The rise of the Far-Right after the riots
I wish we could ignore that petition. You know which one. The one that would have innocent people thrown out into the street because of what someone in their family might have done.
I wish we could ignore the fact that Nick Griffin has been gaining thousands of Twitter followers (including 2000 in just one day).
I wish we could ignore the fact that the EDL mobilised and tried to create the ‘Enfield Defence League’.
I wish David Starkey wasn’t massively racist on national television and thought he could get away with that. Anyone who sympathises with Enoch Powell is a disgrace. Anyone who blames black culture for criminality is scum.
I wish that the guy who set up that massively popular Facebook group, ‘Supporting the Met police against the London rioters’, wasn’t a disgusting racist, but he is. On his Twitter, he called black people monkeys and joked about people going back to the jungle.
I wish that I hadn’t seen normally sensible people in my Facebook feed calling for live ammunition being used against rioters.
But, shamefully and terrifyingly, all of these things actually happened.
Even just tonight I was told off by a Tory for bringing a social analysis to the riots, because apparently that’s wrong now. He also said that bringing up institutional racism in the Met is just like bringing up bad things people do, essentially. So apparently I’m not allowed to criticise London’s police force anymore, even the officers who are appallingly racist.
I’m sorry, but there’s a phrase for that, and that is privilege-denying. The other phrase for it is called ‘being an apologist for institutional racism’.
Being a racist, being a fascist, having fascist or racist views, wanting to kill someone because they stole a pair of trainers, all of these things are very much in the ‘not okay’ column of life. As is opening live rounds of fire on children, which is has basically been suggested when people say that the police should be allowed to use guns on rioters.
All of these things – very much bad. Very much not okay. In fact, incredibly wrong and disgusting.
In the same way that mugging people is wrong, burning down people’s houses is wrong, killing kids for looting an iPod or whatever is also incredibly wrong.
The riots were horrific in many ways. Obviously. But this doesn’t mean the country can adopt an anything-goes approach to policing. It doesn’t mean people should just sit back when someone’s being a racist scumbag in case they get accused of ‘condoning’ looting. We cannot throw morality, reason, values and all sense out of the window because of four nights of rioting. If we do, we destroy the only things worth having.
Postscript: Please ‘like’ the Facebook page ‘Not using rioting as an excuse to be casually racist’. And challenge racism and fascist views whenever you see or hear them, if you have the energy to do so. Together we are stronger.
This post first appeared on Be Young And Shut Up, which we encourage you all to read.
Wibble Wibble, thanks for calling me numbnuts, I feel that addeed a lot to this discussion.
Ralph, fighting racism and the far right doesn’t mean condoning the riots. A swing to the right will have an enormous effect on the country and is worth writing about and warning pepople of. People are capable about being angry about or thinking about more than one thing at once. It’s a false argument to suggest that because something bad happened, I should shut up about racism.
And adding ‘sort yourself out’ at the end, I feel was rather pathetic.
Thanks to the other commenters, I don’t agree with all of you but you added interesting things.
The rioters did the EDL’s work for them- terrorising ethnically diverse areas. Funny how some people seem to be more upset about Starkey than criminals burning, killing, and frightening whole communities, most of which were poor and disadvantaged to start with. Sort yourself out.
I didn’t listen to David Starkey, I didn’t see the riots, but am aware that the BBC gives a disproportianate amount of time to airing right wing views, by inviting people like David Starkey along to inflame public opinion. The BBC seems to forget that it’s a public broadcasting corporation, with a duty to act responsibly. If people can be arrested for making inflamatory comments likely to cause civil unrest then the BBC should be responsible for who they invite, and what parts of a programme get aired, including any language likely to inflame situations. This isn’t ‘censorship’, its common sense. They have a tool at their disposal called ‘editing’. Like the papers they,re guilty of not observing editorial standards. Once something is in the public domain the damage is done, whether its true or false. Who benefits from these riots:- the Government, they are using this as an excuse to bring in ever more Draconian measures to inflict pain on the young and the poor, it also helps to distract the general public from corporate excess, the filthy rich and the true wealthy villains that fly in and out of our airports across the world everyday, those whose hands appear clean but should be stained with the blood of the millions dying from their speculating, arms deals, land grabs etc. lets not take our eye off what they’re up to, and not sink into blaming ‘the deserving and undeserving poor’, whether white, black, brown etc.
I see you’ve completely ignored the fact that you did ‘misquote’ him and have instead decided to have a go at me for being shortist.
Anyway, he wasn’t blaming ‘black culture’ he was blaming ‘ASPECTS OF BLACK CULTURE’ numbnuts, read what he said.
I suspect a lot of the reaction to the riots is pure fear – and quite understandably. For a while on Monday night it really did look as if the police had lost control in the capital. Major disturbances had broken out in at least 8 districts, we had fires, looting a reports of violence. There was a sense that we stared over the edge into the abyss.
Leaving aside any analysis of causes, something I’ve already waded into, what really changed this time was that technology gave those involved in looting a distributed command and control structure, arguably one far more powerful than anything the police have because the police have to go through a decision making process based on intelligence (no sniggering at the back) whereas the ‘rioters’ were a collection of autonomous decision makers who could react and redeploy instantly. Once they’d achieved a certain level of numbers it became clear that the police couldn’t cope and had things escalated further the police response was pretty much on the verge of coillapse – a couple more major outbreaks of violence and there would have been almost zero response.
It’s a little like the US iin Iraq – the other side has now seen the limits of conventional power and is no longer as scared. The response we’ve seen since is intended to scare them again. I’m not convinced it will work not least because the justice system loses credibility when it’s manifestly unjust.
And the biggest problem is surely that we have a government that doesn’t know how to talk to people living in the affected areas even if it really cares. I can’t believe I’m about to speak warmly of Michael Hesletine, but this government badly needs his 21st Century equivalent.
As for Starkey – he may have re-read Enoch Powell but Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech has precious little to tell us about what happened last week – only about how much we’ve changed for the better as a nation since he gave it.
http://headstrongclub.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/starkly-starkey/
But as Kate says Wibble please don’t mock him for his lack of height only his lack of depth.
Starkey seemed to be blaming hip hop (which he knows nothing about) and patois, among other things, but it’s my view as well as Owen Jones’s (who was on the show) that he was blaming black culture for criminality.
Whatever someone’s uncle’s done, that doesn’t excuse shooting someone in the chest – if Mark Duggan had done something wrong that should have been taken to the courts. The police have no right to shoot to kill, nor to apply retributive justice.
Starkey’s short because he had polio when he was four. He was also born with club feet. Both of these things will have required a lot of painful treatment. Have a go at him for being reactionary or racist, but don’t have a go at him for being a ‘dwarf’- not only is he not a dwarf but I don’t envy having to put up with all that pain and having people taking the piss out of you for your height for the rest of your life.
Although Starkey is an annoying reactionary dwarf at the best of times (sorry to any short people reading this), to be fair to him he didn’t actually say what you’ve reported. He blamed an ‘aspect’ of black culture not black culture per se and also argued that a section of the white underclass were aping this ‘aspect’ of black culture. So he was being fairly offensive to most people, as is his wont.
He may be very, very wrong, but I think that you should at least be fair in reporting what he said.
As an aside, were you aware that Mark Duggan was the nephew of a man allegedly responsible for up to 25 unsolved murders? Doesn’t mean anything of course, except my uncle doesn’t exactly fit that bill, does yours? No wonder the coppers had itchy fingers…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Noonan
Thanks. I was kind of hoping that the riots might have united people of all colours. Naive I suppose.
Some people have been saying that lots of the rioters were black and it’s somehow black kids’ fault, despite the fact that there were loads of white people there too…Also, I can’t explain what the racism is about, as racism’s so blatantly both so stupid and scientifically wrong it’s inexplicable! I know what you mean though, and no, I don’t get the logic either..I guess racists will use any excuse to be racist
I didn’t get the impression the riots were carried out by people of any particular race any more than any other. The only thing I heard was that the Muslims came out very well – they guarded the streets and their kids didn’t riot on the whole. So what is all this racist response about?