The UK riots-have you been a news junkie like me today? For the last few hours I’ve been reading online and watching videos. Seeing the riot fires in London is somehow surreal and I’m not sure why. I didn’t get that feeling after the Vancouver riots. Maybe it’s the way they’re spreading from city to city like an invisible fuse is slowing burning through the country.
Here’s some of what I’ve been reading:
General news about the riots can be found at the BBC’s Live: UK riots page. Some riot photos can be seen here and also at this Flickr group.
From SkyNews:
Man Shot By Police ‘Did Not Open Fire’
“The victim of a police shooting did not fire at officers before he was killed, according to a report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
An IPCC ballistics report said there was “no evidence” that a handgun found near where Mark Duggan was shot by armed officers had been used.
The 29-year-old died after a gunshot to the chest on Thursday. The death sparked the first night of rioting in London in Tottenham.”
And two commentary pieces that make some very good points.
From Penny Red:
Panic on the streets of London.
“Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.
(snip)
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.”
The above blogger wrote her post while there was rioting nearby. I don’t think I could stay calm enough to not only blog but to make excellent social commentary too. Impressive.
And another commentary, this time from the Guardian:
There is a context to London’s riots that can’t be ignored
“Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago, the country has seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities, several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march and now unrest on the streets of the capital (preceded by clashes with Bristol police in Stokes Croft earlier in the year). Each of these events was sparked by a different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures. The government knows very well that it is taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest on a scale we haven’t seen since the early 1980s. With people taking to the streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and serious losing streak.
The policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms, but the context for social unrest cuts much deeper. The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday, where it appears, contrary to initial accounts, that only police bullets were fired, is another tragic event in a longer history of the Metropolitan police’s treatment of ordinary Londoners, especially those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and the singling out of specific areas and individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.”
And of course there’s The Clash song-London’s Burning.
Posted by Vixen in News