London's Burning – the revolt of the youth

“Mindless violence” - “pure criminality” - “monsters taking over our streets” - the British politicians and media, from the Tories and Murdoch's rabid tabloids to Labour and the liberal BBC, have closed ranks to denounce the tide of unrest sweeping the country's cities. But what is taking place on Britain's streets is a revolt against an oppressive state apparatus that is enforcing an unjust society, an apparatus that has lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of millions. It is a revolt against state-backed racism and the colonial mentality of the British ruling class towards black people. It is a refusal by hundreds of thousands of youth to accept a world where they are destitute, with no jobs and no future.

In an interview with the BBC Tuesday morning, Home Minister Theresa May set the official tone by ruling out of order any discussion whatsoever that the urban rebellions might be due to anything other than just “thieving and looting”. But what was the spark that set off this firestorm of rage? It was the killing of 29-year-old father of four Mark Duggan by the Metropolitan Police in the North London borough of Tottenham. Duggan was a resident of the Broadwater Farm Estate, a large social housing complex that was the setting for a powerful rebellion 26 years ago, when a police raid killed Cynthia Jarrett, the mother of a local community activist. Mark Duggan was widely known in the local community, who have been shocked and angered as details of the killing have emerged. He was killed by the police after an armed unit stopped the mini-cab he was travelling in.

According to the Evening Standard, the main London evening paper (‘Father Dies and Policeman Hurt in ‘Terrifying’ , shoot-out’, 05/08/2011), a 20-year-old eyewitness saw Mark Duggan killed while he was lying on the ground. The witness is quoted as saying: ‘About three or four police officers had both men pinned on the ground at gunpoint. They were really big guns and then I heard four long shots. The police shot him [Duggan] on the floor.’

The police initially claimed that Mark Duggan fired a bullet at a police officer which lodged in the officer’s radio, ‘luckily’ saving his life. It has since been reported that the bullet was in fact fired by a police weapon. Now the cop who shot Mark Duggan says he never claimed Duggan had fired at all. The whole story that Duggan fired first and the police acted in self-defence is now in shreds.

But here's the important part: most people were pretty sure there was a police cover-up even before the facts came out. Over and over again people have seen the police cloak their bloody repression in lies. When the young Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes was shot 6 times in the head in 2005 following the bombings on London's transport system, the police said he was behaving like a “terrorist”, only for it to be shown later he was doing nothing out of the ordinary. When Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper vendor, was clubbed by a police sergeant during the April 2008 G8 protest and died, the police first denied they'd struck him at all and instead blamed the protesters. The Innocent Project documented how over a period of years nearly 200 people died while in police custody – but not a single cop ever went to prison for any of these deaths – as if every single death were somehow natural or brought on by the dead man himself.

And all this is part of a bigger web of lies and deceit, where the politicians and media tout their wars as being waged for “democracy” and “freedom”, when they are nothing but vicious wars for empire, and they call this capitalist dog-eat-dog hellhole of inequality and oppression the best system on earth.

The so-called Independent Police Complaints Commission say there is no truth in the allegations that Mark Duggan was killed in cold-blood by the police. And the politicians from the entire spectrum are saying, calm down, wait for its verdict. But what sort of credibility can this body have? The Director of the IPCC is Moira Stewart, a former Police Commander who was criticised for failing to pass on vital information to her superior, Ian Blair, then Police Commissioner, about the case of de Menezes. The IPCC is meant to investigate all killings by the police. Putting Moira Stewart in charge of investigations for the IPCC makes the organisation into a travesty.

Here we see the theory of checks and balances in capitalist democracy in action! The police investigated by the police and then declaring themselves completely innocent. Is it any wonder the oppressed peoples in areas like Tottenham have no faith in this system?

On top of this, police credibility has been seriously undermined when the Met's top two officers recently had to resign after it came out that they had taken gifts worth thousands from cronies of the Murdoch media empire and that Murdoch's agents had paid cops hundreds of thousands in bribes for personal phone numbers of crime victims, royals, and celebrities.

Labour Party politicians initially made some noise about how the revolts are being fueled by cutbacks by the Conservative-Liberal Democratic Party coalition. And the current government austerity programme, and the larger financial crisis it is part of, is indeed hitting people hard. Unemployment nationwide has almost doubled in 3 years, and it is especially high in places like Tottenham – for every job in the borough there are 54 young people there who need work, and the unemployment rate for Black youth is over 50%. One study reported that Tottenham is actually one of the areas of Britain that will be least affected by the government cutbacks – because there was almost nothing to be cut back to start with!

Tottenham and most of the other areas that have seen the most intense fighting – Peckham, Lewisham, Hackney, in London, Liverpool's Merseyside, and similar districts in Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham – all sit towards the bottom of the food chain inside imperialist Britain. And for 13 years, the very Party that working people, women, minorities and the poor generally were told was theirs – Labour – presided over an intensification of social and economic inequalities. As Tony Blair's top adviser Peter Mandelson infamously said of Labour, we are intensely at ease with people getting seriously rich. They have also turned out to be intensely at ease with people sinking into grinding poverty.

But as the rebellions continued, Labour has ditched its talk about the social causes of the rebellion and jumped into line with the entire British ruling establishment and begun to call for more repression – on BBC, former London Mayor “Red” Ken Livingstone is trying to prove himself “electable” in the upcoming Mayoral elections, by hailing the police, and calling for beefing up their ranks. Black Labour Party MPs or ex-MPs like Dennis Lammy have joined in, as has Dianne Abbott who said, “Cuts don't turn you into a thief.” Labour will undoubtedly renew their talk of how these events show the need to fight the “Tory cutbacks” - but only once they are sure that the rebellion has been crushed by brute force.

Deep down everyone knows why the police shot Mark Duggan. Black people in Britain have suffered the worst of all from imperialism. First black people were enslaved in the African Holocaust, then the lands were colonised in the nineteenth century ‘Scramble for Africa’. How does a nation that has committed such genocide justify its actions to itself? By telling itself that black people are ‘violent’ and ‘savage’ and deserve to be exploited and oppressed by ‘superior’ white people. It was these self-serving stereotypes that are the background for the mentality of the police officers that opened fire and killed Mark Duggan. The people who have protested and revolted will sense this, even if these views never appear in the mainstream media.

One of the main themes being put out by the media, including the BBC, is that the police have been going “too easy” on the youth rebelling in the streets. This has unleashed a frenzy of activity from the English Defence League, the British National Party and other racist thugs on social media networks. On so-called respectable blogging sites like Yahoo UK, there have been countless open calls not only to expel the immigrants but to outright “exterminate” them. But there is not a word of protest at this from any establishment figure.

And what about the endless stream of charges that, as Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, put it, “Let's be clear, the violence we saw last night had nothing to do with the death of Mr Duggan. It was needless opportunist theft and violence – nothing more, nothing less.” Several things need to be said about this. First, consider the hypocrisy of the political and media spokesmen of this system flying into a frenzy of outrage at inner city youth stealing trainers, mobile phones or other petty items. This ruling class built their system on the slave trade, they enforced a colonial empire at the cost of tens of millions of lives, and today they make hundreds of billions from an empire that stretches around the globe and is enforced at gunpoint in Afghanistan and Iraq. These world-class imperialist hypocrites have no right to condemn anyone for “looting and thieving”.

But let's take a closer look at the actual way the “thieving and looting” has gone down. In fact, it is very clear that, as the Guardian headlined their coverage on 9 August, “There was no doubting their aim: they wanted to fight the police.” Much of the youths’ tactics, lighting fires in side street dustbins and the like, have been aimed at drawing the police into fighting them on terrain where they have at least half a chance to get in some blows. The police, in turn, try to avoid that and instead have their own priorities – mainly defending prestigious corporate and government buildings, while conceding to the youth more space to go into areas without such targets.

So when the politicians and media point to the few flats or family shops that were burnt on the first night in Tottenham, it is important to be clear that it is the police themselves who are a major factor in determining what gets protected, and what doesn't. Furthermore, the revolts started in a spontaneous, angry outburst by teenagers who were necessarily inexperienced in struggle. Errors get made in the course of any struggle. There have been two more nights of revolts following the initial revolt in Tottenham, and it seems that despite the rapid spread of unrest, no or at least fewer homes have been destroyed by fire.

The masses taking part in this revolt or out on its fringes are full of the contradictions that come from being part of capitalist society, but being in its most oppressed sections. In one housing estate in the center of the fighting in Hackney, one Afro-Caribbean mother lamented that the youth were getting away from the original cause of justice for Mark Duggan, and was especially upset at the looting of local shops, but when her son and his mates showed up with a bag of new clothes for her, she was delighted: I'm on benefits, we've got nothing, she explained. Mothers struggled with their young sons and daughters not to go out, but shouted with glee when they saw projectiles strike home on a police van. A middle aged Iraqi political refugee clutched to his chest his valuable personal documents that he’d salvaged, and worried that the car burning in the street might ignite his flat just above, but was torn by sympathy for the youth, who were up against the very same forces who'd turned his own country into a killing ground. An Afro-Caribbean woman and her daughters gathered around a burning dumpster singing Bob Marley's song “Burning and Looting”.

It is true that numerous family shops and corner stores have been looted, and this is a source of mounting tension – shopkeepers, often from a single nationality, are forming teams in different areas to defend their shops, which offers the police real opportunities to fan the flames of infighting among the oppressed.

But at the heart of this welter of contradictions, the force driving these rebellions is a sense on the part of the youth that it's a chance to strike back at the larger forces dominating their lives and oppressing them, and they're running to seize that chance. A group of four British-born youth of Somali origin heading for the fighting in Hackney Monday night talked of how they felt that they had no one that they could count on but themselves and their mates, that they might have to drop out of college due to the recent massive hike in education fees, and that they considered themselves “revolutionaries”. One question in the air: how much were the youth influenced by the rebellions in the Middle East and North Africa?

It is also worth pointing out that despite the howls of outrage by the establishment about the “violence ruling England's streets”, there have been no reports of anyone but the police being specifically targeted by the youth. And despite the conflicts that have erupted from time to time on the streets between white, Asian and Afro-Caribbean youth, during these rebellions all comers of whatever race are still being greeted in a spirit of unity and solidarity – a theme that is spelled out repeatedly in the Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry messages that are flying over the airwaves.

Observers have also been struck by the patchwork of rebellion that has swept through the capital and now the country. Previous rebellions – Brixton and Tottenham in the 1980s in particular – were confined to a single area of the capital, in response to a particular outrage by the police. But as in the outbreaks of revolt in France a few years ago, fighting with the police has now erupted in at least 20 or more different districts in the capital plus several in cities in the Midlands, with the youth proving far more fluid and fast-moving than even the mobile police forces. It is no exaggeration to say that this has caused shock among establishment “talking heads”, who have struggled to explain this. They recoil at the idea that there are broad ranks of youth, numbering in the millions, who feel themselves to be excluded from society and to have no allegiance to its norms and rules and who long for the chance they are getting today.

This rebellion is fueled by anger at cutbacks, poverty, racism and the police. There is real fury right now at the brutality and oppression of a state apparatus that can just gun down a black man in cold blood then try and cover its tracks with lies and misinformation. But while this was the spark, the fact that this spark has caught fire and spread so far and so fast reflects much more than any one particular abuse. The police are the front-line enforcers of an entire capitalist system that is built on exploitation and inequality. In the eyes of the system, police violence is by default “legitimate” - because they are the armed defenders of property relations that lead to a handful accumulating fabulous wealth, while millions live with nothing, and no hope of ever having anything more. It is not chance that sees the cops stop young Black men on the street thousands of times a month, with almost no arrests – this is just the sharpest edge of an entire system, and efforts to reduce what is going on to one or another particular abuse will lead to trying to put plasters on the sores when what's needed is to get to the root cause and overthrow the system that is the source of all these abuses through revolution.

As night three of the rebellions winds down, the question on everyone's lips is, what next? Cries are going up for broad curfews or for the army to intervene, ideas that are being evoked even by liberal news presenters like the BBC's John Humphrys. One thing is sure: the justice and respect the masses crave and deserve will not be granted to them by this system.

London: Legitimacy in question?

28 March 2011. A World to Win News Service. On 26 March London was the scene of another struggle against the UK coalition government. Hundreds of thousands of people – between a quarter and a half a million, according to various media reports – protested against the budgets cuts and other austerity policies imposed by the Tories and Liberal Democrats and the misery that awaits the lower sections of the people. This was the biggest demonstration in London since the Iraq invasion in 2003 when millions marched. On Saturday it took several hours of marching before those at the back of the demonstration got to the starting point of the march. At Hyde Park, where the march ended, people kept arriving for several hours.



The participation in this march by far exceeded the expectations of the organisers, the Trades Union Congress. But the size and cruelty of the planned cutbacks drew a very large and varied group of workers, teachers, lawyers, nurses, pensioners, unemployed, students, doctors, elderly, youth, teenagers, women and men.



Many banners also called for the UK to "Leave Libya Alone". Some people wore T-shirts updating the title of a popular song, "Walk like an Egyptian – Fight Like an Egyptian!"



However the protest was not limited to the planned march along the path set by the police and organisers. Despite threats by various forces including the police, angry youth were determined to send a clear message to the ruling class that they are not going to let themselves be squeezed by the government to solve a financial crisis that is not their fault and pay for what they perceive as the interests of the rich.



The angry youth gave their message by invading stores and attacking banks and other symbols of capitalism, in dozens of central London locations.



Just before 2 pm a bloc of youth slipped away from the main march and went into Regents Street. Later the Topshop (billed as the world's biggest fashion store, whose owners are notorious for paying no taxes) in Oxford Street became a target of some demonstrators. At the same time a group carrying a home-made "Trojan Horse" occupied Oxford Circus, where Regents Street meets Oxford Street. Clashes between police and protesters in Oxford Street itself were also reported. Since a big section of Oxford Street, the biggest shopping centre of Central London, had been closed to vehicular traffic, demonstrators considered it a good path to continue their march.



Then the HSBC bank at Cambridge Circus near Piccadilly Circus was attacked. At nearly 3 pm the luxury Ritz hotel 500 yards on the west side of Piccadilly Circus became the target of the protesters.



An hour later, hundreds of protesters occupied Fortnum & Mason, a luxury foods shop in Piccadilly. Although they were totally non-violent and non-disruptive to those busy shopping, according to legal observers, and soon left voluntarily, they were "kettled" on their way out and all were arrested.



Meanwhile the Trojan Horse in Oxford Circus was set ablaze, while bonfires were also lit and fireworks set off to attract attention. Some groups occupied several shops on Oxford Street. More banks such as Lloyd's TSB and Satander, and a Porsche dealership, were attacked. Demonstrators reportedly picked up police barricades and used them to smash windows.



Police attempted to contain the protesters in several locations in Central London's West End. Many protesters refused to let themselves be hemmed in and clashed with police to break out.



Around 7 pm clashes broke out in Jermyn Street off Piccadilly Circus. Flames rose high from waste bins.



Later on in the evening the protest shifted to Trafalgar Square. There several thousand protesters gathered to dance and listen to music around the fire. A few tents were set up, showing that some people intended to stay overnight. Following the example of the anti-Mubarak movement, they intended to turn this monument to the British Empire that once ruled Egypt into a new version of Cairo's Tahrir (Liberation) Square. The police seemed to find this intolerable and they started to provoke the protesters, wielding their batons to push and beat them.



Finally, with the excuse the demonstrators might unleash "blind violence", the authorities deployed their infamous kettling tactic. Massive numbers of police surrounded the protesters and kept them trapped in the cold open air until they were released in the early hours of the morning.



The police tried to imply that they had avoided using kettling during the day. Some observers commented that the police seem to have been instructed to be less violent than usual to avoid being compared to the Gaddafi regime currently being bombarded by the UK and others in the name of democracy.



However it seems more likely that the protesters successfully avoided being trapped by using new tactics such as demonstrating in different forms at different locations. It was not until people converged on Trafalgar Square and darkness fell that layers of police officers were able to surround and contain them. The idea that thousands of people might hold a demonstration in that location and draw many others into their protest was more than the authorities were willing to stand for.



In addition to the several hundred arrested that day, the police announced that they would go through the photos of demonstrators (the authorities try to take a picture of every single person, especially when they are kettle) and make further arrests.



Almost immediately a chorus of condemnation of the protest arose from government figures, leaders of the opposition Labour Party, the Trades Union Congress and the mainstream media. In a way similar to the propaganda aimed at the youth now shaking reactionary regimes in the Middle East, these brave London protesters were labelled hooligans and criminals.



These youth did not generally attack buildings randomly. They intended to give a clear message by carefully selecting symbols of what they see as wrong in the UK – that the government is serving the big companies and the "rich".



Who are the real hooligans and criminals in society? Those who are cutting public services, destroying the education system and health service while shoring up the profits of the gangsters who own the banks and big business? Or those who protest against that? Quite a few people are asking themselves these questions.



A reader of London's Independent newspaper, using the name Kubelik posted her comments on the readers' blog. She said that as she left the march with a few other teachers, feeling satisfied with the day's activities, she found herself in Piccadilly witnessing a bit of the radical protests going on there:



"At first I wanted to be indignant and disassociate the violence from the main event, thinking that it would detract from the homogeneity of the main march and be represented as the actions of criminals and violent extremists. However, after a few conversations with the rioters, my view started to change.

"So here is what they said: We live in a very corrupt society with huge levels of inequality not just in this country but across the world. Our politicians can no longer be trusted and are seen as having their snouts in the trough (no problem). Young people are being disproportionately targeted by government policy (working in a university I have no argument here). The poor, disabled and old are being disproportionately affected (yep). Capitalism is a social construct that benefits the few and marginalizes the many, it divides to conquer and fosters material enmities that fragment society, and encourages selfishness. It works in a cycle that inevitably means those least able to cope with any downturn are the ones most heinously discriminated to as a result of this barbarity (this seems to be consistent with my experiences).

"They are angry and frustrated and feel betrayed by the generations that precede them. They see a cabinet of millionaires, a patrician elite protecting their benefactors and friends in the city... So, given this, isn't it a legitimate response to target those who profit by and uphold a system that victimises so many? Isn't it completely legitimate, in the absence of the law, to take matters into their own hands and fight for a better world?

"This morning I was left wondering whether we should demonise them as criminals or herald them as heroes."



There are indications that this speaks for many middle-class people today.



Speaking to the rally at Hyde Park that ended the day's official activities, Labour Party leader Ed Miliband joined the rest of the establishment in demonising the protesters. The pro-Labour organizers of the march called it "March for the Alternative". But what alternative did he put forward? He did not even condemn the cuts but criticised the government for going "too far and too fast" in carrying out what he described as necessary cuts. He was roundly booed. Later the healthy objections to his speech were attributed to "fascist agitators".



People in all three major parties, at the top and even many at lower levels in the Labour Party, all agree that these cutbacks are unavoidable.



It may be that the government's current deficits, amounting to ten percent of the GNP, are unsustainable. Part of the money went to pay for the cost of UK participation in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the years of the occupation of these two countries, and building up the British military. Another part went to save British banks and big business from bankruptcy. And then there are big tax breaks for business. It may be that these kinds of measures are essential to boost the global interests of the British imperialists.



But many Britons consider the national health service, accessible higher education, public housing and other programmes set up over the last half century, not to mention jobs, as their right. The idea that the UK can no longer even have a decent public library system, let alone social benefits for people who will be in big trouble without them, goes against what many people think British life and "values" are all about, or at least should be.



The militancy of the student struggle against fee increases, the broad character and massive numbers of people who turned out for the march and the anger of the youth indicate a deep and sharp dissatisfaction with the way things are and an unwillingness to accept what they consider wrong no matter how much politicians tell them that there is no alternative. No matter how serious the financial crisis is, why should the ordinary people who didn't cause it be made to pay for it, and why should the people at the bottom bear the biggest burden? The whole cutback agenda violates many people's sense of justice.



But what if what all the politicians say is true, that "the British economy", the capitalist system whose "success" in the UK has been based on hundreds of years of exploitation and the oppression of a large part of of the world, can no longer function without harsh measures for millions of ordinary Britons? At the same time, if more people understood that such a system does not have to exist, wouldn't their resistance be even stronger?



Many believe that this is only the beginning. Another reader of the Independent commented, "this is the rage of a nation that is saying enough is enough!! and its absolutely legal... and they better start paying attention before it's too late. The social and political tsunami is coming!!”



Whether or not these words turn out to be prophecy, wishful thinking or something in between, it is likely that the discomfort so many people find in the current political situation and the anger at injustice that is rising will encourage a growing number of people not only to resist but also to ponder and debate the question of whether or not things really have to be this way.