The Riots. # 171. 06/08/2024.

Out of Many, One People

Welcome. Yes, I said last week’s blog was the last until mid-September, but someone asked me what I thought about the riots, and my views expanded into this blog, inevitably written from a distance and in mid-story.

The Riots.

These are race riots.

They are the most serios riots we have had since 1945 as they are explicitly directed against non-white groups – against asylum seekers and Muslims. By contrast, the 2011 riots, which began with a peaceful, and under-policed, protest at the killing of Mark Duggan, quickly became an opportunity for ethnically mixed, mainly young people to engage in looting and mayhem. In terms of damage to property the 2011 riots were considerably more serious than the present riots; in terms of threats to the life and limbs of minority ethnic people, and to long term damage to the fabric of British society, the present riots are far, far worse. When people of South Asian appearance in a car in Hull are pulled out of their car then we are seeing a level of public racial violence not seen for decades, and that many of us thought is now unthinkable. After I wrote a blog recently saying that I thought pragmatic Britishness would never see the sort of ideologically based  racism of German Nazism, a friend responded saying that he thought I was, in effect, too complacent. I still think I was right, but I am now less sure.

Levelling up has not happened.

It is no coincidence that several of the towns that have seen the worst rioting also no longer have football teams in the Premier League (Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Bolton, Hull). As a business, football has followed the money to the south (Bournemouth, Brentford). People in the south-east are not just better paid, they live longer and are healthier. 59% of their young people plan to go to university, as opposed to 33% in the north-east. Eight years ago the Brexit vote suggested a high level of alienation from the country’s direction of travel. The false coinage of Johnson’s ‘get it done’ brought no change. Now a Labour Party whose manifesto wrestled with overcoming minority ethnic alienation but said little about overcoming working-class alienation does not immediately seem to be offering any better hope.

Before the crash of 2008 an increasingly bigger national cake meant that as long as everyone was getting a bit more, it mattered less that some got a lot more. Now for those in stagnant or declining economic circumstances, the fact that a minority are getting an ever bigger slice, inevitably creates grievance and anger. Only a government committed to costly, long-term levelling up will reduce that alienation.

An internally hungry man is an angry man.

Bob Marley’s original line can be expanded. A lack of inner well-being and fulfilment also generates anger. People need the positive fulfilment that comes from being a part of a stable, generation-crossing family, and the satisfaction of meeting those needs through their work. The feeling of belonging to a wider project gives sense to our lives. In reality we now have the decline of opportunities for stable and relatively unskilled work, a disastrous decline in marriage and two-parent families, the disappearance of an honourable national story, and the loss of an underlying religious faith that we all have value and that life ultimately makes sense.

In an increasingly identarian culture the lack of having a recognised and respected culture increases the sense of alienation and anger. Those who are rioting see black people valued through initiatives such as Black History Month, they see the organised sexual abuse of white girls by predominantly Mirpuri Moslem gangs glossed over, whilst they themselves are labelled as beneficiaries of white privilege. For economically and culturally secure white people justifying this ‘ethnic asymmetry’ (see blog #16, 18/02/2021) can make sense. For white people who feel by-passed by such advantages then the lack of regard for their barely recognised identity fuels a deep sense of bitterness, self pity and anger. Anger that needs to find a focus – notably on those thought to be taking an unwarranted share of the national pie as asylum seekers, or those thought to be disassociating themselves from the national identity, Muslims. The low income end of White British ethnicity is the least recognised, most ignored social/ethnic group in the country

Where are we heading?

Riots come to an end. After the burning and large-scale looting in 2011 some shops in Tottenham High Road stayed closed, most re-opened. The big stores remained. Life returned to normal, and as in other large retail centres things recovered. But the hatred unleashed now is not as easily prevented as theft. Do expressions of anger clear the air, blow themselves out, and lead to a new season of calm? Or do they, once expressed, consolidate a pattern of behaviour that becomes routine? There have always been expressions of racial abuse, or even violence, but they are widely regarded as having been in decline. Is the present, largely unanticipated outbreak of violence, just a distressing blip in a largely positive trend; or will it lead to a step change where – as many minority people currently fear - abusive words and covert violence are increasingly widespread?

Very small numbers can be extremely important. How do we balance the 1600 people who sent abusive texts to Bukayo Sako after his penalty miss in the 2021 Euros against the many thousands of Brentford supporters who gave him a standing ovation when he came on as a substitute for Arsenal a few weeks later? In hard numbers, those who have engaged in racist violence over the past few days are still quite small. Will Reform voters or sympathisers not like where they see the road leading us to, and draw back from insinuations promoting a future of violence and disorder? Or will many take violent behaviour to validate and increasingly express their hidden inclinations to engage in racist expressions and acts.

A multi-racial society is comprised of uncountable billions of interactions – shaped by policies, decisions, appointments; by communications through the media; and by personal interactions in the factory, on busses, at school, in families or amongst neighbours. From these interactions patterns begin to emerge, and it is from those patterns that we form our view of the nature of multi-racial Britain. It is a running theme of these blogs that those patterns can be taken to tell a good story or a bad story(# 45 & # 113) and I have generally chosen to emphasise the good story; partly because I think it gives a better guide to the future and because the Christian gospel inclines our minds towards hopefulness, but especially because it fits better with the situation as I perceive it – albeit, as is highly significant at present, very much from a London perspective (see blog # ‘Is London exceptional’).

That ‘good story’ is under considerable pressure at present, but in a volatile situation we can only pose alternative scenarios, not make strong predictions. What is clear is that the anxiety and distress felt by many minority ethnic people needs receptive and serious attention; that amongst very large numbers there is a genuine concern to build unity; that there are small numbers being stirred by malevolent ill-will to create violent division; and that amongst a significant section of the British people there is a corrosive sense of being disregarded, which calls for strong, wisely shaped government action. Above all it calls the church in prayer and faith to renew and re-engage its mission, especially of affirming dignity and building hope, in areas where it has been struggling for decades to have effect. May God help us.