Posts by Russell Brown
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I've just put up a guest post from London by Stella Duffy.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to George Darroch,
I reckon that’s entirely post-facto. Militant anarchists might feel good about this, but there’s little to suggest that there’s been anything that follows their methods. No black-bloc style work, very little anti-capitalist intent actually on the streets.
Fair enough, sorta. I recall the local anarchists always being very keen to run the police, and to organize to do so, and I do think that's where that flyer will have come from. But otoh, Twitter says anarchist groups have been helping locals put out fires in Hackney.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Mark,
I think the previous five or six years were relevant as a social backdrop, and I thought so at the time. Not least the police culture of the times -- Gideon Tait's team policing units have a lot to answer for.
Alcohol was an issue, but the main cause was the staggeringly inept policing -- responding to a minor disturbance away from the crowd by closing the exit to Queen Street with a line of riot police then ordering the concert to stop wasn't just stupid, it was arrogant.
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I suspect that whatever degree of coordination is present has something to do with the anarchist groups, who have always been fairly organised. Check this advisory flyer from Tottenham.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Rich Lock,
As well as missing a couple of riots, I’ve also been caught up in a couple. I haven’t really got the right words to describe the crowd dynamics and volatile atmosphere, but the punch-in-the-gut adrenaline ride you experience as a participant, even an unwilling and involuntary one…..
Snap ...
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to BenWilson,
Also, as Russell honestly notes, quite exciting. People realizing that their potential to cause damage can lead to real social change is empowering to them. That’s if that is the outcome, of course. It could lead to them simply feeling the exhilaration of massive scale violence, something that can easily go the wrong way fast.
I think it’s mostly the latter. The sheer adrenalin rush of being even an observer in a full-scale riot is a very powerful thing. Some of them may feel shame when they get up in the morning and see what they’ve wrought.
Also, the sheer fuckwittedness of Julian Assange’s tweets in the past few hours – demanding to know why the BBC hasn’t “interviewed any of the London protesters” when they did so in Egypt and Syria – has been something of an indictment of his thought processes.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Kumara Republic,
All the more so when the Met’s top brass got caught taking bribes from the Spews of the World.
It does seem reasonable to assume that disgraceful behavior at the Met has undermined faith in the police -- although I'm not sure #hackgate is uppermost in the minds of the people on the streets,
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This Google Maps mashup of where the riots are is developing alarmingly quickly.
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Video from Clapham Junction, where the police seem to have been caught completely unawares:
The BBC said the police were assembling in Clapham Common North, but none had riot gear. Poor bastards.
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A pretty sharp comment under Nina Power's story:
There's a widespread myth that law and order is preserved by police, politicians and other forces of authority. Not true. Never has been. If we all decide to go out and chuck a dustbin through Argos's window and help ourselves, it would take about 15 million coppers to contain it. We actually have about 150,000.
Law and order is kept by a collective acceptance of mutual goals. If, as a society, we look after each other, offer everyone a share and a stake in the common weal, maintain some semblance of a Rousseauian Social Contract, then the vast majority of people will mostly stick to the rules without ever needing to see a police officer.
When people lose that sense of being looked after, no longer feel part of society, no longer feel like they have any kind of share in any kind of collective, the ties that bind begin to be broken.
Rioting, especially the type of vandalism & looting we've seen in London, is a sure sign that the social contract is unravelling around the edges. In the days and weeks and months to come, we shall see how far it has frayed.
There are few things more dangerous to a society than a populace with nothing left to lose.