Britain Feature: So Why is London Burning? (Saunders)
Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 8:49
Photo: Paul McDiarmid (Getty)These are not race riots: Though they began, on Saturday afternoon, with a small protest in Tottenham, north London, over the shooting of a dark-skinned man by police under suspicious circumstances, they quickly became a much wider and less purposeful explosion of youth criminality.
Tottenham was the site of the terrible Broadwater Farm riot of 1985, which also began with a protest over a police shooting --- but that was another London, deeply divided along racial lines, with a furious and socially excluded Caribbean community battling an all-white and explicitly racist police force. This week, by contrast, both the rioters and the police are multicoloured.
Nor are these explicitly political riots: There is no message, no motive, no cause, no slogan. Efforts by some opposition politicians to link these events to Prime Minister David Cameron’s spending cuts have been met with incredulity in the affected neighbourhoods, where those cuts have not yet had any municipal effect.
But this is clearly an event with far deeper causes than simple random hooliganism.