[Debate] Academic seeks new understanding of rioters - perverse capitalism to blame

[m_redmond at btinternet.com]

http://tinyurl.com/cgjcohc

Academic seeks new understanding of rioters
		
					The UK's leading expert on gangs says the official inquiry into what caused the summer riots is woefully inadequate
		
		
  	
			guardian.co.uk,
															
				            Monday 28 November 2011 20.30 GMT	        
        
    
        	    





		
										

        


    
        

        
        	
        			
							
										Riots in north London in August 2011. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA


					
	
    
	    Not too many academics have finished up with a broken nose as a consequence of their research.
 But few academics spend long periods talking to young people on 
deprived estates. The threat of violence, then, is an occupational 
hazard for Professor Simon Hallsworth, director of the Centre for Social
 and Evaluation Research at London Metropolitan University, and the UK's leading expert on gang culture.
Two
 years ago, the threat became a reality after he took a short cut 
through "a dodgy part of Hackney". "I finished up on the ground being 
kicked by a group who mugged me." But he seems sanguine. "You either let
 that kind of thing get to you or you don't. At least it gives you an 
appreciation of the violence that is a regular part of so many lives 
because of conditions that they can't escape from."
What there are
 not, he maintains, are as many organised gangs as the media and the 
government would have us believe.   "Those that do exist are a lot more 
fluid and lack the hierarchical structure that the stereotype attributes
 to them," he says. In the 10 years in which he has been engaged in 
research on gangs, he says, "they've been blamed for just about 
everything from drugs to the sexual abuse of women to dangerous dogs. 
But if you could eliminate gang culture tomorrow, all those things would
 still be going on and you'd still have disorder."
David Cameron's
 response to the August riots, he argues, was nothing more than a 
"scapegoating strategy" that stigmatises the black community and what is
 now dismissed as a "feral underclass". By lumping many complex issues 
together under the label of gang culture, the government has absolved 
itself of any responsibility for what Hallsworth believes is a crisis in
 the neo-liberal economic theory that has held sway since the early 
1980s.
"There was an almost unquestioning acceptance of Cameron's 
claims across the mass media," he says. Only the Guardian is absolved, 
in his view, as the paper has embarked on the first empirical study of 
the riots in collaboration with the London School of Economics.Hallsworth's
 reaction has been a transatlantic collaboration with Dr David 
Brotherton from John Jay College, New York. Together they have produced 
Urban Disorder and Gangs: A Critique and a Warning, published online as 
part of the Runnymede [Trust] Perspectives series.
They
 call for hard questions to be asked about "the perverse form of 
capitalism" that governments appear committed to on both sides of the 
Atlantic. "It is not working for the many in a society of escalating 
inequality and disadvantage where upward mobility is now a thing of the 
past."
In 1981, Hallsworth arrived in Brixton, moving into a flat 
the day after the first riots began. At least it gave him an insight 
that would prove invaluable in his later academic career. "Lord Scarman,
 who drew up his report on the '80s disturbances, was a patrician figure
 steeped in the values of the welfare state," he says. "He knew that 
society was to blame as well as the rioters. Today, official attempts to
 understand are woefully inadequate."He dismisses yesterday's 
interim report by the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, chaired by 
the former chief executive of Jobcentre Plus, as "a superficial glossy 
brochure" before adding: "It tells us nothing new about the riots; tells
 us nothing more about the profile of the rioters than we already knew; 
profiles statistics already in the public domain, and it is written in a
 style that makes the mistake of assuming that sound bites constitute 
serious analysis. Worryingly, it begins and ends with the assumption 
that if you listen to people enough – mostly non-rioters – and list what
 they say, that constitutes an explanation. As to solutions, it leaves 
us with, by and large, more of the same already being rolled out, 
including the over-use of prison, which it does not challenge or 
question."One fundamental change over the last 30 years, 
Hallsworth believes, is the transition from a welfare state to what he 
calls a security state. "We have the widespread use of CCTV, a much more
 coercive attitude by the authorities and the biggest prison population 
in Europe. And that was before the riots. No longer is there any 
aspiration to be universally inclusive and aim for full employment. The 
requirement for a cheap and flexible labour force is paramount.
"So
 these youngsters live in a society where you're judged by how you dress
 and the type of phone you carry, yet they're excluded from jobs that 
provide the means to buy them."They conclude their critique by 
suggesting that now is the time to mobilise youth. "Only this time 
round, it means investing in them and their communities; not 
law-enforcement agencies and a new gang-suppression industry."
At a
 time, however, when reducing the budget deficit is the only game in 
town, Hallsworth has no illusion that his advice will be taken seriously
 in government circles any time soon.
Megan.

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