PURE CRIMINALITY is a convenient way to describe the violence and looting that spread so dramatically throughout London and other English cities this week. Parliamentary debate and saturation media coverage reinforce the narrative of individual culpability and moral torpor, as do reports of severe or lenient court treatment of offenders and reinforced security.
Yet this is an incomplete and lazy account of what happened. These events cannot be explained only by such a simple morality, however deplorable the actions in question. The wider social, political and international context that gives them meaning needs to be explored as well if the lessons and issues involved are to be properly learned and understood.
Why should the police shooting of a black man in Tottenham have triggered first a protest movement by his relatives and then a growing wave of larceny and arson in other neighbourhoods? Prime minister David Cameron criticised police for treating the fast-paced developments as a matter of public order rather than of criminality – and indeed their tactics were inadequate. But this does not explain why trouble erupted at this particular time and in this particular way. Not only police tactics but popular hostility towards the police in that part of London are central facts in the story.
French media are intrigued that the subsequent looting was directed against shops rather than being politically inspired like the riots there in 2005. The sheer power and symbolism of consumer society must be taken into account, especially at a time of increasing economic hardship and expenditure cuts affecting younger and poorer people more than most. These were not politically motivated actions, but the political context is certainly not irrelevant. As for morality, the commentator Peter Oborne argues plausibly that criminality in the streets cannot be dissociated from the decline in standards among the British governing class. The feral poor and the feral rich are well matched in a much more unequal society for which consumption displayed is the touchstone of status and power.
These events have attracted so much attention because they coincide with a huge international economic turbulence. Crowds and markets can behave irrationally when driven by austerity politics in a rapidly changing world. Rounds of public protest in Greece, Spain and Portugal reflect the euro zone’s uncertainty, but such movements are not confined to Europe. Israel and Chile have seen major public protests against high living costs and unfair cuts in spending and there have been similar movements in civil society throughout the Arab world.
Recent research shows that from the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s to anti-government demonstrations in Greece in 2010-11, austerity cuts have tended to go hand in hand with politically motivated violence and social instability. We have, thankfully, been spared this so far in Ireland – but for how long? Public policy must absorb the lessons involved.