2011 – Riots Confirm That Consumerism Also Has a Sprint Setting

England Burns, Politicians Return From Holiday, Looting Interpreted as Diverse Range of Theories

Riots Confirm That Consumerism Also Has a Sprint Setting

England Burns, Politicians Return From Holiday, Looting Interpreted as Diverse Range of Theories

In August 2011, England experienced four consecutive nights of rioting in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Salford, and dozens of other English cities and towns — a sequence of disorder that began with a protest in Tottenham following the police shooting of Mark Duggan and that spread, with a speed and a geographic breadth that the initial protest’s specific grievance could not explain, into something considerably more complex, considerably more disturbing, and considerably more available for competing political interpretation than the single cause that launched it.

The riots produced, in their immediate political aftermath, a competition of explanatory frameworks whose intensity was inversely proportional to the clarity of the evidence. The Conservative explanation emphasised criminality, moral failure, family breakdown, and the cultural damage inflicted by decades of welfare dependency — a framework that made the riots a symptom of the broken society that David Cameron had been diagnosing since his Opposition years and that the coalition’s programme was designed to address. The Labour explanation emphasised austerity, police cuts, social exclusion, and the economic conditions that the coalition’s spending reductions were producing in the communities most affected — a framework that made the riots a symptom of the policy decisions of the preceding fourteen months.

Both frameworks contained truth. Neither was sufficient. The riots were conducted by people with diverse motivations — genuine anger about police conduct, opportunistic looting, gang activity, the specific excitement of collective disorder that the presence of others creates — whose individual actions cannot be reduced to a single political explanation without doing violence to the complexity of what actually happened.

Mark Duggan and the Specific Beginning

Mark Duggan was shot dead by Metropolitan Police officers in Tottenham on 4 August 2011, in circumstances that were disputed at the time and that an inquest jury subsequently found to constitute a lawful killing while also finding that Duggan was not holding a gun at the moment he was shot — a combination of findings whose logical coherence was questioned by the family and by commentators who found the two conclusions difficult to reconcile.

The protest outside Tottenham police station on the evening of 6 August, held by family members and community members seeking information about the shooting, became violent in the early hours of 7 August when the police response to the gathering produced confrontations that spread into the wider Tottenham community and from there, with astonishing speed, to Hackney, Brixton, Croydon, and within days to cities across England.

The speed of the spread was attributed in part to social media — specifically, BlackBerry Messenger, which allowed rioters to coordinate movements, share information about police locations, and communicate with each other in ways that the police could not monitor as readily as public social media platforms. This attribution was accurate as a technical observation and insufficient as a causal explanation — the technology facilitated the spread; it did not create the conditions that made spreading possible.

The Looting: Commerce Conducted Without the Commerce

The most visually striking aspect of the 2011 riots was not the violence but the looting — the systematic removal of goods from shops whose windows had been broken, conducted by individuals and groups with the focused efficiency of people who had identified an opportunity and were taking it. Shoe shops, electronics retailers, supermarkets, sports goods stores — the targets were specific and reflected, with uncomfortable clarity, the consumer aspirations of a generation that had absorbed the culture of consumerism while lacking the income to participate in it through normal channels.

The LSE and Guardian research project that surveyed riot participants found that the majority cited specific grievances about policing and poverty rather than a desire to acquire goods — but the television footage of the looting was more vivid than the survey data, and the political response was shaped by the footage rather than the research. David Cameron’s broken society speech, delivered on his return from holiday in Italy, emphasised personal responsibility and the moral failure of the rioters in terms that resonated with a public watching burning buildings and broken windows.

The courts dealt with the rioters with a speed and severity that reflected both the public’s demand for visible consequences and the magistracy’s capacity for expedited processing in the specific conditions of a national emergency. Over three thousand people were arrested. Many were sentenced to custodial terms that, for first offences, exceeded the normal tariff for the offences committed — a departure from sentencing norms that the Court of Appeal subsequently declined to criticise on the grounds that the exceptional circumstances warranted exceptional responses.

Police Cuts and the Timing Problem

The coalition’s programme had included reductions in police funding that were producing, in 2011, the beginning of a reduction in police officer numbers that would continue through the decade. The timing of the riots — arriving as the cuts were beginning to take effect and before their proponents could point to efficiency savings that made up the numerical reduction — provided Labour with an argument that the coalition rejected and that the public was not in a position to adjudicate with confidence.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary’s reports through the coalition period documented the effects of police cuts on officer numbers, response times, and the capacity for proactive policing in communities where the relationship between police and public had been deteriorating since the deaths, the stop-and-search controversies, and the specific institutional failures that the various inquiries and reviews of the 2000s had documented. The riots were not caused by police cuts. They were managed, in their early hours, less effectively than might have been the case with more officers available, which is not the same thing but is not nothing.

The Olympic Year Approaches

The 2011 riots took place eleven months before the 2012 Olympics — the Games that London had won in 2005 and that were now approaching with the specific combination of anticipation and anxiety that major sporting events generate in the cities that host them. The riots had raised, unavoidably, questions about the safety of the city that was about to welcome the world — questions that the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office were required to address in their Olympic planning with the seriousness that the proximity of the events demanded.

They addressed it. The 2012 Olympics passed without serious incident and produced, in its cultural and sporting achievement, the national moment that the 2011 riots had suggested was unavailable. This sequence — disorder in August 2011, celebration in August 2012 — encapsulated something about Britain’s capacity for self-renewal that the riots’ grimness had temporarily obscured and that the Games restored, at least for the duration of the opening ceremony and the fortnight that followed it.

The causes of the 2011 riots were not resolved by the 2012 Olympics. The communities most affected by the disorder were not transformed by the Games that took place in the borough adjacent to them. The policing of Black communities in London and other English cities did not undergo the fundamental reform that the riots suggested was necessary. The social exclusion that the LSE research identified as a contributing factor was not addressed by austerity policies that were, in their distributional effects, concentrated on exactly the communities the research had described. These are the subsequent paragraphs of the 2011 story, written in the years after the fires were extinguished and the politicians had returned from their holidays and the theories had been published and the world had moved on to the next emergency.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

Mark Duggan was shot dead by Metropolitan Police officers in Tottenham on 4 August 2011. A protest outside Tottenham police station on 6 August became violent in the early hours of 7 August, triggering four nights of rioting across England. Over three thousand people were arrested; many received custodial sentences exceeding normal tariffs for their offences. David Cameron returned from holiday in Italy to address the nation, emphasising personal responsibility and the broken society. The LSE and Guardian research project subsequently found that the majority of riot participants cited policing and poverty rather than a desire to loot. The 2012 London Olympics took place from 27 July to 12 August 2012 without serious incident. An inquest jury found in 2014 that Mark Duggan’s killing was lawful but that he was not holding a gun at the moment he was shot.

ORIGINALY PUBLISHED: 6 August 2011 (London, UK)

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]