Riots & Revelation
“Shop looted and youths storm McDonald’s and start cooking their own food”
- Daily Mail
(Do you want Armageddon with that, sir?)
I was at a demonstration once when someone tried to climb the Downing Street fence. The police responded as you might expect, we all got squeezed a bit, and I went home, shaken by my first taste of civil unrest. Some years later I saw a football riot kick off in Manchester, from the top deck of a bus on the Oxford Road. It was so stupid that it was funny, fizzling out as quickly as it had started.
Tonight, London braces itself for a fourth night of disorder, with police numbers tripled, and talk of water cannon and rubber bullets. I have been teaching about riots at school today, pausing as sirens go past the window, encouraging Colombians to loose the “ee” in “eesmashing”, drilling Koreans to say “vandals” rather than “bandoos”. We were joking about what we would loot that night, but speeding fire engines aren’t all that funny. Stories of rioters breaking into McDonald’s and flipping burgers are hilarious, but also spine-chilling. Given complete autonomy, what kind of mind chooses to do that?
Unprecedented riots look like part of an unprecedented apocalypse to me. Rioters and authorities, like their counterparts in the Middle East, co-ordinate their efforts through technologies which didn’t exist a few years ago. The Arab world is ablaze, the economies of the US and much of Southern Europe are melting, but perhaps something is emerging from the flames. Residents of some areas got together last night to defend their streets when it became clear that the police were overstretched, proving that a united community is quite capable of facing challenges without state intervention. The broom army organised their clean-ups on the same new technologies as the police and thieves.
Is looting Foot Locker a political act? Perhaps not, but it is an expression of national, even global consciousness. Smash and grab tactics dominate US and UK foreign policy, where the pickings are rich enough. Top MPs routinely claimed four and five figure sums in expenses for TVs, rugs and refurbishments to their second homes, until the scandal was uncovered. A global banking crisis was precipitated by short-sighted greed, and the selfsame bankers still take Christmas bonuses several times greater than a teacher’s annual wage. Greed is good, and that is the ethic of our masters, whether they are big men in politics, the media, or finance.
Priorities have shifted, putting money before anything else. London’s new skyscraper, The Shard, will dwarf anything else in Europe, a monument to the power of global trade financed by Qatari oil money. Compare that to the earliest building code, laid down in the Talmud, where it is decreed that the tallest building in town should be the house of prayer. Our twenty pound note, the biggest note most Brits outside of the financial sector have the pleasure of fingering, used to feature the composer Elgar; he was replaced with the economist Adam Smith, staunch advocate of both the free market and the Opium Wars, which are, of course, two sides of the same heavy coin.
An interview of tragically inarticulate rioters reveals how they felt that they were striking at the rich by attacking small businesses and homes. Sadly, they are just emulating them.
The best of British?
