RIOTS AND THE CRISIS OF NEOLIBERALISM

John Lea

(version 4 - 12th October 2011)

The riots which swept over many English cities in August were certainly the worst in recent decades – in terms of extent and damage to property – but they were by no means the first. Indeed they have occurred regularly at the beginning of each decade since the 1980s. London, Liverpool and Birmingham in 1981 (and again in 1985), in several decaying industrial cities in North East England in 1991, in Bradford and other towns in Yorkshire in 2001 and now across a wide swathe of urban England a few weeks ago.

A comparison between the latest riots and those of the decades since 1981 seem an obvious first step in finding out what has happened and why.  Even a superficial comparison illustrates, in my opinion, the progressive inability of British governments, increasingly influenced by doctrinaire neoliberalism, to devise policies presenting any semblance of a solution.

saving citizenship

It is instructive to begin with the Brixton riots of April 1981 in which for three days young black men in the Brixton area of South London battled police on the streets. There was, as more recently, the familiar initial response by government and media of 'mindless criminality'. This is understandable: citizens and police officers were hurt, property was looted though to a much lesser extent than in August 2011. But it is important to note that the driving force of these events was the deteriorating relations between young black men and the police. Once the violence had died down the necessity of a judge-led public inquiry, was generally accepted. The fact that this occurred during the government of Margaret Thatcher presiding over rising unemployment and economic decline is perhaps surprising as is the fact that a well known liberal judge, Lord Scarman, was appointed to conduct the inquiry

Reading Scarman after the recent riots is to return to another world. The old liberal certainties were, Thatcherism notwithstanding, still in place for a section of the British ruling elite. Scarman delivered the expected remarks about criminality and disorder, recommended increases to police powers and much else that is familiar. But here the similarity ends. There are two important features of Scarman which contrast with subsequent riots, including the recent ones.

Firstly, Scarman took the rioters seriously. He understood the importance of the massive police stop and search operation (Swamp 81) as a precipiting factor and characterised the riots as an “outburst of anger and resentment… against the police.” In other words while not condoning the activities of the rioters he conceded a strong element of rationality to their actions. In no way did he characterise the community from which the rioters came as dysfunctional or pathological. On the contrary, he praised the black community in Brixton as possessing. "a wealth of voluntary effort and goodwill." So what Scarman identified was a normal community with a legitimate grievance. Though in no way did he condone rioting as a form of ‘collective bargaining’ he certainly saw it as a signal that something needed to be done. 

Secondly, an important part of the failure leading to the riots therefore lay on the side of society and its institutions rather than the rioters. The riots exposed a flaw in a society that had failed the populations from which the rioters came. What needed to be done was to take steps to secure the inclusion of young blacks into what he (Scarman) still saw as the welfare state consensus around the idea of citizenship as not cultural homogeniety but participation in a common set of rights - to employment, welfare, education, housing etc which defined social citizenship. Due largely to racial discrimination young black people had become ‘excluded’ from what the majority enjoyed and therefore steps needed to be taken to secure ‘ social inclusion’. He warned, however, that "in order to secure social stability there will be a long term need to provide useful, gainful employment and suitable educational, recreational and leisure opportunities for young people, especially in the inner city."

Scarman made two sets of recommendations which seem, from the standpoint of the current political atmosphere, extremely radical. He advocated state-led initiatives designed to fulfil the "long term need to provide useful, gainful employment and suitable educational, recreational and leisure opportunities for young people, especially in the inner city." In other words there was nothing wrong with the community but it could not provide these things on its own as it lacked the access to resources and political weight. Secondly he understood the feeling of political marginality and powerless in the black community and the obvious step to remedy this was to increase community participation in the work of the key institution with which young blacks came into daily contact - the police. Scarman criticised the police, particularly in their relations with young black people. The term 'institutional racism' entered the political vocabulary. He called for increased police-community liaison and consultation recognising the need to give marginalised communities some sort of voice in the process of political negotiation and compromise even if only a local one. In fact Scarman can be read as trying to rescue and strengthen the strategy of multiculturalism as a way to integrate the existing black and Asian communities (see my longer article), a strategy that was already showing signs of collapse by the early 1980s

Many of Scarman's recommendations - such that certain types of stop and search by police officers be recorded - found their way into subsequent legislation like the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act. My object here is not to trace the effectiveness or otherwise of Scarman's recommendations but to note the standpoint from which they came and contrast it with that of the reaction to the riots of August 2011. Scarman also needs to be put in context. His report was criticised (rightly) by radicals for what he did not say - although he characterised much of the police action that led up to the riots as  institutional racism he failed to develop a clear account of its dynamics. His criticisms of the police use of stop and search can be characterised as half hearted.

But as Stuart Hall remarked at the time, Scarman's liberalism was already at loggerheads with the increasingly prominent hard line being taken by the Thatcher government on riots and crime in general. We should see Scarman therefore as a 'last gasp' of a liberal reformism in which riots were read as the sign that a particular community had become marginalised from the structure of social rights and had therefore been  failed by society and which signified the need for state-led investment in poor communities to provide worthwhile jobs and employment, quality education and leisure facilities as part of the contract of social citizenship as participation in shared welfare rights which had been celebrated up to that point as the hallmark of the British post-war settlement. Needless to say, unlike his recommendations on policing, Scarman's attempt to rescue that citizenship for the black community fell largely upon deaf ears.

community cohesion

Now 'fast forward' to the 2001 riots in Bradford and Oldham and other small Yorkshire textile manufacturing towns (we can skip over the 1990s riots because the dynamics were similar)as in Brixton there was an inevitable ethnic dimension. These Yorkshire towns were home to sizeable Asian communities formed from immigrant workers who had been drawn into the expanding textile industry during the 1960s. But now this was in decline and unemployment was, once again, a major factor. But rather than young Asians on the streets clashing with the police – there was in fact plenty of this – the riots were understood as a matter of the poor fighting among themselves, specifically whites fighting Asians. The police were seen as largely absent. Indeed they were accused of having regarded large ethnically mixed areas of high unemployment as virtual 'no-go' areas which they visited only occasionally and in force. The problem was, as far as the official view was concerned, how to stop these poor communities fighting each other.

A Scarman might have noted the differences but still looked for sources of resilience in the Asian and white communities, at their day to day prosaic 'getting along' rather than in any notion of inherent ethnic conflict and would have reiterated that the best way to sustain cohesive and tranquil communities was to recognise the "long term need to provide useful, gainful employment" to substitute for the decline in the Yorkshire textile industry under the impact of globalisation and competition from cheaper areas of the global south. But of course it was this very globalisation that now made such recommendations – in the form of state-led job creation so incongruous that no commentators dared suggest them. Or, rather the terminology of job creation was used but it had metamorphosed from Keynesianism to neoliberal free market inspired injunctions to poor communities to stop fighting each other and adopt the right attitudes and motivations so as to attract footloose global investment into these once thriving but now economic backwaters.

The riots were read no longer as a sign of social and economic marginalisation but rather a self-exclusion ultimately due to the pathology and lack of motivation of the poor white and Asian communities themselves. The reports which investigated the riots and which articulated this standpoint were conducted not by someone of the stature of Lord Scarman but by bureaucrats and lesser notables such as Herman Ousley and Ted Cantle

The old Keynesianism had been replaced by a political economy of 'community cohesion', 'capacity building' 'social capital acquisition'. This was now the time of New Labour and the governments of Tony Blair which, if they produced nothing else, excelled in the production of terminology. Communities had to take ultimate responsibility for themselves and make themselves attractive places for globally mobile investors. Citizenship meanwhile was no longer a set of rights but also, and with the decline of the welfare state predominantly, a set of responsibilities: to speak English, to stop obsessing about political and religious issues in Pakistan and to (this included the whites) get on with people of a different ethnicity so as to form a cohesive, compliant potential workforce. This was the overwhelming message of the inquiries – this time not led by judges but by government appointed bureaucrats. The need is "to understand the obstacles that prevent some ethnic minority communities from being more successful in local labour markets."  If they are successful, then they won't riot.

But even in this neoliberal reincarnation the state was still seen as an active player. It had a crucial role to play in the production of community cohesion. Funding was available for 'citizenship training' to work with young people from the riot areas to help them recover self-esteem (which cynics reinterpreted as a willingness to endure work at poverty wages) and to be proud of their localities. Anything but the actual provision of worthwhile employment itself. That had to come from global investors.

August 2001 - 'zero degree protest'

This brief historical survey serves to show how far things have worsened in Britain (or rather England – there have been no riots in Scotland or Wales). The initial precipitator of the August 2011 riots was the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a young black man in the North London district of Tottenham, an area that had a previous riot in 1985, again arising from a conflict between police and the black community. For young Tottenham blacks very little had changed in relations with police over the previous thirty years. Despite some heroic efforts in community relations by police, local government and voluntary agencies, young blacks are still massively disproportionately stopped and searched by police compared to whites.

But the riot spread like wildfire across London and northwards to Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. It was clear that it was no longer a conflict with the police but simply that the police got in the way of an orgy of 'shopping with violence' as the looting began to be characterised in the media. Young people across England who were not black and who had never heard of Tottenham or the shooting of Mark Duggan were throwing bricks through windows and walking off with trainers and flat-screen televisions while the rest of the population looked on in shocked disbelief and prime minister David Cameron dithered about whether to return from his Tuscan villa.

the rioters

The demographic characteristics of the rioters is unsurprising: young, mainly from deprived areas of cities, disproportionately unemployed and already involved in criminality of some sort - a fact which has been mangnified out of all proportion in a desperate search for an explanation. But explanation is precisely what is difficult in the conventional sense. There is a danger in trying to see the riots as related to some particular precipitating factor such as police treatment of young (especially blacks), unemployment, Coalition government cuts (most of which, as for example the abolition of the education maintenance allowance, have yet to make their effects felt). Certainly all of these features were present: there were rebellions against the police: for the constant harassment of youth in public space (where else do unemployed young people with no other accessible facilities have to go?) by stop and search, dispersal zones etc. Likewise, looting and ‘taking stuff’ (much more predominant than in previous riots) can be seen as getting back against the system ‘shopping with violence’ as the revolt of what Zigmunt Bauman has termed the ‘failed consumer’. Also there is the fact that the riots came after the prolonged media portrayal of arrogant bankers, corrupt MPs, police corruption, phone hacking, the collapse of any claim to moral leadership by the political and economic sections of the ruling class

But these factors fail to grasp the essential character of the riots. Slavoj Žižek wrote (in a recent article in London Review of Books) “This was zero-degree protest, a violent action demanding nothing... Opposition to the system can...only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. ” Echoing the same point, the rapper and poet Genesis Elijah lamented: "We used to riot for a cause / Now we riot just because."  Everything has been discredited, there are no political parties or social movements offering a meaningful alternative; nothing has worked, there is no solution, there is nothing to demand. Rage is the only option - 'shopping', looting, fighting the ''Feds'... The riots were waiting to happen.  That is why they are more serious than any that have gone before: they grasp the essence of capitalism now as destructive reproduction and they play out its destructiveness in the form of rioting “just because we can”

the reaction

The lack of focus is reflected in the government and media reaction. The ‘outbreak of mindless criminality’ denunciatory phase is a feature of reaction to all riots but it usually gives way to a calmer causal analysis signified in the appointment of a Scarman or other bureaucrat to analyse causes and produce a recipe of responses. But an important feature of the August 2011 riots has been the  prolonged denunciatory phase - This seems in fact to continue to be the government’s main reaction. It is echoed by Justice Secretary Ken Clarke’s speech in early september about the riot as an action of the ‘feral underclass’ pointing out that the majority of rioters had prior criminal convictions.  This unsurprising fact is then joined to talk about gangs and  dysfunctional families to  effectively  anaesthetise any attempt to refer to socio-economic deprivation or even, as in the 2001  riots, lack of community cohesion. Now it is gangs and 'troubled families' - even though in the case of gangs, data from those so far (late september 2011) processed by the courts shows no plausible 'gang' affiliation for 70-75 percent of rioters. Various local authorities have threatened to remove housing tenancies from families whose members participated in the riots though the legal basis for this is as yet unclear and the more repressive measures against 'gang culture' are being contemplated

 There has been a general reluctance on the part of government to move beyond various knee-jerk measures lashing out at rioters or their families and established the calmer atmosphere which would be imposed by an official public inquiry of a Scarman or even of the investigations that followed the Bradford riots. Under some pressure from Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband and inquiry has been finally established but it contrasts with previous inquiries in being a much lower status affair, chaired by none less than the head of the government employment agency JobCentrePlus! Also, though it does include among its tasks that of finding out why people rioted it is clear that the main focus is on victims and how communities came together to clean up - community resilience against the rioters. The vacuum has been taken up by Guardian, LSE, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Open Society Foundation in their 'Reading the Riots' project.

In general terms the government reaction contrasts considerably with the response to previous riots. There is neither any trace of a Scarman-style  'negotiated' settlement aimed at  socio-economic and political inclusion nor a 'restructuring' solution aimed at community cohesion but a an entirely repressive solution aimed at tough sentences, special measures to deal with gangs and dysfunctional families (allegedly productive of rioters) with the possibiity of an intensified workfare programme aimed at the more successful 'rehabilitation' of rioters (and anyone else) who lands in the hands of the criminal justice system

The overwhelmingly punitive nature of the response to the riots is itself reflective of a profound crisis of the neoliberal state. Neoliberalism aims to demolish the welfare state (through privatisation) and in particular to force the young, poor and unemployed, into the precarious, insecure, low wage labour market through various forms of workfare (making minimal benefits conditional on job-seeking activity). This can take a 'top-down' state-led form which characterised the New Labour strategy for community cohesion (and other aspects of urban renewal). But such state-led strategies are, under conditions of global recession and a political determination by the UK coalition government to reduce and privatise state activities still further, decreasingly viable. Therefore the government finds it difficult to acknowledge that the riots have any roots in deprivation or the global economic recession.  This would imply some sort of remedial social policy involving public investment to boost the demand for jobs. This would involve a serious compromise of the current orientation to massive cuts in public spending cuts extending even to the police and criminal justice system.

Thus the focus on dysfunctional families, gang-affiliation and repeat criminal offenders is coherent with the government's ‘Broken Britain’ theme in which presupposes that these more specific focused issues (exemplified in David Cameroon's notion of '120,000 trouble families' ) can more easily be managed by private and voluntary sector initiatives. Meanwhile what state spending remains will become more and more concentrated on the consolidation of the security state. The new government Prevent strategy will be widened to an orientation from the focus on individuals prone to terrorism, to those prone to ‘gang affiliation’ to those prone to ‘rioting’. That is to say, the precariat as a whole

The second reason why the riots cannot be grasped by government is a mirror image of the character of the riots as 'zero-degree protest' (to use Žižek's phrase) .  It is difficult for any government oriented to the preservation of the status quo, but particularly a neoliberal one, to respond in any coherent way - apart from repression - to a rage against the system as a whole. Though in no sense a political one (it has no political programme and takes the form of criminality, perhaps a resurgence of 'social crime'? puts no demands, has no alternative), it is part of the more generalised rebellion of the global surplus population (that is, surplus to the requirements of capitalist profitability) or precariat which we see in the Middle East, Africa, and various parts of Europe. These movements have widely differing politics and consciousness and class origins. In the UK the rioters has, as we have noted, no politics (as yet). They are not linked to the students who are more like the Spanish ‘indignados’ and the frustrated educated youth of Egypt and Tunisia but they are likely to be of changing composition as sections of the middle class drift down into the precariat under the impact of prolonged recession

But what all these movement have in common is  that global financialised capitalism cannot give them a future. Only a radical transformation of the system and redistribution of wealth and life chances will suffice