The Riots That Dare Not Speak Their Name

By Andrew Brons MEP. I was on my way to visit my daughter and her family in Australia when the first of the riots broke out and therefore in Australia when they proceeded. Whilst that provided me with an alibi against any suggestion that I might be responsible in the sense of culpable, I was regarded as being responsible in the sense of answerable. What could I say?

News in Western Australia is notoriously parochial. When I was last there in 2006, the war between Israel and Lebanon was at its height but the main item on Western Australian television news was whether the state government planned to make the consumption of hot drinks by car drivers illegal!  The war in the Middle East was not the second item or even the last; it was not mentioned.

However, on this occasion, the riots in particular districts of London and in particular districts of other cities in England seem to have grabbed the Australian (or in the case of Perth, the British ex-pat) attention. They featured on all the news channels and were front page news in the main newspapers.

Perhaps, they destroyed the illusion, in the minds of ex-pats and those whose British ancestry went further back, that the Britain that they or their ancestors had left was still intact. The coverage was lengthy, detailed and appeared to be informed. The noticeable omission was the ‘R’ word to describe the riots or the ‘B’ word to describe the rioters.

Correspondents to the Australian newspapers were not slow in responding that the failure of British governments to respond to Enoch Powell’s call for something to be done about immigration in the 1960s was the root cause of the riots. They did not use the ‘B’ word either but that would have been impolite.

The question is when does a riot become an ‘R’ word riot? A group of rioters made up exclusively of one racial group against victims entirely of another racial group or other racial groups, with an antagonistic racial feeling towards that group or those groups would undoubtedly be a ‘race riot’. Oh dear, I’ve used the word now, albeit in the conditional mood. A short trip down the Thames (possibly in the conditional mood) and through that notorious gate to the Tower is only a matter of time.

The first wave of riots in London were clearly in protest against the shooting of Mark Duggan and the rioters were certainly disproportionately and quite possibly in the majority wholly or partly of Afro-Caribbean descent.  However, there were some White youths among them who had clearly adopted Afro-Caribbean culture.

Dr. David Starkey referred to these people in his coverage of the riots. He spoke about them politely and most certainly did not use a highly offensive ‘W’ word, sometimes used by reprehensible people to describe Whites who emulate Blacks. He did not use that word and neither shall I.

The aforesaid are almost reminiscent of Mr. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G who pretended to be an Asian who pretended to be a Black man. Does multi-racialism have to be this complicated?

The motivation of the initial riots was a racial empathy that the rioters had with the Black victim of a police shooting in Tottenham, Mark Duggan. Empathy with one’s co-racials is not to be deprecated and, had it manifested itself in the forms of polite letters to The Times,  an offer of legal advice to the bereaved family or even a tasteful obituary to his local newspaper outlining a life time of charitable enterprises, it would have merited applause.

The arson attacks on public and private property and attempts to burn people alive in their own homes were neither polite nor empathetic. However, we must ask whether racial empathy that takes the form of rioting could be described as ‘a race riot’. The suggestion is not self-evidently ridiculous.

The rioters in most of the subsequent riots were disproportionately, but not as overwhelmingly Afro-Caribbean, and in some (Salford) predominantly Whites. There appears to have been copy-cat rioting in some areas by Whites, who could not be described as emulators of Black culture.

Most of the accounts of the riots confused three groups of people: the rioters; the spectators; and the looters. Whilst the rioters were disproportionately Black, the looters were predominantly White. It was reported that most of the looters appearing at Highbury Magistrates Court were White and had criminal records. It appears that the criminal classes moved in, after the rioters had moved on.

They judged that they would, by that time, be safe from the rioters if not from the media cameras. The police might have felt intimidated by violent, predominantly Black, rioters but they mustered up enough courage to apprehend low-life White criminals. The spectators were people from the area who were not the rioters and they came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.

The Guardian got itself into trouble by referring to the fact that Hassidic Jews were to found among the spectators. This was almost evidence of anti-semitism! I hope that the same accusation will not be made against me for reporting what The Guardian had reported.

A fourth group of people were those hoping to instigate further riots, via Facebook and Twitter, in market towns and leafy suburbs. They were simply sad people who lacked a certain something in their lives. I suppose it could be said that a four year gaol sentence might be just that something.

The remaining questions are:

1. What were their causes?

2. How could they have been avoided?

3. What can we do now to avoid their repetition?

The answer to the first question might be found in one of two categories of hypothesis:

(a) The nurture hypotheses: that the causes were the result of the life experiences of the rioters; their family structure; absent parents; discrimination (in the ‘against’ sense rather than the ‘between’ sense); being ‘victims’ of low educational achievement (yes, you have read that correctly); being ‘deprived’ of economic success; and possibly poor potty training if all else fails.

(b) The nature hypotheses:

(i) the individual nature hypotheses that the particular individual has been dealt an unlucky set of genetic cards that have propelled that person into riotous behaviour.

(ii) the group nature hypotheses that particular population groups are prone to particular patterns of behaviour. I am afraid that this is where Orwellian crime stop is needed. Indeed, it should have become activated before this point and I can only be surprised that it has not. Crime stop, it will be remembered, means:

“the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

Crime stop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough.

On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body”.

(Part II Chapter IX of Ninety Eighty Four by George Orwell)

Crime stop has finally come into operation.

Hypothesis (b) (i) is refuted without the need for argument.

Hypothesis (b) (ii) is hereby removed from the record and has been unsaid retrospectively. That is the end of that!

How could all of this have been prevented? Nurturists would say that the conditions producing individual rioters and the conditions producing riotous behaviour in general should have been avoided.

Those with a nature explanation would suggest, if they were allowed to suggest anything, that individuals or groups with a tendency to act in an anti-social way should be excluded from the National Society.

How might these events be prevented in the future? The nurturists would, of course, suggest that all of ‘causes’ of the anti-social behaviour should be eradicated and the behaviour will follow suit.

Those advancing a nature hypothesis would say that individuals with a consistent record of criminality should be removed from free society for as long as possible. They (that is ‘we’) would also suggest that immigration from countries in which anti-social behaviour is endemic should be curtailed completely. Those immigrants from such countries who have been convicted of serious offences should be deported without delay. The remaining populations from those countries should be persuaded that their future would be much rosier in a country in which their inherent cultural values would be cherished, without hesitation or resentment.