The riots of 2011

With Britain feeling the Olympic wind under her wings, there is currently little appetite to remember the darker sides of last years. One of the low points of public life has been the riots in London and other British cities in 2011. The BBC has now released a documentary on the riots which presents the view of those who took part. The words are spoken by actors but the content originates in interviews that were conducted as part of research commissioned by The Guardian and the LSE. 

The documentary is revealing, if only in its conclusion that there was indeed no single cause why the riots happened. This corroborates social research which points to some evidence that collective action is rarely driven by singular motifs that apply to all participants. In fact, just as with so many other social action, individuals bring their own reasons and motivations to the event. 

There is however a clear reason why the riots spread the way they did. After a demonstration and an initial wave of battles with the police in Tottenham, the riots then spread and lasted full four days and nights. This was unprecedented and the documentary throws some light on why they lasted so long. Law enforcement was mainly absent and the police were standing back rather than confidently tackling the widespread violence. We will have to wait for the next episode of the BBC documentary to hear the police side of the story, but one thing appears to be clear already: as one of the young people said, most rioters looted 'because they can'.

The riots - almost one year on

The fall out from last year’s riots is still being felt in some areas in the UK. There have also been some interesting studies that examined the causes of the unrest, most notably The Guardian’s Reading the Riots. Although some of the explanations rioters gave for their behaviour sound ‘rehearsed’, there can be little doubt that there are some genuine grievances in parts of the population about socio-economic inequalities and policing practices. 

As recent data suggests black young people are 30 times more likely to be stopped and searched for police than their white fellow citizens. This represents a dramatic increase of about 300% in only two years (the comparable figure for 2009 in London is: black people were 10 times more likely to be stopped than white people). 

The practice of stop and search is also questionable in terms of its overall effect on knife crime for which it was re-designed after a spate of fatal stabbings in London. Only 0.5% of all searches led to the prosecution of persons for the possession of a dangerous weapon. So some grievances in the black community about policing seem to be genuinely justified. 

One interesting aspect of the available data however raises questions about any simplistic link between deprivation and rioting behaviour. The data suggests that around 46 percent of rioters were black, 42% were white and only about 7 percent were described as Asian. Whilst all current research indicates a strong link between poverty, lack of opportunities or employment and rioting, the ethnic composition hints at an additional underlying factor, such as the capacity for social control in families and communities. 

We know from other research in the UK that black teenagers are more likely to grow up in single mother households than any other ethnic group. This may significantly reduce their access to sufficient social and economic resources to learn, develop skills and take up employment opportunities. 

This is not to say that single mother households cannot serve as loving and caring environments which foster responsible social behaviour. Yet it may mean that social control is more likely to be exerted within functioning families where parenting tasks can be shared between several family members. Hence tackling the absence of fathers for many of our black teenagers must be a priority for the whole of society.

crisis of representative democracy?

This summer the UK political system was shaken by two main events: the trials of politicians who had claimed expenses illegally and the demonstrations against tuition fees. Many people would add another event, the recent riots in some cities, but I firmly believe this is a law and order issue that the political class will address by adequate policing.

Why did the expenses scandal and the demonstrations on tuition fees stand out for me? Mainly because of the fundamental shifts in the way politics is done in this country, for which they are symptoms. The expenses scandal did not just reveal the contempt in which much of the population held politicians of all political colour, it also coincided with a crisis of trust between the represented and those representing them.

The demonstrations on tuition fees was often hailed as another 'political awakening' of young people. I believe it is nothing of this sort. Rather it reflected an unwillingness to accept that politicians could and should take decisions for the people in this country that do not accord with what they had previously promised to do. In other words, the tuition fees saga ruptured the belief that there is a direct link between people's vote in the general election and the agenda politician subsequently enact. This may be a curious aspect of the British political system only, given that Continental politics is often done with compromise between political parties due to the lack of clear parliamentary majorities. However, this rupture was significant since it also coincided with the ascendancy of new media and new technology.

What does this all mean? The decline of trust and the rupture between an (imagined) link between electoral promise and parliamentary work results above all in one thing: a crisis of representation.

This is rarely commented on in the public but I believe it is a more significant development than temporary eruptions of violence on the streets of London or Manchester.

The reason is that it lays bare the ambiguity at the heart of modern politics: that the people's will can somehow consistently be represented by politicians in parliament. Two developments have considerably undermined this useful fiction. First, the rise of modern technology which makes public the type of knowledge that has previously been only accessible to politicians, specialists, or academics. Second, the rise of the call for self-determination, on a personal and community level. Both trends chip away at the notion that a small number of politicians can and should take decisions for a large number of constituents.

The argument in favour of representative democracy has always been that direct democracy is neither practical nor reasonable. Impracticable because modern politics requires fast decision making in a complex world. Unreasonable because party politicians could channel the plethora of ideas into a competition of best political strategies which would play out fairly in the arena of parliamentary chamber.

The gravest challenge to these useful fictions is the recognition by the population that there is no reason why individuals and communities should not take the decisions themselves, that have so far been taken by politicians. Apart from international security, there is little that necessarily requires people to ask a small number of party political representatives to make decisions about their lives. The foundations of representative democracy were always shaky, now they are coming under sustained attack from two sides: politicians who, through behaving criminally, severe the trust between their constituents and themselves, and, on the other hand, a growing awareness that politicians are actually redundant in the bigger scheme of things as new forms of social communication emerge.

Over the next decade or two, politicians will be battling for their position and role in society. The outcome is not certain at all.