What is behind the outbreak of mass criminality on London's streets? Don't blame immigration or race. Many of the victims were immigrant shopkeepers:
Many of the independent Turkish and Kurdish grocery shops, takeaways and hairdressers in the street do not have shutters or security guards. So closing early and going home just isn't an option. Workers, friends and relatives stood on guard — some with baseball bats — outside the businesses yesterday evening after word spread at about 4pm that a loot was being planned.
Don't blame racism:
As David Lammy, Tottenham’s MP, has said, these are no race riots. The Eighties uprisings at Broadwater Farm, as in Toxteth and Brixton, were products, in part, of a poisonous racism absent in today’s Tottenham, where the Chinese grocery, the Turkish store and the African hairdresser’s sit side by side.
I think it's clear that a great deal of this is pure criminality unleashed by an insufficiently tough police reaction to the initial incident that sparked the rioting. I remember the dynamic in my DC neighborhood when I watched it burn in 1990. A soft initial police response gave permission for dozens of sheer thugs to come and loot and burn the neighborhood from elsewhere. Don't believe me? Here's a resident unafraid to tell the truth. Here's a video from a resident watching Clapham Junction being looted:
And the use of social media and nifty little bikes reveals the criminal opportunism here. But even Mary Riddell in the Telegraph sees the background of austerity, accelerating social inequality and the bleakness of the economic future as part of the context:
It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.
All those factors are again in play. In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then. Last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30 per cent to £333.5 billion.
Europe’s leaders, our own Prime Minister and Chancellor included, were parked on sun-loungers as London burned. Although the epicentre of the immediate economic crisis is the eurozone, successive British governments have colluded in incubating the poverty, the inequality and the inhumanity now exacerbated by financial turmoil.
Britain’s lack of growth is not an economic debating point or a stick with which to beat George Osborne, any more than our deskilled, demotivated, under-educated non-workforce is simply a blot on the national balance sheet. Watch the juvenile wrecking crews on the city streets and weep for all our futures. The “lost generation” is mustering for war.
(Photo by Wenn.com via the Daily Mail.)
The Dish 