I have few words of consolation for my city. My daughter just escaped riots and looting in leafy suburban Ealing. Hanwell is burning. My kids local shops are destroyed. There is looting in Harrow, Croydon, Wembley, Peckham, Woolwich, Clapham, Lavender Hill, Chalk Farm... I can't keep track. Here's a link to a google map
http://maps.google.co.uk/...
These are not inner city suburbs famous for racist policing or social exclusion. Class and race do play a part. But as my daughter said, when I asked, who is doing this...
It's just teenagers dad.
This is also NOT an issue any more of heavy handed policing. Turkish shopkeepers in East London are forming their own militias. Everywhere people are complaining: where are the police?
I've tried after my previous diary about the initial riots in Tottenham to search for other reasons for these riots. But the demographic of those districts now in flame - the way this has spread to other cities, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, can't be explained by the dynamics of the 80s. There is more in common with the 60s. A whole generation is disaffected.
There were hints of this in the major civil disorder here last year: the student riots at the 300 percent rise in tuition fees instigated by a government containing Liberal Democrats who promised to abolish tuition fees.
There is no excuse for burning families out of their homes. There's no future in destroying the livelihood of local shopkeepers. There's no future in destroying employment and investment like this.
But it's clear that law and order has broken down in London. The police are overstretched. They have acted with restraint. But now they are going to deploy for the first time in my memory, armoured vehicles on the British Mainland (they were used in Northern Ireland before).
David Cameron is returning from holiday to attend a COBRA - the Cabinet Emergency Committee - tomorrow morning.
This is social unrest of such scope it requires social and political remedies, and as I said in my diary yesterday, the austerity measures which hit youth particularly hard are a factor.
But there's nothing progressive in the smell of smoke. There's nothing progressive in the young men stealing mobile phones. It's a hiding to nothing. And the dangers of a backlash, of draconian policing and generalised repression, have stepped a little closer in Britain.
And now military vehicles are deployed in my kids local high street.
Thanks to a link below to the excellent blog by Penny Red (Penny Laurie). She's nearer to the trouble than I am, and her words resonate
Read the whole blog here
Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.
Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.
UPDATED: So much going on this morning. So much analysis, anger, devastation of people's livelihoods and homes. Some amazing community clear up action
Mercifully few physical casualties. Some quick points:
1. Hundreds arrested. London prisons cell are full.
2. Police force will be tripled tonight in London to 16,000.
3. Cameron has returned from holiday to an emergency COBRA committee.
4. Parliament recalled on Thursday (twice this summer) Unprecedented.
5. One man died of his wounds today having been shot in Croydon
6. The police will use baton rounds, rubber bullets, if need be.
I'll be heading out later with a journalist to some of the potential trouble spots and bring you more news, though I hope it will be a much quieter night.
I'll leave you with the brave and inspiring intervention of this woman in Hackney (I've linked rather than embedded because of autoplay)
In the clip, which includes strong language, the woman urges rioters to leave local shops alone, and concentrate on protesting against the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked the original riots in Tottenham.
The reaction on Twitter and other social networks was almost universally positive. One commenter wrote: "This woman has restored my faith in humanity somewhat today. I want to marry her."
And just in case this is imagined through the lens of US civil strife, let me stress that these are in no ways race riots. The initial shooting of Mark Duggan, that triggered the first riot in Tottenham, had a racial and policing dimension. But even then the rioting and looting wasn't dominated by any ethnic community. As it has spread across London's inner suburbs, and even out to its leafier ones like Croydon and Ealing, the only pattern I can see is youth and poverty. I may be wrong, and nothing is monocausal, but as well as the amazing woman in the link above, let me add two images which show both the highsand lows of the current civil disorder:
And the great London clean up begins
Tue Aug 09, 2011 at 10:00 AM PT: Well, the largest number of police ever are being deployed to the capital. There are police officers everywhere round me: they've closed down the diamond district where I lived, and urged most shops and pubs to close. People are heading home and talking about a 'curfew'.
I'm still planning to accompany my journalist friend tonight, and I'm very much hoping there will be nothing to see. But I've never seen London like this. It's reminiscent of the chaos of the 7/7 bombings, but the causes are much less simple and stark.
It's no good just calling the rioters criminals, as if that explained anything or everything. In that regard, several MPS have been proved to be criminals, and senior Newscorp execs might be proved to be so. Criminality is a symptom, and the looting is just too widespread to put down to organised gangs. Race, class and exclusion have much to do with it - but the primary thing seems to be youth, consumer goods (half the Carphone Warehouses in London attacked) and a general sense that there's no authority which people respect anymore.
The expenses scandal undermined our MPs. The Murdoch scandal both our media, politicians and senior police officers. In belief in the hierarchies has crumbled.... but anarchy cannot take its place. Self organisation, community spirit, a London protected and cherished and policed by its own citizens is the only solution to this.