The UK riots: the psychology of looting. The first day after London started burning, I spoke to Claire Fox, radical leftwinger and resident of Wood Green.
On Sunday morning, apparently, people had been not just looting H&M, but trying things on first. By Monday night, Debenhams in Clapham Junction was empty, and in a cheeky touch, the streets were thronging with people carrying Debenhams bags. Four hours before, I had still thought this was just a north London thing. Fox said the riots seemed nihilistic, they didn't seem to be politically motivated, nor did they have any sense of community or social solidarity. This was inarguable. UK riots: Egyptians swap views online over roots of unrest. Egyptians use their mobiles to record celebrations in Tahrir Square, Cairo, after the toppling of Mubarak this year.
Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images In Egypt, where burning buildings and running street battles between police and civilians have become a familiar sight this year, reaction to the violence in Britain has been sharply divided. On social media sites Egyptians started intense debates over the underlying causes of events in London and asked whether any links could be drawn between the unrest in England and their own dramatic political upheaval. "Many people here seem to see the riots as a revolution of sorts, but anyone expressing that sentiment online quickly gets chastised by Egyptian-Brits or Arab-Brits who tell them that it's anything but," said Mohamed el-Dahshan, a writer and economist. Mosa'ab Elshamy, tweeted in frustration at those likening the British riots to the Arab Spring.
But he thought some of the root causes could be similar. 'Banker puppet govt + police brutality + betrayed youth = London riots' London's (Tottenham Riot): Lee Jasper (Race Equality Campaigner) Joseph Stiglitz on economy and riots (09Aug11) Darcus Howe BBC News Interview On Riots
Harriet Harperson vs Michael Gove on rioting and looting (08Aug11) Riots in London: London burns. London riots: police debate how far they should go to regain control. The biggest outbreak of rioting to hit Britain in living memory has led to debates within the police service about how far forces should go to regain control of the streets.
Pictures of police officers standing and watching as youths smashed and looted shops have puzzled the public. But Steven Kavanagh, the Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner, denied those images were a sign of the force being soft on rioters: "The Met is not namby pamby," he told the Guardian. He added: "The face of policing has changed, 25-30 years ago it would have been a different response, we'd have gone to baton rounds and water cannon straight away. Now we are more measured.
" If the rioting was a surprise, people weren't looking. It's usual practice when someone is killed that their personal details are not made public until the next of kin has been informed.
Mark Duggan's family saw in headlines that he had been killed as a result of a "terrifying shoot-out". Why such a difference in treatment? I was one of those who went to Tottenham police station on Saturday, with members of his family, to get an official acknowledgement that Mark had been killed. No official confirmation had been given to the family.
As a community we were outraged they were being treated with such disregard by both the Met and the IPCC. Urban riots: Thirty years after Brixton. There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored. Mark Duggan did not shoot at police, says IPCC. Mark Duggan, whose shooting by police sparked London's riots, did not fire a shot at police officers before they killed him, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said on Tuesday.
Releasing the initial findings of ballistics tests, the police watchdog said a CO19 firearms officer fired two bullets, and that a bullet that lodged in a police radio was "consistent with being fired from a police gun". One theory, not confirmed by the IPCC, is that the bullet became lodged in the radio from a ricochet or after passing through Duggan. Duggan, 29, was killed last Thursday in Tottenham, north London, after armed officers stopped the minicab in which he was travelling. The IPCC said Duggan was carrying a loaded gun, but it had no evidence that the weapon had been fired. It said tests were continuing. Nothing 'mindless' about rioters. Civil disturbances never have a single, simple meaning.
When the Bastille was being stormed the thieves of Paris doubtless took advantage of the mayhem to rob houses and waylay unlucky revolutionaries. Sometimes the thieves were revolutionaries. Sometimes the revolutionaries were thieves. And it is reckless to start making confident claims about events that are spread across the country and that have many different elements. In Britain over the past few days there have been clashes between the police and young people. We can dispense with some mistakes, though. More broadly, any breakdown of civil order is inescapably political. The fierce conflict remains ahead The profusion of images that modern technology generates makes it even more difficult to impose a single meaning on a complex event.
There are signs too that technology is allowing individuals to intervene in the process by which meaning is assigned to social events. Panic on the streets of London. I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn.
The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Fullsize -