David Cameron has denied the recent wave of riots were due to government cuts. In a speech on Monday, August 15th, he blamed declining moral standards, bad policing, bad parenting, schools, and the welfare system.
In response, Labour leader Ed Miliband attacked the government for resorting to “knee-jerk gimmicks” and said it should not blame police, parents, or the “so-called underclass”.
Mr Cameron said, “These riots were not about race: the perpetrators and the victims were white, black and Asian. These riots were not about government cuts: they were directed at high street stores, not Parliament. And these riots were not about poverty: that insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this. No, this was about behaviour, people showing indifference to right and wrong, people with a twisted moral code, people with a complete absence of self-restraint.”
Mr Miliband said, “We all bear a share of responsibility for the society we create: governments, Labour and Conservative; powerful elites in politics; business and the media; and all of us – me and you as well.”
Both leaders agreed that bankers, MPs, and the media were partly to blame for the riots.
“Moral decline and bad behaviour is not limited to a few of the poorest parts of our society,” said Mr Cameron. “In the banking crisis, with MPs’ expenses, in the phone hacking scandal, we have seen some of the worst cases of greed, irresponsibility, and entitlement.”
In his speech, the prime minister set out an ambitious programme to fix what he called Britain’s “broken society”.
“I don’t doubt that many of the rioters out last week have no father at home,” he said. “Within the lifetime of this Parliament we will turn around the lives of the120,000 most troubled families in the country.”
Schools also had a part to play in the “social fight-back”, he said. “If young people have left school without being able to read or write, why shouldn’t that school be held more directly accountable?”
He went on to suggest the introduction of elected police and crime commissioners as well as scrapping police paperwork. “For years we’ve had a police force suffocated by bureaucracy, officers spending the majority of their time filling in forms and stuck behind desks,” he said.
The Conservatives already attempted to introduce such American-style commissioners last May, but their plans were defeated in the House of Lords after the Lib Dems objected.
Mr Miliband called for a commission to look for the causes of the riots, a “genuine national conversation”.
“We need to understand the link between the problems in our society and the way our economy works. We need to ask what we can do about an economy where children don’t see enough of their parents because they are working 50, 60, even 70 hours a week,” he said.
Neither Mr Cameron nor Mr Miliband mentioned de-industrialisation as a possible cause of mass unemployment and the benefits culture. The term “chav”, which now refers to unemployed anti-social youth, is thought to have originated in the town of Chatham, once home to the Chatham Dockyards that built ships for the Royal Navy for over 400 years. The docks, which had been the scourge of Napoleon, closed in 1984 despite a recently built nuclear submarine refitting complex. Since then, Chatham and the towns around it have become known for multi-generational mass unemployment and anti-social behaviour.
Read on: Cameron criticised by police
Cameron criticised by police
Last week, Mr Cameron angered senior police officials with plans to consult with “supercop” Bill Bratton, a former police commissioner for Los Angeles and New York, who was awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2009, on how to deal with gangs.
“I am not sure I want to learn about gangs from an area of America that has 400 of them,” President of the Association of Chief Police Officers Hugh Orde told The Independent on Sunday.
“It seems to me, if you’ve got 400 gangs, then you’re not being very effective,” he said.
Senior police and politicians have argued over who should take the credit for the “robust tactics” that brought order to UK streets after the worst sustained disturbances in the country since World War II. A total of 1,222 people have been arrested over violence, disorder, and looting.
During an emergency debate in Parliament, Mr Cameron said that police tactics used in the initial response to the riots “weren’t working”.
The prime minister said that the cautious approach taken by police in handling the rioters was being used as “an excuse by opportunist thugs in gangs”. Mr Cameron told Parliament that the police had admitted that they had miscalculated the riots, seeing them as civil disorder rather than crime.
“We sometimes are accused of excessive force and then we’re accused of not being forceful enough,” said Acting Metropolitan Police Commissioner Tim Godwin in response to Mr Cameron’s parliamentary address.
Talking on the BBC Newsnight programme, Orde emphasised that the tactics were “decided by chief officers and their staff”.
When asked why police tactics changed only after politicians returned from holiday, he said, “The fact that politicians chose to come back is an irrelevance in terms of the tactics which were by then developing. ... The more robust police tactics you saw were not a function of political interference, they were a function of the numbers being available to allow the chief constables to change their tactics to the numbers of staff they had.”
Controversy over race
Historian David Starkey caused an outcry after he suggested that the riots were inspired by black gangster culture, which had been adopted by a portion of white youths. Speaking on BBC2’s Newsnight, he said that “a substantial section of the chavs that you [author Owen Jones] wrote about have become black. The whites have become black.”
“A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England. That is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country.”
Such mannerisms were parodied by Sacha Baron Cohen’s massively popular Ali G character.
Speaking of Tottenham MP David Lammy, who is black, Dr Starkey said, “It is not skin colour, it is cultural. Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off, so you were listening to him on radio, you would think he was white.”
David Lammy responded by saying that Starkey’s comments were “dangerous and divisive”. BBC business correspondent Robert Peston said on Twitter, “David Starkey’s nasty ignorance is best ignored, not worthy of comment or debate – though I fear there will be a media feeding frenzy.” Other commentators called for Starkey’s TV career to end.
The historian was not without support, however. Author Toby Young wrote in the Telegraph that
“Starkey wasn’t talking about black culture in general, but, as he was anxious to point out, a ‘particular form’ of black culture, i.e. ’the violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture' associated with Jamaican gangs and American rap music.
“He was quite specifically condemning a sub-culture associated with a small minority of people of African-Caribbean heritage. (Admittedly, he could have made this clearer.) Rather than being racist, he was merely trotting out the conventional wisdom of the hour, namely, that gang culture is to blame for the riots.”
Mr Cameron also pointed to gang culture as a cause of the riots. “At the heart of all the violence sits the issue of the street gangs,“ he said. ”Territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent, they are mostly composed of young boys, mainly from dysfunctional homes. They earn money through crime, particularly drugs, and are bound together by an imposed loyalty to an authoritarian gang leader. They have blighted life on their estates with gang-on-gang murders and unprovoked attacks on innocent bystanders. In the past few days, there is some evidence that they have been behind the co-ordination of the attacks on the police and the looting that has followed.”
