The future of austerity?

The Tottenham disturbances instantly raised memories of the Broadwater Farm riots that rocked the neighborhood 26 years ago. While an early report claimed tonight’s violence to have been much more limited, Twitter is currently ablaze with live reporting. At one point, BBC reporter @rickin_majithia tweeted that he was being pulled out by the BBC because the situation was getting too dangerous, after one man was allegedly beaten up for taking pictures.

The violence was not entirely unpredicted. Earlier this year, the Guardian published a report with the following message: “after Haringey council shuts eight of its 13 youth clubs, local teenagers fear boredom will fuel violence between young gang members on the streets of north London.” At the end of the video clip, one man can be heard saying, with near-frightening conviction in his voice, “there’ll be riots, there’ll be riots.”

Is this a troubling early sign of what lies ahead in the coming years? As Martin Luther King put it, “a riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” The UK already was one of the most unequal societies in the Western world, but the dismantling of social services will only further accentuate these economic inequities. The storm has been brewing for a while…

Can David Cameron survive this and News of the World? And, really, closing clubs to save money? Was that it? If so, the officials behind the closures are crazy. It’s as if they have no idea about their own culture. The UK is not the US. The UK takes its clubs seriously. Indeed, I recall one Scandinavian critic (he wrote a book called LA Nonstop—I failed to find a link to it) speculating that the richness of the musical culture in the UK was a consequence of the centrality of clubs in the culture as a whole. “Everyone there is in a club. And each club has its own sound. It’s really quite extraordinary.” You do not close clubs to save money; you close clubs to start trouble.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

7 replies on “Guns of Tottenham”

  1. Apparently they’re soooooo poor and disenfranchised, they had to really on their Blackberries (Crackberries) to organize a good looting session:

    “BBM as it is known, is an instant messenger system that has become popular for three main reasons: it’s fast (naturally), it’s virtually free, and unlike Twitter or Facebook, it’s private.

    BlackBerry recognized the appeal of their products to the urban market and has had a long association with Jay-Z in the States. In the U.K., they recently hosted a “secret gig” in Shoreditch Town Hall featuring Tinie Tempah, Wretch 32 and Devlin.”

    “Mr. Akwue also points out that it would not be the first time that the private communications allowed by BBM, which are not easily intercepted by police, have been connected to criminality.”

  4. When the riots happened in Vancouver no one lammented on the poverty of the perpetrators. Look at the difference in how the 2 situations are viewed. White’s riot and they are overgrown entitled frat boys. Blacks riot and they are the downtrodden victims of social injustice. Same actions, different conclusions based soley on race

  5. This can – and if nothing changes, will – happen here.

    Those who say it can’t are busy shorting the US economy and buying Swiss Francs.

  6. @Andrew S Yeah, that could be something to do with the Vancouver rioters being set off by losing a hockey game. The riots in London were set off by the cops killing a black guy. See the difference?

  7. The rioting in London has next to nothing to do with “the cops killing a black guy.”

    Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said yesterday the violence had “absolutely nothing” to do with the death of Duggan. “It was needless, opportunistic theft and violence — nothing more, nothing less — and it is completely unacceptable, and the people who have suffered are those who have lost their businesses, shopkeepers who have lost their shops,” he said.

    The Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating the shooting of Duggan.
    “The IPCC awaits further forensic analysis to enable us to have a fuller and more comprehensive account of what shots were discharged, the sequence of events and what exactly happened,” the commission said in a statement yesterday. It said in an earlier statement during the day that “speculation that Mark Duggan was ‘assassinated’ in an execution style involving a number of shots to the head are categorically untrue.”

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