The racist and Islamophobic violence that swept across England and Northern Ireland in August has been called ‘pro-British protest’, ‘demonstration’, ‘disorder’ and ‘riots’. Calls for their recognition in more critical terms – as pogroms or right-wing terrorism – are convincing.
The language of riots and disorder has inevitably drawn comparison with events in England almost exactly 13 years ago. On 4 August 2011, Metropolitan police officers brutally killed 29-year old Mark Duggan in Tottenham, North London, sparking disturbances in towns and cities across England over four nights – the most serious civil unrest in a generation.
Despite important differences between the two periods, looking back to 2011 offers crucial lessons about how the government might respond now, what issues will likely remain unspoken or unattended to, and what needs to be done over the coming weeks and months.
Embedding narratives
The meanings that come to settle around these riots will be powerful in shaping and justifying the politics of this Labour administration. As in 2011, the days and weeks following riots are crucially important in setting the scene for the political agendas that follow. The government now needs to set out its longer-term policy responses to the 2024 riots. Politicians, journalists, commentators and academics will offer competing diagnoses for the unrest, identify different actors to blame, and prescribe varied solutions.
This summer’s disorder has not been on the same scale as 2011, when the ten police forces arrested 3,960 people within a month of the unrest. Nor are sentences handed down so far as inflated as those given in the wake of the 2011 riots, which were on average four times longer than usual and – in line with broader patterns in criminal justice – disproportionately targeted working-class and racially minoritised young people.
Nevertheless, the Labour party’s contemporary law-and-order rhetoric carries distinct echoes of the Coalition government in 2011, with Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood stating that ‘crimes must lead, unerringly, to punishment’ and that the courts ‘will continue to deliver justice, until the last offender languishes in one of our jails’. Despite the ongoing crisis in the criminal justice system and in the prison system, a fortnight after this summer’s riots began, more than 1000 people had been arrested and 575 charged, and more than 300 were in prison on remand.
While Starmer credited the police and the courts with preventing further attacks, mobilisations to defend communities under threat received much less recognition
While prime minister Keir Starmer has credited the police and the courts with preventing further attacks, large mobilisations of diverse communities and anti-fascist and anti-racist organisations to defend local organisations and show solidarity with communities under threat has received much less recognition.
The 2011 riots were a response to Duggan’s death and to the long history of police brutality against Britain’s black communities. They also followed the wake of the 2008 financial crash, and within a year of the new Coalition government’s brutal austerity agenda slashing public services and deepening inequality.
Yet David Cameron and his Conservative Party insisted that the riots were ‘not about race’, ‘not about government cuts’ and ‘not about poverty’. Separating the unrest from structural issues of racism, discriminatory police practices or the ravages of neoliberal austerity, the finger was instead pointed at individual and cultural problems, most notably gangs and gang culture, welfare dependency and inadequate parenting.
Pushing agendas
The government’s diagnosis of a ‘broken society’ reinforced other efforts to reframe economic and political issues like child poverty and youth unemployment as the result of individual choices, effectively positioning the poor as deserving of their disadvantage. Media responses to the disturbances also coalesced around dehumanising and shockingly stigmatising language of ‘scum’, ‘ferality’ and ‘vermin’.
Sarah Lamble notes that, once the riots had been framed as decisively non-political, they were ‘easily reduced to a consequence of poor choices and failed morals, which thus warranted punishment’. This punishment came not only in the form of the state’s startlingly harsh criminal justice reaction but a raft of vengeful social policy projects that were already planned.
The Troubled Families Programme, launched in 2012 apparently in response to the previous summer’s unrest and designed to ‘turn around’ the lives of 120,000 of the most ‘troubled’ families in England, had been on the agenda since 2010.
Once the riots had been framed as non-political, they were ‘easily reduced to a consequence of poor choices and failed morals, which warranted punishment’
The riots lent urgency and funding to the project: £448 million in central government funding was invested to tackle purportedly intergenerational issues of ‘worklessness’, antisocial behaviour, criminality, educational exclusion and welfare dependency. Drawing on old ideas of an underclass and shifting responsibility away from the state and onto working-class mothers, programme success has been questionable at best.
Despite research finding that gangs played a negligible role in the 2011 riots, the government also declared ‘all-out war on gangs and gang culture’, leading to the introduction of the Gangs Violence Matrix, criticised for its overwhelming targeting of black young people. The disturbances were leveraged to argue for urgent urban ‘regeneration’. Sweeping change to local areas ‘scarred by the riots’ only accelerated widespread dispossession and displacement of residents.
Meanwhile, racial disproportionality in the criminal justice system and wider inequalities – the deeper causes of the unrest – continued to worsen while the Conservative government doggedly denied the existence of systemic and structural racism.
The Labour government’s response to this summer’s violence has similarly focused on punishing those arrested on the streets and avoiding structural issues. Attempts to explain the disorder, not simply condemn it, have centred on social media, with consequent calls to tighten up the already contentious Online Safety Act. As Alberto Toscano notes: ‘to reduce the cause of these events to disinformation and hooliganism is an exercise in historical amnesia and whitewashing’.
Fuel from Labour
Little has been said by politicians and commentators about the entrenched Islamophobia, xenophobia and racism fomented by the last government, supported by swathes of the media, rightwing thinktanks and academics. Labour has not challenged the violently racist logic that has underpinned politics for decades; they have echoed and amplified it.
Just weeks after rioters attempted to burn down hotels housing people seeking asylum, the government has already returned to their manifesto promises to ‘toughen’ border security and create a ‘swift and firm’ asylum system that ‘fastracks’ removals of unsuccessful applicants.
The Labour government has already returned to manifesto promises to ‘toughen’ border security and ‘fastrack’ removals
The riots are however being presented as a moment of redemption for the police – silencing urgent conversations about institutionally racist culture and practices, deaths during police contact, the racism embedded in profiling potential offenders and Stop and Search. Coming soon after protests over an officer appearing to stamp on the head of a Muslim man at Manchester airport, the same forces are being presented as saviours, with the Labour Home Secretary calling for unconditional respect for the police.
Holding to account
It is vital that we pay sustained attention to the complex and multifaceted causes of the riots, which the government currently seems unwilling to do. Calls are being made for an official inquiry into the riots, but that alone is no guarantee of meaningful engagement with, or resolution for, victimised communities. Whatever the mechanism, we will need to look closely at racist and Islamphobic attitudes, to communities’ experiences of the recent violence, and to the worsening deprivation across society.
This scrutiny must not scapegoat ‘the white working class’, but hold the parties really responsible to account. In stark contrast to the rogues’ gallery of rioters’ faces on TV screens, complicit elites – including former PMs and government ministers – using racist rhetoric to push punitive immigration policies and hatred and mistrust of Asian communities appear to have impunity.
After 2011, the most nuanced insights into the roots of unrest came not from the ministers or academics, but from the filmmakers behind The Hard Stop, Riots Reframed and Riot from Wrong, artists, playwrights, grime and hip-hop artists such as Lowkey and Wretch 32, and black community organisations’ artistic and political responses. This time around, we must listen carefully to what is yet to emerge, from every social quarter – and challenge misleading narratives before they embed.
