Reading the Riots.

If there were any more apt indication as to the sheer stupidity of England in 2011 it's the idea that the August Riots were caused by the police.

This was the result in December 2011 after month of painstaking "research". The Guardian commissioned a report in conjunction with the LSE into the riots suggesting the cause was the rioters were not satisfied with the police service. According to the same newspaper 73% of those who were convicted for rioting had a previous criminal record.

So the "cause" of the riots is not straightforward criminality but the police attempting to enforce law and order. As one opined, “The police is the biggest gang out there.”

Even worse is Gary Younge's muddle headed rationalisation for the brutal, primitive and doltish resentments that the rioters used as a retrospective pretext for their crimes. Writing in The Guardian, Younge attempted to fit the riots in with a form of strangulated "protest" which was still "political".

"Given the spontaneous, geographically diverse and inchoate nature of these disturbances, there was never a credible single cause. Even if there had been, there were few among the rioters who would have been in a position to articulate those grievances"

That was because large numbers were semi literate idiots, a product of a dysfunctional education system, and clear they were not going to "articulate" their grievances any more than they were prepared to do a job that more educated Eastern Europeans were prepared to do.

Partly, this was the fault of "the system". A proportion of the rioters had further education but it was largely useless in the face of better motivated and educated Poles who did not lose their jobs in the wake of the economic crisis. But the left shied away from the question of mass immigration.

The riots were not a "protest" any more than the Nazis burning down synagogues in the 1930s were a "protest". If violence against property and people can be rationalised by merely taking at face value what rioters say and fetishise "alienation" then the same indulgence could be given to those in the EDL or BNP.

Younge continued to impose an ideological frame over the events by pretending it was the spontaneous outgrowth of a true 'cry of despair' as none of the elites cared about their grievances. "The journey from the margins to the mainstream is a perilous one, which few make intact without losing their voice".

The rioters never had a "voice" in the first place as this was not a "protest" but a set of vicious criminal actions expressing openly a contempt for law dressed up in the language of protest as a means for the rioters to feel justified in their decision to take what they already had decided they had a right to loot from the shops.

True, the violence was not primarily driven by gangs but the aesthetics and supposed "glamour" about taking on the police and fighting "da system" promoted by a retarded sub literate pseudo "culture" of gangsta rap and gaining "respect" through violence as a necessity for "survival" in the urban jungle.

In many ways Gangsta sub culture was the moral equivalent of neo-Nazi rock music. Except because it is black, the trend was pandered to as an authentic expression of streetwise youths by guilt ridden whites and those who saw it as "cool" rather than banal, bleak and largely barbaric in tone, language, meaning and expression.

These trends had been encouraged and patronised by youth and "community leaders" with an interest in being their spokesmen and who, naturally demanded "more resources" for youth clubs to prevent riots, no less than the middle class entrepreneurs who made money out of these fads and fashions.

Naturally, that was not up for discussion. Instead, scorn was poured on the Cameron government for even suggesting it was pure criminality, as if the looting, burning and mob violence was not just criminality and any leader would not make a show of denouncing the criminality of crime.

Obviously the society that had created it was dysfunctional but attempts to downplay the criminality in favour of seeing it as mere reflex action to an oppressive society were equally as mendacious.

"The government's narrative may have been ridiculous, but in the absence of a counter-narrative, many believed it plausible. The impression of unclaimed chaos and the shots of burning cars, devastated shopkeepers and hooded youth lent credibility to claims that this was nothing more than young hooligans running amok"

The reality of shopkeepers having their shops looted and livelihoods affected was not part of a "narrative". It takes a special form of pseudo intellectual to posit a post modern "it's all a narrative" when the reality is plain for all to see and reveal a new narrative in which what the rioters themselves say about why they did-"police brutality"it is accepted.

Along with the other idiot leftist canard, that economic injustice causes riots. In which case, a large number of those in Middle England would be rioting now should they feel that the economic crisis since 2008 was wholly the fault of the bankers and the state

"Poverty was clearly a factor. Ministry of Justice figures revealed almost two‑thirds (64%) of the young rioters lived in the poorest areas and 42% relied on free school meals. "There is nothing so dangerous as a man who has nothing to lose," wrote James Baldwin. "You do not need 10 such men. Only one will do." With youth unemployment rising to 21.9%, Britain is producing thousands".

No, it's poverty of ambition and not literal poverty, a sense that nothing means anything anyway other than consumerism and so, when the chance availed itself, there was no point not looting and stealing, not least if the bankers and people at the top are no different. This is still a point about moral collapse which Younge ignores he writes,

The general assumption, among those who believed political causes both existed and mattered, was that the driving force for discontent was economic. Everyone from the UN to Nick Clegg had predicted social unrest if the austerity measures were pushed in time of recession. Indeed, the government's high-handed moral pronouncements were particularly hard to take given the recent behaviour of our political and financial elites: a corrupt political class embroiled in phone hacking and expense scandals, and a disdainful financial sector where failure brought huge bonuses.

The immorality of the underclass is no different to the immorality of the elites but the rioters were merely reacting to circumstances the elites had caused and, so, the moral calculus becomes one where those reacting to those circumstances by using violence are somehow better than the violence and greed of those at the top:riots and looting are a form of "protest" after all.

This creed was a cliched form of 1960s radicalism in North America which flatly contradicted the claim he was not "romanticising the riots ". After all Younge threw in quotes by Martin Luther King-"A riot is the language of the unheard.- and James Baldwin, the Afrocentric black power fascist and quoting him was irrelevant unless trying to glamorise brutal and primitive impulses.

The cause most often cited for the riots was poverty (86%), but unemployment (79%) and inequality (70%) featured prominently too. Few guessed, though, that this tinder in the box was lit at least as much by the long arm of the law as the invisible hand of the market".

These statistics were largely meaningless. The poverty is all relative compared to the Eastern Europeans who were quite willing to work hard in awful jobs they were overqualified for. So either immigration had to be to blame or else the training system and welfare dependency that bred this mentality of entitlement, as the jobs were there prior to the economic crisis.

Younge continued to belt out the statistics in the report as though pure facts.

"Almost three-quarters of interviewees said they had been stopped and searched by the police in the last year; 85% said "policing" was an important or very important cause of the riots. Just 7% believed the police do a good job in their area".

This ignores the fact that most arrested already had a criminal record. Perhaps they are now "service users" of the police, with a consumer right to complain if policing is not to their satisfaction. Naturally, the fact the police failed to use the necessary force on the lawless mob to protect people and property incurred the further contempt of the law abiding and lawless alike.

What the August Riots did do was to bring into focus an increasingly dysfunctional society teetering on the brink of descending into a weird surreal dystopia. The riots frightened those who could no longer explain it in accordance with the old paradigms of "race riot" as in the 1980s or that it even had a motive that could be understood and dealt with.

It's possible to go beyond both the trite line that all the rioters were mindless criminals and that their actions were merely a reflex to poverty or "police brutality". Both explanations are fundamentally stupid and are ways of evading asking deeper questions about what is wrong with English society.

The right doesn't want to admit that consumer capitalism and greed was a factor nor the left that it was neither poverty nor inequality nor "the police".

The riots were a product the of nihilism created by the entitlement mentality bred by welfare dependency, debt fuelled something for nothing consumerism, a defective training and education system, the police obsessed with "community policing" and a a gansta rap aesthetic and boredom.

The Meaninglessness of the English Riots was their Cause.

Clifford Stoot and Stephen Reicher have offered one more attempt to frame the events of 6-1o August 2011.

Yet another piece of rationalisation of the riots for those who want to lead some 'social response' to the riots which is as flawed as the authoritarian repression model of dealing with the spectre of disorder. Face facts: the riots are an inherent result of addictive compulsive disorders.

There is no morality to the riots any more than morality plays much of a part in decision making across British society, be it the greedy bankers, lying spinning politicians and corporate admen and PR spivs who sell the people want they are conditioned to believe really want, whether the X Factor, celebrities, etc.

Riots generally occur when groups have a sense of illegitimacy about how they are treated by others and where they see collective confrontation as the only means of redressing the situation.

Indeed, by coming together in the crowd, people become empowered and can invert normal social relations. EP Thompson, the pre-eminent historian of crowds, argued that in a world where the powerless are generally invisible, the riot is a form of "collective bargaining".

At the very least ( my italics ) the rioters' problems have become a problem for the powerful and hence the powerful have been forced to take note of issues they had previously ignored.

Where is the evidence that the rioters and looters had specific demands and were trying to increase pressure upon the government to deal with their wants and needs ? Have they conducted a survey of the looters and how they regarded their role in the violence ?

This is a convenient ideological rationalisation of the kind that is designed to console those who need to find a meaning that satisfies their need for meaning and to give a voice to the voiceless to advance their own careers and interests.

Does any of this matter? Well, yes it does. Because our understanding of the nature of crowd action has fundamental implications for how we respond to them.

Obviously. But this response does not matter. It's another interpretation based on an obsolete belief that there are necessarily always rational interpretations of mob behaviour when the irrationality of the mob is generated by pathologies that still are created by a consumer society of entitlement.

Let's face facts: there were riots outside Ikea in Wembley over being first to get into the store to take advantage of the sales offers. Advertising and media ramps up desire for consumer goods as the be all and end all of human existence.

Under New Labour's regime of credit fuelled debt bingeing and easy money, there was cash for the goodies that the rioters used ( laptops, blackberry Iphones etc etc ). Then that dried up and jobs became scarce due to the colossal scale of migration of better educated and hard working Catholic Poles

Migration has not once entered the reckoning of the liberal left as regards the riots, despite them invoking 'alienation'. and unemployment. The figures that show migrants taking the majority of created jobs in the British economy has not been discussed in The Guardian which continually lauded it for the past decade.

If, like Cameron, you see riots as an irrational and pathological phenomenon, then the response is first to repress (why reason with those who have no reason?) and second to look for problems inherent within the communities from which the rioters are drawn.

Thus we see the government pledging a series of new repressive police powers such as curfews (which the police themselves don't want) and looking to uncover the source of moral sickness among disaffected youth.

So this sort of consumerist rioting is not a moral sickness any more than pathologically greedy bankers ? Really ? Perhaps there should be no judgementalism or moralism about the bankers actions then. They are alienated from themselves and others no less than rioters.

If, however, you see the actions as a meaningful response to a shared sense of illegitimacy and lack of alternatives then you need to address the way in which this has arisen. That is, you need to look at the experience of relations between rioting communities and those with power, authority and influence in our society.

The lack of meaning in the lives of those who rioted and were given a sense of identity through acting violently to create a sense of meaning and "empowerment" does not mean the riots were a 'meaningful response'. The meaninglessness of it is as meaningless as an absurd and fundamentally unproductive consumer money economy of which it was a symtom.

The riots had causes but the rioters themselves had no cause and the primary spring was 'because they could' due to social media networking, boredom with life, no direction or higher goal to which to put their aggressive energies and partly identification with a gansta rap subculture that glamourises violence as the way to survive.

Once law and order broke down due to the police being afraid they would alienate "the community", the riots spread with a seemingly unstoppable momentum into sheer criminality and looting. That does not make them 'mindless' or the causes of the riots being down to only criminality but it helps the government to portray it as such.

Beat the Gangs at their Own Game-Legalise All Drugs.

"Together we can beat the gangs" is the view of Iain Duncan Smith who pops up in The Guardian today. He explains,

'Even without the riots this is a phenomenon we should be deeply concerned about. Gangs have created no-go areas and made impossible the very things that could help deprived neighbourhoods to rejuvenate, such as community action and business development. Gangs are both a product of social breakdown and a driver of it'

Was it, though, about criminal gangs only ?

The English riots probably had multiple long term causes and a set of short term triggers. Certain amateurish gangs might have been attracted to using Mark Duggan's death to try and loot and sell the goods elsewhere and make a quick buck. A short cut to pleasure as a consumer right.

More likely, some would-be gang types and those who tap into a subculture of gangsta rap and nihilistic hatred led the way. Through the flashmob mentality spread via Facebook and Blackberry many who would not ordinarily start a riot were encouraged to go out on the rampage by these exemplars of fast track violent consumerism.

In which case, what IDS proposes to crackdown on gangs is a straightfoward attempt to prevent gangs dominating certain patches of London, something Saci Lloyd even mentioned today was a factor that was intimidating youths in certain parts of this city.

Most likely by cracking down on gangs, it could be possible in the longer term to stem gang culture. Blaming cuts only for the riots is obviously short sighted and naive. Poverty played a part in generating the mafia in Sicily. But few would think this was only a result of poverty and not of a certain culture.

But this is England. Not Italy.

So stamping out gangs in London has to go together with something that kneejerk reaction politicians seeking re-election through exploiting populist sentiment have been seldom prepared to do-give up on the futile "war on drugs" and legalise them all. The evils and expense of prohibition are far greater than the evils of drug taking.

This would save a lot of money and take away the main source of income for gangs. If those in the subculture choose to value shooting up heroin, even if they end up dying, which is hardly a loss for society anyway, that is clearly far better than enriching and thus ennobling gang culture through the explicit wealth shown by their leaders.

There is an absurdity of trying to protect youths against themselves, as regards hard drugs, the high price of which, due to their scarcity through the 'war on drugs', results in so much crime against others in 'the community'. This would be far offset by their ability to indulge legally either to the point of death or else take the choice of rehab options cheaper by far than policing the gang entrepreneurs who supply the market.

Given that the consumer society that defines Britain makes a fetish of consumer choice, it is hardly surprising that some who don't have the money to buy the consumer goods that alone define their banal and moronic lives ( the poor ) or the intelligence to rise above it ( both rich and poor ) turn to drugs.

This demand creates huge profits for those utterly fanatical free marketeers willing to supply the goods that are wanted. Which creates gangs and, by extension gang culture: not least because consumer capitalism needs that extra kick of transgression to keep certain bored individuals consuming.

The entire edifice of pop music and telly, trashy pop pap media and the exploitation of the sex urge through it that aims at fixating youths on disposable transient idols, the Radio 1 geared up 'prolefeed' and the X Factor is all part of an economy based on ramping up expectations, excitement and phoney ecstatic consumerist clamouring.

It's obvious that those who 'can't get no satisfaction' through the existing profitable channels for release from the tedium of a consumer society ,in which any long term comittments to God, religion, nation, country, idealistic creed etc, for good or ill does not matter any more will seek outlets.

Craving consumers, whose only aim in life is to consume and gain the job that will afford enough cash to allow the consumption power that will yield branded sportwear, will either turn to even greater reliance Westfield style consumerism or, maybe, drugs. Or looting when the credit fuelled debt binge ended.

Existing interpretations of the riots are mostly obsolete. Certain leftists and liberals look truly pathetic in stating that only inequality and poverty caused these riots or even cuts to youth services. That benefits those in the public sector who want to secure their economic futures in parasitical money economy.

Those on the right, the 'law and order' reactionaries also fail miserably in pretending that the radical free market they continually advocate as a panacea for all ills, apart from the burgeoning nightwatchman state of CCTV cameras and police power, can arrest trends such as drug taking inherent in the pathological nature of consumer society.

Telling it as it is on "Gangsta" Subculture and the English Riots.

Whilst the "gangsta" subculture is not the only reason for the English riots, it is a major factor in glamourising violence and looting, of taking on 'the cops'. Set against the background of an increasingly deracinated and meaningless consumer society, it is hardly surprising the subculture appeals.

As Tony Sewell wrote in the Daily Mail ( August 15 2011 )

....despite the attempts of some apologists to dress up the looting as a political act against an oppressive Tory establishment, the fact is that the ethos of materialism — or ‘bling’ to use the street term — that pervades urban black youth played a major part in the widespread criminality perpetrated by rioters of all races.

That is why the looters targeted specific stores that are cherished in this culture, such as those selling mobile phones, trainers, sports clothes or widescreen TVs. Let’s face it, there were no reports of the vandals looting bookshops or public libraries.

What motivated the troublemakers was not genuine poverty but rather a raw acquisitiveness that is fuelled by so much in this black-led youth culture, from the imagery in rap videos to the lyrics of hip-hop music. The twin central themes of this world are sex and material possessions.

It is a milieu that glories in loose women and fast cars, in macho dominance and easy wealth. Concepts of restraint, hard work and personal responsibility are absent. Respect is something to be demanded rather than earned.

So much of the music and the video output is close to pornographic, with women degradingly treated as little more than sex objects. In this world, the highest ideal to which a man can aspire is to be a philandering, gun-wielding gang leader.

Where I believe Dr Starkey is right is that it is now just as likely to be a white or Asian teenager posing on the internet in baggy designer clothes and dripping in gold chains, either waving a weapon of some kind or pointing their fingers at the camera in a grotesque parody of a shooting.

Tragically, this has become the acme of ‘cool’ for a generation of youngsters, regardless of the colour of their skin.

Even the boy whose Spanish-born mother may be evicted from her council house after his arrest for looting last week was photographed in an oversized rapper-style cap and T-shirt with a skull motif.

A key aspect of ‘gangsta’ culture — one that we saw writ large on the streets last week — is an utter disregard for the police and the rule of law. You only have to consider that one of the most controversial rap songs of the past two decades was called Cop Killer to understand the danger posed by these influences.