Public Unrest, Social Institutions and Trust

We will no doubt be asking for some time to come what happened in England's towns and cities over the past few days. It is clear that the trigger was the police response to the marchers requesting an explanation for the death of their son, brother, friend and lover Mark Duggan. Some reports have said that he was killed in a 'cross-fire' with the police: the ballistics report confirms that this is fiction -- the gun found on the scene had not been fired and the bullet in the police radio was from an officer's weapon. It seems, therefore, that the family was right to quietly demand answers. The people of Tottenham did not wait for ballistics evidence, but acted upon past experience of black deaths in interaction with the police -- Duggan was one in a line of local residents to die at the hands of enforcement officers. The Duggan family has condemned the violence: the vigil was planned to be peaceful.

However, this was not just a race riot: Mark Duggan's death cannot explain the further violence and looting in London and around the country.

Anarchy and Austerity: Why London Won't Be the Last City to Burn

The riots and fires consuming London are a story about senseless violence and crime. They are also a story about urban politics, race relations, education inequality, and British culture and society. But underneath all of that, they are part of an economic story that is universal.

For the last year, Great Britain has embraced austerity to a degree that would make some American conservatives blush. The purpose of shrinking government was to reduce debt. But the effect has been to kill the economy. With the UK tottering on the razor's edge of recession, consumer confidence is at a record low, unemployment is rising, and even the most optimistic economists predict one-percent expansion for the rest of the year.

The scourge of young restlessness growing in this noxious petri dish is potent enough to have a nickname. The British call them the NEETs, as in "Not in Education, Employment, or Training." Last year, British Employment Minister Chris Grayling called chronic youth unemployment a "ticking time bomb." That bomb is way past ticking.

Over 1,000 Arrested in U.K. as Anger Over Inequality, Racism Boils Over Into "Insurrection"

Unrest continues to spread across England after protests erupted Saturday in London when police shot to death Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man. Mobs firebombed police stations and sets shops on fire in London, Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Nottingham and Birmingham. After waiting for several days, Prime Minister David Cameron has cut short his vacation and recalled Parliament from summer recess. Scotland Yard has ordered its officers to deploy every available force to stop the unrest, including water cannons and possibly the use of plastic bullets. London has been flooded with 16,000 officers, the largest police presence in the city’s history. We go to London to speak with journalist Darcus Howe, a longtime critic of police brutality in black and West Indian communities across the U.K., and author and blogger Richard Seymour of the popular British site "Lenin’s Tomb." "There is a mass insurrection — and I am not talking about rioting — I am talking about an insurrection that comes from the depths of society, from the consciousness collectively of the young blacks and whites, but overwhelmingly black, as a result of the consistent stopping and searching young blacks without cause," says Howe of the uprising. Seymour notes that anti-terror legislation has led to an unprecedented number of stops, predominantly of youth of color, but protests against the stops have been largely ignored by the British media. "A political establishment, a media, and a state system that gives people … the impression that they will not be listened to, unless they force themselves on to your attention, is going to lead to riots," says Seymour.

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Source: Democracy Now! 

Anarchy in the UK

London  

Perhaps the whole point of a riot is to defy explanation: it’s an eruption of the irrational, a shattering of glass and boundaries, a testosterone-fueled roar that briefly flips anger and emptiness into something like ecstasy. What’s in the minds of the young men (and women, too) in London, Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool who’ve sent great sheets of flame rising into the August night, devouring local businesses that it took years to build; who’ve turned plate glass to spiderwebs with one crack of a brick; who’ve gone home with their backpacks stuffed with cell phones, Nike trainers, X-boxes and Wiis? Well, wouldn’t we like to know, we middle-class types with access to a blog and an analysis, a “network” and a future?

Today Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson returned reluctantly from their  vacations to confront the arson and looting that have spread through Britain's cities over the last three nights, like a pair of Eton prefects summoned to contain the fifth form. Parliament has been recalled for the second time this summer (the first was over phone hacking by Murdoch’s News International); 450 people have already been arrested; Cameron has promised 6,000 more police on London’s streets this evening. But will it be enough?

Birmingham riots: intense anger after deaths of three young men

Community leaders in Birmingham are working all-out to calm intense anger in the city's British Asian community over the deaths of three young men who were rammed by a carload of suspected looters.

West Midlands police arrested a man near the scene and recovered a vehicle, which forensics experts are examining. They later launched a murder inquiry.

Groups of residents in Winson Green, the inner-city area where the men were killed as they tried to protect local businesses in the early hours of Wednesday, openly warned of inter-communal violence if the murder inquiry fails to produce rapid results.

Their anger was passed on by the local Labour MP for Ladywood, Shabana Mahmood, and the Bishop of Aston, Rt Rev Anthony Watson, who joined a meeting at Dudley Road mosque, which locals claimed was on looters' hitlist of targets where money might be found. The victims, brothers Shazad and Munir Hussein, 32 and 30, and Haroon Chohan, 19, were among some 80 young men who turned out after a gang tried to ransack the nearby Jet petrol station on Monday night.