Why London and Other Riots?

the riots had spread to Manchester, Croydon and Brixton.

All of a sudden, the once quiet city centres became urban war zones. Some of the aggrieved youths resorted to the social communication media like Twitter and Face Book to urge people to join in the mayhem. British Prime Minister David Cameron promptly cut short his vacation and raced back to No. 10 Downing Street ostensibly to take charge of the situation.

But it was not just the killing of Duggan that ignited the fire of the riots. There were already pockets of discontentment as many of the youth who took to the streets felt the system itself no longer cared about them. Poverty, high unemployment, decaying infrastructure in some rundown neighbourhoods occasioned by Cameron's austerity measures, all contributed to the feeling of anomie that provided the fuel for the crisis.

Although we do not want to see what happened as another race-related crisis like the one of 1985 also in Tottenham, it is instructive to argue that the widening gap between the rich and the poor but especially the black underclass has created a great divide in British society. And when any society gets polarised along the lines of "we" versus "them", it could portend great danger.

So what lessons can Nigeria learn from the London riots? The first is the way the British authorities handled the riots. During the first 24 hours the rampaging youths outnumbered the policemen on the streets, yet this did not result in a "shoot at sight" order as would have been the case in many places, including Nigeria. Instead the government deployed some 16,000 anti-riot policemen to the troubled streets. And this massive deployment had instant impact as police swooped on the troublemakers, arresting over 1000 within 24 hours.

The point being made here is that most often a "shoot at sight" order to the police can sometimes backfire as we have seen in some of the Arab nations where no matter the number of citizens the police and army killed, the protesters became even more emboldened. We equally commend the British judicial system for its role in ending the carnage on London streets.

The courts promptly dispensed justice as soon as the arrested rioters were arraigned even though some of the sentences have been described as "harsh". For example, four men found guilty of using their Facebook pages to "invite" more rioters were each jailed four years, and a 23-year-old man was jailed six months for allegedly "looting a bottle of mineral water" worth five pounds! These instances notwithstanding, the fact remains that the sentences were meant to send message to the rioters: "If you value your freedom stay home or risk being sent to jail for a long time."

The second lesson is that it is imperative to state that if Britain with all of its social safety net, not minding the austerity regime, could experience such uprising then our governments, at all levels, should know that it is not wise to take the people's present lethargy for granted. The youth are watching all this happen live on global televisions, and social media networks like Facebook and Twitter have equally permeated our society. It will take just a spark before the streets go up in flames.
Source: This Day, 26^th August 2011.

London Riot: Who Let The Jamafricans Out? (part 1)

By Taju Tijani

At last, Mark Duggan can now rest in peace in the cold chamber of his new sepulchre. Back on London streets, the palpable cyclones of racial hostility are frighteningly visible. You can see the damping frowns on the faces of elderly white women as they cross path with the next Jamafrican in hoodies.  

Already, the leaders of United Kingdom are all inside a shocking airplane of psychological amnesia. The reason why the Jamafricans were out on the streets and their sympathisers, the chattering white “chavs”, is being airbrushed by the mainstream media. It is astonishing to see Britain falls helplessly back into its cage of delusion and denial. Well, the reason why the Jamafricans and their white “chavs” supporters turned Tottenham, Clapham, Ealing and Croydon into bonfire was because a police officer shot Mark Duggan twice and fatally killed him. The initial police motive was to conceal this fact and accuse Duggan as the stupid hero who fired first. This was debunked.As the hours ticked off and information of his defenceless shooting circulated among the youths of Tottenham, they became enraged. The patience of many Jamafricans around Tottenham snapped and that impatience snowballed into a canon ball on the high streets.

Knowing my predilection to support my ‘brovers’, I had to wait and gauge the feelings of “Middle England” and their exerting right wing media before I form an opinion. From both sides of the cultural divide, there was unmistakable class anger. Past riots like the Broadwater Farm, Brixton and Notting Hill have always been memorialised on our hearts mainly from class and racial prejudice. But this is different.

Let me declare my prejudice from the outset. I love fairness, justice and equity. I subscribe to the moral sentiment of a level playing field where merit and your genius win the lottery of the good life for you. I cannot accommodate injustice. I believe in dividing the precious from the vile. In addition, I have a serious grumble with anybody who would want something for nothing.

Mark Duggan’s life is neither a testament to success nor failure. He was regarded as a Jamafrican gangster and therefore a clear danger to Queen and country. The white establishment somewhere made a decision to get rid of him. And with two lethal shots, his soul returned to his Creator. Wherever he may be now, he obviously has no recollection of the painful poundings he received as a black Brit. One of the many differences between black and white Britons is their response to Duggan. White people, or at least those who accept Duggan’s ongoing characterisation by the right wing tabloids as a thug, tend to place him in the demon’s gallery reserved mainly for black criminals. But in the barely-get-along estates of Tottenham where Duggan lived and died, he was a hero.

A hero of the underclass, underprivileged and despised Martians called black British. Violence is ugly, ungodly, bloody and cursed. But to Martin Luther King Jr., riot is the voice of the unheard. The young hoodies; the violent sociopathic thugs who carried out the so called “lawful rebellion” or the “midnight marathon shopping spree” in the glittering “white” malls were the unlicensed criminal dissenters pumped up to roll back the years of socioeconomic alienation. Years of black deprivation has to morph somehow into a violent backlash. One can say that Thatcherism backlash segued smoothly into Cameron’s Big Society voodoo, taking both black and their supporting white “chavs” along in a synergy of smash, loot and burn.

I watched in sadness as the criminal vagabonds wandered from one end of the opportunist, no, capitalist continuum to another carting home laptops, Blackberry and even masturbating dildo. Is someone going to screw someone rigid? Possible! Hardcore and radical right wing writers have been out from the Shires to serenade their readers with Eurocentric sentiment of family values. Clan members like Peter Hitchens and David Starkey have never minced their disgust for Jamafricans embrace of the nihilistic counter cultural value of rap music, gangsterism and hatred of education. Hear tacky Starkey, a Jewish, Historian and broadcaster: “A substantial section of the chavs has become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilist gangster culture has become the fashion. The Jamaican patois language that is wholly false has intruded in England and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country. David Lammy does sound white, so does Diane Abbot because they’ve had a white cultural experience. Its one of the reasons they don’t have any street credibility. They have no contact with the young.” Piers Morgan, a journalist and chat show host answered and called Starkey, “racist idiot”. Need I say more?

On the other hand, the bleeding heart liberals have been locking horns with tacky Starkey and his racist minions not to louse up the riot with the silly notion of superiority of one culture over others. If I may ask, in what robust way is the European culture better than say, the Jamafricans, the Chinese or the Indians? Anybody who will disinter the cultures of the universe will soon realise that they are all relative. Here, I have to savage tacky Starkey for floundering under a bafflingly flawed intellectual mediocrity. His point on race captured only his pathological racist revulsion for all things foreign.

Of course United Kingdom has been reconfigured. Either for good or bad. That depends on where you hang your hat. I am not saying that I harbour any florid gush of praise for the satanic mills of early industrial England. We all read how blacks were treated. They were taken to circuses to perform to full audience of ignoramuses who, out of hatred, turned fellow human beings into beast of glad entertainment.
Tijani Blogs on Taju Tijani’s Soundings tajutijani.wordpress.com

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UK: Blair in Riots Response Warning

Former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair on Sunday attacked claims that "moral decline" was behind this month's riots, warning talk of a broken society could ruin the country's reputation abroad.

In a rare intervention in domestic politics since leaving power, Blair also warned that flawed analysis by politicians risked producing the wrong policy responses to the violence, reports AFP.

The former Labour leader said the real cause of the unrest, which erupted in London before spreading to other English cities in four nights of mayhem, was groups of disaffected youths outside the mainstream.

"Britain, as a whole, is not in the grip of some general 'moral decline'," he wrote in the Observer newspaper.
"The big cause is the group of young, alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour," he continued.

He added that many of those involved were "from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, middle class or poor."

Prime Minister David Cameron has repeatedly suggested a loss of morals fuelled the unrest. Last week, he vowed to confront a "slow-motion moral collapse" in parts of the country and said his priority was mending the "broken society."

Blair's remarks were not solely directed at the right, however, and he accused leaders across the political spectrum of failing to realise that the riots were not symptomatic of society as a whole.

"Failure to get this leads to a completely muddle-headed analysis," he wrote, warning policymakers may as a result come up with the "wrong prescription."

He urged politicians to "focus on the specific problem and we can begin on a proper solution.

"Elevate this into a high-faulting wail about a Britain that has lost its way morally and we will depress ourselves unnecessarily, trash our own reputation abroad, and worst of all, miss the chance to deal with the problem in the only way that will work."
Blair, who was prime minister from 1997 to 2007, has largely kept out of British domestic politics since quitting power.

He has focused instead on a string of new roles, with the most high-profile one being as envoy for the diplomatic Quartet seeking to revive Mideast peace talks.

London police meanwhile said Sunday latest figures showed there almost 3,300 recorded offences linked to the disorder in the capital between August 6 and 9.
Source: This Day, 22^nd August 2011.

Lessons of the UK riots

By Sun News Publishing

The wave of violence and arson that raged through several United Kingdom cities, last week, following police killing of a 29-year-old man, Mark Duggan, in Tottenham, North London, boldly underscores the fact that no country is immune to social discontent and unrest. 

The riots, Britain’s worst since the race riots which set London ablaze in the 1980s, occasioned burning of vehicles and buildings, looting of shops and attacks on policemen. At least 1,900 rioters were arrested, over 371 charged, and 16,000 policemen deployed to quell the uprising. Six persons were confirmed dead in the riots, which also led to postponement of the Nigeria-Ghana friendly in London over security concerns.

The UK riots took the world and, indeed, the country’s security agencies, by surprise. The unrest shattered the peace of London, an important cosmopolitan city and a foremost tourist destination hosting the busiest airport in the world. 

For Nigeria, London is especially important as it hosts a large population of its people. Although the circumstances that led to the London police killing are not very clear, the speed with which the resultant riot spread to other parts of the country like Manchester, Birmingham and Croydon, suggests underlying simmering animosity against the government and the police in Britain. The involvement of mostly youths from poor and deprived areas of the cities in the rioting suggests it is a fallout of social discontent possibly arising from economic strangulation of the people via recent budget cuts and other austerity measures.

The lesson for Britain in this incident is that there is a limit to which the people can be financially stressed. Although Prime Minister David Cameron described the riots as “criminality, pure and simple,” and the police attributed its spread to “copycat criminal activity,” the authorities in Britain need to look into the socio-economic underpinnings of the revolt. The preponderance of economically disadvantaged youths in the protests supports the argument that economic stress is at the bottom of the problem.

This situation has unequivocally exposed the underbelly of capitalism in Britain. It vividly shows that an economy cannot be run only on the vagaries of market forces. Instead, the human factor has to be taken into reckoning because the people are not only the means, but also the end of economic planning.

For Nigeria, it is instructive that a nation like Britain can have a revolt on its hands. If Britain with her social security system and other social safety nets, good roads, constant electricity and an efficient transportation system can have a people’s revolt on her hands, one can only imagine what can happen in a country like Nigeria which lacks these. 
The lesson for Nigeria in this unfortunate incident is that social unrest can break out anywhere in the world that the people have cause to be unhappy with their governments. 

The current impression that Nigerians are complacent and cannot revolt against the government may be a costly mistake, as Britain found out last week. The challenge to Britain, Nigeria and, indeed, all countries, is the need for governments to take the people’s welfare more seriously. Well-being of citizens should never be sacrificed on the altar of cold economic calculations. They should, at all times, be at the centre of governance. Authorities should strive to give their policies and programmes human face. 

Considering the economic importance of London and UK, it is important that the situation is quickly brought under control and the issues that contributed to it, quickly addressed. This uprising is not good for Britain. Renewed commitment to the people’s welfare by governments across the world will reduce propensity for frequent riots. 
Source: Sun, 17th August 2011

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London police charge 1,000 people over riots

LONDON-(AFP) – Police in London said Wednesday they have charged more than 1,000 people over rioting in the British capital last week, but warned of more to come asofficers trawl through 20,000 hours of CCTV footage.

A total of 1,005 people have been charged with various offences out of the 1,733 arrested in London so far, although nationwide some 1,179 people had been brought before the courts by Monday afternoon.

“This is a significant milestone but the investigation is far from over,” said Tim Godwin, the acting commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

About 500 officers from Scotland Yard are working on the riots, he said, adding: “Our tireless investigations to find those responsible for last week’s appalling violence continue.

“Officers across the Met are carrying out great police work, day and night, to gather the kind of evidence which has led to these charges.”

The majority of those arrested were detained in the days after the riots, which began following the police shooting of a local man in Tottenham, north London, and spread across several English cities over four nights.

Many suspects were identified by members of the public, including their own families, after police published CCTV footage of shops being ransacked in London, Manchester, Birmingham and other towns.

About 125 police spent the weekend examining CCTV footage, Scotland Yard said, while images of suspects posted on photo-sharing website Flickr have been viewed 7.8 million times.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson said the high number of arrests was down to the hard work of police and “the outstanding support they have had from law abiding Londoners who will not tolerate this behaviour in their communities”.

By Monday afternoon, 115 people had been convicted over the riots across England and Wales, of whom at least 26 were under the age of 18, according to figures from the Ministry of Justice.
Source: Vanguard, 17th August 2011

London on fire

By Our Reporter

Why was Mr Mark Duggan of Tottenham killed by a London policeman? This question even though might for now be difficult to answer, the spontaneous sporadic violent protests that followed that dastardly police act will forever be remembered in British history.

The death of Duggan, 29, and father of four, through two gun shots in the chest has thrown the entire United Kingdom (UK) into turmoil. He was a passenger in a silver Toyota minicab believed to have been stopped by police in Ferry Lane, close to Tottenham Hale Tube station, when the incident occurred. Even if he had challenged the police, they have no right to kill anybody in a country where capital punishment is not allowed in their criminal law.

Despite the fact that David Cameron, British Prime Minister, was forced to cut short his summer vacation and his deployment of 16,000 police officers to curb the despoliation of London, the scars of destruction for three consecutive days would take some time to heal. The fire bombing of Tottenham police station in Tottenham by a mob, and the setting alight of several buildings, a market place, including cars in several cities across the UK remains a gory sight to behold.

What started as a racial vitriol was hijacked by touts who looted, vandalised and caused arson in that famous London city. The devastating aftermath that reverberated round the Queen’s land will definitely set economic activities there back by millions of pound sterling. The vandals took advantage of the incident to unleash criminality on the UK.

Whatever the situation, the ugly occurrence in Tottenham underscores a general disenchantment in not only the UK but entire Europe by the largely marginalised people who are helpless about their pathetic condition. The London incident should signal a warning to countries in Europe like Germany and France, that the time to mellow down on capitalism by creating an atmosphere that will correct the social imbalance in their systems has come. Even in America, there is emerging now, a new trend of social disillusionment and it may be bad if they allow what has just happened in London to replicate in their climes before they take action. They may have to learn their lessons at a grave cost.

We believe that Nigerians too have a lot to learn from the spontaneous courageous response of the people of Tottenham to that sad incident. Over the years, Nigerians have demonstrated shameful docility to worse incidents of injustice and police brutality against fellow countrymen in the past.

We call on the British government to be fair in its attempt at resolving the crisis. As the manhunt for the vandals who destroyed and looted valuables in the country continues, it will only make sense if the policeman that pulled the trigger and his other collaborators are identified and brought to book as well. After all, the IPCC ballistics report has shown that there is “no evidence” that a handgun found near where Mark Duggan was shot by armed officers had been fired. Ensuring that justice is done to all sides in this matter will send the right signal to overzealous policemen in that country that they must show great circumspection in dealing with inhabitants of the UK, irrespective of their colour or creed.

This is not the time for security agencies in all parts of the world to be insensitive and inhuman in their approach to handling of human conducts that tend to break their laws. We condole with the family of Duggan, especially his four kids that have been made fatherless by the negligence of the British Police patrolling the streets of Tottenham. Our hearts pour out as well to those who have had to bear collateral damage as a result of the policeman’s conduct.
Source: The Nation, 14^th August 2011.

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Cameron’s Broken Windows

By Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen

OUR son lives next to a Turkish mosque on Kingsland Road in Hackney, where some of London’s worst mob violence has occurred. When looters rampaged through Hackney last weekend, there were few police officers to stop them and residents had to chase them off with butcher knives, truncheons and baseball bats. Vigilante action succeeded where normal policing failed.  

Kingsland Road resembles the bustling, ethnically mixed streets of Brooklyn. During the day, it is a home of sorts for unemployed young men with nothing to do; Britain’s youth unemployment rate is currently over 20 percent. During the economic boom a decade ago, though, nearly as many were out of work, and they did not all turn to crime. 

To counter the risk that they might, there were storefront drop-in centres for young people in the neighbourhood; these places are now shutting down, as are other community services, like health centres for the elderly and libraries. Local police forces have also been shrinking. 

All are victims of what people in Britain call “the cuts” — the government’s de-funding of civil-society institutions in order to balance the nation’s books. Before the riots, the government had planned to cut 16,200 police officers across the country. In London, austerity means that there will be about 19 percent less to spend next year on government programs, and the burden will fall particularly on the poor. 

The rioters in London appear to be young men of varying races — despite reports of a monolithic mob of alienated “black youth.” But there is a racial dimension to this drama. The wave of riots began with protests against the police killing of a young black man, Mark Duggan. While initially peaceful, the demonstrations soon descended into violence. When the unrest spread to Manchester on Tuesday, many of the rioters there were apparently white. 

An old-fashioned Marxist might imagine that the broken windows and burning houses expressed a raging political reaction to government spending cuts — but this time that explanation would be too facile. 

The last time Britain saw widespread rioting, in the 1980s, street violence came after a long and failed political struggle against the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which suppressed trade unions and decimated social services. Today, the rioters seem motivated by a more diffuse anger, behaving like crazed shoppers on a spree; while some of the shops looted are big chains, many more are small local businesses run by people who are themselves struggling through Britain’s economic slump. 

There has been a change in national temperament that has affected decent citizens as well as criminals. The country’s mood has turned sour. Indeed, the flip side of Britons’ famed politeness is the sort of hooliganism that appears at soccer matches and in town centres on weekend nights — an unfocused hostility that is usually fuelled by vast quantities of alcohol. Fears of anarchic urban mobs date from Shakespeare’s time, and Prime Minister David Cameron has summoned these old fears, describing the present conflagration as “senseless.” 

Mr. Cameron was good at selling people on the idea of cutting costs, but he has failed to make the case for what and how to cut: efforts to increase university fees, to overhaul the National Health Service, to reduce the military and the police, even to sell off the nation’s forests, have all backfired, with the government hedging or simply abandoning its plans. 

In attempting to carry out reform, the government appears incompetent; it has lost legitimacy. This has prompted some people living on Kingsland Road to become vigilantes. “We have to do things for ourselves,” a 16-year-old in Hackney told The Guardian, convinced that the authorities did not care about, or know how to protect, communities like his. 

A street of shuttered shops, locked playgrounds and closed clinics, a street patrolled by citizens armed with knives and bats, is not a place to build a life. 

Americans ought to ponder this aspect of Britain’s trauma. After all, London is one of the world’s wealthiest cities, but large sections of it are impoverished. New York is not so different. 

The American right today is obsessed with cutting government spending. In many ways, Mr. Cameron’s austerity program is the Tea Party’s dream come true. But Britain is now grappling with the consequences of those cuts, which have led to the neglect and exclusion of many vulnerable, disaffected young people who are acting out violently and irresponsibly — driven by rage rather than an explicit political agenda. 

America is in many ways different from Britain, but the two countries today are alike in their extremes of inequality, and in the desire of many politicians to solve economic and social ills by reducing the power of the state. 

Britain’s current crisis should cause us to reflect on the fact that a smaller government can actually increase communal fear and diminish our quality of life. Is that a fate America wishes upon itself? 

Richard Sennett is a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and New York University. Saskia Sassen is a professor of sociology at Columbia.

– Los Angeles Times

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British riots fuel anti-migrants fear

BY HUGO ODIOGOR

Everyone’s heard about the police taking bribes, the  members of parliament stealing thousands with their expenses. They set the example. It’s time to loot”.  With these words, a youngster set the tone for the rationale of London looters that unleashed a wave of violence and looting that swept through London and other major cities.

It is what social and clinical psychologists would classify as transfer of aggression as the gale of angst that swept through the streets of London, Tottenham, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Nottingham, Liverpool and Manchester, with arson, looting and vandalism manifesting what Nigerian-born Lola Adesoye identified as the “outpouring of social discontent caused by social and economic exclusion, stratification of the  society along the lines of “the haves and have nots”, the collapse of the family and public education system as well as corruption within the law enforcement  authorities”.

Parts of London exploded on Saturday following the controversial death of Mr. Mike Dungan, a Briton  of  Afro-Caribbean descent, who was gunned down by Metropolitan Police from Operation Trident. Reports said the father of four was killed when the cab that he was  riding  in was confronted by the police. Worse still was the attempt to cover up the incident by the Independent Police Complaints Commission which said the shooting was from “non-police firearm”. But independent accounts said that the bullet in the body of the dead man was issued by the police. This set the stage for the most horrendous street riots in the UK which raised racial tension and old social strains as noticeable in the 1980s.

But the orgy of violence which ravaged UK was multi-ethnic and multi-racial as hooded looters ransacked stores and homes. Scenes of smoke billowing from torched stores, cars, houses, smashed windows and broken glasses became features of television footages and news reports. Young people employed social media platform of Twitter, text messages, to coordinate the riots and beat the police.

Arab Spring
The scale and scope of the UK destruction within three days made mockery of the Arab spring which broke out early in the year and swept through Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan and Israel. An expert in international relations said the social and economic factors the propelled the so-called Arab spring were present in the UK riots.

The crippling unemployment, corruption, social and economic exclusion and, above all, the huge deficit budget arising from the country’s involvement in foreign military operations were listed as the cause for the explosion. Other local people in east London point to the wealth gap between the rich and the poor as the underlying cause of the riots; they also blame what they saw as police prejudice in the treatment of issues in Britain.

Social and economic strains
When over 750,000 teachers in Britain marched out in protest in June 2011, it was the  biggest  public sector strike since the 1926. Their anger was with the proposed cuts  of 80 billion pounds ($130 billion) from public spending by 2015 to reduce the huge deficit. It equally  planned  to introduce austerity measures as part of that Conservative Party  plan  to macro-manage its tottering economy.

There have been past cases of social tensions in UK in recent times. In November, December and March, small groups broke away from large marches in London to loot. In the most notorious episode, rioters attacked a Rolls-Royce carrying Prince Charles and his wife Camilla to a charity concert.

Class War
Adesoye, who is an activist and social commentator in the UK, said the spasmodic outbreaks of violence reflects the failure in British public education system where teachers lack authorities to enforce discipline while the family units are disintegrating.  The British authorities, he says, treat some of its citizens as scum and second class citizens. While the city authorities alienate the youth and they don’t feel to be part if it. The violence created a mob culture which fed on depersonalisation of the individuals who simply lost their identities in the conflict.

The young people who took part in the riots feel no sense of allegiance to the authorities and the country. They see the police as corrupt and scandal prone.

Shoddy policing
Over 16,000 policemen were unleashed on the streets creating the impression of a city under siege. The rioters had go on with their mayhem with little challenge from the police. John McDonnell, a legislator from the opposition Labor Party, said: “We are reaping what has been sown over the last three decades of creating a grotesquely unequal society with an ethos of grab as much as you can by any means. A society of looters created with MPs and their expenses, bankers and their bonuses, tax-evading corporations, hacking journalists, bribe-taking police officers, and now a group of alienated kids are seizing their chance.”

Government response
Prime Minister David Cameron cut short his vacation in Italy to attend to the crisis. He was furious on Wednesday when he promised to toughen police control as well as action to restore law and order. He said: “We needed a fight back and a fight back is under way”.
Source: Vanguard, 14^th August 2011.

Britain shows our dark sides

By Hardball

The attempt by Iran’s sometimes hysterical president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Libya’s beleaguered strongman, Muammar Gaddafi, to derive public relations profit from the violent street protests in Britain was largely unsuccessful. The reason was not because the riots were illogical; no, they were essentially a product of decades of national neglect of the youths, decaying moral values, and dysfunctional families. They were also probably a reflection of the austerity programmes of the coalition government headed by the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron.

However, beyond being a reaction to social and economic pressures, the riots temporarily made Britain the lightning rod for humanity’s mysterious dark side. Apart from hardened criminals, the rest of us have a bizarre antinomian streak that exposes us to a brief and sometimes fatal rejection of the moral laws that bind a society together. The question to ask is: what is that thing in us that lures us into crime, over which we fleetingly lose control? After the riots, Britain has had to weigh the discomfiting truths of the rioters being preponderantly teenagers or a little older, and a significant percentage among them coming from either wealthy or fairly comfortable homes. There was the heart-rending story of a 24-year-old young graduate who trained as a social worker. On the second night of the riots, she passed by a looted shop, looked in, and saw some electronic items, and in one crazy moment decided to help herself to a 27-inch television which she did not need because she already has one in her room. To worsen the pain for her family, she comes from a respectable home.

Guilt-ridden, she turned herself in, has been distraught ever since, and believes she may never be able to live down the fact that she looted a shop in a fit of absentminded folly. But such behaviour is frighteningly human. The best among us have their shadowy dark side: telling a convenient but embarrassing lie; capacity to murder or organise and even legitimise genocide; a needlessly adulterous relationship; a wealthy royalist shoplifting. The list is endless; so too is the tragedy. At the end of one such indiscretion, the perpetrator often asks himself: what pushed me into doing it? The answer is never of course straightforward, as many simple and innocent British families are finding out to their eternal shame. Lucky indeed is the man who never gets to ask himself that painful question.

Source: The Nation, 14^th August 2011.

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BBC Cleared Over Starkey's Race Remarks
Ofcom will take no action over historian's offensive comments on during UK riots

THE BBC has been cleared by Ofcom over the controversial race remarks made by historian, David Starkey, during an appearance on Newsnight.

The media regulator, which is said to have received more than 100 complaints from members of the public, said the historian's offensive comments about the recent UK riots had sufficiently been challenged by Newsnight's presenter, Emily Maitlis.

"This was a serious and measured discussion within a programme with a well-established nature and format and with reputation for dealing with challenging subjects. The effect of his comments was limited by the presenter's moderation of the item and his comments were countered by the views of other contributors," an Ofcom spokesperson told the Independent.

In an appearance on the show following the August riots that rocked the country, Starkey lamented about cultural changes and claimed "the problem is that the whites have become black".

He said: “The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.”

To further outrage, the historian went on to say: “Listen to David Lammy (MP), an archetypical successful black man,” he said. “If you turned the screen off so you were listening to him on radio you’d think he was white.”

Fellow guest on the show, writer and education adviser Dreda Say Mitchell, wasted no time in voicing her outrage.

She said to Starkey: “You said David Lammy when you heard him sounded white and what you meant by that is that white people equals respectable.”

She added: "You keep talking about black culture. Black communities are not homogenous. So there are black cultures. Lots of different black cultures. What we need to be doing is ... thinking about ourselves not as individual communities ... as one community. We need to stop talking about them and us."

In an exclusive interview with The Voice show after the BBC 2 show aired, Starkey justified his comments, saying:

“I used the Lammy example to emphasise that I was speaking about culture and not skin colour. What I was saying is that Lammy had an Oxford education and talked as though he had. I regard myself as a civilized man. But it’s not about skin colour, it’s about culture. It’s basically how people are brought up, reared, educated and socialised, the life opportunities they make for themselves, and the life opportunities that are available to them.”

He also hit black at widespread claims that he was a racist. He said:

“I’m absolutely not, in anyway possible, racist. I think racists are demented. I was born crippled, with two left feet and had to wear surgical boats until I was in my early teens. I turned out to be gay and I had to wear spectacles from the age of nine."

In an earlier statement, the BBC said that while it understood that some people may have found Starkey's comments offensive, "he was robustly challenged by presenter Emily Maitlis and the other contributors who took issue with his comments".

Source: The Voice, 4^th October 2011.