Northern Ireland and Clapham Junction: a comparison

By Mark Rowney / @markrowney

When I was about 17, I answered the doorbell. There was this kid from just down the road that I’d seen about and he asked me, “Do ewe like yer car mister? We can torch it fer ya, if ewe like?”.

It was a common racket. In order to attract the police, you torched a car to get the fire brigade out and the police would have to come out to protect them. You then could get your jollies and have a go at the RUC. Great fun! If you were that way inclined.

Of course it wouldn’t do to go around torching anyone’s car. So permission was sought from people in the local community who owned cars. That way they could claim on the car’s insurance for its being torched by criminal activity and were likely to get more than the car was actually worth. That night the kids had their riot and a few weeks later, the “concerned” resident had themselves an upgrade. Everyone was happy.

Of course riots in the 1990’s in Northern Ireland (or even the riots of a few weeks ago) weren’t really a joyous example of harmonious community relations, but the nature of them was very different to what happened around the corner from my house last night. Riots in Northern Ireland often (but not always) have a specific focus; the police. They were usually in demonstration against a specific event such as Drumcree, as well as being coupled with all the usual factors that you find in riots; disenfranchisement, social deprivation etc. However, it was rare for the rioters to specifically target local business. Looting didn’t really occur. For one thing, that bore the risk of being seen as “anti-social behaviour” for which the paramilitaries had serious punishments.

Last night just seemed like rage without direction. In Clapham Junction the rioters torched the fancy dress shop and looted Ladbrokes and Curry’s. It’s interesting that the trouble did not seriously spread just a few metres to the more salubrious Nortcote Road. There was no political targeting of the banks for example. It has been described as pure mindless criminality, without thought for who was being hurt.
And it was, but there is an important distinction between acts of mindless criminality and labelling the perpetrators as mindless criminals. They should be punished for what they have done, but they didn’t just spontaneously decide to go out and trash the place. There are deep seated motivations for their actions and my concern is that it seems that Cameron is already attempting to sweep the roots of the problems under the carpet by focussing on the symptom that is the criminality of what happened and not on the problems that motivated such criminality.

I wasn’t out on the streets last night talking to the individuals concerned. I’ve simply heard the same reports you have; the Sky News interview outside Curry’s in Clapham Junction and the BBC interview with the 2 girls drinking wine at 0930 this morning. I don’t know if quietly young people have been talking for some time about “doing something” and then something started to happen, or if it was more spontaneous than that. The problems that they cite will be predictable and importantly, local, even if the solutions aren’t; lack of jobs, poor relations with police and other authorities, an inability to “get out” because they can’t afford transport, boredom etc. I do find it a little disheartening to see some already try to focus on the one issue of single parent families.

Rioting, by its very nature, is a shock to the system. When things get this bad, government at all levels must reflect on what it is doing. It must ask itself, what could we be doing differently? Importantly it must talk to the people who were out there last night; we won’t catch all of them and even if we did, we won’t lock them up indefinitely. When all this settles down, it could flare up again if we don’t start to address the problems. And when that debate begins, we must ensure that we include those who may have been on the streets last night. My own token input; well there is one thing the kids last night and the kids in Eden village back home had in common: they had great fun rioting. If they had had something else to do…?

Oh and just for the record, I said no to the little scamp who knocked on my door.