Nothing can justify or excuse the terrifying wave of violent lawlessness that swept through London and other British cities earlier this month. Hardworking people in struggling neighborhoods were its principal victims. Public support for racial and ethnic coexistence also suffered a damaging, and we fear lasting, blow.
Mr. Cameron, a product of Britain’s upper classes and schools, has blamed the looting and burning on a compound of national moral decline, bad parenting and perverse inner-city subcultures.
Would he find similar blame — this time in the culture of the well housed and well off — for Britain’s recent tabloid phone hacking scandals or the egregious abuse of expense accounts by members of Parliament?
Crimes are crimes whoever commits them. And the duty of government is to protect the law-abiding, not to engage in simplistic and divisive moralizing that fails to distinguish between criminals, victims and helpless relatives and bystanders.
The thousands who were arrested last week for looting and for more violent crimes should face the penalties that are prescribed by law. But Mr. Cameron is not content to stop there. He talks about cutting off government benefits even to minor offenders and evicting them — and, in a repellent form of collective punishment, perhaps their families, too — from the publicly supported housing in which one of every six Britons lives.
He has also called for blocking access to social networks like Twitter during future outbreaks. And he has cheered on the excessive sentences some judges have been handing out for even minor offenses.
Such draconian proposals often win public applause in the traumatized aftermath of riots. But Mr. Cameron, and his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, should know better. They risk long-term damage to Britain’s already fraying social compact.
Making poor people poorer will not make them less likely to steal. Making them, or their families, homeless will not promote respect for the law. Trying to shut down the Internet in neighborhoods would be an appalling violation of civil liberties and a threat to public safety, denying vital real-time information to frightened residents.
Britain’s urban wastelands need constructive attention from the Cameron government, not just punishment. His government’s wrongheaded austerity policies have meant fewer public sector jobs and social services. Even police strength is scheduled to be cut. The poor are generally more dependent on government than the affluent, so they have been hit the hardest.
What Britain’s sputtering economy really needs is short-term stimulus, not more budget cutting. Unfortunately, there is no sign that Mr. Cameron has figured that out. But, at a minimum, burdens need to be more fairly shared between rich and poor — not as a reward to anyone, but because it is right.
Fair play is one traditional British value we have always admired. And one we fear is increasingly at risk
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/opinion/wrong-answers-in-britain.html?_r=2
On a warm spring day, strolling in south London, I heard demanding voices behind me. A police van disgorged a posse of six or more who waved me aside. They surrounded a young black man who, like me, was ambling along. They rifled through his pockets, looked in his shoes, inspected his teeth. Their thuggery affirmed, they let him go with the barked warning there would be a next time.
For the young at the bottom of the pyramid of wealth and patronage and poverty that is modern Britain - mostly the black, the marginalised and resentful, the envious and hopeless - there is never surprise. Their relationship with authority is integral to their obsolescence as young adults. Half of all black British youth between the ages of 18 and 24 are unemployed, the result of deliberate policies since Margaret Thatcher oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in British history. Forget plasma TVs; this was panoramic looting.
Such is the truth of David Cameron's "sick society", notably its sickest, most criminal, most feral "pocket": the square mile of the City of London where, with political approval, the banks and the super-rich have trashed the British economy and the lives of millions. This is fast becoming unmentionable as we succumb to propaganda once described by the American black leader Malcolm X thus: "If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing."
As MPs lined up to bay their class bigotry and hypocrisy in parliament, barely a handful spoke this truth. Not one of the heirs to Edmund Burke's 18th-century rants against "mob rule" by a "swinish multitude" referred to previous rebellions in Brixton, Tottenham and Toxteth in the 1980s, when Lord Scarman reported that "complex political, social and economic factors" had caused a "disposition towards violent protest" and recommended urgent remedial action. Instead, Labour and Liberal bravehearts called for water cannon and everything draconian. Among them was the Labour MP Hazel Blears. Remember her notorious expenses? None made the obvious connection between the greatest inequality since records began, a police force that routinely abuses a section of the population and kills with impunity, and a permanent state of colonial warfare with an arms trade to match: the apogee of violence.
It seemed hardly coincidental that on the day before Cameron raged against "phoney human rights", Nato aircraft - including British bombers sent by him - killed a reported 85 civilians in a peaceful Libyan town. These were people in their homes, children in their schools. Watch the BBC's man on the spot trying his best to dispute the evidence in front of his eyes, just as the political and media class sought to discredit the evidence of a civilian slaughter in Iraq as bloody as the Rwandan genocide. Who are the criminals?
This is not in any way to excuse the violence of the rioters, many of whom were opportunistic, mean, cruel, nihilistic and often vicious in their glee: an authentic reflection of a system of greed and self-interest to which scores of parasitic money-movers, "entrepreneurs", Murdochites, corrupt MPs and bent coppers have devoted themselves.
On 9 August, the BBC's Fiona Armstrong - aka Lady MacGregor of MacGregor - interviewed the writer Darcus Howe, who dared use the forbidden word "insurrection".
ArmstrongMr Howe, you say you are not shocked [by the riots]? Does this mean you condone what happened last night? HoweOf course not . . . What I am concerned about is a young man called Mark Duggan . . . the police officer blew his head off. ArmstrongMr Howe, we have to wait for the official inquiry before we can say things like that. We don't know what happened . . . We're going to wait for the police report on it.
On 8 August, the Independent Police Complaints Commission acknowledged there was "no evidence" that Duggan had fired a shot at police. He was shot in the face on 4 August by a police officer with a Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine gun - the same weapon supplied by British governments, Tory and Labour, to dictatorships that use them against their own people. I saw the result in East Timor, where Indonesian troops also blew the heads off people.
An eyewitness to Duggan's killing told reporters: "About three or four police officers had [him] pinned on the ground at gunpoint. They were really big guns and then I heard four loud shots. The police shot him on the floor." This is how the police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes on the floor of a London Underground train in 2005. And there was Ian Tomlinson, and many more. The police lied about Duggan's killing as they lied about the others. Since 1998, more than 330 people have died in police custody yet not one officer has been convicted.
"Funny, too," noted the journalist Melanie McFadyean, "that the police did nothing while some serious looting went on - surely not because they wanted everyone to see that cutting the police force meant more crime?"
Still, the brooms have arrived. In an age of public relations as news, the clean-up campaign, however well-meant by many people, can also serve the media goal of sweeping inequality and hopelessness under gentrified carpets, with cheery volunteers armed with brand new brooms and described as "Londoners" as if the rest were aliens. The otherwise absent Boris Johnson waved his new broom. Another Old Etonian, the PR to an asset stripper and currently the Prime Minister up to his neck in Hackgate, would surely approve
From: http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2011/08/pilger-police-british-young
There has been little economic news for the coalition government to cheer about since it was formed 15 months ago. It inherited an economy that was growing quite strongly but activity came to an abrupt halt last autumn and has flatlined ever since. Inflation has been well above target, squeezing real incomes and dampening consumer confidence. The recovery in manufacturing has petered out, denting hopes of a rebalancing of growth towards production and exports.
One of the few bright spots for ministers has been the behaviour of the labour market. The number of people in employment has grown and the labour force survey measure of unemployment has been falling. Private sector employment has risen, allowing David Cameron and George Osborne to argue that those losing their jobs in the public sector can find work elsewhere. Unemployment has been the dog that hasn't barked. Until now.
Data from the Office for National Statistics was unambiguously disappointing, as the employment minister Chris Grayling frankly admitted. The government has two ways of calculating unemployment: the claimant count, a narrow measure of the number of people out of work and claiming certain state benefits; and the Labour Force Survey, an internationally-agreed yardstick that classifies someone as unemployed if they are out of work and have actively looked for a job in the past month. Both measures are now showing chunky rises, with the claimant count up by 37,100 between June and July, and the LFS measure rising by 38,000 in the three months to June.
Economists will not be entirely surprised by this news. Unemployment is considered a lagging indicator of economic performance, because firms normally hold on to staff in the early stages of a downturn and only start firing people when they think the drop in demand is permanent rather than temporary. This trend has been amplified in the recession of 2008-09 and its aftermath by the willingness of workers to accept pay freezes in return for holding on to their jobs.
But there is only so long that firms can hoard labour. The British economy contracted by 6.5% in six quarters of decline between the spring of 2008 and the autumn of 2009, and its recovery since has been weak and slow.
National output is still 4% below where it was at its peak in early 2008. As a result, private sector job creation is faltering at the time public sector job cuts are kicking in. Ministers like to boast about how the economy created 500,000 private sector jobs in the latest year; what they don't say is that the "latest year" ended in March 2011 (more current data is unavailable) and that more than 300,000 of the 500,000 increase took place before the coalition came to office.
Even before the latest spasm in the global financial markets, the outlook for jobs looked poor. The austerity in the public sector means unemployment among women is now at its highest level since the late 1980s.
The number of people working part time because they can't find a full-time job rose by 83,000 to 1.26m in the three months to June, the highest figures since comparable records began in 1992. Over the past three months, the rise in unemployment has been heavily concentrated among the young, with an additional 20,000 jobless in the 18-24 age group.
What does all this mean? It means that the jobless total, currently at 2,494,000, is likely to go through the 2.5m level next month. It means that unemployment among 16-24-year-olds, now 949,000, will be heading towards 1m when this year's graduates enter the labour market. And it means that the government's austerity programme and welfare-to-work plans face the same potential problem.
Both are predicated on there being plenty of jobs if only people are prepared to look for them. Yesterday's figures suggest that is not the case.
From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/17/unemployment-rise-jobs-not-there
Anew report, published today by theCommission, shows a continuing trend of women being passed over for top jobs in Britain. More than 5,400 women are missing from Britain's 26,000 most powerful posts [1].
The report, Sex & Power 2011, measures the number of women in positions of power and influence across 27 occupational categories in the public and private sectors.
The Commission's report calculates that at the current rate of change it will take around 70 yearsto reachan equal number of men and women directors of FTSE 100 companies. It also found it could be up to 70 years before there are an equal number of women MPs in parliament – another 14 general elections.
Worryingly, the results of this year's report differ very little from those in the previous report of 2008..
Figures from this year's report reveal that, while women are graduating from university in increasing numbers and achieve better degree results than men, and despite level pegging with men in their twenties, they are not entering management ranks at the same rate, and many remain trapped in the layer below senior management.
Among this year's findings were:
In politics women represent:
In business women represent:
In media and culture, women represent:
In the public and voluntary sector, women represent:
Studies have shown that outdated working patterns where long hours are the norm, inflexible organisations and the unequal division of domestic responsibilities are major barriers to women's participation in positions of authority.
The British economy is paying the price for this exclusion. It has been suggested that greater diversity on corporate boards would improve business performance and increase levels of corporate social responsibility.
Commissioner Kay Carberry said:
"The gender balance at the top has not changed much in three years, despite there being more women graduating from university and occupying middle management roles. We had hoped to see an increase in the number of women in positions of power, however this isn't happening.
"Many women disappear from the paid workforce after they have children, so employers lose their skills. Others become stuck in positions below senior management, leaving many feeling frustrated and unfulfilled. Consequently, the higher ranks of power in many organisations are still dominated by men.
"If Britain is to stage a strong recovery from its current economic situation, then we have to make sure we're not wasting women's skills and talents.”
For: http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/news/2011/august/sex-and-power-5-400-women-missing-from-top-jobs/
But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion—a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.
Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn’t Baghdad, and British Prime Minister David Cameron is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.
How about a democratic example then? Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighborhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford—clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a "state of siege” to restore order; the people didn’t like that and overthrew the government.
Argentina’s mass looting was called El Saqueo—the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country’s elites had done by selling off the country’s national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatization deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centers would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge.
But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn’t theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behavior.
This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G-8 and G-20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuitions, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatizations of public assets and decreasing pensions—mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these "entitlements”? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.
This is the global Saqueo, a time of great taking. Fueled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights left on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94 percent of millionaires were afraid of "violence in the streets.” This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.
Of course London’s riots weren’t a political protest. But the people committing nighttime robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious.
The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered—a union job, a good affordable education—being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.
David Cameron’s response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.
At last year’s G-20 "austerity summit” in Toronto, the protests turned into riots and multiple cop cars burned. It was nothing by London 2011 standards, but it was still shocking to us Canadians. The big controversy then was that the government had spent $675 million on summit "security” (yet they still couldn’t seem to put out those fires). At the time, many of us pointed out that the pricey new arsenal that the police had acquired—water cannons, sound cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets—wasn’t just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.
This is what David Cameron got wrong: you can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance—whether organized protests or spontaneous looting.
And that’s not politics. It’s physics.
From:
Some have suggested that the events in Tottenham and elsewhere in England were the result of parents from some communities not being allowed to ‘discipline’ or smack their children. These comments are often supported by little more than anecdote and need to be challenged.
Firstly, no one has yet presented evidence that those children and young people involved in the looting that followed the peaceful protest had not been ‘disciplined’ or smacked. We must point out that the fact that these young people were out on the streets involved in criminal activity does not mean they were not smacked or ‘disciplined’.
Secondly, international evidence suggests that physical punishment is an ineffective discipline method in raising children; furthermore, that it becomes more ineffective the older the child. Beyond this, the evidence suggests that children learn negative lessons from physical punishment, including that use of violence in a relationship is acceptable.
Unfortunately, some consequences of this have been demonstrated in England: Victoria Climbié was smacked and it was the escalation of this discipline that led to her death.
In terms of the future, it is beyond our comprehension how a way of ending violence in the streets is by encouraging it in the home. Those looking for solutions to violence that will work could start with those proposed by the World Health Organisation’s Violence Prevention Alliance which notes that effective methods include evidence-based parenting education classes accompanied by effective social welfare.
The Race Equality Foundation have been deploying the evidenced based Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities (SFSC) parent programme for the past ten years. Find out more about SFSC.
To speak further about these issues, please contactJabeer Butt.
The best time and place to apply the crowbar to the conveyor belt to crime is before it starts moving – early in a vulnerable child’s life or at the first signs of trouble. When police were first faced with rioters they were criticised for collecting evidence of acts of disorder and not preventing it from happening in front of them. Yet that’s precisely what we tend to do with our most troubled families: we condemn their parenting when their children and young people fall foul of the law but are reluctant to step in – and help – before the line is crossed.
The emphasis on Early Intervention that runs through almost every important report on improving social mobility cannot remain a lofty concept in social policy – or be used to justify even more state intrusion into family life. Early intervention rests on a recognition that children’s physical, social, intellectual and emotional development is heavily influenced by their early experiences. Healthy brain development, in particular, requires a nurturing and responsive parent or caregiver. Abused and neglected children are at least 25% more likely to become involved in delinquency, to fall pregnant in their teenage years and to become drug users, as well as to suffer from mental health problems.
All too often this repeats a dysfunctional cycle – perhaps one of their parents was an addict or severely depressed and unable to meet their emotional and physical needs. Sometimes a tragedy strikes an otherwise robust family, parents find themselves unable to cope and there is no one else around to prevent the children falling through the cracks. Divorce and separation can also hit children hard. It’s not all about the early years but they do set the tone.
The Early Intervention paradigm has to revolutionise the thinking of local authorities, health commissioners and educators so they see the effort of ordinary people through voluntary and private sector initiative as indispensable. Helping families and children before problems escalate requires services to work together well and outside of usual professional and sectoral silos – this is not about passing families from one service to another. The ability to build strong relationships with families where there is mutual trust is essential, again often done best by voluntary sector organisations. Concentrating on parents’ and children’s deficits is far less effective than finding grounds for encouragement and building on these, requiring flexibility and sensitivity to family dynamics.
What does Early Intervention look like?
n response to the call for a Family Test on government policies and plans to remove benefits, Imran Hussain, Head of Policy at Child Poverty Action Group, said
Family Test on government policies
"If the Government’s thinking about prioritising families, then it needs to rethink the policies harming families. Attacking child benefit, cutting tax credits and reducing support for childcare all flunk the Family Test, hurt families and weaken our society. "The Government came in promising to cut child poverty, saying the previous government hadn’t done enough, but the IFS has shown that its policies will increase child poverty by 300,000 in the next 3 years.
"If the Government’s thinking about prioritising families, then it needs to rethink the policies harming families. Attacking child benefit, cutting tax credits and reducing support for childcare all flunk the Family Test, hurt families and weaken our society.
"The Government came in promising to cut child poverty, saying the previous government hadn’t done enough, but the IFS has shown that its policies will increase child poverty by 300,000 in the next 3 years.
Plans to remove benefits
"The David Cameron of 2006 was right, we need to address poverty if we want strengthen our society and prevent social unrest. Rather than scrambling to show they’re doing something tough, ministers should be recalling what they’ve said in the past about the damage done to our society by poverty and inequality. "Knee-jerk plans to remove benefits from people convicted of less serious offences are dangerous and very likely counterproductive. How can a society that delivers double punishments for the poor, treating the rich and the poor differently, be called a 'fixed' society or the kind of world we want to live in? "By contrast, those convicted, but not in receipt of benefits, will not be similarly sentenced to this 'destitution punishment'. "Even ignoring the administrative nightmare of removing benefits and dealing with the inevitable fresh claims by dependants, it’s a recipe for exclusion and social division.”
"The David Cameron of 2006 was right, we need to address poverty if we want strengthen our society and prevent social unrest. Rather than scrambling to show they’re doing something tough, ministers should be recalling what they’ve said in the past about the damage done to our society by poverty and inequality.
"Knee-jerk plans to remove benefits from people convicted of less serious offences are dangerous and very likely counterproductive. How can a society that delivers double punishments for the poor, treating the rich and the poor differently, be called a 'fixed' society or the kind of world we want to live in?
"By contrast, those convicted, but not in receipt of benefits, will not be similarly sentenced to this 'destitution punishment'.
"Even ignoring the administrative nightmare of removing benefits and dealing with the inevitable fresh claims by dependants, it’s a recipe for exclusion and social division.”
For further information please contact: Imran Hussain Head of Policy, Rights & Advocacy, CPAG Tel. 020 7812 5216 or 07816 909302 ihussain@cpag.org.uk
Well done Starkey, you splendid old chap, for fearlessly voicing your obtuse and racist views on the riots, and exhuming old Enoch to be your witness and prophet. As he sizzles in Hell or flaps his wings through fluffy clouds, the politician must wish he were here today when vulgar chauvinism well enunciated by learned Englishmen has become such a badge of patriotic honour. In his time (well before the PC armies apparently took over these isles) Powell was banished from the Tory front bench by Ted Heath.
It was on Newsnight that David Starkey CBE, shared his perverse opinions. The BBC certainly knows how to pick them. The ill-tempered, snobbish presenter is a Tudor historian and therefore clearly has much to tell us about street action, inner-city life, policing, fractured lives and localities and the distempers of modernity. It's all happening, he says, because white kids have turned "black", are wearing low-slung pants and have absorbed the mutinous ways of Caribbeans and Africans. Jamaican patois, too, has "intruded on England" and made England a "foreign country".
Such ignominious racial and ethnic scapegoating is embedded in Britain's past. Years back, in his sober study, Race, Policing, Lore and Disorder in a Multi-Racist Society Michael Keith wrote of earlier civil disturbances in Britain: "People conceptualized rioting as a form of pathological contagion, commonly associated with black communities, a contagion that threatened to spread from those points at which disorder had first erupted." In one of the most disrespectful interviews I have ever seen on television, the black activist and broadcaster Darcus Howe was accused of being a rioter in the past by a BBC presenter. Of course the usual suspects have come out to blame migration and that new term of abuse, "multiculturalism".
Inevitably, Starkey has been roundly supported by the right and now claims he was talking about the culture of "nihilistic" black gangs not race, as if racism is only ever that extreme revulsion some feel about dark pigment. We should discuss culture specific crimes and behaviours – like honour killings and indeed black violence, or poor education and drug dealing which is the main business activity in some ethnic enclaves. Starkey didn't do that. Instead he blamed black people for white anti-social behaviour. So, the endless, ugly Catholic/Protestant wars in Scotland and Northern Ireland are the fault of people like Ms Dynamite. And violent football fans would be purring pussycats if that dratted MV Windrush hadn't docked. And those drunken weekend skirmishes on our streets, well that's just Englanders expressing their melancholia caused wholly by the sight of darkie gangstas roaming their green and pleasant land. And was Dianne Abbot – not accused of any expenses fiddling – the real reason why moralists like Michael Gove and David Cameron claimed what they should not have for expenses?
We now know that a celebrity academic can be stupid and a careless carrier of unattended, infectious bigotry. Well, let me not be too hard on the "national treasure". I suppose this furore does compel us to consider the impact of race and ethnicity on the troubles. These weren't race riots in the good old-fashioned sense. Racial disadvantage still blights prospects in Britain, though there has been much improvement since the hardest times back in the early 1980s. Some of the young Britons of colour who came out last week, might have been protesting with terrible inarticulacy against a destiny that never changes. But most of the other troublemakers came from a variety of backgrounds. It wasn't an uprising by black Britons against overtly discriminatory police action either, even though the trigger had been the shooting of a young black man by police officers. Nor was this a conspicuous conflict between different ethnic communities or yet another episode of endless strife caused by disaffected Muslims.
The murder of the three Muslim men in Birmingham, allegedly by black men, was prevented from turning into internecine war by the exceptional moral behaviour of the bereaved families. So far, the city has avoided the catastrophic hostilities of yesteryear between black youths and Asian shopkeepers. But, truth to tell, race, religion and ethnicity still stain the way people feel, act and try to understand what has happened.
Why, they ask, are people described as "Asian" when they behave nobly (as they did in Birmingham) and "Muslims" when the story is negative? And, there are complaints from the area where the dead men lived. A Muslim resident told a newspaper: "One black man is killed and there are riots across the UK. Three Asians are killed and you don't see an MP." A young Brummie Asian woman with a black boyfriend has gone into hiding: "They now are sure all blacks are animals when before they just thought that. They will kill us both."
The same antipathy is evident elsewhere. Young black men say they are treated like scum by Arab, Turkish and Asian businesses. It is worrying, too, that some anti-riot groups are identifiably exclusive, like the white battalion in Eltham where Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racists and the muscular Southall Sikh troop, who said they would see off any rioters. Beware of self-made enforcers – vigilantism is volatile and tribal. Consider too the way society has reacted to recent breakouts. When young black men are killing each other, or deeply dysfunctional estate kids of all races tyrannise their neighbourhoods, it is their problem, and few give a damn. Now that they have broken out, sometimes enthusing well brought-up white kids, everybody suddenly takes it very seriously. Race and class determine everything, even when they seem not to.
We can't afford to be so divided, mistrustful and prejudiced against this group or that. The millions who are revolted by what just happened had better understand that to bring greater national unity we need to hear less from the likes of Starkey and more from wise people like Tariq Jehan, father of one of the dead men in Birmingham who talked so movingly about our collective humanity. But, as they would say on Newsnight and other political programmes, where's the story in that?
From: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-race-played-a-part-but-not-as-starkey-imagines-it-2337672.html
