再A year after the riots, August 4th 2012 P45 英国暴動から一年経過

f:id:nprtheeconomistworld:20191001070319j:plain


再A year after the riots, August 4th 2012 P45 英国暴動から一年経過

 

One of the worst incidents of last year's riots took place at the Bartons Arms, an ornate Victorian pub in the Aston district of Birmingham. Criminals set it alight, then shot at police officers on the ground and helicopter;six people have been jailed for to up to 30 years for the ambush. But, with the the help of its punters, the pub soon opened again. A scorch mark on the bar is the only reminder of the carnage. Virtually the only trace in central Birmingham is a marketing ploy. After the windows of Cyber Candy, a sweet shop, were smashed, its hoardings were daubed with the words ゛Keep Calm and Candy on゛. The slogan now adorns balloons in the window. The unrest ゛feels a little bit like a dream,゛says Casey Rain, a local musician who chronicled the tumult on his blog. ゛Once all the damage was cleaned up, people just tried to forget about it.゛ The riots that began in London on August 6th last year, soon spreading to Birmingham and other cities, seemed at the time to be an outbreak of mass lunacy. Now those few anarchic days feel instead like a mass hallucination. The closest analogy in recent history may be with the death of Princess Diana. Like the fevered week of mourning in 1997, the riots seemed set to be epoch-making;yet, a year on, so slight has the impact on politics and policy been that it almost seems as if they never happened at all. That is not true, of course, for those since caught. At the last count 3,051 people had appeared in court (out of up to 15,000 thought to have been involved) and 1,968 had been convicted, mostly for burglary, theft or public disorder. The sentences, some for trivial-seeming crimes such as stealing groceries, have been much harsher than normal. A desire to make examples of the miscreants has trumped doubts about the value of incarceration. Court records ane surveys provide a fairly clear profile of the rioters. With a few well-published exceptions, they were mostly male, young and from poor areas. Many were ゛known to the police゛(though such people are also easier to catch). Gangs were not a big factor - except by suspending hostilities to make common mayhem. The rioters' motives were varied, ranging from hatred of the police to thrillseeking and opportumistic theft. They were angry and greedy;bored and disaffected;focused looters and regretful copycats. Where the arsonists were more successful, such as Tottenham, in north London, scars remain. It was here that the trouble began, when a protest against the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, a local man, spilled into violence. The job centre has reopened, the Post Office has moved up the high street, but several premises that were burned down are yet to be rebuilt. David Lammy, Tottenham's MP - and author of a wise book about the riots - worries that firms are going to the wall because, after a long wait for compensation, they now face punitive rises in their insurance premiums. Tottenham is getting a dollop of regeneration cash to rebuild and improve its infrastructure. Yet beyond the sentences and the sticking plasters, the legacy of the riots has been slight - astonishingly so, considering how apocalyptic they seemed. Nick Pearce, oe the Institute for Public Policy Research, speculates that previous bouts of widespread rioting, such as in 1981, demanded a response because they were fuelled by racial grievances. This time it has been easier to dismiss the violence as mindless criminality. There are other reasons for the oddly shallow impact. According to one analysis, the disadvantaged urban youngster, with rocky home life and a shoddy education, too often ゛slips into the ranks of the permanent jobless...unemployable゛. That is from an inquiry into the Watts riots in Los Angles in 1965: another country and era, yet the same prescription - better education, more jobs, more sensitive policing - were repeated in the official report on last year's riots. England's violence merely highlighted the existance of a large, heedless urban underclass. Because the underlying issues are old and well-known, the government has generally been able to say that it is dealing with them already, citing its ongoing education and welfare reform.