Britain’s recent woes could become Ireland’s catastrophe

WHO ever said nothing ever happens in August? The riots in Britain have caused bewilderment and outrage in equal measure. The image of London has been severely damaged. But before the media turns to its next big thing, there are a few points worth bearing in mind about what we have seen on our TV screens.

1. This is nothing new

The English have been periodically rioting since at least the 14th century and the Peasants’ Revolt. The last mass outbreak of riots in Britain was far, far worse. Back in 1981, with monetarist austerity really biting, Mrs Thatcher had to contend with a much more serious situation. What’s more, she had the support of only a minority of her cabinet colleagues and her stock with the British public at large was far lower than David Cameron’s is today. And the riots then were more sustained. They went on for months, not days. Contrary to her reputation, her answer was a massive dose of public spending, particularly in Liverpool. The impressive Albert Docks development is the legacy. Meanwhile, the nearby streets of Toxteth are scarcely any less mean than they were 30 years ago.

2. Race has precious little to do with it

Although it was the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, a young black man, in Tottenham that sparked the upheaval, that does not explain how it spread far beyond North London to areas with very small black populations. What started as a peaceful enough protest by the Duggan family and residents of the notorious Broadwater Farm estate spiralled into mass looting. So now we are supposed to believe that the stealing some expensive trainers or a blingy watch is a perfectly understandable grief reaction. But the fact is, there was no community uprising in Tottenham or anywhere else — just small groups of individuals and rival gangs with no cause to fight for.

3. The black community in Britain has moved on

Broadwater Farm got its reputation back in 1985. Rioters had murdered a police constable, Keith Blakelock, and tried to behead him. The subsequent MP for the area and then leader of the local council, Bernie Grant, went on the media saying that locals believed the police “got a bloody good hiding”. He implied that this was his view too. For good measure, he tried to somehow pin the blame on the legacy of slavery. The MP for Tottenham today, David Lammy, also black, is much more polished. He made sure to condemn the violence while subtly criticising the police. Call it the difference between Sinn Féin and the SDLP. Lammy is a man to watch. Britain’s first black prime minister? Possibly.

4. There are no easy explanations

Despite claims that the rioters are “Thatcher’s grandchildren”, Britain is not the US-style economy it briefly was. Public spending in real terms has never been as high as in the last five years. Anyone who still thinks Britain is a low-tax economy is living in the past. Yes, a long process of de-industrialisation, with the loss of manual jobs, has impacted heavily on certain geographical parts of Britain. But the violence we saw in recent days is not a result of the fact that these communities were hit hard by market forces. Instead, whole areas are artificially propped up by extraordinary levels of public intervention and welfare-state spending.

5. Comparing looters with bankers is bogus

To conflate those bankers who behaved badly but not illegally with looters is, in effect, to encourage either the impunity of the latter or the punishment of the former, who have broken no law. The bankers’ main fault was to have lent too much. At the time, everyone thought it was a jolly good thing and got themselves into debts they never had any hope of repaying. But, given a choice, most of us would rather live through a recession than have their house burned down by a mob. The looters have enough illegitimate sense of grievance without the intelligentsia providing them with further moral justification.

6. Shutting up shop was not the answer

Over the course of four days, the police were advising shops, restaurants and businesses to shut up, board up, and send home their staff. In effect, they were calling on decent society to go into hiding. The idea seems to have been that if you evacuate the streets of shoppers and socialisers, then maybe the rioters will, for want of an audience, do the right thing and go home. Actually, what you do is empower the rioters with their non-existent agenda. It is effectively an invitation. That institutional cowardice in response to historically quite minor disturbances helped sustained the rioting and allowed it to spread. The police warning that trouble was coming — by implication making clear that they could not protect life and property — may well have put the idea of a little looting in some people’s heads.

7. The police have a lot to answer for

Back in 1981 the police acted as the frontline of a state at war with sections of its own population, determined to hold the line at all costs in an all-out battle for control. By contrast, last week the police more often looked as if they did not even know where the line might be and were fearful of crossing it.

THE policing authorities have suffered a loss of nerve and an identity crisis, no longer sure whether they are supposed to be a “force” or, in the new language, a “service”. They have found it is not that easy to turn from their new focus on psycho-babble, PR and management-speak to acting as an old-fashioned body of armed men upholding public order. The gardaí and PSNI top brass are flown over to Bramshill, the British police training college, but what they have to learn there is not entirely clear.

8. Britain is not what it used to be

The modern British state — whether some people in Ireland like it or not, and through some ferocious tactics — managed to contain a war in the North for 25 years. It also fought and won nothing less than a civil war against Arthur Scargill, 100,000 striking miners and their supporters. It might have been upbraided afterwards in the Scarman and Macpherson report,s but it put down full-scale community unrest in the English inner cities in the early 1980s. Yet nowadays the authorities — police and politicians alike — appear lost when faced with a bit of sporadic thieving and arson by comparative handfuls of rebels without a cause.

“The fightback starts here!” David Cameron announced in Westminster last week. Listening to his rhetoric, anybody might have imagined that the mighty British state, with its thousands of well-armed riot police, was somehow the brave underdog fighting a war of liberation. The only thing that seems to unite the authorities is contempt for those communities not drunk on public spending which dared to fill the void left by modern policing. There will be small groups on this island which will take away from last week the lesson that the British state has given up defending itself. Britain’s difficulty could become Ireland’s catastrophe.