When you strip away the froth and the gimmicks, the more Boris Johnson publishes about his housing strategy for London the more it looks like a plan for the gentrification of large areas of the capital. No more social housing funded from his London pot, just ‘affordable rent’ at much higher rents. An end to the ‘50% affordable’ target in housing development.
No social rent targets set for the boroughs. No mitigation of the government’s Local Housing Allowance caps and the cap on total benefits, which even he fears might lead to ‘Kosovo-style cleansing’ of poor people from some parts of the city.
Johnson’s recently published London Plan, which will determine development over the next decade, has been well critiqued by Labour’s Nicky Gavron in the Guardian. She shows how the plan’s overall housing target is inadequate to meet London’s needs, but reserves her strongest criticisms for his policies for social housing and Johnson’s decision to remove Ken Livingstone’s planning policy that 50% of new homes should be affordable
and that, of those, 70% should be for social rent. These policies were based on detailed
assessments of housing need and the capacity of sites to deliver, and were beginning to have real effect. They were also supported by the independent Inspector responsible for
investigating Johnson’s proposals. All the inspector’s key recommendations have been ignored or over-ridden by Johnson and Eric Pickles, it appears on ideological grounds.
Why smoke and mirrors? Well, Johnson talks the talk but he walks a very different walk. He may be a card, but he is at heart a highly ideological Tory. Just like his fellow Bullingdon boy, David Cameron, the compassionate talk and the occasionally progressive idea hide the harsh market-driven policy. For example, despite saying that he didn’t want London to become like Paris “where the less well off are pushed out to the suburbs” his plan proposes building market housing in areas where there is a lot of social housing to provide a better mix but then fails to ensure that social housing will be built in areas of mainly market housing to create more mixed communities everywhere. It seems nowhere
is appropriate for social housing. He gives the go-ahead to his friends in the boroughs to remove social housing in so-called regeneration schemes, homes that will not be adequately replaced. Taken together with the government’s housing benefit policies, we now have a fully fledged policy of removing social housing, failing to build any more, and encouraging the social segregation of the city. His policies will make London like Paris but
worse.
Why smoke and mirrors? Well, just published, his latest consultation document – Initial Proposals for a Revised London Housing Strategy continues to claim credit for the delivery of social rented homes as if he really cares about having a balanced housing programme. Housing development is a very long process and the social rented homes he’s talking about are mainly the completion of those that were started under the programme for 2008-11 that was set by Ken Livingstone and the Labour government before leaving office.
Why smoke and mirrors? To understand the mayor’s real housing policy we have to look at his first unfettered decisions – the new programme for 2011-2015 – which virtually excludes funding for new social rented homes. Any new social rented homes that get built in future will either be subsidy-free (for example as a result of s.106 agreements) or will be built with local borough subsidy (eg through free land) or directly by the councils themselves. Johnson replaces homes for social rent with housing at ‘affordable rent’ levels (up to 80% of market rents). He claims in his document that this is a great achievement – providing ‘affordable’ homes with far lower levels of public subsidy. Magic. But the truth is that the rents are not affordable, the cost is transferred to the occupier or, if the occupier is eligible, onto the housing benefit bill. It is a less direct and less efficient way of providing homes. Despite the government’s protestations that it wants to make it easier to get into work, the scheme’s high rents make it harder.
Throughout, the real aim, to ‘marketise’ housing and remove social housing as a concept, is hidden from public view.
And the man with a shock of white hair, a top hat, a few jokes and a droopy magic wand, releases the blue smoke, flashes the bright lights and deploys the mirrors. The trick is complete.
Cue applause. Or catcalls – because he’s been rumbled.
Category: Blog Post
Categories
A tale of two rioters
Picture the scene. Two 15 year olds caught up in the riots. Both enter a building and steal something, no violence involved but it’s clearly burglary. Both are caught by CCTV, arrested, charged, and brought before the Courts. Both are sentenced to 6 months in jail. The justice system has worked.
But there is one difference between the two children. One lives with his parents in a small terraced house that they bought 25 years ago and have brought their three children up in. No-one in the family has been in trouble before. The other lives with his parents in a small terraced house that they got from the council 25 years ago and have brought their three children up in. No-one in the family has been in trouble before.
What does justice have to say about this? Both have been dealt with, punished seriously for their crime. Both will have the blight of a criminal conviction and prison sentence hanging over them for years to come. But it’s fair treatment.
The first boy, when released, will return to his family in their family home and try to take up his life. There is some security and stability as he rebuilds. It’s hard but possible.
The second boy, when released, finds that his family has been evicted by the council from the family home because of his crime. They were declared intentionally homeless, so they won’t be rehoused. They have taken two private rented rooms in a shared house at a cost of nearly twice the council rent they were paying. Dad thinks he can’t afford to keep working. The youngest child is bedwetting, a result of the trauma of eviction say the medics. Mum is suffering from depression and is struggling to keep her job. They are not able to take the oldest boy in. He drifts off to stay on someone’s sofa. There is no security and stability from which to build. It’s very hard and it feels almost impossible.
What does justice have to say about this? None of this is fanciful; anyone involved in housing knows that this story reflects the reality.
There is no doubt that the mood is about retribution. Polls show that more people want tenants evicted than don’t. But neighbours who are home owners or private tenants probably don’t want anyone convicted of a serious crime living next to them either. And the determination of some councils to evict, and the government’s determination to make it easier for them, will not apply more generally to your common or garden murderer or rapist or burglar.
It may allow politicians to sound tough. It may be what people want. But it isn’t justice. It’s double punishment, it’s guilt by association, it’s discrimination on the grounds of tenure, pure and simple.
Labour, nationally and locally, should have nothing to do with it.
This post by Steve Hilditch follows previous posts on the riots and the aftermath by Steve and Tony Clements here here here here and here. We are keen to see these issues debated as widely as possible. This post has also appeared at LabourList where there are also a number of comments and a bit of debate.
The National Housing Federation’s statement, based on Oxford Economics’ Research, that home ownership will continue to decline, from 73 per cent of households at its peak to a likely 64 per cent in the next decade, brought Grant Shapps into the spotlight on the Today programme this morning.
Interviewer Evan Davies knows a little economics and that relief for the millions locked out of home ownership will only come from much greater housebuilding (interview available on iplayer). So he badgered our friend to say if housebuilding would increase as a result of the government’s various policies. Now you might imagine that the answer would be ‘yes’. But instead there was prevarication and several attempts to explain the intricacies of the New Homes Bonus, bottom up rather than top down, and the rest. It was a minor relief that he didn’t explain his houseboat strategy.
Davies, apparently unimpressed, pressed the simple point about whether building will rise. Yes or no? Our hero blustered… difficult to predict… try to make them go up… disappointed if not… pulling out all of the stops… Still the word ‘yes’ did not escape from his lips.
What can we read into this equivocation? Well, a cynic would say he knows that
housebuilding is not going to increase under his policies and may well fall into further decline. And even a friendly interpretation could go no further than to suggest the probable real truth. He has no idea. One giant experiment – scrapping the regional
framework of strategies and targets in favour of localism plus a little financial incentive – is leading to chaos and uncertainty and power being put in the hands of those opposed to housebuilding. No-one knows what the outcome will be, but we can all guess.
Amongst other indicators, the Oxford Economics report shows that the number of projects receiving planning approval – an important measure of the ‘pipeline’ for new build – has not recovered from the collapse caused by the recession. According to OE, the policy changes “are already having an impact on the planning decisions made by a number of local authorities – e.g. Bristol and the surrounding authorities, Milton Keynes and Leeds have cut their future housing allocations by a total of 88,000 according to the Home Building Federation. As such, we see only a gradual recovery in house building – it will take until 2020 or beyond for new starts to reach pre-crisis levels.”
The NHF is calling for more government investment in affordable housing to stimulate a wider, faster economic recovery, for suitable surplus public land to be made available for the building of affordable homes, for local authorities to regularly assess housing need and for ministers to make a renewed commitment to building the homes the country needs.
Categories
Myths about migrants
On Red Brick we’ve taken an interest in trying to test out and bust a few of the myths in housing.
One area where there are more myths than most is in migration policy and the access that ‘foreigners’ have to social housing. It’s interesting that social housing is often portrayed in the media as being the lowest of the low, except when it is occupied by immigrants, in which case it is a wonderful national asset that should only go to ‘British people’.
Migration Watch gets a lot of sympathetic coverage in some parts of the media and their latest use and abuse of statistics comes in their ‘study’ on social housing and migration in England, in which they claim that the social housing requirements of new immigrants will
cost the taxpayer £1 billion a year for the next 25 years. They say that “45 additional social homes would have to be built everyday, or nearly 1400 a month, over that period to meet the extra demand” and “The impact of immigration on the availability of social housing for British people has been airbrushed out for too long. Either the government must cut
immigration very substantially as they have promised or they must invest very large sums in the construction of extra social housing”.
At least I can agree with the last 13 words of that quote.
John Perry, who blogs at the Migrant Rights Network, has analysed Migration Watch’s claims and the Migration Observatory has published a detailed briefing on the real facts about migrants and housing.
Perry demonstrates that there is no automatic link between the number of new households that are projected to be formed by migrants and the provision of social housing. On current government spending plans migrants would have to take virtually all of the funding available and new homes provided for the claim to be true.
Yet few if any new migrants will actually get these homes. The percentage of new social lettings going to foreign nationals is 7%, most of whom have lived here for many years in
order to qualify. The Migration Observatory points out that 75% of new immigrants go into the private rented sector, and that is probably where the serious issues around migration and housing lie.
The veracity of Migration Watch’s analysis can be summed up by the graph they include which shows the ‘cumulative stock of migrants’ and ‘households on waiting lists’ on the same chart, as if they were correlated in some way. You might as well correlate Newcastle United’s league position and the frequency of cyclones in south east Asia.
With his Chartered Institute of Housing hat on, John Perry has also written a helpful guide on the role of housing providers in relation to UK migration and how to handle national policies and trends, published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
The paper comments that “Migration policy often focuses on the number of new migrants entering the UK, but little is done to support neighbourhoods where migrants already live. Central government is withdrawing from these issues at a local level, placing more
importance than ever before on regional and local leadership”.
It then highlights the ways in which housing providers have already taken steps towards better neighbourhood cohesion and integration and suggests ways in which they could do more because they are well placed to do so. It also explores the perceived and actual
competition between migrants and host communities for housing.
Migration is a complex and emotive topic where exaggeration is rife and ‘facts’ are often exploited by the media to promote a particular political agenda. The housing world generally and many individual providers have a terrific record in promoting community coherence, work that is needed more than ever after the events of the last few weeks. There is an appetite in the sector to do even more and the CIH/JRF guide and the MO briefing are invaluable and highly recommended tools.
The latest fault line in the Coalition seems to be developing around taxation.
Chancellor George Osborne is ‘reviewing’ the top 50% income tax rate, much to the annoyance of the LibDems, whose priority in income tax terms is to raise thresholds to take the lowest paid out of tax altogether. The LibDems have the Coalition Agreement on
their side and Danny Alexander is on the record as saying: “The idea that we are going to shift our focus to the wealthiest in the country at a time when everyone is under pressure is just in cloud cuckoo land.” But Osborne faces a lot of pressure from the Tory right, including Boris Johnson, who has called loudly for the 50% tax rate to go.
The LibDems’ Vince Cable has admitted that the top rate of tax should be removed, because the Coalition are united against high marginal rates of tax, but that it should be
replaced by a tax on wealth or on highly valued property, not a position that will endear him to the Tory right. Cable was a strong advocate for the LibDems manifesto promise (which didn’t make it into the Coalition Agreement) to introduce a Mansion Tax.
Last weekend Eric Pickles joined the debate (or bitter in-fighting, whichever you prefer),
arguing that the 50% tax band was only a temporary measure to reduce the deficit and lambasting the Mansion Tax idea: “It would be a very big mistake to start imposing
taxation on the back of changes in property values, particularly with big regional variations”….”People will suddenly find themselves in a mansion and they hadn’t realised it was a mansion. If it is only going to be mansions, the kind of thing you and I would regard as a mansion, it ain’t going to raise very much.” But he also makes clear he is against any increase in taxes on ‘the middle class’. As he is also against taxes for the rich, that doesn’t leave many options other than more cuts.
The LibDems’ original proposal for a 0.5% annual Mansion Tax on properties valued at £1 million or more was quickly revised when they realised how many people in LibDem target seats in London and the south east already owned homes that were over the threshold. Their revised proposal – a 1% annual tax on homes over £2 million – hit far fewer people and attracted more support – including from David Miliband during the Labour leadership election. The tax was estimated to raise £1.7 bn a year and Miliband claimed it would avoid the need to make savings in the housing benefit budget.
Taxing wealth, property and land has been a shibboleth for many in the Labour Party over
the years. The Labour Land Campaign has argued long and hard for the introduction of a Land Value Tax saying, in principle, that land is a finite resource, that increases in value are created by the society as a whole not the individual landowner, and that the community as a whole should benefit.
An excellent pamphlet by Toby Lloyd published by Compass in 2009 called ‘Don’t bet the house on it’ looked at the ways major reform of property taxation could help tackle our dysfunctional housing market and the crisis in housing supply. He detailed the advantages of introducing a LVT, making possible a total reform of the complex array of property-related taxation in this country.
Whether Labour’s housing policy review will venture into this territory will have to be seen. It would not be good if the LibDems managed to push the Coalition into adopting a Mansion Tax or any other additional property tax as part of a deal over removing the 50% tax band but Labour had not even got round to considering the matter. The argument about Mansion Tax could raise some fundamental issues about the housing and land markets that all parties have dodged for many years. Even if the Tories don’t like it, there may even prove to be a progressive majority in favour of a big reform.
The more I hear from MPs who fiddled their expenses but were allowed just to write a cheque to pay them back, now denouncing people who stole chewing gum or bottled water or were given a pair of shorts during the riots, the more I think they have lost control of their ethics.
An excellent piece in the Guardian today by Vera Baird (Riots sentencing: a sinister attempt to upend the judicial process) describes how firmly the government’s hand is on the tiller of the rash of extreme punishments, aiming to deliver Cameron’s edict that everyone involved in the riots should expect to go to jail, no matter how trivial their offence. Using historical precedents – for example, during the miners’ strike it was very difficult to get fair acquittals for strikers at the magistrates’ court – she shows how easy it is to lose all judgement: anger is not a good servant of justice.
The government-inspired hysteria around sentencing is reverberating around many councils as well. There was a rush of council leaders trying to look tougher than the rest, although they were all beaten to it by Wandsworth, a council which has never held tenants in high regard (or indeed wanted them in the borough at all), who claimed that a tenant whose son had been caught up in the riot “will today (Friday) be served with an eviction notice”. Nearly Legal website notes that Wandsworth’s new leader Ravi Govindia’s rush to make a name for himself was not all that it seemed. First, the tenant’s son has not been convicted of anything, and secondly, the alleged incident was not in the location of the tenant’s flat, so that any attempted repossession on the grounds of nuisance would struggle.
And then the Notice seems to have not been a Notice of Seeking Possession, let alone an ‘eviction notice’ but a warning letter. The tenant concerned even got quite a good hearing from the normally prejudicial Daily Mail. NL wryly commented: “If even the Daily Mail is having second thoughts, Ravi Govindia clearly runs the risk of looking, well, pretty damn stupid in such a desperate act of witless publicity seeking.”
Mary Riddell, writing in the equally unlikely Telegraph, commented: “Threatening to evict a charity worker and her eight-year-old daughter is an act of political spite. Had this mother, whose “crime” is that her 18 year-old son is charged with violent disorder, given birth to a mass murderer, she would not be treated in such a fashion.”
Wandsworth are now looking like fools and so are the Labour councils now caught in the slipstream. They should reconsider their precipitate action and come to their senses.
There are 2 big events for LHG in September.
London Labour Housing Group
LLHG will hold its first AGM on Monday 12 September at the House of Commons. The guest speaker will be Jon Cruddas MP who will lead a discussion on London housing policy for the mayoral election and the Labour Party’s national housing policy review.
The meeting is open to members of LHG living in London. Labour Party members can sign up to join LHG at any time, including on the night. For membership information, go to: http://www.labourhousing.co.uk/join-lhg
We need to know numbers in advance so if you are interested in coming, please email Steve Hilditch at [email protected]
LHG at Labour Party Conference.
For those attending Labour Conference in Liverpool, below is the information for LHG’s fringe meeting.
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Labour Party Conference 2011 Fringe Meeting Labour Housing Group with SERA and the Co-op Party Homes For The Future – reviewing possibilities Sunday 25th September 2011 –– 6.00pm – 8.00pm Riverside Balcony, ACC BT Convention Centre Chair Jacky Peacock OBE, Vice Chair LHG Speakers: Leonie Cooper, SERA Huw Lewis, Welsh Admission is FREE and REFRESHMENTS are provided
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Maybe it’s understandable that people want to lash out after the appalling behaviour of those involved in looting and violence during the riots last week. But there is also a risk of a dangerous authoritarian response. This not only includes proposed changes to the nature of policing that have always been resisted before – bringing in the army, rubber bullets, water cannon and public whipping of members of the underclass just in case they were rioters (sorry I made the last one up) – but also wider and wider forms of punishment such as removing benefits from perpetrators.
Suddenly on Thursday the debate focused on council tenants, as Tony discussed in his post on Red Brick, and the issue is leading the news today. Councils of all political persuasions knee-jerked in favour of evicting perpetrators who are or live with council tenants, and Wandsworth appears to have been the first to issue a notice of seeking possession. Mr Bandwagon himself, Grant Shapps, was quickly on to it, saying if necessary we could have new laws by the Autumn if the existing power isn’t strong enough. In his article in Inside Housing Shapps says: ‘As things currently stand, whilst thuggish behaviour against neighbours or in the immediate vicinity of their home provides a ground for evicting a tenant, looting or other criminal activity by tenants further from their homes can’t usually be taken into account. People who commit anti-social behaviour should feel the consequences regardless of whether their actions are taken within the immediate vicinity of their home or further afield.”
And Mr Bullingdon (did he or didn’t he take drugs and smash places up, I can’t remember?) David Cameron joined in, saying council tenants were subsidised (they aren’t) so they have additional responsibilities to behave. Branding a whole class of people, not for the first time, he said: “I think for too long we have taken too soft an attitude to people who loot and pillage their own community. If you do that you should lose your right to housing at a subsidised rate“.
Simplistic solutions? Bullingdon boys don’t even which end of the broom is up.
The existing law indeed may not give Shapps and Cameron what they want, as the always excellent Nearly Legal website briefed. To get a possession order the landlord will
have to demonstrate that nuisance was caused or an indictable offence committed
‘in the locality’. It is a discretionary ground for possession so the courts would decide on the merits of the case.
In my view the criminal justice system exists to assess evidence and context and impose sentences on those found guilty. The question we have to ask is why the crime of looting a High Street should be punished by removal of housing, but only if the perpetrator is a council tenant? The riots have nothing specifically to do with housing or council estates. Why aren’t we debating removing NHS benefits or free school meals? Or parking permits or driving licences? Or tax relief for pension contributions? Or access to higher education? Or child benefit?
Housing associations seem to have reacted much more sensibly than some councils on this one. Peabody’s Stephen Howlett, said he thought courts were likely to find eviction of tenants caught up in the riots disproportionate: “We want the strongest action to be taken against those involved, but our preference is for the criminal justice system to be the
focus.” The measures risked simply moving the problem to another area, or pushing tenants further into poverty: “These people have to live somewhere, so if they are evicted you risk just exporting the problem.” He had talked to a mother on the Pembury estate in Hackney who was was “terrified that she and her younger child would be made homeless as a result of her 17-year-old who she could not keep under control“. He added: “This is not simple. We have to be very careful.”
The only reason tenure-based punishment has gained traction amongst politicians and some parts of the media is that it reflects pre-existing prejudice that council tenant = underclass = rioter. It is part and parcel of the scapegoating and stereotyping of social tenants in general and council tenants in particular. It often seems to be the case that council tenants are singled out for extra punishment or additional requirements to behave in a particular way. Eviction for anti-social behaviour – not applied to other tenures, not
even to RTB lessees or their private tenants -.was only an acceptable policy because it involved ASB in the dwelling or the locality, that is the place where the tenancy existed, but it is now proving to be the thin end of the wedge.
There is no information that council tenants were disproportionally involved in the riots, so far this is a knee-jerk reaction not based on evidence. From what I’ve seen so far, some were tenants and some weren’t. Tottenham for example is a genuine mixed tenure community with both middle class and working class home ownership and private renting and housing association renting as well as council housing, from which rioters could have been drawn. It would be ludicrous to suggest owner occupied households containing a perpetrator should be foreclosed or lose their exemption to capital gains tax on their properties.
Fortunately Ed Miliband has been taking a more considered approach. I agree with him when he says: “These issues cannot be laid at the door of a single cause or a single Government. The causes are complex. Simplistic solutions will not provide the answer. We can tackle the solutions only by hearing from our communities…… They want us to go out and listen to them in thinking about the solutions that are necessary. Before any of us say we know all the answers or have simple solutions, we should all do so.”
Categories
Wasted assets?
Monimbo
Eric Pickles’ latest burst of ‘localism’ is his plan to force councils (and other public bodies) to publish a public register of their assets. Like the requirement to publish minute details of expenditure, this will encourage the press and others to try to catch councils out. They’ll try to find things they don’t know they own or (in the views of the press) shouldn’t own.
For example, already mention has been made of county councils owning farmland, as if his were a horrendous crime. Yet as Steve mentioned in his bucolic Northumberland post, tnanted farmland is profitable and a perfectly reasonable asset to hold.
Yet Andrew Boff, Conservative housing spokesperson in the GLA, says anyone looking at the land owned by public bodies will be shocked. He must be of a sensitive disposition.
I looked at the public assets shown on the DCLG’s map for an area I know well. Surprise, surprise: the council owns several parks and open spaces, a school or two, a library and – yes, shock horror – a house!
The DCLG register is just a trial, apparently. Before being opened to public scrutiny, the real asset registers will have to be consolidated from different records, checked for veracity, put in a central system (standardised across England?) and then kept up to date.
Just think about the implications for housing alone – a council’s (say) 20,000 houses
might well be digitally mapped, but will they be on the same database as (say) the schools? Assets change constantly – for example, as houses are sold through the right to buy. If empty assets have to be shown, will the system have to show every short-term void? In the case of council housing, the cost of doing all this or harmonising databases will presumably fall on the housing revenue account – in other words, tenants will pay from their rents.
Now you could argue that this is all no more than good practice in the digital age, and the more transparent these things are the better. Both are good arguments. But I don’t think
they are foremost in Pickles’ mind. I think he wants to imply that these assets – or a good proportion of them – are being poorly managed or kept empty at the taxpayer’s expense. Then I think he wants another smokescreen for insufficient houses being built.
Finally, if he or his spies in the Daily Mail can find a few wasting assets, he’ll no doubt feel vindicated and might even manage to get a site or two sold on to private builders. Don’t hold your breath though, he’ll be happy if he gets the odd example of incompetence to ‘justify’ the whole bureaucratic exercise.
There are some similarities between what has happened in Tottenham over the past few days and the riot of 1985. Both were triggered by a death during a police operation and a family demanding answers about what happened, followed by a march on Tottenham Police station and people feeling ignored and disrespected. Then, crowds gathered on Broadwater Farm estate which became the venue for the subsequent riot. The riot had nothing to do with the estate, it was about policing, and the location could equally have been Tottenham High Road then as now. But the pressure cooker exploded and the appalling, and I believe still unsolved, mob murder of PC Blakelock cemented the notoriety of the estate.
Talking our way through hundreds of riot police, three of us opened the Broadwater farm Neighbourhood Office at 7am the following morning, dealing with many terrified people.
Teams of council staff arrived spontaneously and began the clean up. Shops and cars had been burned out but there was remarkably little damage to the residential parts of the estate – extraordinarily, the glaziers were hardly needed – although the impact on residents’ morale was palpable.
Local politicians and neighbourhood staff were outstanding in the aftermath, and especially Bernie Grant, who showed enormous courage in the face of a despicable media campaign of vilification. He devoted many years of his life afterwards to making the Farm, and the wider Tottenham area, good places to live and strong communities. He eventually got the relationship between the community and the police onto a new footing.
Everything that has been said about the criminality of the current riots, the appalling firesetting and looting, is fair comment. There are a large number of people, many very
young, who have done very bad things and they should be arrested for them as soon as they are identified. It hurts, but we have to understand that many of the rioters have done this to their own communities; it is not good enough to say it was all done by people from somewhere else.
It will take a long time for communities to recover, but there were signs all over the news today of councils responding magnificently and communities pulling together and supporting each other. I have been struck by the many interviews with community activists and leaders who are stunningly articulate about what is happening in their areas, why things have been going wrong, and what needs to be done. They give the lie to the
many derogatory things that are said about working class areas. In many cases they are already the Big Society but without the resources and wherewithal to withstand the tsunami of post-recession policies that have caused hope and aspiration to evaporate.
A twin track approach is needed. Obviously the police response has to be better and the community deserves to be better protected. Cuts to police numbers should be withdrawn. There will be many operational lessons to be learned, especially when so many communities come under attack at the same time. What is so different from 1985 is the speed with which the rioting spread through so many different areas across London and further. The blackberry phenomenon needs to be understood for the future, the police seemed clueless in the face of it.
But those that can only condemn and talk of clampdowns and state retribution are making a big mistake. Even Mrs Thatcher sent out Michael Heseltine to find out what was happening in Liverpool after the Toxteth riots. Boris Johnson hasn’t got a clue. His one
dimensional response, repeated by David Cameron, about ‘sheer criminality’ is just not good enough, and Ken Livingstone is much more sure-footed and grounded in reality when big issues like this arise.
If it has no other dimension than criminality, if it has nothing to do with economic and social conditions, and policing, why has it happened now? Is it completely unrelated to the closure of youth centres, the removal of EMA, rising youth unemployment, and rising numbers of young people being stopped and searched on the streets, which they see as harassment and disrespect? If poor communities are constantly accused (even by some Labour politicians) of fecklessness, worthlessness (to the point of being told they shouldn’t have children if they can’t afford them) and scrounging, and a feeling of hopelessness is added by the unfair and unequal impact of the recession, is it a surprise that the outcome is a destructive form of alienation that eventually expresses itself in violence?
If bankers ruin the global economy then earn millions in new bonuses, if politicians and policemen are perceived to be on the make (even if most aren’t), if a media empire indulges in criminality as a matter of routine, if we only measure worth in material possessions, we should be traumatised but not astonished when youth also display heartless avarice and grab what they can. Maybe Laurie Penny is right when she wrote in her blog last night that “people riot because it makes them feel powerful, if only for a night.”
For the future, we should take our lead from the dignified comments of the furniture store owner, distraught at the loss of his building, which had served the local community for 150 years, who was right to condemn but also had the perspicacity to ask why, what is it about our society that can make such things possible?