Civil unrest in Britain: where does responsability lie?

Nina Power

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 85 spring 2011

The recent civil unrest in Britain has prompted much discussion about responsibility and where it falls. The right-wing press has been predictably quick to demonise those who participated, invoking phrases such as “feral underclass” and blaming the smashed windows and looting on “pure criminality”—an oxymoron if ever there were one.

Right-wing publications are confused as to whether to refer to participants collectively—as some sort of headless mob swept along by destructive forces—or to single out and blame individuals.

Handily for the tabloids, they can do both. Courts handed down sentences of unprecedented length for incredibly minor crimes as forms of individual punishment for the events as a whole. One student received six months in jail for stealing £3.50 worth of bottled water and two men who put up joke Facebook posts calling for riots in their home town that didn’t happen both got four years inside.

These kinds of exemplary deterrent sentences have been handed out in the UK with worrying frequency. Students involved in large protests in November and December of last year similarly have been explicitly punished for the events and the atmosphere of the day, even if they could hardly be held responsible for everything that was supposed to have happened.

So responsibility seems to lie everywhere and nowhere. Many early commentators on the civil unrest refused to even begin to analyse what had just happened:

Now is not the time for reflection, now is the time to simply make it stop!

But whether one is interested in the agency of crowds or the responsibility of individuals, it seems perfectly obvious that one would look to the context in which these events took place for clues.

Civil unrest seems to be a fixture of Conservative governments in Britain. The riots that happened this year began in Tottenham, North London, after the police shot Mark Duggan to death in his car and subsequently assaulted someone protesting with the family outside the local police station. Twenty-five years ago when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, riots also took place in Tottenham after Cynthia Jarrett collapsed and died during a police raid on her home.

There have been more than 300 deaths in police custody since 1998, yet not a single police officer has been found guilty. Harassment by police officers is a daily feature for many young black and Asian youths in parts of London. Clearly there are significant background features that contributed to the recent civil unrest but by any logic I believe the police are to blame for much of what occurred.

It is furthermore unlikely that criminalising those involved, or evicting them from their houses as has been proposed by several London councils, is going to do anything to quell anger against the authorities and prevent further unrest.

Kneejerk populism is the order of the day and anything is permitted that shows the state flexing its muscles in a bid to reassure the property-owning classes that any dissent will not be tolerated. As of today, 2,590 people have been arrested in connection with the unrest and prisons are filled to bursting point, with more minor riots and skirmishes breaking out in the most densely populated institutions.

But if context is taken into consideration when people are prosecuted for involvement in protests and riots, why stop at the atmosphere of a particular demonstration or event?

Many have tried to downplay the political dimensions of the riots, claiming that they are “merely” looting. But taking something without paying for it has been a behaviour of the ruling class for as long as it has existed. Indeed, there have been blatant recent examples of this happening in Britain: take the expenses scandal which saw hundreds of MPs having to give back money that they’d stolen from the taxpayer (and very occasionally having to go to jail) and the bank bailout which saw ‘private’ firms receive billions of pounds of state support while continuing to give their staff massive bonuses.

If we are going to have a serious discussion about context, responsibility and agency, we should start by looking at the hypocrisy of those at the top rather than the transgressions of those at the bottom.