History and Rioting (The Inevitable 'Riots' Blog Post): Part 2

Living in Interesting Times
"May you live in interesting times" runs the Chinese curse (allegedly). Those of us in the UK (and in many other countries to an even greater extent) are getting to know exactly what that means at the moment. Sometimes I wonder whether people can ever really experience the making of history (a complex theoretical issue which I won't go into) but up until about a fortnight ago I was wondering whether, if things in the UK went on as they were, whether we might be experiencing the making of an historical conundrum, the sort of thing that will give rise to endless exam questions in future decades and centuries, all boiling down essentially to one question: 'how the hell did that happen?'  I was taken back to this pondering in the letter by David Parker to the Guardian, linked to in Part 1 of these thoughts. 

My thinking went along these sorts of lines.  Imagine that we were historians working at some point in the future and read this narrative:  Once upon a time, there was a huge economic crisis caused by the irresponsible actions of the super-wealthy elite.  A government attempted to right the situation and in fact it was handling the situation reasonably effectively.  However, it had done other ill-advised things, such as getting involved in expensive and unpopular wars, and handled many other issues very badly and it, and especially its leader, were widely disliked.  So people believed that its economic record was very bad and it was overthrown and replaced by another ministry led by a shiny-faced young aristocrat who played well on his dour old opponent's failure to get within waving distance of charisma.  This new government, however, was based upon a very slender and tenuous control of the political core of the country.  Yet, to the surprise of many of those who had backed it, once in power it launched a series of repressive measures, taking rights and resources away from the people, especially the poor - reducing their ability to find work, to acquire education, to subsist in times of necessity, and many other things besides.  They were supported in this by other ministers who had hitherto based their status on advocating quite the opposite point of view.  And so far from doing anything to restrain the super-wealthy aristocracy, they even mooted the cutting of their taxes.  In the middle of all this, they decided to hold a marriage for a prince and princess at huge cost to the tax-payers.

If the next part of the narrative went 'and so it was that the people rose in revolution and herded the unpopular aristocracy and their government off to the guillotine', no one, I think, would be very surprised - whatever you might think of the rights and wrongs of political violence (to which, as you know, I am opposed).  Up until very recently the conundrum seemed to me to be why, in early twenty-first-century Britain, nothing happened at all.  People swallowed the myth of the deficit, and of the Labour Party's economic mishandling of some of the elements that produced the crisis (sure it made mistakes, but ones that most other governments were making at the same time; mistakes that only emerged with hindsight, and as we now know, re. Coulson, the NotW, etc., saying that you'd have done things differently with hindsight forgives all).  Peaceful protests were slapped down with heavy-handed policing.  Very minor disturbances (occupying Selfridges or wherever) were reported as terrible anarchist outrages, and people actually believed this.  A government with no popular mandate carried out extreme ideologically-driven slash and burn policies, some at least of which were not even in their manifesto, supported by a minority party that had gone to the electorate espousing entirely antithetical ideas.  And - so it seemed - got away with it, as people swallowed their nonsensical stories. The people seemed to have been lulled into a kind of political coma.  Why had people sat idly by as the last traces of a welfare state, created on a wave of popular idealism after a huge costly war, were dismantled around them? This seemed to be the making of a knotty historical problem - a really counter-intuitive development that bucked any attempt a historian might have made to predict what happened next.  Why, in comparative terms, did this happen in twenty-first-century democratic Britain, with an educated electorate and mass-communication, when similar actions had toppled governments and, indeed, heads in earlier autocratic regimes with largely illiterate populaces living in small-scale communities?  Interesting indeed.

Then the riots happened.  And of course it is too simple to say that it is all down to The Cuts, just as it is too simple to lump together all the actions in all the different towns and either say that they were all political or that they were all criminal.  But there is no getting away from the fact that there were no riots like this under thirteen years of Labour government (whatever the latter may not have done actively to ameliorate the situation it inherited) and indeed none since the last Conservative administration, particularly the last one to launch cuts and attacks on the public sphere like this.  To say 'ah, but it was just that all these problems were stoked up by labour and just happened to break out now' won't cut it.

There are issues of course that need to be teased apart, of which the following are just a few:

• The initial causes of the violence in north London
• Subsequent violence, looting and so on
• The role of gangs in the background to the riots and in the activities afterwards
• The specifics of the different communities in the towns involved

Now, even this very short list ought to make it clear that no catch-all explanation is going to work. It also brings out one feature of discussions in the past week that has really concerned me and that is the sheer poverty of vocabulary in British political discourse. We are given two choices: either we condemn, or we condone the violence. These events brought out, as such things are wont to, the best and worst in human beings. In the best, we saw the father of one of the boys pointlessly killed trying to defend their property speak with great compassion and humanity; in the worst we saw an already assaulted East Asian visiting student helped up, only to be cynically robbed of his possessions. Extreme events have a tendency to produce the best and the worst. Great heroism took place during the London Blitz; so did considerably less heroic actions. When I wrote a book about warfare I commented that battles, concentrations of extreme emotions, produce great acts of self-scrifice and heroism, and of cowardice and cruelty.

Yet, the BBC (at its very worst here) and other media appear to have gone down the same route as it did with the - as everyone can now surely see - massively-exaggerated cases of window-breaking etc during the anti-Cuts protests: 'But surely you, X, must condemn this violence?' 'Well, I think it's a complex issue that cannot be judged so simply...'  'Aha, so you condone this sort of violence!'  This simple binary choice won't suffice.  People did do many things that must very obviously be condemned; they did many other things that are - I would say - deeply regrettable, not least because they hurt their own community more than anyone else's, and they did things (like stealing ice-cream cones) that frankly I don't give a monkey's cuss about, one way or the other.  I would not have a problem with the trashing or looting of multi-national companies' property were it not  for the fact that the costs of such actions won't be borne by the directors and principal shareholders but by the shop-staff and other workers at the lowest level.  The problem with the vocabulary of condemnation, when applied in blanket form as - naturally - the government wants it applied, is that it reduces the issue to the simple blaming of individuals without further analysis.

One doesn't have to look far for analogies.  Take the Metropolitan Police.  What events of the past few years have shown is that while the Met is very effective at blowing the heads off unarmed Brazilian electricians and at valiantly herding largely unthreatening middle-class school-children and young adults into cul-de-sacs and hemming them in there for hours (provided enough warning is given for them to get sufficiently tooled up and mob-handed), when a spontaneous outburst of serious public disturbance occurs it is - shall we say? - considerably less effective in 'defending the public'.  Does this mean I have no sympathy for the bobbies who find themselves in the front line faced by angry mobs, in the course of doing a job that is difficult and in its basic, founding principles entirely commendable?  Of course it doesn't.  But nor does it mean that I can condone white-washing or - and this is the important bit - dumping all the blame for the killing of Ian Tomlinson just onto the individual officer that carried out the actual actions that ended up killing him (any more than I 'condone' his action).  The problem goes, and the analysis has to go, further than that.  You do see, I hope, the analogy.  It's not direct or equivalent but it is about the similar problems that occur when you are simply given the choice between blanket condemnation or condoning of all the actions of individuals or even organisations, when it might be structures and context that need attention.  Historians are supposed to be able to look at the complex mix of individuals, motives, structures and contexts in the analysis of events.  Not that this means - as I have suggested before - that they should not pass moral judgement (or, perhaps better, at least present their account in such a way as to reveal a moral compass as well as the complexities).  In some ways this is an interesting contemporary case-study.

In some superficial ways our hitherto evidently aberrant historical narrative has returned to form.  We have had our 'peasants revolt' and the aftermath has been entirely in the usual mold.  Judges across the land have competed, so it seems, for the 'Judge Jeffreys Memorial Award' for absurdly harsh sentencing.  Plenty have compared the sentences dished out to rioters with the (lack of) sentences handed down to fraudulent, corrupt MPs, and the size of the sums of money illegally obtained in both cases.  The hypocrisy has been astonishing.  For trying to start a riot (on Facebook) - a riot that didn't happen - two lads get 4 years in jail.  Cameron divested himself of the cliche about justice needing to be seen to be done, while not heeding the first part of the phrase - that justice needs to be done.  This is not justice.   My new favourite historian can be seen as inciting murderous vigilante violence on his Torygraph blog, and nothing happens at all.  Inciting riotous violence - bad: inciting murderous repressive violence - good.  I suspect (indeed I hope) that the way the narrative does seem to have jolted back to some sort of historically 'normal' course (after all even Nick Clegg, in a show of political clairvoyance and perception that he has subsequently lost, it seems, predicted the riots himself, well over a year ago) suggests that this 'story' has some way to run yet.

I have wanted to break these thoughts up into more manageable chunks.  In the next I want to explore some of the issues involved in this violence from a historical perspective.

History and Rioting (The Inevitable 'Riots' Blog Post): Part 1

Well, we've had nearly a week of post-rioting analysis and on balance I don't think it's been a good week for history.  There are some hat-tips in order.  One to Emeritus Professor David Parker (Leeds) for this splendid letter to the Guardian:

For many years I taught a final-year undergraduate course on the uprisings of the peasants and artisans that swept across large parts of 17th-century France. Buildings were attacked, their contents pillaged, crops destroyed and occasionally a perceived oppressor was killed. Had my students explained it all by simply invoking feral criminality they would have failed.

Blud, dem restronters got no rite complainin wen we come
an trash der stuff, innit?*

Of course the web was awash with the predictable racism and reactionary nonsense, e-petitions were launched to strip rioters of their benefits (presumably as a means of increasing the stake they feel they hold in society) but there have been a lot of rather thoughtful analyses.  They've come from across the board too, with some in the Telegraph, surprisingly, where Peter Oborne has been writing a lot of sensible things of late, and even (you might want to be sitting down for this bit) The Daily Mail.  That's right: a sensible and even-handed piece of analysis in the Mail: maybe the riots achieved something after all.  Some nicely-turned words of wisdom came from the most unlikely sources.  

As I see it, the skills of an historian, when confronted by a complex phenomenon like this, ought (and  this is neither original nor controversial) to include at least the following:

• The evasion of a simple catch-all explanation, of whichever 'political' narrative, particularly a doctrinaire explanation
• The avoidance of reliance on untestable notions like 'innate human nature'
• The avoidance of sweeping generalisation
• The ability to disentangle different elements within the phenomenon; to tease out geographical and other variables
• An aversion to reducing a complex phenomenon to simple cause and effect

And thus it was that, in amongst all the web traffic, historians did have interesting perspectives to offer.  Someone dug out the 1816 report into a wave of lawlessness by gangs of what might today be called feral youths in Napoleonic-era London, which concludes that the reasons for the disturbances were:

• The improper conduct of parents
• ......The want of education
• The want of suitable employment
• The violation of the Sabbath and the habits of gambling in the public-streets
• The severity of the criminal code
• The defective state of the police
• The existing system of prison discipline.

On p.23 of the report there is even a discussion of the police corruption and consorting with criminals, which seemed familiar too.  I admit that I am wary of the 'ooh isn't it just like...?' school of historical commentary, but this did seem to have interesting implications.  Best of all was the publicising of a report presenting data showing a link between fiscal retrenchment or 'austerity' and social instability.  A 5% cut in spending doubles the rate of episodes of civil unrest, or so it seems from data from the last century.  Some historical bloggers have had thoughtful things to say.

At this point things looked to be going well for the profession.  Well, I say that; some of my former students popped up on Facebook spouting bile about the rioters and advocating the shooting of looters on sight, showing just how miserably I had failed in my attempts to instill in them any sense of humanity or ability to stop and think critically about things.  Ho hum. 

But it was all to go horribly wrong when, for reasons best known to themselves, Newsnight decided to invite 'historian' David Starkey to discuss the causes of the riots.  I put the inverted commas around Starkey's description because, although he was once quite widely respected as an historian of early modern England (and I believe the work he produced back then still is quite highly thought of), he hasn't held a university post in over a decade (apart - funnily enough - from a grace and favour fellowship at Saint Frithfroth's College Oxbridge or somewhere).  He has lived off being a right-wing controversialist rather than off anything that one might call serious history.  (For general theoretical caveats as to whether someone of his ways of thinking might ever actually have been a good historian, see my provisional comments on the ethics of history, previously on this blog passim.)  Why they asked Starkey - ostentatiously not a social historian - to comment on all this eludes me.  Anyway, as you probably all know by now, Starkey divested himself of various comments about how Enoch Powell had been right about the perils of immigration, but that inter-racial violence was not the problem.  No indeed, the problem was the import of 'Black' culture and the fact that the whites had 'become black'.  Well, dear reader, as we have seen before, there are certainly historians with well-paid and privileged academic posts who don't always, or can't always be bothered to, think as hard as I think they might about what they write on topics of direct relevance to the immigration debate, or perceive that words have power and consequences and require care, especially in addressing a wide audience outside the groves of academe.  Maybe, like them, David Starkey just wasn't thinking.  Far be it from me to be so 'distasteful' as to suggest - even to raise the possibility - that he might actually hold the political position that seems to emerge from a straightforward reading of his words.  You can almost certainly guess what I think.  Any good work done by historians earlier in the week was pretty severely tarnished (to put it mildly) by Starkey's performance.  There's been level-headed response by other participants, and the inevitable fun-poking - see here, here and here for some of my favourites.  Even the Mail had a go - underlining the fact that we really must be living in the End Times and that the Angel of the Lord, trumpet in hand, can't be far off.  Significantly, it initially decided to switch the 'comments' facility off.  Sadly it's back on now - hence no link (I thought I'd spare you).


Here are one or two points our Diddy David might want to think about (some of these are things to which I will return in Part 2) - none of them is very original; none exactly requires deep or complex conceptual thinking, and that is damning enough in itself.

For a start, rap (at least in the form in which it has arrived in the UK) and Jamaican patois come from two different cultures, Dave.  The fact that the members of both are people considered, since the concept of colour-based 'race' was invented, to be 'black' does not make them interchangeable.  Not a sophisticated point, really.  Maybe more controversially, the very notions of black and white are heavily bound up with particular cultures (p.44 of Barbarian Migrations, and esp. n.19) - I don't think that this is what Starkey was saying.  If it was his analysis would have been way more complex and subtle and wouldn't have included references to Enoch Powell and immigration.  But that point, quite apart from 'black' culture not being a monolithic, interchangeable phenomenon (and thus directly linked to skin colour), leads on to the question of what sorts of economic structures produce this culture?  What socio-economic structures produce situations wherein in some communities, social organisation takes the form of gangs?  Put a group of comfortably-off black people, with a stake in a society where they feel valued, together in a room and whatever genetic features govern the pigmentation of their skin do not make them naturally say, 'hey, what say you we form a gang, pimp our Volvo and carry out some drive-by shootings?'  Having skin considered in modern taxonomy to be 'black' does not lead automatically to the formation of gangs and the trashing of private property any more than, say, having been to Eton and Oxford does.  Oh.


Anyway, what structures lead to a position where respect in these communities is maintained at gun- or knife-point?  What structures lead to a situation wherein young men find that the best way out of the ghetto, and the best outlet for artistic creativity is in a form of rebellious music that (often) celebrates the milieu from which they have emerged?  What structures lead to the situation where these young men can see the best sign that they have escaped the depredation of their youths as the public ostentatious consumption, in (to the traditional elite) shocking fashion, of the goods that are widely held to be commensurate with the established elite?  (I'm thinking of pictures of rappers swigging Krug from the bottle.)  And then, why, David Starkey, do you think that this music might possibly be attractive to people in a similar socio-economic situation?  It's not that the whites have become black, it's that the poor in one irresponsible, obscenely wealthy** capitalist country have realised thanks to mass media and communications, that they have quite a lot in common with the poor in another irresponsible, obscenely wealthy capitalist country.  But while we're on the subject of mass media and modern communications, who is it that really profits from this music?  Let me tell you, I don't think that the bulk of the proceeds from sales of NWA records went straight back into Compton.  Famously, more than a few rap artists never get out of the trap they were born into; they get rich and die trying.  I hazard a guess that the overwhelming bulk of the profits from the demonised gangsta rap end up in the pockets of the white fat-cat males of the capitalist super-wealthy.

The above are not deep or sophisticated points, by any means.  Nevertheless, you'd really like to think that someone could do a wee bit better than that when they did at least once cut the mustard as a historian, unlike most of the 'writers and historians' who festoon our screens or the people the media regard as 'historians' (like writer and gentleman antiquary, Andrew Roberts).  Disappointing.  But as if Starkey's cack-handed attempt to blame it on the boogie were not bad enough for the British historical profession, we have subsequently had this (here, incidentally, are more fabulously trenchant insights perpetrated by the same deep thinker).  This is by someone with a paid post (if only a fixed-term one) in the history department of a British university.  No, really, it is.  Here are some examples of the level of 'analysis' that we can, apparently expect, from the Cambridge-educated rising stars of the British historical profession:

1. Starkey wasn't being a racist because he said black and white people were involved
2. The riots were predictable because violence is innate within British people

Taking this apart historically is rather akin to shooting fish in a barrel.  And, because I am a 'powerful' professor (no, stop laughing at the back, I am, really - someone told me last week) and this, erm, scholar is a junior post-doc, some might see it as bullying (and they would have a point), I'll leave that to you.  What distresses me are the implications of these pieces for the state of the British historical profession. 

I'll say no more, specifically, because - besides the potential bullying charge (though I expect any such criticism would just bounce off this target; I'm sadly familiar with his type) - criticising the British socio-educational elite - even floating the idea that sometimes they don't (or can't) think as hard or as deeply as you might expect people paid to think to ... well ... think - gets me into trouble.  So, as well as leaving you, dear reader, to consider and comment on the levels of historical thought and sophisticated analysis implied in this piece, I'll leave you to be 'distasteful' enough to pose the question of what side of the political fence this brilliant young Turk might sit on.  You might, I suppose, ponder the issue of whether someone with the level of historical ability clearly implicit in this piece would have got any sort of post-doctoral post were he not from the socio-educational background he clearly is from - that's entirely up to you.  You can analyse, to your heart's content, whether or not the ability to spout what some people (other than me obviously) might - might: I'm only saying that it's an interpretive possibility - consider to be "mindless bullshit" with absolute confidence in the fact that they are right might just, possibly, be - in some way or other - linked to any particular social and educational formation.  Who knows?  You might for all I know - and who am I to say? - wonder whether there are any historians of - let's say, just for the sake of argument - the end of the Roman Empire, or the Early Middle Ages, or the Anglo-Saxons, or any other historical sphere of interest to you, who evince similar tendencies.  Maybe there are; maybe there aren't.  Who knows?  That's all up to you.  Maybe you might wonder whether, in the implications of this piece, its context, its attitudes, there isn't just a little of what it has been that has made the people at the very opposite end of the socio-educational league table feel so very alienated, and angry, and feel that no one cares about what they might say or think. 

Think - just a little - about the implications of how this individual, from his privileged background, has a blog in the Daily Telegraph through which to pour his not over-sophisticated musings into the willing eyes of readers across the land, in spite of (and I hope I'm not being un-generous here - I'm just going on the evidence before me) not exactly being the world's next Marc Bloch.  Hell, even I, the 'powerful professor' don't get that access to the media, in spite of my 'power' (or the merits of my works); then again I merely attended a small town comprehensive and a provincial university.  But I confess it bugs me.  Now think about how someone who really comes from a disadvantaged background feels.  This (and, believe me, I am trying REALLY hard to avoid expletives here...  breathe, Guy ... gather) ... this privileged 'scholar' can get anyone to listen to whatever shit he spouts thoughts he wants to express.  What chance does someone from Tottenham have to get access to this audience for their own opinions which (whatever Starkey might say about grammar etc) I'd be hard pushed to see as less articulate?  No; this Telegraph 'historical' blog and its implications are (in my view, based on the showing of the posts above), especially if it continues in this vein, something that the British historical profession should feel more than a bit nervous about.  Now, I have said some unguarded things on this blog, which I regret, and some deliberate things that have been censored, which I don't regret, so we ought probably, difficult though it might be, to cut this young man a bit of slack.  But advocating the formation of a National Rifle Association and the shooting of rioters and looters?  I have to say that that really is something that I find more than a tad 'distasteful'.  I wonder if anyone will be penning any letters of complaint to his head of department.  Doubt it.

Diddy David Starkey clearly has more than enough successors lined up.

I'll just say that, for me, reading the Telegraph blog post linked to above has been the icing on the cake of a fortnight of absolute despair, at - quite apart from the wider and more important issues of the state of the country - the British academic history profession and its elitist, conservative structures (you might wonder why this was ever a shock to me) and has seen my respect for it badly (probably irreparably) damaged.  All that is implicit in that blog-post makes me angry.  It makes me very angry indeed.  And I know you don't like me when I'm angry.

P.s.: It's not even as though it is only 'feral criminals' in deprived area who like rap and related forms of music that have come out of the deprived areas of US cities.  Maybe, just maybe, it actually has some merits of its own?  I know a very genteel professor of medieval history who likes Eminem, as an exponent of a particular type of spoken poetry, seen within a long tradition.  I know someone else, who normally is quite an opera buff, who has taken to an occitan rap CD, and another medievalist who cheers herself up in the car by playing loud French hip-hop.  The fact that these genres have spread beyond the 'Anglo-Saxon' linguistic community is significant in itself.  Why, even I own a Kanye West CD.  Not because I like his anger or what he has to say - I am very bad at paying much attention to lyrics - but because, well, I find him musically quite interesting.

---

* For non-Brits, this is a picture from some years ago of Oxford University's notorious Bullingdon Club, whose privileged young male, er, members take to trashing restaurants and throwing money at the proprietors as they leave. Pictured, standing, second left, is our beloved Prime Minister, and seated at right, our beloved Mayor of London.  Cameron hates this photograph, which is why we should all feel duty bound to circulate and publicise it at every possible turn.

** Yes. Obscenely wealthy.  The next time some dumb-assed, Mail-reading accountant tells you that there's no money, or that 'the country can't afford' to pay for education, health, whatever - have a look around you in most towns or estates (even the not especially wealthy ones) in the UK.  Count the number of cars per house.  Count the number of cars on the roads with only one person (the driver) in them.  Count the TVs, the DVD-players, the fridges - yes, even the fridges - even the running water for god's sake.  And ponder.  Does this look like a poor country to you?  And while you're pondering, spare a thought, beyond wanting to form a National Rifle Association or citizens' militia and gun them down on sight, for the people in those - still mercifully few - communities where this standard level of wealth - which is just 'background noise', so that we don't even notice it, such is the wealth (yes, wealth) of the country - and prosperity don't apply.  Just a little thought for the day.