London riots one year on: What needs to change.....

By Lindsay Johns for the Daily Mail

Published: 11:35 GMT, 6 August 2012 | Updated: 00:34 GMT, 7 August 2012

Today officially marks the one year anniversary of the riots which undeniably devastated the social fabric of our country last summer. Sparked in Tottenham by the shooting of Mark Duggan by the Metropolitan police (or more accurately, according to those speaking on behalf of the dead man’s family, by the continued failure of the police to explain to the parents why he had been shot), appalling, internecine scenes of feral looting and savage violence broke out across both London and England.

I for one remember watching open-mouthed with a mixture of consternation, disgust and sheer horror as Croydon, Brixton and Peckham all burned and young thugs ran amok with impunity.

Despite the colossal bravery of the police officers and firemen who tackled the disturbances and the blazes and despite the highly commendable camaraderie and the magnificent, almost Blitz-like esprit de corps of those who came together to help in the ensuing clean-up, waving their brooms with gumption and defiance, tens, if not hundreds of millions of pounds worth of physical damage was done to Britain and her global reputation.

Let alone the inestimable emotional and psychological damage to the nation’s psyche and, more importantly, to the wholly innocent victims of the wanton thuggery and heinous loutishness which prevailed on our streets for several days in early August 2011.

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Brave response: A riot police officer directs his colleagues to clear people away from a burning car in Clarence Road in Hackney on August 8th last year

Shocking, blitz-like scenes: Firefighters tackle the flames in shops and residential properties in Croydon

In a classic outpouring of soul-searching and hand-wringing, liberals in the following months attempted to blame the riots on everything from institutional racism, police brutality and inner-city unemployment to poverty, EMA cuts and the apparent lack of opportunities for young people. In short, they attempted to blame everyone and everything, other than the rioters themselves, for the harrowing orgy of violence those involved chose to inflict last summer upon us, the law-abiding majority of ordinary citizens.

The Guardian’s Reading The Riots report was, if I read it correctly, for the most part a brazen apology for, a blithe exculpation and an eloquent justification of the atrocious and utterly egotistical behaviour of the rioters and their “supermarket sweep” style, “shopping with violence” destructive spree.

But now it is time for us, one year on, to ask ourselves some stark questions. What has changed in Britain and what needs to change henceforth, if we are avoid a repeat of last year? It is surely in the common interest for both left and right to come together and weigh up what needs to be done now to avert further trouble and strife. I am certainly no policy maker, but what I can do is speak from my experience working for many years as a volunteer mentor to young people in Peckham – an area itself hit hard by the riots.

Of course we need to work hard to eradicate high youth unemployment. Of course we need to offer genuine hope and the tangible belief in a brighter future to young people across this country. Of course we need to improve the quality of education our young people are receiving. Of course we should act with the utmost compassion to the less fortunate members of our society. Of course we need better relations between the police and certain segments of the community. Of course we need to review the efficacy of such policies as Stop and search in certain milieus. All these, as far as I am concerned, are self-evident.

Liberals in the following months attempted to blame the riots on everything from institutional racism, police brutality and inner-city unemployment to poverty, EMA cuts and the apparent lack of opportunities for young people

Appalling: Scenes of feral looting and savage violence broke out across both London and England last year, but has anything changed?

But whatever happened to promulgating a sense of good, old-fashioned personal responsibility, or is that now a dirty word? Whatever happened to us being (or teaching young people to be) the architects of our own destiny and masters of our own fate, rather than constantly blaming our lot on everyone else? Whatever happened to trying to get young people to develop a fully functioning moral compass?

This sickening culture of grievance and perennial victimhood is nefarious, utterly debilitating and thoroughly imprisoning. Ironically, it is this very sense of victimhood, mixed now with a pervading sense of imperious entitlement, which inner-city youngsters are actively encouraged to nurture which ends up imprisoning (metaphorically and, also sadly, literally) the very people it is thought to exculpate and thus liberate.

Such excuse-making is not only patronizing, but also does a huge disservice to the myriad of industrious, determined and law-abiding young people up and down the country in the inner-cities who did not feel the need to riot last summer, or who admirably resisted the temptation to do so because they knew such action to be both immoral and very stupid.

Moreover, let us once and for all bury the pathetic, fallacious and quite frankly dangerous assertion (so beloved of liberals) that the riots were “political”, or overt, conscious political statements by the teenage underclass. No they weren’t.

Kids with no knowledge whatsoever of Mark Duggan went looting in other parts of London and other parts of the country simply because they could, because they were bored, because they wanted the thrill derived from violence and robbery, together with a new flat screen TV and a brand new pair of trainers into the bargain, and thought they could get away it with it, not because of any deeply held ideological or political convictions.

As is always the case, it is the middle-class, left-wing academics who have subsequently projected onto the young people for whom they purport to speak the motives they ardently wish the latter had actually possessed, in all probability to both bolster their sociology PhD theses and their research grant applications, as opposed to admitting to their real, wholly non-political motives.

Moving forwards, what needs to change? Firstly, I think our attitude to youth and with it young people urgently needs re-visioning in this country. Post-riots, all we have seemed to do is listen even more assiduously to young people’s grievances and then duly base policy around placating them and their teenage whims and caprices. In all honesty, what does a 14 year old from Peckham or Croydon know about the world? Truth to tell, not much, save how to poke someone on Facebook, download illegal music from the web and play Call of Duty: Black Ops to a high level.

I would argue that, if anything, we are now in danger of listening far too much to young people. As adults, we should instead have the temerity to actually teach them something, as opposed to constantly listening to them, slavishly genuflecting at the altar of youth and thinking that youth per se is a miraculous panacea.

No it’s not. If we really want to empower young people and give them the keys to a successful future, we should stop rushing to cow-tow to their every whim, and instead give them a good education, and resist from spectacularly abdicating our parental and pedagogic responsibility, as so many of us seem to be doing at the moment.

Secondly, we need to show young people that the bling culture ethic which they have fully bought into (or been encouraged by adults to buy into) – that of rampant, hedonistic materialism with no thought for the consequences of their actions and no desire for hard work, the culture of meretricious, instant gratification - is a massive, evil lie.

Ever since I started mentoring in Peckham the vicious tentacles of bling culture have been steadily spreading, but its grip has recently got much worse with the advent of much negative, otiose hip-hop and grime music which glorifies such negative and destructive lifestyles. We need to take steps to combat this and instead engender a belief in the utility of delayed gratification, a belief in the efficacy of a hard work ethos and a belief in the need to shun crass materialism in favour of decent, more well-rounded, truly civilizing values like love, kindness, politeness, respect for women and education.

Those with no knowledge whatsoever of Mark Duggan went looting in other parts of London and other parts of the country simply because they could, because they were bored

With it, young people’s mind-numbing addiction to technological gadgetry needs rapidly overcoming – an addiction which effectively stymies the art of real conversation and the development of genuine human communication.

Very soon, if not already, many young people will be wholly unable to go for a college, university or job interview with any real chance of success, because many of them are functionally illiterate and unable to string a sentence together or make themselves understood in proper English, without resorting to text speak, street patois, ghetto grammar or inane filler words such as “like”, “basically” or “you get me?” – all words and phrases which make them sound utterly moronic. And as for eye contact and (foolishly) expecting young people to be able to look you in the eye when they talk to you, you might as well forget about it.

Young people across the country need to be taught that language is power and that a proper command of standard English is essential if they wish to ameliorate their educational and job prospects. They also need to be shown that if they want to succeed in modern Britain, they need to be able to confound, not conform to stereotypes.

People in power (namely adults) will (not unreasonably) judge them on the way they walk, talk and dress – in short, the way they present themselves to the outside world. High time, therefore, for young people to be encouraged to get rid of the hoodies and the baggy jeans hanging down their bums!

Mark Duggan's funeral: Mark's shooting by the police was a catalyst for the nationwide disturbances last summer

The profound boredom cited by rioters as one of their principal motivations – in essence a tedium vitae - is itself a savage indictment on our culture. Nowadays, young people are growing up in an MTV Base “3 minute attention span” society where the very act of reading a book - an act which for thousands of years has formed the fundamental basis of our civilization, as a conduit to knowledge, wisdom and erudition, plus access to other worlds of the imagination, not to mention the best that has been thought and written in human history - is considered to be a “long ting” (time consuming, in street parlance, therefore highly unattractive).

They are growing up in a proudly anti-intellectual culture where reading, for many boys at least, has a serious image problem, as it is seen as deeply uncool and geeky, if not positively effeminate. We need to show young people that it’s cool to be clever and to love books and reading, not just cool to be a rapper or a footballer.

What liberals, what professional naysayers – those whose very careers (and, in all probability, mortgage payments) rely on carping on about how perennially awful everything is, and what too many needlessly nihilistic inner-city young people constantly fail to acknowledge, is that, contrary to popular perception, there are opportunities out there for young people, if people are willing to look for them.

If anything, for a variety of reasons, prestigious public schools are now practically falling over themselves to give bright, inner-city (especially BME, or Black and Minority Ethnic) youngsters places and scholarships, as are the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, whose outreach programmes consistently strive to reach and encourage applications from as many diverse demographics as is humanly possible. The harsh (but somewhat obvious) truth is that schools and universities cannot admit young people if they do not apply.

Choosing to wallow in self-perpetuating negativity and cynicism will get young people nowhere. Let us imbue them, instead, with a dose of unerring positivity and a “can achieve” attitude, but let us as adults equally make sure that the positivity which we imbue them with is not an empty illusion or a chimera, and that it can lead to something tangible for their future development, empowerment and success.

Scenes in Hackney where a mob looted an off-license, set fire to a car causing residents to be evacuated

I have talked at length before about the need for inner city young boys to be offered alternative paradigms of masculinity, not just the clichéd, formulaic and limiting hyper-macho ones that rap, football, X-boxes and popular culture persist in offering them. Equally I have talked before of the need for increased discipline, boundaries and parameters both in schools and in the home, more hands-on fathers providing strong, positive role models and the need to inculcate a much greater respect for authority in this upcoming generation of young people. Again, these things are self-evident, but need executing.

Let us hope that the month of August and with it the rest of the year passes safely without incident and that we do not witness another outbreak of rioting on our streets. The lives of too many innocent people have already been destroyed last year for us to be in need of a repeat performance.

Britain has a wealth of human potential in our young people which we must nurture, not squander. We must invest in our young people with time, love and care, and in so doing strive to give them both the right values and the right tools for a successful future. If we do not, and heaven forbid, there are more riots, then sadly we will only have ourselves to blame.

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