I’ve been meaning to write for days about the shit going down at home. I’m in Glasgow, stripping wallpaper, playing catch-up with my Weegie friends, nursing a diabolical wheezy cough and limping around on my accursed toe…but what has been happening back home in London has saddened, confused and angered me in equal part.
I love my home. The twenty years I was away, I pined. On working days, I now squeeze into the 7.49 from Bromley South to Victoria, more often than not nursing a hangover of gargantuan proportions and quietly lusting after the fellow commuter with the impossibly spikey hair…but when I near the centre of town, even on the dullest day, I smile with relief as the clouds part and an imaginary sun hits the Gherkin. Thames water flows in my veins. I feel a sense of calm and belonging that I normally reserve for my children and my easy-soul-mate friends. I can’t help but grin like a loon when I catch the millennium wheel from the corner of my eye. Disney bluebirds sing around my head and I attempt to swat them away with a metro. This is normal behaviour back home, I am assured.
It is incomprehensible that I am not there to defend my love, but probably better that I am far away as proximity would hurt more. It always does.
There is never an easy explanation for the actions of others – and some just aren’t interested in explanations, won’t address the consequences of *their* actions. The accused do not fit our Daily-Mail-worst-side-expectations. A primary school mentor. A life guard. A charity worker. The daughter of a millionaire sat amongst the young unemployed hoodie-wearing accused. As an avowed lefty, I know that youth unemployment is unacceptably high, not just in the most deprived boroughs of my home town,but in other areas of the UK.. Social mobility is at an all-time low. Getting rid of EMA and hiking university fees makes it substantially more difficult for young people to leave poorer areas, to ‘get-on’. Services helping poorer parents are slashed. Breakfast and after school clubs obliterated, making it even more difficult for parents to work, easier for even primary children to be latch-key kids or roam the streets. An esteemed red Clydesider once said – if you look at a tower block, behind every lit window is a child – and that child might be an Olympic show jumper, a formula one racing driver, find a cure for cancer. The real poverty is that we will never find out, because those children are limited. It is too difficult to break out. Far easier to take what you want rather than work for it.
Discussing the riots with my scared 13 year old son, I volunteered it was better to work for something, that you had pride in your achievements and whilst no-one really *needs* £150 trainers, advertising and contemporaries buy into the lie that a man is the sum of his acquired belongings. We herald consumerism and the acquisition of stuff, as if whoever dies with the most stuff somehow wins. When you’re dead, you’re still dead! Murdo offered a third way; he is an inventive and imaginative child. He cites *not* working hard, not looting but getting your mum to buy you Microsoft points because you’ve done well at school. :)That’s really the same as trying hard and being rewarded. Silly sausage.
Of course, it doesn’t always work like that. You try hard – you keep trying, you try everything your resources allow and you still get shat on.
I can agree, to an *extent* on the effects of family breakdown – that is not to say that families are kept together by insulting little tax incentives, or that there are not brilliant families with smashing, successful kids headed by resourceful, talented, stunningly beautiful single parents (she boasts…) but after break-ups there is invariably a reduction in the family finances and that is matched by the poverty of an absence of decent male role models in the family. Fathers are replaced by the hard-men in the community and gangs become your blood, as your exhausted mother works all the hours she can at minimum wage to put food on the table. Where are the role models for young men? Especially for young black men? Let’s tackle the ‘tricky question’ of race…but not by incorrectly stating this is solely a race issue. The protests at the killing of Mark Duggan were a community speaking out against the murder of an armed man, who felt the need to carry a firearm for protection - what followed was opportunistic and unrelated to race. Those with the political and financial power are white and wear tailored suits. Most Black celebrities are sports stars (‘I hear their bones are lighter – that’s why ‘they’ can run quicker…’ *) or entertainers (‘dance for Massah!’** ) token politicians, token high-ranking policemen, token guardsmen,.. far easier to look to the ‘successful’ neighbourhood yardie with the flash car, the pretty compliant girlfriend, the ‘respect’ that is earned through fear , rather than the respect earned through being a community leader, a teacher, standing up for yourself quietly and firmly, using words rather than knives.
What we lack as a society is opportunity for those who do want to stand up and be counted as useful, productive law-abiding members of society and we lack kindness. Kindness costs very little. It believes in the basic good of humanity. We can see it, if we look carefully, in the ‘post-its’ of support on the boarded up shop-fronts in Peckham, Tottenham, Lewisham, Salford, Birmingham…We see it in mourning the death of three innocent young men in Birmingham. We see it after the horse has bolted into Currys and helped itself to an I-pad. We don’t see it when we cross the road because a couple of young black kids are walking towards us with their hoods pulled up. We don’t see it when we ignore smaller scale violence in our communities because we are scared. It isn’t there when you step over someone lying on the street because you think they’re drunk. When we lie and say we already have this week’s big issue, or just look through its seller. It is absent when families are written off and condemned for private circumstances.
If we lack kindness, more importantly, we lack the politicisation of young people. We lack direction and legitimate protest. Do we think the state would allow Whitehall to burn in the way that hundreds of small businesses burned in the last week? That underlines the importance that those with political power afford to those without. The custodial sentences already handed down to rioters (10 – 16 weeks) do not match those handed out in the example-set sentences in the student riots earlier this year. Swing off the cenotaph = 16 months. Nick a bunch of stuff and throw petrol bombs at the police – 10 weeks. Do te police feel valued? Attack their pensions, sack a third, freeze their wages and expect them to be highly motivated to do their job, which is essentially protecting the public. All of us.
London doesn’t belong to the rich. It never did. Equally it doesn’t belong to the drug-lords and self-styled hard men gangsters. It belongs to me. And you. It belongs to the riot-wombles, armed with dustpans and brushes rather than knives and guns. It belongs to the Sikhs defending their temple. To the Turkish community defending their businesses – to the little west- Indian woman facing down the mob & the 80-odd people linking arms to defend their street against looters moving into residential areas. To those giving food and blankets to people housed in community centres who were burned-out by the selfish. To kids sitting in libraries desperately fighting the odds to be as good as their incredible potential allows. To the office workers pedalling haltingly across box junctions on Boris-bikes and to the wheel-chair users on the bow-down buses. London proudly belongs to representatives of every single nation on earth and especially to the kind at heart who will not be feared by the actions of a minority, who will still believe in the beauty of the human spirit and who share what they have rather than taking what isn’t theirs.
*= bollocks.
**= i didn't say that.
*= bollocks.
**= i didn't say that.
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