London was like a war zone for two days from 6th August. Violence erupted in eastern part of London reportedly affecting Bengali-inhabited areas (Whitechapel) but because of their vigilance, nothing untoward occurred. It has been a relief to know that no Bangladeshi–born persons were involved in the looting or riots.
London remained tense but relatively calm on the fourth day as the presence of 16,000 police, some from Wales, and local vigilantes prevented a repeat of the fiery chaos of 8th August night. Meanwhile, the violence moved on to Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham and the Midlands. Detectives in Birmingham arrested a man on suspicion of murder after three Pakistani-born brothers were knocked down and killed, reportedly while trying to protect their community from looters.
On 9th August, the prime minister, David Cameron returning from holiday in Italy, opened the possibility that police would use water cannons or rubber bullets. Police said more than 1300 people had been arrested since the violence began on 6th August over a killing by police of a young ethnic man in Tottenham, northern area of London.. More arrests are to be made on the basis of CCTV.
Magistrates’ courts in London were forced to sit through the night of 9th August as they attempted to deal with a huge influx of defendants. In other areas of London, groups organised into patrols, often along ethnic lines. ''The Met's not here so tough luck, we'll take the law into our own hands,'' a local man, Ajit Singh, told the BBC.
"When we see children as young as 13 looting and laughing, when we see the disgusting sight of an injured young man with people pretending to help him while they are robbing him, it is clear that there are things that are badly wrong in our society," Prime Minister Cameron said while speaking at a special session of the parliament.
The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, put the emphasis on bad parenting rather than the economic situation. ''We need to look at the underlying causes for the violence. The causes are not simple, they're complex,'' he told the BBC.
Who are the looters?
They were, some said, the alienated poor, those without hope, lashing out in rage and despair. But there are many who do not belong to the underclass as the accused appearing in court in London included university students, a wealthy businessman's daughter, and a boy of 11.
Among the accused was Laura Johnson, 19, daughter of a successful company director. On 10th August, at Highbury, she was accused of looting the Curry’s superstore, in Charlton, of electrical goods worth £5000 ($7800). Another defendant was an 11-year-old child. He admitted looting a store in his home town of Romford, Essex. He was, it transpired, already on a ''referral order'' for another, unrelated offence.
There was Richard Myles-Palmer, with a foot-long list of convictions, found wheeling a shopping trolley full of stolen power-tools through south London. He was referred to the Crown Court for sentence. The maximum penalty available at Highbury was six months. But most cases on 10th August were referred to courts that can send you to prison for 10 years.
Student Samon Adesina, 23, is said to have been one of the looters carrying a flatscreen television away from Surrey Quays shopping centre. He was remanded in custody for a week and will miss his final exam in electrical engineering at an unspecified university, Tower Bridge Magistrates Court heard.
At schools, they do not listen to their teachers and abide by any discipline. Anyone who reproaches a child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence. From an early stage, many children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.
John Stuart Mill wrote in his great 1859 Essay on Liberty: “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.” Yet every day up and down the land, this vital principle of civilised societies is breached with impunity. A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the “feral children” on his patch — another way of describing the same reality.
Compared with its European peer group, Britain is off the charts on many measures of social dysfunction. Its rate of teenage pregnancy is almost three times the average for the other large advanced economies in Western Europe - Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. According to the European Commission, Britain has the highest number of violent crimes per capita in Western Europe, and far more than its peer group of large economies. Britain was the most violent nation in Western Europe. So this violence goes much deeper than the spending cuts made by the coalition government.
So what are the underlying causes? The breakdown of families, the existence of single motherhood, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals with biological parents are a rarity-- have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass. Where are the parents of the young men in hoodies who have been looting stores and throwing bottles at ambulances in front of TV cameras?
In many ways, the violence on the streets of British cities is no more than a new variation on an old theme. How long have English and Scottish football fans been feared around Europe for the violence they brought to games? This pot has been simmering for a long time. The coalition government has since ground the budget deficit down from 10.4 per cent of GDP to about 8.3 per cent this financial year, but the stress of such necessary discipline is showing.
Income inequality and social division in Britain are real and unhealthy. There will always be a substantial minority of people in Western societies who don't want to work, and are also not very employable as a result. The failure to address the decades of social inequality is one of the causes of youth’s frustration. British leaders and their overtly free market approach have led to this inequality- not just welfare dependency. These youths need to believe they can transcend the social and economic morass in which they live. Watching the rich get richer only inflames the issue.
Blame game
The blame game over the riots has begun. Although the leader of the opposition Ed Miliband has not sought to make political capital out of the riots, many Labour MPs blame the Conservative prime minister for public spending cuts which led to increased unemployment among young people. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, criticised the police response. Returning from holiday in the US, Johnson said they should have used greater force and made more arrests. He was worried over security issues over next year Olympic Games in London.
''You've got to ask yourself, could the police have gone in harder, could there have been a more significant display of intolerance by society and the police about what was going on,'' Mr Johnson told BBC Radio. The deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Steve Kavanagh, defended the force for relying on traditional measures and said police numbers in London would be maintained for as long as necessary.
When ministers were taking credit for restoring calm in London, Sir Hugh Orde, head of the Association of Chief Police officers, said that police forces quickly learnt that it was not a law and order problem but looting and violence. Accordingly they reacted to the situation dismissing the politicians’ role in increasing police numbers to confront the violence. He added that the robust policing tactics used by them were devised by police without any political interference.
Finally, analysts say unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose strict penalties for lack of discipline in schools or other forms of violence which are today entirely lacking, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters, for whom their monstrous excesses were only “a great fire, man”.
Barrister Harun ur Rashid, former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN, Geneva.