating over whether I should go and see what was happening, on Monday I set off on my bike with a stills camera. I cycled from my apartment in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets across Victoria Park toward the Borough of Hackney, to check out the scene. Would this just be a copycat riot that the police would quickly put down, or was it going to explode into something bigger?
Knowing that the local kids would not appreciate my taking the pictures mid-riot, I planned to get the aftermath shots: upturned, burned-out bins; trashed vehicles; local people wandering through the broken glass...
As I turned onto the main road I saw a red-faced man with a Union Jack flag tattooed on his forehead walking along with two women, drinking cans of beer. One said: "There were loads of masked up Asians swarming outside the Tube station, ready to riot." This man and women were drunk, seemed furious, spoke racist and walked scared.
Tweets warned cyclists to stay out of Hackney's London Fields park - on my route to the area where the riot was kicking off. Gangs, they warned, were robbing people and snatching their bikes.
In the past, gangs specialising in robbing bikes had often lain in wait in London Fields, but during the past decade, with the opening of bijou cafés and the weekly farmers' and arts and crafts markets, Hackney was getting "gentrified". These bike robberies had become less common. But yesterday, old times had returned.
The rocketing house prices and gentrification in East London have left young people in the area aware that they are unlikely ever to be able to afford to buy a home of their own in the area in which they grew up.
The British coalition government's introduction of what it laughably calls "affordable rents" means massive increases in rents for social housing, driving people from their homes and traditional areas into who-knows-which wasteland. In Hackney and Tower Hamlets, luxury apartments sit side-by-side with some of the poorest estates in the country. Raising rents to 80 per cent of the "market rent" of the private sector must mean massive increases.
High tensions
Cycling up Morning Lane, I spotted the first burned-out rubbish bin. The road was scattered with rocks, broken bricks and dung from the police horses. The people walking by looked anxious and on edge. As I approached the junction onto Mare Street I saw four mounted policemen, a bus with a smashed windscreen, overturned bins and smashed plate glass splintered across the tarmac. .
The windows of JD Sports - purveyor of fine tracksuits, "hoodies" and trainers - had been smashed and were now guarded by four policemen in full riot gear behind a taped police line. Youths on bikes stood around chatting, resting their feet on upturned litter bins. Many people raised their mobile phones to get a shot of the trashed leisurewear shop.
The police stood there frowning. Two helicopters flew above, circling the area.
I met a friend, whose hobby is alternative internet projects and who works as a doctor, along with another journalist friend. Passers-by told us that there were burning police cars amid the social housing of the nearby "Pembury Estate" and that the roads were cordoned off. We rode on our bikes, seeking a way through the police cordon.
There were lines of police at the bottom of Pembury Road, on the junction with Lower Clapton Road. People leaned anxiously out of Victorian three-storey houses, their homes behind the taped police lines surrounded by police vans.
A young mixed-race girl of about seventeen leaned anxiously out of her front window, biting her lower lip.
In the distance I could see riot police in a stand-off. There was no getting a better shot from this angle.
We rode into the housing estate. Youths ran backwards and forwards excitedly in groups between the ages of 12 and 18, black and white, reflecting the ethnic mix that is East London.
In the distance, the police advanced and the younger boys ran back towards us. An older punky-looking man stood swigging from a large bottle of vodka, watching. A young lad asked: "Did you nick that vodka?" "No," he replied, winking. "I bought it." Then they all burst out laughing.
The most vulnerable hit hardest by financial crisis
More kids ran backward and forwards, not safe to get a picture here: we rode a little further north to Hackney Downs road, where police cars had allegedly been burned.
From there, we could see the youth hurling stones and cans. Behind us, more youth stood, poised and tense. The rage was tangible.
I raised my camera to take a long shot of the scene.
A lad came up to me and advised me not to get my camera out and to watch my bike because the gangs were out robbing bikes and cameras. "They'll smash your camera," he said. "A guy down there has already had his camera smashed."
Two police vans drove along the road, riot police emerged and ran towards the stand-off. As I ran forwards to get a shot, cobblestones flew over my head. The youth behind meant business.
As the sun set I left the area, remembering how, on March 1, 2011, Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, told members of parliament: "The price of this financial crisis is being borne by people who absolutely did not cause it." He said then that government spending cuts were the fault of the City and expressed surprise there had not been "more public anger".
People made unemployed and businesses bankrupted during the crisis had every reason, he said, to be resentful and to voice their protest. He told the MPs' Treasury Select Committee that the billions spent bailing out the banks and the need for public spending cuts were the fault of the financial services sector.
Asked when living standards enjoyed before the crisis would return, King said: "The research makes it clear that the impact of these crises lasts for many years. It is not like an ordinary recession, where you lose output and get it back quickly. We may not get the lost output back for very many years, if ever."
The situation is complex, with the cuts, the closure of services and the contempt in society for communities which are regularly referred to as the under-class - whose youth are now expressing their anger.
On Twitter late last night, following the main bulk of the riots, I was astonished at the incomprehension generally expressed as to why they had occurred. There seemed to be an extraordinary lack of awareness that working class youth in Britain are being punished for the financial excesses of the banking collapse.
The public spending cuts this year meant many of the youth summer schemes in London did not run. These riots suggest boredom - and inarticulate rage. The youth are smashing and grabbing the things society tells them to want.
The coalition government's austerity measures have hit this generation hard. There will be no higher education for those who cannot take on burdensome debt. The chance of ever being able to afford to buy a home in London seems remote - except for those whose wealthier parents can provide the deposit for a home loan.
A generation of young people have been left behind by this coalition's policies and the policies of previous governments. How can these young people see that they have anything invested in British society that will enable them to become fulfilled and successful adults?
The comments on Twitter and Facebook, following Monday's riots in London, starkly reflect the class divides within Britain today.
Hitting the streets
After spending much of the day deliberating over whether I should go and see what was happening, on Monday I set off on my bike with a stills camera. I cycled from my apartment in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets across Victoria Park toward the Borough of Hackney, to check out the scene. Would this just be a copycat riot that the police would quickly put down, or was it going to explode into something bigger?
Knowing that the local kids would not appreciate my taking the pictures mid-riot, I planned to get the aftermath shots: upturned, burned-out bins; trashed vehicles; local people wandering through the broken glass...
As I turned onto the main road I saw a red-faced man with a Union Jack flag tattooed on his forehead walking along with two women, drinking cans of beer. One said: "There were loads of masked up Asians swarming outside the Tube station, ready to riot." This man and women were drunk, seemed furious, spoke racist and walked scared.
Tweets warned cyclists to stay out of Hackney's London Fields park - on my route to the area where the riot was kicking off. Gangs, they warned, were robbing people and snatching their bikes.
In the past, gangs specialising in robbing bikes had often lain in wait in London Fields, but during the past decade, with the opening of bijou cafés and the weekly farmers' and arts and crafts markets, Hackney was getting "gentrified". These bike robberies had become less common. But yesterday, old times had returned.
The rocketing house prices and gentrification in East London have left young people in the area aware that they are unlikely ever to be able to afford to buy a home of their own in the area in which they grew up.
The British coalition government's introduction of what it laughably calls "affordable rents" means massive increases in rents for social housing, driving people from their homes and traditional areas into who-knows-which wasteland. In Hackney and Tower Hamlets, luxury apartments sit side-by-side with some of the poorest estates in the country. Raising rents to 80 per cent of the "market rent" of the private sector must mean massive increases.
High tensions
Cycling up Morning Lane, I spotted the first burned-out rubbish bin. The road was scattered with rocks, broken bricks and dung from the police horses. The people walking by looked anxious and on edge. As I approached the junction onto Mare Street I saw four mounted policemen, a bus with a smashed windscreen, overturned bins and smashed plate glass splintered across the tarmac. .
The windows of JD Sports - purveyor of fine tracksuits, "hoodies" and trainers - had been smashed and were now guarded by four policemen in full riot gear behind a taped police line. Youths on bikes stood around chatting, resting their feet on upturned litter bins. Many people raised their mobile phones to get a shot of the trashed leisurewear shop.
The police stood there frowning. Two helicopters flew above, circling the area.
I met a friend, whose hobby is alternative internet projects and who works as a doctor, along with another journalist friend. Passers-by told us that there were burning police cars amid the social housing of the nearby "Pembury Estate" and that the roads were cordoned off. We rode on our bikes, seeking a way through the police cordon.
There were lines of police at the bottom of Pembury Road, on the junction with Lower Clapton Road. People leaned anxiously out of Victorian three-storey houses, their homes behind the taped police lines surrounded by police vans.
A young mixed-race girl of about seventeen leaned anxiously out of her front window, biting her lower lip.
In the distance I could see riot police in a stand-off. There was no getting a better shot from this angle.
We rode into the housing estate. Youths ran backwards and forwards excitedly in groups between the ages of 12 and 18, black and white, reflecting the ethnic mix that is East London.
In the distance, the police advanced and the younger boys ran back towards us. An older punky-looking man stood swigging from a large bottle of vodka, watching. A young lad asked: "Did you nick that vodka?" "No," he replied, winking. "I bought it." Then they all burst out laughing.
The most vulnerable hit hardest by financial crisis
More kids ran backward and forwards, not safe to get a picture here: we rode a little further north to Hackney Downs road, where police cars had allegedly been burned.
From there, we could see the youth hurling stones and cans. Behind us, more youth stood, poised and tense. The rage was tangible.
I raised my camera to take a long shot of the scene.
A lad came up to me and advised me not to get my camera out and to watch my bike because the gangs were out robbing bikes and cameras. "They'll smash your camera," he said. "A guy down there has already had his camera smashed."
Two police vans drove along the road, riot police emerged and ran towards the stand-off. As I ran forwards to get a shot, cobblestones flew over my head. The youth behind meant business.
As the sun set I left the area, remembering how, on March 1, 2011, Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, told members of parliament: "The price of this financial crisis is being borne by people who absolutely did not cause it." He said then that government spending cuts were the fault of the City and expressed surprise there had not been "more public anger".
People made unemployed and businesses bankrupted during the crisis had every reason, he said, to be resentful and to voice their protest. He told the MPs' Treasury Select Committee that the billions spent bailing out the banks and the need for public spending cuts were the fault of the financial services sector.
Asked when living standards enjoyed before the crisis would return, King said: "The research makes it clear that the impact of these crises lasts for many years. It is not like an ordinary recession, where you lose output and get it back quickly. We may not get the lost output back for very many years, if ever."
The situation is complex, with the cuts, the closure of services and the contempt in society for communities which are regularly referred to as the under-class - whose youth are now expressing their anger.
Pennie R Quinton
Homepage:
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201189161741876869.html
Comments
Hide the following comment
A message made of honey.
10.08.2011 13:05
The problem is that the people of this country just don't understand that this narrative that there as problem A, caused by problem B which has the solution answer C just isn't working. The structure is sound but the detail is horribly wrong.
Its really tempting to want to beleive that this rioting is the product of a banking industry that let us all down financially. Really tempting but it just aint so. This crisis is a political crisis and the banking industry is simply where it first manifested itself. The idea that this is all the fault of greedy bankers works wonderfully for socialists and communists and was the first excuse offered by the Labour government when the crisis first appeared but that was always going to happen. For anti-capitalists, the financial system is always responsible for everything.
And it is responsible for a great many woes in this world. But not this time. This time it is a woefully underperforming government that holds the tinder box and matches. The narrative offered by labour has been accepted by everybody because, well, nobody really knows HOW to deal with a crisis in which the only people who can get us out of it...are those that got us into it! Its one of the reasons our Parliament isn't working anymore. The scale of this problem dwarfs the scope of influence that Parliament can exercise at any given time.
I really sympathise with those who live in inner-cities and blocks of tenement housing crammed into tiny boxes living ontop of their neighbours. Its hard. And I sympathise with the fact that they are in near daily contact with police officers, many of whom exhibit profound distaste toward people on the basis of their ethnicity. In a lot of ways, the rioters and the police are crammed together and thats bound to create problems and we have seen those problems emerge spectacularly all over the south-east of England.
But rioting like this degrades the economy and sharpens the problems that many in those communities face. The rioters have made a very difficult situation fundamentally worse by the actions they have taken. They will now go home, will return back to what they were doing before and they will now become completely exposed to the hardships that individual police officers will be imposing on them. Businesses will fail, investment will stop, local community groups will close and funding right across the board will also dry up. This is really sad.
Of course the police have their own agenda. They have been using this rioting as an opportunity to tactically withhold their services in order to ensure that this rioting expands and creates as much political capital as possible. Political capital they can use to hold the government to ransom when it comes to spending assessments and funding reviews. What we have seen, is the police switching this violence on and off like a tap, and the kids on the estates have obligingly stepped forward and helped them out as they would. This is what you have to expect from two sides that inhabit the same coin. This rioting has been heavily organised and is something that shames us all.
For the young girl looking at the violence from her balcony window all I can say is sorry. Sorry that you have to see this and sorry that the world you inhabit is one in which lies flow like rivers in the streets you should feel safe enough to walk in and call your own. I'm sorry that you are not free. I'm sorry that everybody you see on TV, everybody that knocks on your door asking you vote for them, everybody that comes into your home and sticks a microphone in your mouth and asks you to say something they can use, everybody that she can hear on the radio and read on the internet...is a part of that lie.
It shouldn't be like this and until people in this country wake up to the basic reality of the situation they face, things will get harder and the landscape will continue to be dominated by the thickheaded and agenda laden opportunists that fundamentally helped bring this crisis into our world.
All you need my dear...is courage. It is the quality these opportunists lack above all others.
Cuts Control.